Battleaxe was ordered by the British Admiralty on 4 September 1974, as the second Batch I Type 22 Frigate. The ship was laid down at Yarrow Shipbuilders' Scotstoun shipyard on 4 February 1976, and was launched by Audrey Callaghan, the wife of James Callaghan, the Prime Minister at the time, on 18 May 1977. Battleaxe was completed on 28 March 1980. Battleaxe was long overall and at the waterline, with a beam of and a draught of. Displacement was standard and deep load. She was powered by two Rolls-Royce Olympus TM3B gas turbines rated at a total of and two Rolls-Royce Tyne R1MC turbines rated at a total of, driving two shafts in a Combined gas or gas arrangement. They gave a speed of when powered by the Olympuses and when powered by the Tynes. The ship had a range of at. Anti-aircraft armament consisted of two sextuple Sea Wolf surface-to-air missile launchers, one forward of the bridge, and one on the roof of the helicopter hangar. Four Exocet MM-38 anti-ship missiles were fitted on the forecastle. Gun armament was limited to a pair of 40 mm Bofors guns, mainly for peacetime patrol duties. A hangar and fight deck was fitted aft, allowing the ship to operate two Westland Lynx helicopters, which could carry anti submarine torpedoes, while close-in anti submarine armament was two triple STWS-1 torpedo tubes.
Battleaxe was at Gibraltar on 24 March 1982, as part of Exercise "Springtrain 82", but when the Falklands War broke out in April that year, she, unlike sister-ships and, did not deploy to the South Atlantic as she was suffering from problems with her propeller shafts. Battlexe did deploy to the South Atlantic shortly after the end of the war, however, escorting the aircraft carrier, leaving Devonport on 2 August, reaching the vicinity of the Falklands on 24 August and returning to Britain on 19 November. She was deployed to the South Atlantic again from July 1983 to December 1983. On 2 July 1988, Battleaxe rescued the stricken sailors from the yacht Dalriada, which had sunk after colliding with the submarine 's periscope. Battleaxe was deployed on the Armilla patrol, the Royal Navy's standing deployment in the Persian Gulf in August 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. She returned to Plymouth in November 1990.
Brazil
Rademaker was involved in an unfortunate incident on 29 November 2004, during the annual FRATERNO naval exercise with ships of the Argentinian Navy. While conducting gunnery practice against target drones, a malfunction of the Argentinian frigate ARA Sarandi's automatic weapons system caused her to fire on the Rademaker; four Brazilian crewmen were injured together with an Argentine naval observer. The ship suffered moderate damage. Also in 2004, Rademaker deployed to Port-au-Prince, as part of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. In April 2017, Rademaker was involved in the search for the missing bulk carrierStellar Daisy after she disappeared in the Atlantic. Rademaker joined the international efforts to locate the missing Argentine Submarine in November 2017.
In fiction
HMS Battleaxe was featured in Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising. HMS Battleaxe is seen in the background in the 1982 BBC production of Smiley's People Episode 3.
