The great lesson of Taranto is that ships that took years to build and commission could be sunk in minutes by bombs delivered by air

(Gordon Lucy’s article can be read here ‘Daring WWII air raid that restored UK’s naval supremacy in Mediterranean,’ and Richard Doherty’s letter here ‘Air raid in Med was courageous but failed to sink battleships’)

I fully take on board his point that the three Italian ships in Taranto harbour ought to be regarded as put out of action rather than sunk.

In an interview (reproduced in ‘Lost Voices of the Royal Navy’ by Max Arthur) Michael Torrens-Spence explained:

‘It’s difficult to know whether you have hit the target or not because, once you have dropped the torpedo, you’re away. I didn’t even see any of the action around me, I was too busy looking for barrage balloons … We did not know what damage had been done until the RAF took some photographs afterwards which showed three battleships sitting on the bottom…

‘When we were debriefed they wanted to know if I hit anything and I could only say that you couldn’t miss a big ship at short range if the torpedo ran straight. The photographs of the raid appeared in all the newspapers. I was credited with a hit on the Littorio. But ships sunk in the harbour can always be refloated. Only one of the three was never repaired’.

With respect to the Swordfish, if you regard the definition of obsolete as being ‘no longer produced’, then Mr Doherty is absolutely correct because the last Swordfish was produced as late as August 1944.

If on the other hand, you choose to define obsolete as ‘out of date’, you have a tenable argument. The Swordfish was not exactly a modern aircraft. However, as Mr Doherty rightly indicates, the Swordfish had a most impressive track record, not least the distinction of having caused the destruction of a greater tonnage of Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft during the course of the war.

In action against the Bismarck, the Swordfish’s obsolescence arguably was to its advantage. The Swordfish were too slow for the fire-control predictors of the German gunners, whose shells exploded so far in front of the aircraft that the threat of shrapnel damage was diminished. At least some of the Swordfish flew so low that most of Bismarck’s flak weapons could not depress enough to hit them.

With respect to the Swordfish sortie led by Lieutenant-Commander Esmond VC against the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau in February 1942, Vice-Admiral Otto Ciliax paid generous tribute to ‘the mothball attack of a handful of ancient planes, piloted by men whose bravery surpasses any other action by either side that day’.

Perhaps the Italians did reverse the effects of the Taranto raid as a result of the actions of Italian naval special forces in Alexandria harbour in December 1941 but surely it would be necessary to take account of the impact of both the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the losses sustained by the Royal Navy in the evacuation of Crete at the end of May (almost entirely due to German air superiority). If there was a shift in the Mediterranean in favour of the Axis powers surely it was down to German possession of Cyrenaica, Greece and Crete that conferred air superiority on the Luftwaffe.

The great lesson of Taranto is that great ships that took years to build and commission could be dispatched to the seabed in a matter of minutes by bombs and torpedoes delivered by air.

In his autobiography ‘War in a Stringbag [the Swordfish’s nickname], Charles Lamb observed of Torrens-Spence that ‘his innate nervousness always forced him to press home his attacks to a suicidal degree’, a trait evident not only at Taranto but also off Cape Matapan in torpedoing the Italian cruiser Pola.

Gordon Lucy, Belfast

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