Daring WWII air raid that restored UK’s naval supremacy in Mediterranean

On the night of November 11-12, 1940, the Fleet Air Arm mounted a stunningly successful attack on the Italian battle fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour, the principal Italian naval base in southern Italy.

Operation Judgement was the first attack in history wholly mounted by carrier-based aircraft.

Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham had good cause to describe the operation in the following terms: “Taranto, and the night of November 11–12, 1940, should be remembered for ever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.”

Twenty-one Swordfish biplanes took off from HMS Illustrious and flew 180 miles across the Mediterranean. The Italian naval base was well defended with barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns, hundreds of machine guns and search lights.

Nevertheless, the surprise was almost total and two waves of Swordfish biplanes managed to drop their torpedoes from a height of 30 feet and to sink three Italian battleships: the Caio Duilio, the Conte di Cavour and the Littorio, one of Italy’s newest and largest battleships. Two cruisers were badly damaged and two fleet auxiliaries were sunk.

Ulsterman Captain (then Lieutenant) Michael Torrens-Spence has been credited with responsibility for sinking the Littorio, for which he was awarded the DSC.

Torrens-Spence was born on March 10, 1914 at Whiteabbey, Co Antrim.

His father was a professional soldier who spent most of the Great War as a PoW. At the age of 13, young Michael entered Dartmouth Royal Naval College. He served on a number of ships before volunteering for the Fleet Air Arm. After flying training at Leuchars on Avro 504s, he was commissioned as a pilot in both the RAF and the Navy.

When he retired from the Navy (having narrowly missed promotion to Rear Admiral) he became county commandant of the USC in Co Armagh. On the formation of the UDR he became the commanding officer of the Co Armagh battalion. In 1981 Torrens-Spence succeeded the brutally murdered Sir Norman Strong as lord lieutenant of Co Armagh.

There is a satisfyingly rich symbolism in the sinking of the Littorio. Littorio is the modern Italian for lictor. The lictors were the men who carried fasces (the bundle of wooden rods and an axe) before the two consuls in ancient Rome, symbolising the authority of the consuls to impose both capital and corporal punishment on the citizens of the Roman Republic. The fasces provided Mussolini with both the name and the symbol of his political movement. With the sinking of the Littorio, Mussolini’s dreams of a fascist empire were well and truly sunk.

Despite the loss of two planes, the Fleet Air Arm had succeeded in depriving the potentially formidable Italian battleship fleet of approximately half its strength in one night. At one stroke the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered to British advantage.

Of Taranto, Gordon Corrigan, the military historian, has observed: ‘Had this action been undertaken by modern aircraft it would still have been highly creditable, but the Swordfish, known as ‘the stringbag’, was obsolete before the war began.’

Developing his point further, Corrigan has noted: The Swordfish ‘could barely get up enough speed to stay airborne once it left the carrier’s deck. The crew of pilot and observer sat in open cockpits, with a high explosive torpedo weighing 1,500lbs beneath them, and with a top speed of only 128mph had to hope they could complete their tasks without meeting any land-based fighters against which they would have had no chance whatsoever.’

The significance of the Taranto raid is threefold. First, its immediate purpose was to deny the Italian navy control of the narrow Sicilian Channel through which the main Mediterranean north-south and east-west sea routes passed. In this, it was stunningly successful. Furthermore, in the 19th century the Mediterranean had been regarded as ‘a British lake’. Taranto went a long way in re-establishing British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. At the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, Cunningham again bested the Italian navy (and Torrens-Spence once again played a significant role).

Secondly, there is an interesting, if not entirely straightforward, relationship with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese naval attaché in Berlin paid a discrete visit to Taranto to survey the damage which the Fleet Air Arm had inflicted on the Italian navy. Taranto did not inspire the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had been toying with the concept of such an attack as early as 1937) but it did inform Commander Minoru Genda’s planning of the Japanese attack on the US naval base. Genda studied the Taranto attack very closely. The air attack on Pearl Harbor was a larger scale operation than Taranto involving six Japanese carriers, each one carrying more than twice the number of planes that a British carrier had. Thus, the attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in far more devastation, sinking or disabling seven American battleships, and seriously damaging a number of others. However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not alter the balance of power in the Pacific as dramatically as the British raid attack on Taranto did in the Mediterranean. Pearl Harbor’s greater geopolitical and historical significance lies in the fact that it brought the United States into the Second World War as a belligerent.

Finally, both Taranto and Pearl Harbor demonstrated the vulnerability of battleships to airborne attack and signalled the end of the battleship era. Four further examples underscore the point. On December 10, 1941 HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya. On October 24, 1944 the ‘unsinkable’ giant Japanese battleship Musashi was sunk by American carrier aircraft during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. On November 12, 1944 RAF Lancaster bombers sank the Tirpitz, the Bismarck’s sister ship and the largest battleship ever built in Europe, in a Norwegian fjord. The future would belong to the aircraft carrier, as the war in the Pacific would reveal shortly.