by Ross Kemp
By 2015, with all twelve Swordfish on the flight deck, Illustrious and her escorts immediately began to increase their speed for the takeoff. As the bows of the ships cut into the calm surface of the sea, great sprays showered the foredecks and the gathering wind tugged hard at the clothes of all on deck. The wash from Illustrious’s giant propellors, or ‘screws’, churned up a seething froth of white foam below the quarterdeck at the stern of the boat. The pilots and their observers in their bulky flying suits and Mae Wests walked through the darkness to their aircraft, pulled themselves up into the cockpit, settled themselves on their parachutes and strapped themselves in. The riggers and fitters assigned to each aircraft slapped the backs of the air crew and offered cheery words of encouragement.
The luminous wand of the deck officer made circles in the darkness, telling the pilots to fire up their engines. The handlers inserted the handle to wind the inertia starter, filling the air with a high-pitched whining sound. Slowly the revs built, the pilots set the throttle, and twelve Pegasus engines, almost as one, coughed into life as clouds of smoke billowed from the exhausts. The pilots checked the gauges on the instrument panel and pushed the engine to full throttle, then back to tick-over, awaiting the summons forward. The ship was approaching maximum speed of almost thirty knots and the wind was now howling down the flight deck, offering as much lift as possible for the heavily burdened bombers. The crouching maintainers and handlers, buffeted by the gusts, dodged the whirling propellors as they slipped around the aircraft, ready to unfold and lock down the wings and remove the wooden chocks under the wheels. It was just before 2030 and some moonlight was visible through a break in the clouds.
A green light gave the signal for the first aircraft to fly off. The twelve aircraft, ranged on both sides at the rear of the flight deck, were to taxi out to launch their takeoff run, alternately from starboard and port. The silhouettes of 1,500-lb MkXII torpedoes were clearly visible under the fuselage of six of the aircraft and the 250-lb semi-armour-piercing bombs under the others. The first aircraft was flown by the leader of the striking force, Lt Commander Kenneth ‘Hooch’ Williamson, CO (Commanding Officer) of 815 Squadron. His observer was Lt Norman ‘Blood’ Scarlett. Moving out into the line running down the centre of the deck, Williamson held the brakes while the Swordfish’s double wings were folded out and locked tight. On the signal, Williamson opened the throttle and released the brakes. The engine roared as the 3.5-tonne fully loaded biplane gathered speed along the 740-foot-long deck, dropped over the bow and then climbed into the night. The other eleven followed in rapid succession and, eight miles from Illustrious, still climbing and heading in a roughly northwesterly direction, the force formed up on Williamson’s lead aircraft. Cruising at around eighty knots, the attack force were on course to reach Taranto shortly before 1100.
At around 7,500 feet, the twelve biplanes disappeared into thick cumulus cloud. When they emerged into the bright moonlight on the other side, the formation had been reduced to nine. Colliding in cloud could and did happen, but it was more likely that three other aircraft had become detached and were making their own way to the target area. All the aircrews later remarked on the extreme cold they suffered in the open cockpits. On arrival at the target area, the plan was for the twelve aircraft to split up. The two carrying the parachute flares were to drop them over the battleships as the torpedo-bombers negotiated the barrage balloons at the harbour entrance. The bombers were to head straight for the inner harbour to attack the cruisers and destroyers. The hope was that before the majority of the AA gunners had gone to action stations and opened up, the torpedo-bombers would be diving onto their targets. But, in the event, far from their arrival being a surprise to the defenders, virtually every gun in the Italian Navy was manned, loaded and waiting for the Royal Navy raiders. One of the aircraft that had become detached in the cloud, crewed by Lt Swayne and Sub-Lt Buscall, reached Taranto fifteen minutes before the others because it had flown at sea level. On realising they were the first to arrive, they had no choice but to fly around and wait for the rest of the attacking force. Inevitably, their presence was picked up by Italian listening devices and the alarm was raised.
Williamson and the others knew they were on the right navigational course when they were about ten minutes away. Hundreds of guns opened up and ‘flaming onion’ tracer shells erupted in the night sky. From that distance the skies above the harbour resembled a giant fireball. ‘Taranto could be seen from a distance of fifty miles or more, because of the welcome awaiting us,’ wrote Lt Charles Lamb, one of the flare-droppers, in his war memoir. ‘The sky over the harbour looked like it sometimes does over Mount Etna, in Sicily, when the great volcano erupts. The darkness was being torn apart by a firework display which spat flame into the night to a height of nearly 5,000 feet.’
If the aircrews had been in any doubt about the risks they faced in the attack, they were dispelled in an instant by the scene ahead of them. Their survival would depend on the skill of each pilot and the famous manoeuvrability of the Swordfish. The torpedo-bombers’ task of attacking the heavily gunned battleships was the most important and the most challenging. They would have to dive almost vertically through the wall of fire rising to meet them, straighten up a few feet over the surface of the harbour, line up a target, drop the torpedo and escape in a steep climb back through the barrage.
The formation reached Taranto at around 8,000 feet just before 11 o’clock. At 2256 the first flare-droppers, crewed by Kiggell and Janvrin, dropped their line of sixteen flares in rapid succession along the eastern side of the harbour. The flares, which would burn for three minutes, had delayed fuses, allowing the droppers to escape before they were lit up for the AA gunners. The harbour, already illuminated by the defenders’ fire, was soon bathed in a bright light, but there was so much smoke from the flak drifting through the air that some of the targets remained obscured. The barrage of the Italian gunners reached a feverish pitch as they concentrated their fire on the tiny flares slowly floating down from the heavens. In hindsight, they would have been better off focusing on the Swordfish. Kiggell’s flares were burning so brightly and the ships were now so clearly visible that Lamb decided not to drop his, fearing they would be more help to the defenders than the attackers.
Sitting 5,000 feet above the harbour, Lamb had the best seat in the house from which to observe the unfolding drama below. ‘For the last six months, almost without a break, we had attracted the enemy’s fire for an average of at least an hour a week; but I had never imagined anything like this to be possible. Before the first Swordfish had dived to the attack, the full-throated roar from the guns of six battleships and the blast from the cruisers and destroyers made the harbour defences seem like a sideshow . . . into that inferno, one hour apart, two waves, of six and then five Swordfish . . . danced weaving arabesques of death and destruction with their torpedoes, flying into the harbour only a few feet above sea level – so low one or two of them touched the water with their wheels.’
The torpedo-bombers split into two subflights of three and launched their attack simultaneously. The first subflight attacked the northernmost battleships, while the second, led by Kemp, made for the southernmost. All six biplanes dived straight into the storm of fire. The first, led by Williamson and Scarlett, with the Conte di Cavour as their designated target, arrived on the scene bang on time, just as the first flares were adding their glare to the illuminations. Straightening up out of the dive, they passed unscathed through the barrage-balloon cables as they roared through the harbour entrance towards the line of battleships. Pointing straight at the massive silhouette of the Cavour, Williamson flicked the release button on his throttle lever. They were so low at this point that they felt the splash as the lethal ‘fish’ slapped into the water. The torpedo sunk below the surface and moments later an almighty explosion thundered across the harbour.
Almost instantaneously, the Swordfish slammed into the water.
The official reports suggest they had been h
it by AA fire, which might have been the case, but the Swordfish might also have dipped a wing tip in the water as Williamson made to turn away. The flight commander, semi-delirious after cracking his head on impact, struggled to get out of the cockpit and he was under water when he finally managed to wrestle free from his parachute and harness. When he reached the surface, at first he thought it had started to rain until he realised he was swimming through machine-gun fire. ‘Blood’ Scarlett recalled: ‘I just fell out of the back into the sea. We were only about twenty feet up. It wasn’t very far to drop. I never tie myself in on these occasions. Then old Williamson came up a bit later and we hung about by the aircraft, which had its tail sticking out of the water. Chaps ashore were shooting at it.’ For half an hour, the two men clung to the tail of the Swordfish and watched the rest of the raid unfold before they swam off to a floating dock 100 yards away and clambered into the clutches of some very angry dockworkers.
The two other aircraft in the subflight, piloted by Sub-Lts Julian Sparke and Douglas Macauley, survived the approach into the harbour, and managed to get their torpedoes away. But both narrowly missed the Conte di Cavour and exploded close to the Andrea Doria, without causing any damage.
The second subflight were assigned to attack the Littorio, which was anchored a mile to the north of the Cavour, closer to the town of Taranto and the entrance to the inner harbour. The first two, piloted by Kemp and Swayne, approached from the west and came under the heaviest fire yet as they swept down into the harbour. Having survived the barrage from the shore defences, they were at mast height when the cruisers lowered their guns and added their considerable weight to the fire. The guns were elevated so low that many of the rounds were seen to riddle some of the other ships in the harbour. Kemp dropped his torpedo about a thousand yards short of the Littorio and watched it streak towards the battleship. As always after dropping the 1,600-lb torpedo, the Swordfish bucked upwards, and Kemp corrected the attitude of the aircraft before climbing steeply back into the streams of AA fire.
Swayne had managed to drop his torpedo 400 yards short of the Littorio, a range so close that he almost careered into the battleship’s rigging as he made his escape. There was a matter of seconds between the two explosions: Kemp’s struck the starboard bow, Swayne’s the port quarter. A column of smoke shooting out of the ship’s smokestacks confirmed that Littorio had been struck a deadly blow. The third Swordfish, with Lt Michael Maund at the controls, was not so fortunate. He decided to attack the Vittorio Veneto anchored close by, but his torpedo ran aground in shallow water.
While the torpedo-bombers laid siege to the capital ships in the main harbour, the other six Swordfish swept towards the Mar Piccolo, the inner harbour where cruisers and destroyers were stacked up ‘Mediterranean-style’ in a neat row along the jetty. If the bombers could negotiate the flak, they could barely miss. Ollie Patch, the only Royal Marine in the attacking force, was the first to arrive over the harbour, but he could barely see the ships for all the smoke and flames from the AA fire. When he finally picked out a target through the haze, he dropped the nose of his Swordfish into a dive so steep he was virtually standing on the pedals. He released his six bombs and made his escape. He twisted and turned the aerobatic Swordfish so sharply to avoid the streaks of tracer heading their way that his observer Goodwin was lifted from his seat and was only saved from plunging to his death by the ‘monkey’s tail’ wire that attached him to the aircraft.
In the space of ten minutes or so, the Italians had filled the air with thousands of rounds of various calibre and the smoke was so thick that when Sub-Lt Sarra dived from 8,000 to 1,500 feet over the Mar Piccolo, he was unable to identify clearly a single ship of the four dozen or so moored there. Dropping even lower to 500 feet, where the concentration of fire was even greater, he attacked the hangars and slipways of the seaplane base. All six bombs exploded and the hangars erupted in flames as he fled from the scene with AA flak and rounds of all description bursting around his tail and wings, shredding the cloth fabric as the biplane climbed as fast as it could to safety. Sarra and Sub-Lt Forde, who had only recently qualified as a pilot, were the most junior pilots of the twenty-one who took part in the Taranto raid and both showed remarkable courage and cool-headedness on the night. Forde, who had become split up from the rest of the bombers shortly before they went in, dived through murderous flak and dropped his bombs from 1,500 feet. Unsure whether all of his bombs had been released, he circled the harbour and plunged back into the firestorm again for a second attack. The last of the bombers, crewed by Murray and Paine, attacked the neat line of destroyers from 3,000 feet, dropping their bombs as they swept from east to west. One landed square on the destroyer Libeccio but, to their fury, it failed to detonate.
Having sensibly decided not to drop his flares, Lamb had circled the harbour, watching the inferno rage below. Keen to make his own contribution before leaving, he headed for the oil storage tanks, which had already been attacked by the other flare-droppers, Kiggell and Janvrin. His bombs found their target, but with no results observed; either the bombs had failed to go off or they had exploded deep inside the storage containers. Lamb’s was the last of the Swordfish to leave the scene of the attack and, as he turned the aircraft back in the rough direction of Cephalonia, he was convinced that he and Grieve, his observer, were the only survivors of the attack. The raid had taken little more than five minutes, but for two and a half hours, the two young airmen flew through the darkness in gloomy silence.
At 2123, an hour after Williamson’s force had set out, Illustrious was ploughing into the wind again when the first of nine aircraft in the second flight roared down the flight deck. The flight comprised five torpedo bombers, two bombers and two carrying a mixture of flares and bombs. There was certainly going to be no element of surprise in their attack. Taranto was already ablaze, the AA gunners now had their eye in and the early warning posts along the coast had alerted the Italian Fleet to the fact that a second wave of attackers was on its way. The pause between the two attacks also gave the defenders the opportunity to gather and reorganise themselves.
The second strike was led by the CO of 819 Squadron, Lt Commander ‘Ginger’ Hale, an excellent rugby player who had played for England before the war. Other notables in the second striking force included Lt Wellham, who had won a DSC for a daylight attack on Italian shipping at Bomba Bay in Libya, in which he had torpedoed and sunk an enemy supply ship. (The Royal Marine Ollie Patch sank a submarine in the same raid.) Wellham’s observer, Lt Pat Humphreys, had been awarded the George Cross in 1937 (then called the Empire Gallantry Medal) during the Spanish Civil War. After his destroyer had struck a mine, he had helped rescue seriously injured men from a compartment flooded with water and oil.
The undisputed flying ace of the force, however, was a lanky Ulsterman, Lt Michael Torrens-Spence, the senior pilot, and second-in-command of 819 Squadron. Every memoir or account of Fleet Air Arm operations in the Second World War stresses his remarkable flying skills and courage. He pressed home his attacks with an almost suicidal disregard for his own safety.
Illustrious’s aircraft had been bedevilled by problems from the moment plans for the raid were laid down, and it was no surprise when the second flight suffered a last-minute setback. The aircraft crewed by Clifford and Going – the same two who had been plucked from the sea the day before after ditching – was badly damaged when it was caught by another aircraft as it taxied across the flight deck. The cloth of the wings was badly torn and, worse still, several of the supporting ribs had snapped in half. There was no chance of it taking to the air in that state and she was taken down in the lift hangar. Clifford and Going were distraught at the prospect of missing the raid and ran straight to the island and begged Captain Boyd and Rear Admiral Lyster to let them catch up the rest of the force. Reluctantly, the commanders agreed. Working with incredible speed and skill, the riggers completed the extensive repairs; thirty minutes later, Clifford and Going climbed into the night and banked
towards Taranto.
Passing them somewhere in the darkness were their colleagues, Lt Morford and Sub-Lt Green, who were returning to Illustrious after developing serious problems of their own. Their long-range fuel tank had fallen off and, in the process, damaged some fittings, which were now smashing against the fuselage. They had already turned back when the engine suddenly cut and the Swordfish began losing height. Morford managed to restart the engine, but the danger hadn’t passed. Observing the strict W/T silence that had been ordered, they were unable to inform Illustrious they were arriving and, as they approached the ship, the gunners on the carrier and the escorting cruiser Berwick opened fire. Green quickly fired the two-star identification signal of the day, the firing ceased at once, Illustrious turned back into the wind and they landed on.
The cloud had lifted as the formation of seven Swordfish slowly climbed to 8,000 feet. Shortly after 1100, still more than fifty miles from Taranto, the observers/navigators in the rear cockpits were able to stow their clipboards of navigational charts. The first wave had just launched their attack, turning the skies over the harbour into a ball of fire that acted like a homing beacon, growing bigger and brighter as they rumbled towards it. At five minutes to midnight, a few miles short of the coast, the two flare-droppers, piloted by Lts Hamilton and Skelton, peeled off from the main attacking force. Coming in from the south, they released twenty-four parachutes in rapid succession before turning their attentions to the oil depot a mile inland from the southern end of the Mar Grande.