Hangor was decommissioned in 2006 and today serves as a museum ship. Khukri’s crew are remembered on a monument at Diu, which consists of a large model of the lost ship inside a glass case, on a hill overlooking the sea.
Navies everywhere studied this incident, and came to the conclusion that the only sure way to conduct anti-submarine operations in future was for surface vessels to work in conjunction with aircraft, or by using a hunter-killer submarine. Subsequently, the Royal Navy shed all of its smaller escort vessels, which were incapable of handling an A/S helicopter.
GENERAL BELGRANO
On 2 May 1982 the British nuclear attack submarine HMS Conqueror launched three torpedoes at the Argentinian cruiser ARA General Belgrano. The cruiser was a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Undamaged during the torpedo and bombing attacks, she had been ordered to sortie to hunt for the Japanese carrier force. Twice lucky, she was soon recalled.
Belgrano had been launched in 1935 as the USS Phoenix, a Brooklyn-class cruiser, designed to counter the Japanese Mogami class which originally carried fifteen 6in guns. The same armament, in five triple turrets, was built into the Brooklyns. Phoenix, completed in 1938, displaced 12,207 tons at full load, was protected by an armour belt up to 55/8in (133mm) thick, and could reach a top speed, when new, of 321/2 knots. In April 1951 she was sold to Argentina and renamed the 17 de Octubre after a significant date in the rise of President Peron. After Peron’s fall, in 1956 she was again renamed, this time as General Belgrano, after the liberator of Argentina.
At the time of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, the 42-year-old cruiser was on patrol to the south of the Falklands, accompanied by two destroyers, the Hippolite Bouchard and Piedrabuena. The destroyers were armed with Exocet anti-ship missiles. The British thought the Belgrano carried them as well, but in 200 °Captain Nestor Cenci, who at the time had been the cruiser’s supply officer, revealed that the ship’s carpenters had fabricated fake Exocet launchers out of wood to fool the British. This subterfuge backfired in a tragic way.
When Margaret Thatcher’s government received the news from the shadowing HMS Conqueror that the Belgrano’s battle group were manoeuvring not far from the British-declared exclusion zone around the islands, they feared that at any moment they could turn north and attack the British Task Force engaged in the reconquest of the Falklands. The Exocet missiles they thought the Belgrano carried, in addition to her heavy armament of fifteen 6in guns, would be a devastating weapon against the transports and aircraft carriers.
Accordingly, on the afternoon of 2 May the Conqueror’s commanding officer, Commander Chris Wreford-Brown, received permission to attack and sink the Belgrano. Conqueror was armed with the wire-guided Mark 24 Tigerfish torpedoes which had entered service just two years earlier, but as he had little confidence in them, Wreford-Brown decided to launch three of the older, unguided Mark VIII** torpedoes. The Mark VIII had originally been designed way back in 1925, and the Mark VIII** was the principal torpedo used by the Submarine Service in the Second World War. The latest Mod 4 versions carried an 805lb (365kg) charge of torpex over 7000yds (6400m) at up to 41 knots.
Launched at 1557, the first torpedo struck the cruiser to port aft, exploding in an engine room. The blast vented upwards through two mess areas and a recreation area, killing more than two hundred crew members. The second torpedo arrived soon afterwards and blew off the bows, but the remaining forward watertight bulkhead held. The Belgrano lost all power and drifted to a stop. Her electrical systems were knocked out so no distress signal could be sent. With no power to the pumps the influx of water could not be countered, and the ship took on a list to port.
After twenty minutes, when the list reached 30 degrees, Captain Bonzo ordered ‘abandon ship’, and the survivors, many burned or injured by the aft torpedo hit, scrambled into life rafts in a rising sea.
Meanwhile, the Belgrano’s two destroyers, unaware of her sinking, carried on their way. The crew of ARA Hippolite Bouchard felt an impact on the hull, which was suspected to be a torpedo that failed to explode. Later, in dry dock, it was found she had four 5in-long (127mm) cracks in her hull, and it was thought the third torpedo had actually exploded, but at some distance from the hull. By this time it was dark, and in the storm conditions the Belgrano’s survivors were not noticed.
For her part, HMS Conqueror went deep, and her crew thought they were being depth-charged, as they heard muffled underwater explosions. The commander of Hippolite Bouchard, Captain Washington Barcena, confirmed in 2000 that in fact they had dropped no depth charges, and that the noises heard by Conqueror’s crew were probably the Belgrano’s boilers exploding. Conqueror spent the next several days avoiding the Argentinian Air Force’s attempts to find her.
Out of the 1093 crew aboard the Belgrano at the time she was torpedoed, it is thought that 275 died in the initial explosion aft. Of the survivors, another forty-eight men died either in the life rafts or of their wounds after being rescued. They had been left adrift for 36 hours after the sinking, and in the freezing conditions those on the overcrowded life rafts had survived only because of huddling together; rafts with only a handful of survivors were found with the occupants frozen to death.
Belgrano would probably have survived losing her bow, as had many other US Navy cruisers during the Pacific War. The hit aft was crucial, denying her electrical power for pumps and lighting, the classic prelude to a breakdown of effective damage control measures. That the veteran vessel had remained afloat for so long was commendable, and led to many of her crew surviving.
The Argentinian response was immediate and dramatic. A naval Super Etendard launched an attack on the British destroyer HMS Sheffield with an Exocet missile. The ship’s computer detected the incoming missile but recognised it as ‘friendly’, which gave insufficient time for the crew to react. The resulting missile impact killed twenty men and disabled the ship, which later sank under tow.