Coventry was no stranger to far horizons. Commissioned in 1978 and built on the Mersey by Cammell Laird, she had been the first British warship to visit communist China in thirty years, then was diverted to patrol the Persian Gulf as the Iran-Iraq War erupted. By the spring of 1982 she was a seasoned vessel with a capable crew, and in the Falklands her contribution was real. Her Lynx helicopter was the first ever to fire the Sea Skua anti-ship missile in combat. Her Sea Dart missiles accounted for three Argentine aircraft, a third of all the kills that weapon scored in the entire war. After the loss of her sister Sheffield, Coventry carried the fleet's forward air defence almost alone until reinforcements could arrive.

Necessity bred a new tactic. With Sheffield gone and Glasgow damaged, the navy paired its surviving Type 42 destroyers with Type 22 frigates and pushed them far ahead of the carriers, an improvised partnership the crews dubbed Type 64. The frigate's short-range Sea Wolf missile would cover the gap if the destroyer's Sea Dart could not engage. So Coventry was lashed, tactically, to HMS Broadsword, and the two ships steamed out to do the dangerous work of drawing fire. At first the pairing delivered. Sea Dart cut two Skyhawks out of the sky north of Pebble Island, and for a brief window the Argentine attack seemed to be breaking against them.

Then the trap closed the other way. A second pair of Skyhawks, flown by First Lieutenant Mariano Velasco and Ensign Jorge Barrionuevo, bore in toward Coventry's port bow. Skimming the waves, they hid in the radar clutter of the islands, and Coventry could not get a missile lock. Broadsword had finally acquired them with Sea Wolf, but as Coventry heeled hard to starboard to shrink her profile, she swung directly across her partner's line of fire and blocked the shot. The geometry of two ships trying to survive together had, in an instant, doomed one of them. Three bombs struck home above the waterline. One destroyed the computer and operations rooms and cut down nearly every senior officer at once; another breached the engine-room bulkhead, opening the ship's largest compartment to the sea.

Coventry listed at once and capsized within about twenty minutes. As survivors clustered in life rafts and clung to the hull, waiting for rescue, some of them began to sing the Monty Python song "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," a flash of gallows humour from young men watching their ship die. Broadsword pulled 170 of them from the water. The dead numbered nineteen, and there would be a twentieth in time: Paul Mills, gravely injured in the sinking, died of his wounds the following March and lies buried in his Cambridgeshire village of Swavesey. From the wreck, divers later recovered the Cross of Nails that Coventry Cathedral had given the ship, a small object forged from the ruins of one war that had now passed through another.