by Ross Kemp
It was never imagined that the Swordfish would be able to hold its own against the speedy, powerful fighters of the Italian or German air forces. The Swordfish could reach 100 knots at a push, but nothing like that when laden with fuel and bombs or a torpedo. The Me109, the Luftwaffe’s workhorse fighter, was four or five times faster; its armament of fixed machine guns and cannon immeasurably more powerful and accurate than anything the British biplane could put up. The Swordfish’s only form of defence was a fixed forward-firing Vickers machine gun and a swivel-mounted Vickers or Lewis gun at the back of the open cockpit; these were so cumbersome and inaccurate that the gunner/wireless operator rarely bothered to use them and they were often removed altogether. A handheld pistol was seen as a more effective means of defence. Slow, defenceless and made from stretched cloth . . . the sight of a leisurely approaching Swordfish was unlikely to put the fear of god into its enemies. The hope was that they would rarely meet.
The Swordfish might not have been the most sophisticated piece of kit to take to the air in the Second World War, but they didn’t build 2,392 of them for the amusement of the Germans and Italians. Speak to the pilots of the Fleet Air Arm who flew her throughout the war, and you won’t hear anything but affection and admiration for the aircraft. They will tell you that the Swordfish had three outstanding qualities: it was extremely manoeuvrable, highly adaptable and, in spite of its flimsy-looking cloth frame, it was as hard as nails.
Its aerobatic qualities certainly came in handy when being chased by German fighters in the Norwegian campaign a few months earlier. A number of Me109s, chasing Swordfishes up fjords, found it hard to lay a round on them as the biplanes twisted and turned. In the aerobatic tangle, the less manoeuvrable German fighters sometimes crashed into the steep rock faces of Norway’s jagged coastline. The Swordfish was highly unlikely to shoot down an enemy fighter, but she could certainly give him the runaround. The aircraft’s versatility earned it the nickname ‘Stringbag’. The Swordfish was happy to drop anything: bombs, torpedoes, flares, depth charges, mines . . . Like a housewife’s string shopping bag, the Swordfish could carry any number of items of equipment at a time. But above all, she could take a great deal of punishment, more than any other aircraft in operation at the time. Most rounds passed straight through her linen-covered fuselage and wings.
Since the emergence of military aircraft thirty years earlier, no strike from the air had ever been attempted on a heavily defended naval base anywhere in the world. This was in part down to the very sensible reasoning that such an operation could have only one outcome: disaster for the attacking force of aircraft. Taranto, like Portsmouth and Wilhelmshaven, was one of the world’s great naval bases, protected by layer upon layer of defences. In addition to dozens of shore batteries, there were, of course, the countless guns of the ships themselves to see off any aircraft mad or brave enough to fly within their range. But Admiral Cunningham was not the only senior commander in the Med to believe that a surprise night attack on Taranto could be carried out. It was a happy coincidence that his air adviser, Rear Admiral Lyster, now in charge of carriers in the Mediterranean, had drawn up plans for an air attack on Taranto two years earlier when war loomed. When HMS Illustrious, Britain’s only modern aircraft carrier, sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar in August 1940, his plans were immediately taken out of the filing cabinet and dusted down.
It has been well known to Britain’s enemies down the centuries that the Royal Navy ‘never refuses action’. Nor has it been in the habit of sitting back and waiting to react to its enemies’ moves. The Royal Navy has always played on the front foot. Or as Admiral Nelson put it: ‘Our country will, I believe, sooner forgive an officer for attacking an enemy than for letting it alone.’ Cunningham was an aggressive commander in the mould of Nelson and, although at the start of the war he had no great enthusiasm for naval aviation, he was sharp enough to understand that the crews of the Fleet Air Arm represented his best, and probably his only, hope of delivering a decisive blow against the Italians. But when Cunningham, Lyster and Air Marshal Longmore, the RAF Air Officer Commanding Middle East, sat down in Alexandria Harbour to draw up a plan for an air attack on Taranto, even those bright military minds could not have foreseen that they were devising one of the great raids in the history of warfare, and one that would have a major impact on the nature of naval warfare for many years to come.
When Rear Admiral Lyster submitted his plans for the raid they were met with an ‘approval’ by the Admiralty back in Whitehall that was so grudging it was almost a refusal. After giving ‘Operation Judgement’ a dim green light, Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, couldn’t resist a little dig. ‘Only sailors who live in ships should attack other ships,’ he wrote.
The broad outline of the plan was for two carriers, HMS Illustrious and HMS Eagle, to get as close to Taranto as possible without arousing Italian suspicions and launch a night attack on the Italian Fleet. The element of surprise was essential. The last thing they needed was every gunner in the Italian Navy at action stations on their arrival. The attack was to take place at night when there was no chance of being intercepted by the Regia Aeronautica, which had no nightfighters in its otherwise impressive air fleet. Although the first wave of Swordfish was tasked with dropping parachute flares to guide in the rest, the attack still needed a good ‘moon period’ to help light up the ships in the harbour. For that reason, and no doubt with a salute to Admiral Nelson too, 21 October – Trafalgar Day – was chosen as the date, only for it to be scrapped soon after a major fire broke out in Illustrious’s hangar. The additional fuel tanks were being attached when one of the aircraft burst into flames. The fire quickly spread, reducing one other Swordfish to a blackened wreck and seriously damaging five others. Much of the damage was caused by the sea water pumped in to douse the inferno. The aircraft that escaped the blaze had to be taken apart, washed in fresh water and reassembled. The raid was postponed first to 31 October, and once more to the night of 11 November – Armistice Day – in order to exploit the light from a near-full moon.
There was a further setback shortly before the two carriers and their escort were due to set out from Alexandria. HMS Eagle, an ancient vessel already in her death throes, had to be withdrawn at the last minute after developing problems with her aviation fuel supply. Rather than delay the operation again, it was decided to leave her at Alexandria. Five Swordfishes and eight aircrew were transferred to Illustrious.
The Swordfish were to be launched in two flights of twelve aircraft with roughly one hour between each attack. Each flight was to comprise six aircraft carrying a mixture of 250-lb bombs and parachute flares, and six carrying torpedoes, which were expected to cause the greatest amount of damage. The orders were kept loose. It was left to the pilots to decide on their arrival at Taranto which was the best ship to target. The battleships were the main prizes, however, and the torpedo bombers, the heavy mob of the operation, were to go for them. It didn’t matter which of the six they attacked because RAF reconnaissance images showed the Italians’ capital ships were bunched so closely together that a torpedo, dropped in their general direction, stood a good chance of hitting one of them. The bombers’ principal targets were the fleet’s heavy and light cruisers and destroyers, but they were also to go for the seaplane base and the oil installations. The flying boats were the eyes of the Italian air force and the bane of the Mediterranean Fleet; the destruction of their operating centre would raise a loud cheer back in Alexandria.
Sitting on the instep of Italy’s ‘boot’ in the heart of the Mediterranean, Taranto was the obvious location to house the Italian Fleet. It had two large harbours. The outer harbour, known as the Mar Grande, is shaped like a backward ‘C’ and is almost three miles in diameter. It was here that the six battleships were anchored, along with three heavy cruisers and eight destroyers. Behind it, in the land-locked inner harbour, known as Mar Piccolo, there was a bomber’s feast of six cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, five torpedo boats, sixteen subma
rines and a variety of minor warships and support vessels. Not surprising, then, that Taranto was protected by a formidable network of defences designed to deter aircraft from attacking some of the most powerful warships afloat. Of the twenty-seven barrage balloons, sixteen were at the harbour entrance, protecting the battleships, and there would have been a further sixty had they not been wrecked in a recent storm. A shortage of hydrogen meant that they had yet to be replaced. With all the gaps between them, the balloons were expected to be more of a nuisance than a grave danger.
The battleships in the open expanse of the main outer harbour were vulnerable to torpedo attack and almost 14,000 metres of underwater netting were needed to protect them (were a torpedo ever to enter Taranto Harbour, it would come, the Italians believed, from a submarine, not an aircraft). On the night of the raid, a little over 4,000 metres of net had been installed – and even these could be avoided thanks to a new invention known as the Duplex pistol, which gave the torpedo two opportunities of detonating. It was fitted with a conventional contact pistol that detonated when the torpedo hit the target and also a magnetic one that went off when the torpedo passed underneath. All the propeller-powered torpedoes were set to run at twenty-seven knots at thirty-three feet, a depth great enough to slip under the protective nets.
It was more the vast array of anti-aircraft (AA) guns that the aircrews had to worry about. Strung out along the shore, as well as on the submerged breakwaters and the island of San Pietro at the mouth of the harbour, and on a series of floating pontoons, there were twenty-one batteries of 76-mm and greater calibre guns, eighty-four 17-mm and 20-mm guns and over 100 smaller weapons. There were also twenty-two searchlights to help the gunners pick out their targets. The guns of the ships doubled the weight of fire that could be brought to bear on unwanted visitors. How the crews of the lumbering Swordfish might expect to escape unscathed from the maelstrom of fire in so confined a space remained to be seen.
Illustrious was to leave Alexandria under cover of providing an escort for a number of convoys to reinforce Malta, Crete and the forces sent to assist the Greeks in their bitter struggle against the Italians. Alexandria was a port crawling with Axis spies and it was essential that Illustrious’s true objective should not be revealed. Were the Italians to pick up a whiff of suspicion that the aircraft carrier’s true target was Taranto, then they would have promptly weighed anchor and moved the entire fleet to the sanctuary of more northerly ports beyond the range of the Swordfish. Rumours had been abounding below decks for weeks, but details of Illustrious’s mission were not confirmed to the aircrews until the naval force had slipped Alexandria on 6 November. The Fleet Air Arm crews were a highly experienced, tight group of young men who would all have flown with one another at some point. Each of them instantly understood the challenge of the historic task they had been handed. As was the strict custom, no one dreamt of airing their fears in the wardroom over a drink at the end of the day, but inwardly each one knew the odds were against them returning. As one of the pilots, John Wellham, noted: ‘My feelings were mixed . . . Certainly, it was a boost to the ego to have been chosen but, on the other hand, it looked a pretty hairy operation, with less chance of returning in one piece than on earlier ventures . . . I had a drink and tried to look enthusiastic.’
The overall operation was given the code Mike Bravo Eight (MB8) and the total force involved practically every serviceable ship in the Mediterranean Fleet, consisting of five battleships, two aircraft carriers, eight cruisers, two AA cruisers, thirty destroyers and many smaller vessels. Once the convoys were considered secure, HMS Illustrious and her escort were to launch Operation Judgement, while a diversionary attack was launched further along the Italian coast in the Straits of Otranto. Inevitably, it was not going to be long before a force of that size attracted the attentions of the Regia Aeronautica. Sure enough, seven Savoia-Marchetti SM79 bombers were soon on the scene but, attacked by three Fulmar fighters, two were sent spiralling into the sea and the rest ditched their bombs and turned tail.
In the countdown to the raid, the naval commanders requested daily sorties by the RAF’s photographic reconnaissance aircraft to provide fresh information about the Italian Fleet and Taranto’s defences. It was unfortunate that the rivalry between the Senior Service and its junior partner meant the relationship was not the healthiest at this time and the lack of cooperation threatened to jeopardise operational activity, including the raid on Taranto. To the undisguised annoyance of the Navy, the RAF regarded the images from their photographic recce flights as their property and they were unwilling to release them. The photos had to be flown from Malta to the RAF HQ in Cairo, where, incredibly, just one naval officer was allowed to look at them, and was refused permission to take them away.
The Navy might have enjoyed a good, clean fight with their enemy, but against their compatriots in the RAF they were forced to play an altogether dirtier game. On the eve of the attack, a young officer, Lieutenant David Pollock, was despatched to inspect the photos. When his RAF colleague was distracted, Pollock smuggled out the images. The following day the photographs were copied and then returned without the RAF ever realising they had been deceived. The copies shown to Admiral Lyster revealed that virtually the entire Italian Fleet, including all the battleships, was still at anchor in Taranto. But the good news was tempered by major alarm over the state of the Swordfish.
In the morning of 10 November, with less than thirty-six hours to go before the attack was launched, one of the Swordfish was on a routine recce patrol, about twenty miles from Illustrious, when the engine cut and the pilot was forced to ditch. Lt Clifford and his observer Lt Going managed to inflate their dinghy before the aircraft sank and, igniting their flame floats, were able to attract the attention of two Royal Navy cruisers. They were flown back to Illustrious. The following morning yet another aircraft was forced to ditch after the engine failed. Hasty examinations back on Illustrious revealed that the ship’s aviation fuel tanks had been contaminated with sea water, probably during the efforts to put out the hangar fire in October. With the clock ticking down to takeoff time, the fitters raced to strip down all twenty-one aircraft earmarked for the operation, wash out their fuel systems, and then reassemble and refuel them.
The air crews on Illustrious had nothing but praise for the small army of riggers, fitters, mechanics and engineers of various description who kept their aircraft in immaculate working order. And it was thanks to their hard work and efficiency that, with barely an hour or so to spare, the attack was able to take place. Had they been forced to delay twenty-four hours, the Italians might well have suspected British intentions and moved the fleet to safer waters. Illustrious and her escort of four cruisers and four destroyers split from the main force and headed north. Admiral Cunningham signalled: ‘Good luck then to your lads in their enterprise. Their success may well have a most important bearing on the course of the war in the Mediterranean.’
By 2000 hours Illustrious had reached Kabbo Point, the flying-off location situated 40 miles off the Greek island of Cephalonia, and 175 from Taranto. The first wave of Swordfish was ranged on deck poised to launch the most daring air raid in the history of warfare. The RAF had just given the Luftwaffe a sound thrashing in the skies over southeast England. Now was the moment for the pilots of the Royal Navy, facing equally daunting odds, to prove their skill and courage.
At 1900, scores of men filed out onto the flight deck to start ranging the twelve aircraft of the first striking force. One after another, the Swordfish emerged from the lift hangar and were wheeled into position at the aft end of the ship. The moon, three-quarters full, glowed brightly above a blanket of thick cloud at around 7,000 feet.
There were several reasons why, when the order was given, the deck crews endeavoured to get the aircraft off the ship as quickly as possible. To provide the heavily laden Swordfish with the necessary lift to get airborne, the carrier had to steam into the wind as fast as she could. Moving in a straight line made her an easier t
arget for subs and bombers, so the sooner she could resume a zigzagging course, the better. What’s more, as the deck was crowded with Swordfish, if an aircraft already airborne got into difficulties, it would be unable to land and would be forced to ditch. It also meant that, in the event of an air attack, the Fulmar fighters would not be able to take off and defend the ship. A rapid series of takeoffs also conserved fuel and extended the range of the strike force as less time was spent waiting for the rest of the aircraft to get airborne. On the night of 11/12 November there was an even more pressing incentive to get a move on: delays and dawdling risked jeopardising the element of surprise that was considered essential to a successful outcome. It was fortunate that in HMS Illustrious, the air crews had a well-drilled ship’s company of the very highest efficiency and skill. While the men on deck went about securing and checking the aircraft, the forty-two pilots and observers of the two striking forces gathered in the wardroom for the final briefing. If all went to plan, they’d reconvene in the comfortable club-like surroundings in six hours’ time to swap stories over a strong drink. It was probably just as well they didn’t know that the planners were preparing for a 50 per cent casualty rate.
Having lost three aircraft to mechanical problems, the final total of aircraft available was just twenty-one, drawn from 813, 815, 819 and 824 Squadrons FAA (Fleet Air Arm). In order to accommodate the extra fuel tank, the gunner/wireless operator was jettisoned and crews were reduced to pilot and observer. There was no gun aboard, but that was hardly going to affect their chances of survival. A misfiring, ancient Vickers against the might of the Italian fleet’s guns and shore defences were no more use than a teaspoon in a knife fight. W/T (Wireless/Telegraphy) silence was to be observed throughout and the removal of the heavy W/T equipment was of greater concern to the crews. Each crew would have to find its own way back to Illustrious. The aircraft carrier might have been over 740 feet long, but in the vast expanse of the Med at night, quite possibly in cloud and with a limited amount of fuel, trying to relocate her could be a nerve-racking challenge.