Raiders (6 page)

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 Italians, 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.’

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.