by Ross Kemp
To a layman listening to the Prime Minister, the crippling of three battleships might not have sounded such a mighty blow, but a navy man would have instantly understood the significance. Although carriers would soon overtake them as the capital ships of a fleet, battleships were the heavy brigade of the sea, and no navy in the world could hope to compete with the Royal Navy if they didn’t possess a superior complement. Mussolini’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ had become ‘Cunningham’s Pond’, thanks to two attacks lasting no more than fifteen minutes between them carried out by twenty biplanes from a bygone era. Taranto represented not just a major shift in naval power in the Mediterranean, it heralded a major shift in naval strategy. Events in southern Italy didn’t go unnoticed by the Admirals in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Although the Japanese had already started planning their carrier-borne air attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Taranto proved it could be done.
Praise for the Illustrious and the men of the Fleet Air Arm came from every quarter. In a letter to Admiral Cunningham, King George VI wrote: ‘The recent successful operations of the Fleet under your command have been a source of pride and gratification to all at home. Please convey my warm congratulations to the Mediterranean Fleet and, in particular, to Fleet Air Arm on their brilliant exploit against the Italian warships at Taranto.’ The First Sea Lord Admiral Pound, who had been so disdainful about the unchivalrous notion of aircraft attacking ships, wrote to his successor in the Med: ‘Just before the news of Taranto the Cabinet were rather down in the dumps; but Taranto had a most amazing effect on them.’ Indeed, news of the attack, trumpeted across the front page of The Times and other newspapers, gave the whole country an enormous lift, not least in London and the other major cities that were suffering the full force of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz at the time.
The mood was less buoyant in Rome and Berlin. The Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, made the following entry in his diary for 12 November 1940: ‘A black day. The British, without warning, have attacked the Italian Fleet at anchor in Taranto, and have sunk the Dreadnought Cavour and seriously damaged the battleships Littorio and Duilio. These ships will remain out of the fight for many months. I thought I would find Il Duce downhearted. Instead he took the blows quite well and does not, at this moment, seem to have fully realised its gravity.’
The price of neutering the Italian Navy was a high one. Mussolini might not have understood – or wanted to understand – that the Taranto raid had changed the balance of power in the Med overnight, but Hitler and his staff certainly did, and they knew that it had been brought about by the efforts of just one ship. Soon afterwards the Luftwaffe was dispatched to the Med to take over from the Regio Aeronautica, partly to assist the Italian invasion of Greece and the Balkans, but also to support Rommel’s campaign in North Africa by attacking Allied convoys and protecting their own. They arrived in huge numbers and among them was an entire Fliegerkorps of 300 aircraft, most of them Junker Ju87 Stuka divebombers, based on Sicily, just a short flight from Malta. The rocky little British colony, the key to the Mediterranean, was the principal objective of the German bombers, but there was one other target high on their list of priorities: HMS Illustrious.
On 7 January 1941, Illustrious accompanied the Mediterranean Fleet on Operation Excess to escort large merchant convoys to and from Malta and Crete. Once that task was completed, Admiral Cunningham wanted to make the most of the Fleet’s presence to seek out and attack enemy shipping along the Italian coast. Rear Admiral Lyster and Captain Boyd implored their Commander-in-Chief not to place Illustrious within range of the Stukas based on Sicily. With only five or six Fulmar fighters fit for action after a series of losses to the squadron, the carrier was as good as defenceless against hundreds of German divebombers. But Cunningham rebuffed their pleas, insisting she was needed for the morale of the rest of the fleet. As events soon proved, it was a fateful decision.
The morning of 10 January was a bright one and Lts Lamb and Torrens-Spence were leaning on the rail of Illustrious’s quarter-deck enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette. Beneath them, the surf seethed and frothed under the force of the carrier’s giant propellers. The force was close to the island of Pantelleria, 60 miles southwest of Sicily and 150 miles west of Malta. They were watching the escorting destroyer, HMS Gallant, cutting through the surf, when a huge explosion tore off her bow. She had struck a mine that had detonated her forward magazine, killing sixty-five men. The rest of the ship’s company were rescued and Gallant was towed into Malta but it was a bad omen for the watching airmen. Much worse was to follow.
Torrens-Spence, the senior pilot of 819 Squadron, had been briefed about the Stuka threat. He turned to Lamb and said: ‘This is a day you will never forget. You can thank your lucky stars that you are flying this morning and not sitting in the hangar at action stations.’
It was almost 1230 and Lamb was returning to the carrier after a morning hunting submarines. Getting low on fuel, he was circling the carrier waiting for her to turn into the wind so that the next wave of aircraft could take off and he could land on. Back on board, the radar officer looked on his screen in horror: a swarm of aircraft was bearing down on the carrier. Lamb banked, levelled out, and had begun to make his approach when he watched the first screeching Stuka dive from on high and drop its 1,000-lb bomb. Every gun on the Illustrious opened with a furious barrage, but there was little they could do to prevent the thirty-three divebombers from hitting such a large target, falling vertically upon her and dropping their deadly loads from a mere 500 feet. In the chaos of the minutes that followed, the Stukas scored six direct hits with their enormous bombs; the three-inch-thick armour on the flight deck of Britain’s most modern carrier and the reinforced fire curtains of the hangar were no defence against the assault. One of the bombs dropped straight into an open hangar lift-well, and the force of the explosion was so great that it picked up the lift platform and dumped it on the flight deck. From the bridge of his flagship, Admiral Cunningham watched in awe as the Illustrious battled for her life. ‘We opened up with every AA gun we had as one by one the Stukas peeled off into their dives, concentrating almost the whole venom of their attack upon Illustrious,’ he recalled in his memoir. ‘At times she became almost completely hidden in a forest of great bomb splashes . . . We could not but admire the skill and precision of it all. The attacks were pressed home to point-blank range, and as they pulled out of their dives, some of them were seen to fly along the flight deck of Illustrious below the level of the funnel.’
They certainly weren’t admiring the skill and precision of it all down in Illustrious’s hangar, which had become a scene of utter horror. For reasons that no airman could ever fathom, the drill was that whenever the carrier came under attack and action stations were called, they were to head down to the hangar where they were to remain, closed down, listening to the boom of the falling bombs and the ceaseless crack of the AA guns until the danger had passed. But the hangar was probably the most dangerous place on board, being packed with aircraft, tons of aviation fuel, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition and dozens of torpedoes, bombs and depth charges. The state-of-the-art flight deck could take only so much punishment against the 1,000-lb fully armour-piercing bombs of the Stukas – and even when a smaller 500-lb arrived through the open lift shaft, the result was carnage below deck.
Many aircrew officers took themselves to the wardroom during an attack, figuring that, as there was nothing they could do, they might as well have a gin and tonic and read the paper until they were given the all-clear. On this occasion the wardroom took a direct hit. The effects of a blast can be extremely random and in this instance, while the thick metal supporting columns of the wardroom were bent into crazy shapes by the explosion, an RAF officer, on board as an observer, was found sitting in an armchair, holding a copy of The Times, but with his head nowhere to be seen and the clock still ticking on the wall behind him. Torrens-Spence was one of only three officers in the room to survive.
But it was the men caught in the hangar who suffered the worst horrors. The disintegrated bodies of men, talking and walking just a moment earlier, lay scattered across the deck and the bulkheads. The first deaths were caused by the blasts themselves and a storm of red-hot metal shards measuring up to four feet long, decapitating and dismembering anybody caught in their dreadful path. All the aircraft quickly caught fire, setting off their ammunition. Thousands of rounds bounced around the metallic interior, and anyone lucky enough to survive the maelstrom soon perished in the intense heat and thick, acrid smoke that followed. Within a matter of seconds the ship’s insides had become unrecognisable, her decks twisted and buckled and filled with the screams of the dying and the injured, suffering from the most hideous wounds imaginable. Neil Kemp, whose torpedo had sunk the Littorio, was one of six Taranto raiders to die that awful day. The young Lieutenant, whom many had tipped to make it to Admiral, was talking to his new CO, Lt Cdr Jackie Jago, when the first bomb struck the hangar. When Jago turned back, Kemp was still standing there but without his head. The England rugby player William Luddington was among the many who lost their lives in the hangar.
Meanwhile, Lamb was fighting for his life in the skies above Illustrious. In theory, a Swordfish stood no chance against a Stuka in a dogfight, but it remains a source of great pride in the Fleet Air Arm that not one of their biplanes was ever shot down by the powerful German divebomber in the course of the war. Lamb succeeded in leading his attacker a violent, twisting dance before the German finally conceded defeat and returned to Sicily. Once again, the incredible manoeuvrability and durability of the Swordfish, and the great skill of its pilot, had carried the day against its state-of-the-art predator. The wings and frames of Lamb’s Swordfish had been shredded by the Stuka’s machine guns and, more alarmingly, his fuel tank had been riddled and was spilling rapidly. With a matter of seconds before the engine cut on him, Lamb managed to ditch the Swordfish alongside the destroyer HMS Juno and was rescued.
Eighty-three men were killed and over 100 wounded, 60 of them gravely, during the 10-minute attack, but had it not been for the ferocious defence put up by her gunners, the casualty list would very probably have been a great deal higher and Illustrious might well have ended the day on the bottom. Incredibly, she lived to fight another day. (The German pilots were dumbfounded to learn that she had survived their pounding.) Working amidst the horrific conditions below deck, the ship’s company toiled heroically to douse the flames and save the ship while the medics tended to the many injured. It was a testament to the designers and dockyard workers at Vickers Armstrong in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria that, instead of slipping beneath the waves as most of the world’s other carriers would have done, Illustrious steamed to Malta at a stately twenty knots, in spite of the heavy damage to her steering. It was the sturdiness of her construction that saved her. The inferno raged below deck for some time but neither the magazines containing the torpedoes and bombs nor the giant fuel tanks caught light. Had they done so, Illustrious would have been blown out of the water and the death toll would have been closer to 2,000. One of the most stirring moments of the day was the sight of the ship’s Fulmars, which had been unable to land on, returning to the scene to protect their mother ship after refuelling in Malta. They succeeded in shooting down half a dozen Stukas before the Germans turned back to Sicily. It was at a quarter to ten that night, her flight deck still steaming from the heat below, that Illustrious, bent and bruised but not broken or bowed, slipped into Malta’s Grand Harbour. It was now that the grisly, traumatic task of collecting the bodies and limbs of friends and crewmates began. Some were never found.
The fact that the other ships of the fleet were left virtually unscathed by the Stuka attack provided the physical evidence that the Germans had come for one reason and one reason alone: to exact revenge for Taranto by sinking Illustrious. But they had failed and three days later they were back. This time, supported by Junker 88 bombers and Messerschmitt Me111 fighters, not to mention dozens of bombers and fighters from the Regia Aeronautica, the Stukas were determined not to give Illustrious a second chance. For much of the time, repairs continued below deck while air-raid sirens wailed and the gunners above tried to beat off the attacks. For two weeks, the Luftwaffe came in wave after wave but, heroically defended by the RAF Hurricane and Fulmar squadrons on the island and the gunners of the harbour defences, Illustrious refused to die. Two huge bombs succeeded in hitting her and three near-misses lifted her out of the water and smashed her against the wharf, damaging her hull. With losses mounting by the day and the RAF growing dangerously short of pilots, Lt Julian Sparke, who had taken part in the Taranto raid, volunteered to fly Hurricanes to help in the island’s increasingly desperate defence. He died ramming a German bomber. On 24 January 1941, following a fortnight of round-the-clock repair work, much of it while under attack, Captain Boyd stood on the carrier’s bridge, Illustrious slipped the Grand Harbour and steamed for Alexandria at twenty-six knots. On arrival, the carrier and her company were given a hero’s salute by every ship in harbour.
In the eight months since she had been launched, the Illustrious had certainly led a colourful existence. It was from her flight deck that the first-ever attack on a fleet at anchor had been launched. That bold action, by half a hangar of antiquated biplanes, had swung the balance of power in the Mediterranean and undoubtedly helped Britain hang on to Malta and the Suez Canal, as well as beat Rommel in North Africa. Her efforts were applauded by Churchill and Roosevelt and hailed around the free world. The Battle of Taranto had truly been one of Britain’s finest hours . . . and yet. And yet, when the gallantry medals were announced in the immediate aftermath of the attack, just two Distinguished Service Orders (to the two flight leaders) and four Distinguished Service Crosses were awarded. The fury below decks – chiefly amongst the sailors and deck crews – was uncontained. When the notice announcing the awards was pinned up on board, it was torn down by a disgusted sailor. No one had forgotten his ‘manoeuvre well executed’ signal the morning after the raid, and at first many suspected it was the cold hand of Admiral Cunningham grudgingly handing out the gongs. But subsequent investigations suggested that the meanness belonged to Whitehall mandarins, not the Admiral.
The matter was raised by Sir Murray Sueter MP in Parliament in May. As a retired Rear Admiral, he was disgusted by the lack of recognition and he suggested to the First Lord of the Admiralty that honours should be awarded to all forty men who took part in the raid. Medals were subsequently awarded to every one of them, but by the time they were announced a quarter of them were dead.
Almost half of the Swordfish crewmen who took part in the Taranto raid did not survive to see the war’s end. But they did at least have the satisfaction of knowing before they went to their deaths that they had played a part in one of the boldest raids ever undertaken; an action that, even in the illustrious history of the Royal Navy, will be remembered as one of its more glorious episodes. Captain Boyd of Illustrious, addressing his ship’s company after the raid, was speaking the truth when he said: ‘In one night the ship’s aircraft had achieved a greater amount of damage to the enemy than Nelson had achieved in the Battle of Trafalgar, and nearly twice the amount that the entire British Fleet achieved in the Battle of Jutland in the First World War.’
Operation Archery
0739 27 December 1941
THE ICY ROOFTOPS glistened in the moonlight as the sleepy fishing port of Vaagso slowly stirred into life. It was one of the shortest days of the year and it would be two and a half hours before the sun finally appeared. Fishermen were heading down to the quays to prepare their boats, mothers were busy laying the breakfast table and replenishing the fires and stoves to keep out the perishing cold. Sleeping off the festive celebrations, most of the 250 German troops stationed in and around the little Norwegian town were still in their barracks and billets. There was little reason to rise early. On the fringes of the Arctic Circle, far from the frontline of the European war, once again
the biggest challenge of their day would be to beat off the boredom. Fifty of the troops, a crack unit sent to the area to rest up after months of hard fighting, could at least look forward to a day of lazing around and drinking.
Four miles offshore, Rear Admiral Burrough stood on the bridge of the cruiser HMS Kenya and checked the clock on the wall. They were a minute later – not bad considering the earlier weather and the distance the force had covered. At the mouth of the Vaagsfjord, the submarine HMS Tuna quietly rose from the depths of the Norwegian Sea and broke the surface of the ice-cold water. There was relief at both ends when the two vessels made contact. Everything was going to plan. Five hundred and fifty Commandos, the new elite fighting force in the British Army, fingered their weapons, ammo pouches and Mills bombs, fastened their haversacks and helmets and clanked their way up from the lower decks of the two troopships and lined up in silence by the landing craft waiting for the signal to embark. No one spoke. Surprise was essential.
The seven ships of the naval force reduced speed and slowly crept towards the harbour mouth. The coastal gun batteries were not to be roused. A Norwegian pilot on the bridge of the Kenya, familiar with the hidden hazards of the fjord, guided the ships towards land. Navigation in Norwegian waters is a perilous affair at the best of times. The rock formations below the surface are as sheer as those in the landscape that tower over the water like giant walls. One moment, a ship has fifty fathoms below it, the next it might be impaling itself on the peak of an underwater mountain. Only the most astute observer would have noticed the slight increase in surf, from the wake of the vessels, rolling towards the steep, craggy coast. It was probably as well that none of the 2,000 souls ashore had the first inkling of the fate that was about to befall their sleepy, picturesque community of red wooden houses, huts and warehouses stretched out along the waterfront. The clock was running down to the launch of Operation ARCHERY, one of the most audacious and significant raids undertaken in World War Two, with consequences far beyond those intended or imagined by its planners at Combined Operations HQ in Whitehall. By the time the first major raid by British Commandos was over, a subtle shift had taken place in the European conflict – and the very nature of warfare had been changed forever.