by Ross Kemp
In this attack, all the torpedo-bombers flew into the north of the harbour, avoiding the gun emplacements on San Pietro Island and the floating batteries at the harbour entrance, but the reception from the Italian gunners, now on full alert, was even more ferocious than that which greeted the first wave. One Swordfish, crewed by Lts Bayley and Slaughter, swooped to torpedo the heavy cruiser Gorizia, but was caught up in the intense volleys of flak, burst into flames and careered into the harbour. Both young officers were killed. The torpedo that was found floating near the crash location the following morning was thought to have been theirs. Its striking head had been crushed but had failed to detonate, suggesting they had managed to hit their target.
Simultaneously, Flight Leader Hale and Lt Torrens-Spence both dived into the intense flak to attack the Littorio, Italy’s newest battleship, whose beleaguered crew were busy trying to contain the damage sustained in the first assault. The Swordfish screeched and strained violently as they fell out of the sky almost vertically before their pilots pulled them hard out of the dive. When they levelled up to make their final approach, they were so low that the undercarriages were almost touching the water. Both pilots flicked the release buttons on the throttle at the same time, roughly 700 yards from the 40,000-ton warship. Both torpedoes found their target on the starboard side and yet another booming explosion added to the already deafening uproar. The other torpedo failed to go off having slapped into the muddy seabed directly below the ship.
Seconds away from smashing straight into the severely wounded battleship, Hale banked sharply, missing a barrage balloon cable by just a few yards before disappearing into the night as fast as his lumbering biplane would allow. Torrens-Spence was flying so low that, as he fled the scene of destruction, the wheels of his aircraft actually dipped into the water. With less skilled aviators at the controls, the Swordfish would have cartwheeled on impact, but in that split second Torrens-Spence showed why he had come to be regarded as one of the best in the Fleet Air Arm. By immediately pulling back on the controls, the Ulsterman saved himself and his observer Lt Alfie Sutton from certain death.
Lt Lea, meanwhile, had his sights on the Caio Duilio, moored at the northernmost end of the main harbour. Dropping beneath the AA barrage, he flew within 600 yards of his target before releasing his torpedo. From that range, he could barely miss the 550-foot-long battleship and, sure enough, seconds later the warhead tore a huge hole in its starboard side beneath one of its main turrets. With his observer, Sub-Lt Jones, clinging on in the back, unable to do anything but watch and pray, Lea also experienced a hazardous escape from the harbour. Flying just above the water, he had escaped colliding with a fishing boat by a matter of feet when he came under heavy fire from the two cruisers Zara and Fiume before struggling clear and heading back out to sea.
Lt Wellham, too, had to show excellent airmanship to emerge from the maelstrom unscathed. In the thundering, blinding chaos of the battle, Wellham had become detached from the other torpedo-bombers but, spotting a gap in the flak, he began his dive. He was gaining speed, pushing 170 knots as the multicoloured streaks of tracer flashed past, when a barrage balloon that had broken free from its mooring loomed into his path. With a less skilled pilot at the controls of a less manoeuvrable and robust aircraft, that would have marked the end for men and machine alike, but Wellham swerved out of the way at the last possible moment. The Swordfish rocked violently as one of the wings caught the balloon’s trailing cable. The wing was badly damaged and Wellham battled with all his strength to rescue the stricken biplane. ‘There was a tremendous jar, the whole aircraft juddered and the stick flew out of my hand . . . We were completely out of control . . . We were diving almost vertically into the centre of the City of Taranto! I hauled the stick back into my stomach.’ Others might have chosen to remove their wounded aircraft from harm’s way, but Wellham pressed on. ‘I was determined to aim at something after carrying the bloody thing all that way and having a rather hairy dive – I’d be damned if I didn’t do something with it.’ Struggling to keep the Swordfish on an even approach – the aircraft needed to be level when the torpedo was dropped – Wellham was 500 yards short of the Vittorio Veneto when he released his ‘fish’. The flagship of the Italian Fleet was leading a charmed existence that night and once again it escaped potentially catastrophic destruction. Given the difficulties that Wellham was having in preventing his Swordfish from crashing, it was not surprising that his effort narrowly missed its mark. (It was subsequently discovered that the ailerons of Wellham’s port wing had been wrecked and a giant hole had been torn in the fuselage.)
Clifford and Going, meanwhile, having made good time in their patched-up aircraft, arrived while the attack was in full cry. A hellish scene played out below. Through the billowing smoke, trails of tracer and explosions of flak, they could see vast slicks of oil stretching out across the main harbour. Clifford, piloting the only out-and-out bomber, circled the Mar Piccolo several times waiting for his chance to swoop. As soon as he spotted a gap in the flak, he put the nose down and tail up, and dropped the three-and-a-half-ton biplane towards the long line of cruisers and destroyers, whose gunners responded with a murderous barrage of fire. At 2,500 feet, he levelled off and turned towards two cruisers, dropping a stick of six bombs as he surged through the flak. Five of the bombs narrowly missed their targets; one scored a direct hit on the Trento, but failed to go off. Not for the first time that night, the bravery and skill of the bomber crews was let down by the shoddy design of the bombs they dropped. Had every bomb exploded as they should have done, then the destruction at Taranto would have been at least twice as great. Most of the bombs had missed their targets by so little that the explosions would still have caused significant damage to the lightly armoured cruisers and destroyers. Clifford banked to the north and disappeared over the coast into the darkness, leaving behind a scene of smouldering devastation. But not until an RAF reconnaissance aircraft photographed the harbour would the Swordfish crews discover if their heroic efforts had succeeded in inflicting any significant damage on the Italian Fleet.
Back on Illustrious, Rear Admiral Lyster, Captain Boyd and the rest of the ship’s company were growing increasingly anxious. The W/T silence that had been ordered so as not to give away the ship’s location was allowed to be broken just once. Williamson was to contact the ship with one short, sharp message to alert them of their imminent return, but he was now a prisoner of war. The time set for the return of the first wave had passed and the men back on Illustrious were beginning to fear the worst for the Swordfish crews when the radar officer picked up a formation of aircraft on his set. Not long afterwards, the dimmed navigation lights of the first Swordfish were visible on the horizon and Boyd turned the giant carrier into the wind for them to land on. To the mounting relief of all aboard, one after another the wheels of the sturdy biplanes thumped onto the flight deck. Each aircraft came to a violent halt as the hook at the tail of the Swordfish caught one of the arrestor wires strung out across the deck before taxiing to the end of the ship where their wings were folded and they disappeared back into the sanctuary of the hangar. By three o’clock all but two of the twenty-one aircraft to set out for Taranto were back in the hangar. Those piloted by Williamson and Bayley would never return. The ship turned southwards to rejoin the rest of the Fleet and head back to Alexandria.
While the observers heaved their weary, frozen bodies from the cockpits and hurried stiffly into the ship’s island to be debriefed, the exhausted pilots went below to inspect the damage to their battle-torn biplanes. Almost every Swordfish had been punctured and perforated, their cloth fabric shredded and singed by the shells and machine guns of the Italian defenders. Sarra’s aircraft alone had seventeen shell holes along its fuselage and wings, while Wellham’s was so badly damaged that the riggers and fitters were astonished he’d been able to keep it aloft, let alone fly it two and a half hours back to the ship. Had the Swordfish been made from metal, it is doubtful whether more than one or two
of them would have survived to tell their tale of what the Italians still call La Notte Di Taranto – ‘Taranto Night’.
Most of the aircrews were convinced that the raid had been a failure. The bombs had failed to detonate, that much was sure, and it was impossible to know if the torpedoes, striking far below the surface, had caused any damage or even hit their targets. Neither striking force was going to hang around in the umbrella of flak over Taranto to inspect the results of their night’s work. But the opinion expressed by one of their number in the wardroom that night – that they had made ‘a complete cock of it’ – summed up the general mood of despondency, a mood that was deepened when the news filtered through that they were going to be asked to launch a further attack. On hearing the speculation, one wit was heard to wisecrack: ‘Bloody hell, even the Light Brigade was only asked to do it once!’
The exhausted pilots and observers who took part in the Taranto raid had been living on their nerves for months, and few of them attempted to disguise their delight when it was announced the following day that Admiral Lyster had decided against a third strike. His decision is often put down to worsening weather conditions, but there was a more weighing factor. At first light, the three Italian battleships that had not been targeted by the Swordfish torpedo-bombers slipped harbour and steamed as quickly as possible for the safety of Naples. With the major prey gone, there was little point in Lyster risking his precious aircrews and aircraft in the pursuit of the smaller warships that were now even less likely to venture out of port and risk action against the Royal Navy.
At the same time that the Italian battleships were weighing anchor and the dumbfounded authorities of the Regia Marina began inspecting the destruction in the oil-choked harbour, Illustrious was joining up with the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet off the south coast of the Peloponnese mainland. If the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Cunningham, was impressed by the efforts of his Fleet Air Arm, he had a peculiar way of expressing it. As Illustrious steamed within view, flags were hoisted aboard his flagship, HMS Warspite, spelling out a message from the Admiral which read: ‘Illustrious manoeuvre well executed’. The signal has since become a famous footnote in naval history, and Cunningham, as already noted, no great fan of naval aviation, was roundly barracked in some quarters for his lukewarm congratulations.
In mitigation, two points need to be made. Firstly, Cunningham was of the old naval school and believed no man should receive special praise for doing his duty and carrying out the job he was trained to do. More relevant, however, was the fact that it was early in the morning and the RAF reconnaissance aircraft was yet to produce its post-raid images of Taranto. Cunningham had no idea of the scale of the damage the Swordfish had inflicted. Had he known that the clumsy-looking, obsolete biplanes had effectively knocked the Italian Fleet out of the war and given him almost total control of the Med, then no doubt even he would have overcome his natural reserve and offered more effusive praise for their efforts. And, to his credit, soon afterwards he tacitly admitted that he had failed to acknowledge the airmen’s achievements: ‘Admirably planned and most gallantly executed in the face of intense anti-aircraft fire, Operation Judgement was a great success,’ he wrote in a report four months later.
While Illustrious steamed eastwards to Egypt, as soon as there was sufficient light, three Cantieri flying boats were dispatched to pinpoint her location so that Italian bombers might deliver immediate revenge. All three were shot out of the sky by Illustrious’s Fulmar fighters and the carrier was spared the efforts of a fighting retreat. Lt Cdr Williamson and Lt Scarlett, meanwhile, were getting used to life as prisoners of war. Their crewmates back on Illustrious had no idea whether they were dead or alive, but the widespread assumption was that they had perished in the crash. After clambering ashore into the clutches of an angry mob of dockyard workers, they were roughly treated at first – perhaps understandably given the destruction being wrought all around them. Their clothes were torn from their backs and they were bundled into a hut. But their captors soon calmed down and gave them a blanket and some cigarettes. They were taken for questioning to the destroyer Fulmine, whose gunners were firing at them when they were downed. Their interrogation could not have been more civilised. They were handed glasses of cognac and issued with clean clothes, and then given a hot meal, beer and a comfortable bed for the night.
‘In fact,’ recalled Williamson, ‘we were almost popular heroes. Two nights after our raid the RAF came over and we were put into an air-raid shelter full of seamen. They all pressed cigarettes on us and towards the end of the raid about twenty of them sang “Tipperary” for our benefit.’ After a short spell in a prisoner-of-war camp at Sulmona, they were transferred to Germany where they saw out the war in less hospitable and comfortable circumstances. In 1945 Scarlett was mentioned in dispatches for organising a bid to escape from his Stalag. The other crew not to return from Taranto were not so fortunate. The body of the observer Lt Slaughter was never found. Lt Bayley is buried in the Imperial War Graves Cemetery at Bari.
As the sun rose over Taranto, thousands of sailors and dockyard workers were working furiously to salvage their crippled ships. The full details of the damage would not be known for a further twenty-four hours but, as he surveyed the scene, Admiral Riccardi, the Chief of the Italian Naval Staff, did not need a team of engineering experts to tell him that his fleet had suffered a catastrophic blow. As an expert in air warfare, he might even have privately admired the skill of the British raiders. In the Mar Grande, the battleships Littorio, Caio Duilio and Cavour were either sunk or beached to prevent them sinking. Three cruisers and two destroyers and two fleet auxiliaries suffered significant damage, mainly from near-misses by the bombs, while the seaplane hangar had been gutted by fire and two aircraft destroyed. The oil depot had also been damaged; it was only the faulty mechanisms of the bombs that had prevented its total destruction.
Between them, the Swordfish dropped eleven torpedoes and over forty 250-lb bombs. The Italian shore defences alone had fired over 13,000 regular flak rounds as well as 1,750 rounds of four-inch and 7,000 rounds of three-inch shells. There are no records of the ammunition expended by the fleet’s gunners, but the aircrews reported that the volume of fire from the warships was even greater than that from the fixed-gun emplacements. Many of these rounds hit the merchant vessels, the dock installations and the city itself, adding considerably to the scale of the damage. Italian casualties, however, were remarkably light: twenty-three killed aboard Littorio, sixteen in the Conte di Cavour, and just one on Caio Duilio.
The Littorio had been hit by three torpedoes, two to starboard and one to port, each one tearing huge chunks out of her thick armoured hull. Kemp’s strike had blown a hole forty-nine by thirty-two feet in the first strike, but it was the follow-up blow delivered in the second strike by either Hale or Torrens-Spence that completed the job. It was a credit to her designers and builders that the damage suffered did not prove fatal. She was left to rest on the bottom of the harbour shallows while repairs took place. The work was complicated by the danger of the unexploded torpedo beneath her keel which, it transpired, had hit her but failed to explode. It was six months before she was refloated and made seaworthy again.
The Conte di Cavour suffered the heaviest damage. Williamson’s torpedo had blown a hole roughly forty feet by twenty-five feet close to the forward ammunition magazine, and she was on the bottom with water over her main decks by the morning. She never returned to service.
The Caio Duilio suffered damage from Lt Lea’s torpedo which ripped a hole of about thirty-five by twenty-five feet in the starboard, right between two ammunition magazines. She was immediately beached to prevent sinking. Two months later she was refloated and sent to the dry dock at Genoa for repairs. It was six months before she was able to return to service. Had Lea’s warhead struck a yard or two to the left or right and hit a store of explosive shells, she would have been blown to smithereens.
According to the Ital
ians, a mere handful of the forty or so bombs dropped by the Swordfish exploded. The crews of the bombers who braved the storm of flak were especially annoyed to hear that their courageous efforts had brought no reward. With the destroyers and cruisers moored so closely together in the Mar Piccolo inner harbour, there would surely have been destruction on a terrifying scale had just half a dozen of the bombs managed to detonate. Had the first striking force managed to retain the element of surprise and arrive unannounced, before the gunners had taken their stations, then the damage might have been that much greater again.
It took almost two days for an accurate assessment of the damage to be constructed from intelligence reports and images from the RAF’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. After month upon month of announcing setback after setback, defeat after defeat, Churchill could barely hide his smile when he stood up to address the House of Commons on 13 November. ‘I have some news for the House. It is good news. The Royal Navy has struck a crippling blow at the Italian Fleet.’ When the cheering had died down, he continued: ‘The total strength of the Italian Battle Fleet was six battleships, two of them of the “Littorio” class, which have just been put into service and are, of course, among the most powerful vessels in the world, and four of the recently reconstructed “Cavour” class. This fleet was, to be sure, considerably more powerful on paper than our Mediterranean Fleet, but it had consistently refused to accept battle. On the night of the 11/12 November, when the main units of the Italian fleet were lying behind their shore defences in their naval base at Taranto, our aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm attacked them in their stronghold . . . I felt it my duty to bring this glorious episode to the immediate notice of the House. As the result of a determined and highly successful attack, which reflects the greatest honour on the Fleet Air Arm, only three Italian battleships remain effective.’