“Illustrious manoeuvre well exe


IN ROME, Eberhard Weichold’s patience was wearing thin.


For five months, the German Navy’s liaison officer to its Italian ally had grown increasingly exasperated. Weichold was a man of action. A gneration before he had commanded U-boat UC22 on three patrols of the Mediterranean in the final months of the war. Pickings had been slim – just three ships sunk – but the rump of the Navy left after Germany’s defeat considered the young Weichold a talent worth holding on to. Two decades later the now 49-year- old was back in the Mediterranean, observing the actions of the Regia Marina (Royal Navy) and reporting to his masters in Berlin. It was a frustrating appointment. Time and again the Italian fleet procrastinated and obfuscated. Its battleships were not ready. Fuel was in short supply. Air power was not available. The reasons were many and varied, but the result was the same: the Italian Navy simply refused to offer battle to its foe, Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet. The latter sailed around the Middle Sea with seeming impunity. Would, Weichold wondered, the Italian battleships “sortie from their harbours at all?” Weichold’s frustration was shared by the German Navy’s High Command. The Regia Marina showed “no will for offensive action” while its foe steamed around the Mediterranean “as if there was no Italian fleet at all,” Berlin seethed.


In Malta, three reconnaissance aircraft lifted off and set a northeasterly course on a round trip of a good 700 miles. The twin-engined Martin Marylands were ostensibly bombers, but today they would do nothing beyond take photographs.


As it had been for much of the summer and autumn, the kernel of the Italian Fleet lay at anchor in the great natural harbour of Taranto on the eastern shores of the gulf named after it. This was the weapon with which Benito Mussolini’s Italy would be “mistress” of the Middle Sea. The Regia Marina, the self-styled Duce (leader) proclaimed, had nothing to fear from the British. “The Mediterranean is our sea.”


High over Taranto harbour, the shutters of the Marylands’ cameras opened and closed in frantic succession. In a fraction of a second, each frame captured a tantalising sight: five battleships at anchor in the bay, a smattering of cruisers, destroyers lined up along a series of jetties and an umbrella of barrage balloons protecting the base from air attack and anti-submarine nets safeguarding the castles of steel against torpedoes.


At Hal Far airfield in southern Malta, Lt Charles Lamb waited impatiently. The Swordfish pilot had been dispatched by HMS Illustrious to collect the photographs the Marylands would bring back from their mission – and hopefully a few Maltese potatoes for the aircraft carrier’s galley. The black market flourished on the island. For £5, Lamb was able to purchase spuds. For the photographs, however, he would have to wait till the morning – they were still being developed. The airmen suggested a game of poker to pass the evening. Lamb agreed. Despite the £5 outlay for the potatoes – and the mess bill – he found himself ‘in pocket’ after his evening of cards. Making money – and out of the RAF


at that – was “very satisfying”. ●♦●


HMS Illustrious had been at sea for four days now, making her way steadily from Alexandria for the waters off Malta, surrounded by a clutch of battleships and escorting destroyers. Ostensibly this mighty force was shepherding a convoy, but Illustrious had other intentions. For several years the senior officer aboard Illustrious, Rear


Arthur Lyster had cherished the idea of dealing the Regia Marina a decisive blow – in its sanctuary – not using the guns of battleships, but with air power.


Britain’s fleet had been the very first to commit itself to a vessel whose sword was the heavier-than-air craft. Indeed, for more than 20 years, the Royal Navy had possessed aircraft carriers. But like all the navies of the world it had never entirely embraced this new method of naval warfare. So far the battleship-minded admirals had prevailed and pooh-poohed Lyster’s plan.


As the world’s greatest navy, Admiral


From the balcony of his chancellery in Rome, the Palazzo Venezia, the Fascist dictator called his people to arms. “A nation of 45 million is not truly free unless it has free access to the ocean.”


By far the strongest of Mussolini’s weapons was his fleet, the Regia Marina – half a dozen battleships, more than two dozen cruisers, in excess of 100 submarines.


Duce’s embarrassment was about to worsen.


But not so Andrew Browne Cunningham – the legendary ‘ABC’. The Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean was a sailor imbued with the spirit of Nelson like few others in the Royal Navy since Trafalgar. He came from the ‘big gun’ school – he had commanded HMS Rodney between the wars and hoisted his admiral’s flag in HMS Warspite as the war clouds gathered in 1939. But he realised the potential of the aircraft carrier. At his very first meeting with Lyster, the latter had raised the idea of striking the Italians in harbour. ABC nodded. He gave the carrier man “every encouragement”. In little more than a month, Lyster had honed his aircrew from Illustrious and Eagle as they practised dropping flares – to illuminate their targets – and the art of dropping torpedoes by night.


By mid-October 1940, Lyster was ready to strike. He would attack on Trafalgar Day but a hangar fire scuppered that plan. Then Eagle dropped out of the equation, courtesy of defects. Some of her aircraft were hurriedly transferred to Illustrious to make up the numbers.


This Sunday there was more bad news for the admiral: contaminated fuel caused three of Eagle’s Swordfishes to ditch. Of the 30 bombers and two carriers he and his staff had envisaged for the Taranto raid – Operation Judgment – there was now a solitary carrier and 21 aircraft: 63 airmen going into battle with obsolecent biplanes carrying 12 torpedoes and a handful of bombs. Those crews were now resting. Some had carried out anti-submarine patrols that morning, others had studied the Judgment plan once more. In Illustrious’ hangar the fitters checked and re-checked the 21 Swordfish and flushed the fuel tanks of Eagle’s aircraft to prevent any more losses.


The work lasted through the night. When they finished it was Monday November 11 1940. The day of Judgment had arrived.


If Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Lyster was the progenitor of Judgment, Benito Mussolini was the catalyst. It was the Duce who had thrust his nation into this second global conflagration at the side of his ally, Adolf Hitler, against the will of his generals and admirals.


Back in June, as France writhed in agony from the onslaught of Blitzkrieg, Mussolini plunged his dagger into the back of his neighbour. For good measure, he declared war on the British Empire.


But this was a flawed cutlass. None of Mussolini’s dreadnoughts possessed radar, his cruisers were poorly armoured, his fleet was ill-trained in fighting at night and the submarines – with which the Duce boasted he would “rule the Mediterranean” – were slow to dive and fared badly under depth-charge attack. In addition, Italy possessed not a single aircraft carrier – the Navy’s Chief-of-Staff, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, deemed the battleship the queen of the seas. Such shortcomings were compounded by an inferiority complex. Since the mid-1930s, Italy’s admirals had viewed the Royal Navy as their principal potential foe. They feared the might of the Empire. They feared the might of the Royal Navy – and its tradition. Cavagnari was convinced the “awesome war machine” with its bases in Gibraltar and Alexandria would strangle his fl eet. The best the Regia Marina could hope to achieve was keeping the supply lines to its North African colony, Libya, open.


If the Regia Marina was fearful of the Royal Navy, the Royal Navy was rather less fearful of its Italian adversary. With war clouds gathering and three likely foes – Germany, Italy and Japan – all ranged against it, Whitehall feared its Fleet would be overwhelmed by the tasks facing it across the globe. The Royal Navy could deal with one threat, perhaps two, but not all three. Something would have to give. The Chiefs-of-Staff toyed with all but abandoning the Middle Sea in favour of dispatching a substantial fleet to the Far East to keep Japan in check. Winston Churchill overruled them. He insisted upon “British domination of the Mediterranean”. His was an opinion shared by Admiral Cunningham, who was filled “with a burning desire to get at the Italian fleet”, not least because he was convinced he could deal with his foe “with something in hand”.


wasn’t keen on coming out to play. Like the German Navy a generation before, the Regia Marina showed “no signs of activity”. When it did emerge from its bases – it clashed inconclusively with a heavily-escorted convoy to Malta in early July – the Italian Navy, Cunningham observed, did not prove to be “very dashing”.


the Regio Esercito (Royal Army). In September 1940, it stuttered from Libya into Egypt, its four divisions driving a single British brigade. The aim was to reach the Suez Canal. It got no further than 65 miles inside the Egyptian border, seizing the coastal fort of Sidi Barrani then stopping. It stuttered into Greece too. Not content with war with London, Mussolini wanted one with Athens too. From his Adriatic colony of Albania, the Duce sent his soldiers into Greece – once again overruling his commanders. So badly did things go that soon the Greeks were invading Albania.


Nor for that matter did Italy’s Army,


On Sunday November 10 he summoned his military leaders to a council of war and lambasted them for turning the Italian Army into a laughing stock around the globe. The


Perhaps he could... but the foe


When Benito Mussolini plunged the Mediterranean into war in June 1940, Britain’s position was unenviable. The bulk of her continental army – the British Expeditionary Force – had been brought home, beaten, from Dunkirk; the remnants were being rescued from Channel ports by the Royal Navy, which had also just effected the final evacuation of Norway.


similar number of barrage balloons, and a good 200 machine-guns. What Taranto did not possess was radar. Listening posts would serve as the city’s only forewarning of an impending air attack.


In the Mediterranean, a relatively weak British force held Egypt, sandwiched between Italian troops to the west in Libya and to the east in Ethiopia and Somalia.


As for the Royal Navy it had enjoyed superiority and, for long periods, supremacy in the Middle Sea since the days of Nelson. But by the summer of 1940, no great power could claim command of the Mediterranean.


East of Malta, intelligence officers aboard HMS Illustrious pored over photographs of Taranto harbour taken the previous day by the Marylands. They showed five battleships at anchor. Further reconnaissance reports confirmed the sixth of Italy’s dreadnoughts would join them in the Mar Grande before nightfall on November 11. The carrier’s aircrew whiled away the time as best they could. They read newpapers or magazines in the wardroom or mess decks, grabbed something to eat, wandered around the quarterdeck, admired the sight of the Mediterranean Fleet at sea.


For the next three years, the crucible of the naval conflict in the Mediterranean – for the Royal Navy and the Regia Marina – would be the centre of the Middle Sea, from Sicily in the west to Crete in the East, Calabria in the north to the shores of Libya in the south, some 300,000 square miles of water. The British fleet sought to safeguard its east-west supply lines, the Italians theirs running north-south; the latter sought to do so from their base at Taranto. Taranto lies on the upper ‘inside heel’


of Italy’s ‘boot’ and gives its name to the gulf between Calabria and Puglia. The city itself occupies a narrow spit of land which separates two great natural harbours – the sweeping outer harbour, the Mar Grande (Big Sea), and the large, sheltered inner harbour, the Mar Piccolo (Little Sea). Linking the two harbours is a canal barely 1,100ft long and under 250ft wide, spanned by a swing bridge which is Taranto’s defi ning image.


The British fleet found itself stretched across 2,000 miles of sea from Gibraltar in the west to Alexandria in the east, with the lynchpin of Malta half-way between the two. The kernels of the Mediterranean Fleet were concentrated at either end of the sea, but the substantial units at Gibraltar kept one eye on the Atlantic, the other gazed eastwards.


remarkable about the Fairey Swordfish. It was slow – slower even than the aircraft it replaced. Its range was limited. It could carry a heavier payload than its predecessor, the Seal. But it also demanded a crew of three: pilot, observer/navigator and a telegraphist air gunner, each in his open cockpit.


In the hangar the fitters had finished their work. The armourers had taken over, fixing magnetic torpedoes and 250lb bombs to 21 remarkable aircraft – remarkable because they seemed to belong to a bygone era.


The Fairey Swordfish was born in 1933 – the year that Hitler came to power and the year that his secret air force demanded German industry produce a single-seat monoplane fighter which would one day become the Messerschmitt 109. In Britain, the biplane was still the dominant design. It certainly was at the Fairey Aviation Company.


Powered by a Bristol Pegasus engine, it lumbered into the sky, cruising at 90kts – a little over 100mph. It was, recalled pilot Lt Charles Lamb, “a very slow machine and a vulnerable target for all”. And yet he loved it. The Swordfish was sturdy, robust, manoeuvrable, almost impossible to stall, difficult to see at night. And in its 18in Mark XII aerial torpedo it possessed a devastating weapon. This 1,610lb ‘fish’ with its 388lb warhead had the potential to sink a 10,000-ton warship. The key was delivery. It had to be dropped in level flight – and just 18ft above the waves – at a distance from its target of no more than 1,500 yards (and typically just 1,000). In Taranto, with its defences, such ranges were impossible. The aircraft would be expected to drop their ‘fish’ at a range of barely 500 yards – 1,500ft. From there, the torpedo would punch through the water at 27kts and, thanks to a magnetic detonator, would explode beneath their target to cause maximum damage.


In two decades of building aircraft for the British military, most Faireys had been biplanes. When the firm’s engineers saw the need for a reconnaissance/gunnery spotting aircraft in the Fleet, they fell back on that tried-and-trusted design. In April 1934, the Torpedo-Spotter- Reconnaissance II – Whitehall placed an extra demand on Fairey; the new aircraft should also be able to carry a torpedo – took to the skies for the first time. It impressed the Air Ministry – in charge of naval aviation between the wars – who promptly placed an order. From 1936, the Fairey Swordfish, as it became, began to enter service. By the outbreak of war, it was flown by 13 squadrons. On paper, there was nothing


The Greeks and the Romans had both recognised Taranto’s potential to dominate the Ionian Sea – and hence the central Mediterranean. The modern day Italian Navy was no different. From here, Malta, the central ‘hub’ of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean operations, was but 300 nautical miles away.


The battleships – half a dozen of them – were arrayed in the outer harbour, close to the shore, surrounded by destroyers and cruisers. More destroyers and cruisers could be found in the inner harbour. The Regia Marina realised the importance of Taranto and protected it accordingly: a series of batteries were peppered around the harbour, plus nearly two dozen searchlights, a


Darkness now shrouded the Mediterranean this Monday, save for the moonlight deemed a pre-requisite for Operation Judgment.


At 7pm, Illustrious and her escorting destroyers and cruisers broke away from HMS Warspite and made for waters 170 miles south-east of Taranto to launch her Swordfish. Through the gloom, a final message was flashed from Warspite’s bridge: GOOD LUCK THEN TO YOUR LADS IN THEIR ENTERPRISE. THEIR SUCCESS MAY WELL HAVE A MOST IMPORTANT BEARING ON THE COURSE OF THE WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. In HMS Illustrious’ wardroom, the aircrew gathered to scrutinise blow-ups of the photographs Charles Lamb had fetched from Malta. The sharpness of the images was stunning. “It was possible to study every aspect of the harbour and its defences,” Lamb recalled. To fellow pilot John Wellham, those defences looked forbidding. There was, he realised, “a formidable array” of anti-aircraft batteries surrounding Taranto – not to mention the guns of all the ships in harbour. “Our staff, sitting in comfortable chairs had decided that the anti-aircraft fire could be discounted.” They hadn’t told Wellham or his comrades that they only expected half of them to return.


Illustrious was now scything through the Mediterranean at full speed, 30kts, driving into the wind. On the aft of her flight deck a dozen Swordfish were ready for take-off, the first of two waves to strike at Taranto. It would attack from west to east, across the Mar Grande then over the Mar Piccolo. The smaller second wave of nine aircraft would sweep in from the north, over the land, and pounce upon the Mar Grande an hour later. Eleven Swordfish carried torpedoes, the rest bombs. There were no air gunners tonight. Just pilots and observers, clad in bulky but warm flying suits. The fitters helped them into their seats and tightened


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