Sheffield was the prototype of the Type 42 destroyer, a sleek and modern warship built to throw a protective umbrella of Sea Dart missiles over the fleet. Commissioned in February 1975, she carried the odd silhouette of her class: paired exhaust deflectors on her funnel, nicknamed Mickey Mouse ears, fitted only to her and two near-sisters that were sold to Argentina. That detail would carry a bitter irony. The same Argentine Navy that bought ships of Sheffield's bloodline now studied her radar signature, her detection ranges, her reaction times. When war came in the South Atlantic, Argentine pilots had effectively been rehearsing against Sheffield's twin all along.

The men who killed Sheffield were not reckless. Two Argentine Navy Super Etendards, flown by Lieutenant Commander Augusto Bedacarratz and Lieutenant Armando Mayora, lifted off from Rio Grande and refuelled in the air before sliding down to thirty metres above the sea. They used a patient technique the crews called pecking the lobes, probing the fringes of British radar while staying out of its main beam. A Neptune patrol plane fed them the targets. The pilots climbed for a few seconds, locked their coordinates, dropped low again, and launched. It was a cold, methodical piece of flying, and these airmen flew home knowing they had done what no one had managed in nearly four decades: sink a modern warship of a major navy.

The Exocet punched through the junior ratings' galley area and breached an engine-room bulkhead just above the waterline. Many accounts hold that the warhead did not even explode, yet it hardly needed to. The impact knocked out the ship's electrical power and ruptured the pressurised fire main, so that when flames took hold there was no water to fight them. The twenty who died were mostly working in the galley and the computer room, in the part of the ship the missile gutted. For six days Sheffield drifted while crews tried to save her, then she foundered under tow on 10 May. Only one body was ever recovered. The fires taught the Royal Navy a grim lesson about the nylon clothing its sailors wore, which melted onto burned skin, and the service changed its uniforms because of what happened here.

A Board of Inquiry convened within weeks and did not flinch. It found that Sheffield had failed to react to Glasgow's clear warning, never went to action stations, never fired her Sea Dart, never launched chaff. The anti-air warfare officer, it emerged, was not even in the operations room when the missiles came, and did not believe his ship lay within Argentine range. When a fuller version of the report surfaced in 2017, it revealed findings of negligence that two officers had quietly escaped, the disciplinary case apparently set aside so as not to dampen the national mood at the war's victorious end. The honesty of that later document is its own kind of memorial: a refusal to let twenty deaths be smoothed over for the sake of a triumphant story.