Wings (28 page)

The first wave was led by Lieutenant Commander M. N. Williamson, to be followed an hour later by the follow-up force under Lieutenant Commander ‘Ginger’ Hale, a former England rugby
player. Charles Lamb of 815 Squadron was charged with dropping flares to illuminate the targets. As he and his observer Sub-Lieutenant Kiggell approached at
5,000 feet, Lamb
‘realized that I was watching something that had never happened before and was unlikely to be repeated ever again. It was a one-off job. 815 Squadron had been flying operationally for nearly
twelve of the fifteen months of the war and for the last six months, almost without a break, we had attracted the enemy’s fire for an average of at least an hour a week; but I had never
imagined anything like this to be possible.’
⁹

The intense reconnaissance of the preceding days had alerted the Italians to what was coming. ‘Before the Swordfish had dived to the attack, the full-throated roar from the guns of six
battleships and the blast from the cruisers and destroyers made the harbour defences seem like a sideshow . . . into that inferno, one hour apart, two waves of six, then five Swordfish, painted a
dull bluey-grey for camouflage, danced a weaving arabesque of death and destruction with their torpedoes, flying into the harbour only a few feet above sea level – so low that one or two of
them actually touched the water with their wheels as they sped through the harbour entrance.’

The Italian gunners had had three levels of attacking aircraft to fire at: the low-level torpedo planes, the dive-bombers and the flare-droppers. But if they aimed at the sea-skimming attackers,
they would hit their own ships and positions. They kept their guns angled upwards, allowing the Swordfish to weave underneath the umbrella of fire and drop their ‘fish’. As Lamb turned
away, he saw burning craft ‘surrounded by floating oil, which belched from the ship’s interiors as the bottoms and sides and decks were torn apart’.

One torpedo ripped an enormous hole below the waterline of the battleship
Conte di Cavour
. Two other battleships were also sunk at their moorings. They were
eventually repaired, but the
Cavour
was out of action for the rest of the Italians’ war. The Swordfish made their own way home. ‘All the way back to our rendezvous with the
ship off Cephalonia the moon was on my starboard bow, which helped me to relax,’ Lamb recalled. ‘The clouds had all dispersed and the shimmering path of watery gold, lighting up the
sea’s surface from the horizon to the water below us made night flying easy.’ A terrible thought kept troubling him. He spoke to his rear-gunner, Grieve, over the voice pipe.
‘“I’m a bit worried,” I said. “We may be the only survivors.’” His fears were unfounded. Incredibly, only two aircraft were lost. Williamson’s
Swordfish was shot down, but he survived with his observer to be taken prisoner. Another, from the second wave, was destroyed by flak and the crew killed.

Taranto signalled the beginning of the end for the Regia Marina. ‘Thus was British maritime power reasserted in the central basin of the Mediterranean in no uncertain fashion,’
recorded the official historian of the war at sea, Captain Stephen Roskill.
¹⁰
The following year the rest of the Italian fleet was neutralized
at the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Allied navies had mastery of the Mediterranean.

The victory of Taranto was remarkable. It was an extraordinarily destructive action given the featherweight lightness of the attacking force. ‘Taranto Night’ is celebrated by the
Fleet Air Arm each year with the same fervour that the navy marks
Trafalgar Day. It was, however, a singular event. Success on this scale was never repeated, although, as we
shall see, six months later the FAA played a key part in another famous victory.

Much of the work the naval fliers did in the Mediterranean was routine, protecting convoys on ‘club runs’ that supplied aircraft to Malta and war supplies from Gibraltar to
Alexandria. For much of the time it was quite congenial. John Moffat joined Ark Royal as a Swordfish pilot shortly after Taranto. This was the last stop in a journey that began when, suffering the
‘soul-destroying boredom’ of a job with a bus company in Kelso, he answered a newspaper advertisement for volunteers for the navy’s air service.

He found that even in the middle of war there were still moments of ennui and that ‘much of my time flying was not the heart-stopping drama of a dive-bombing attack or the stomach-turning
tension of a torpedo run, but long uneventful patrols over mile after mile of flat, featureless ocean’. There were compensations, such as when ‘the sun was just striking the tops of the
mountains of Spain and beginning to burn off the haze lying over the surface of the Mediterranean. [Then] I would feel that upsurge of exhilaration that I have always associated with flying . . .
the open cockpit of the Swordfish was marvellous for the full experience, which really did sometimes seem like a miracle.’ Then there were the times when ‘the clouds were low and dark,
and the sea was a cold, white-flecked steel grey, and the rain beat against my face [and] the patrols became an endurance test’.
¹¹

In May 1941 Moffat was propelled into a drama that provided more than enough excitement. Both he and Charles Friend were aboard
Ark Royal
when it was sent north to
join the hunt for the battleship
Bismarck
, which had fought its way through to the Atlantic via the Denmark Strait and now, damaged but very much afloat, was running for the safety of
Saint Nazaire. By mid-morning on Monday, 26 May, she was only a day from port and the pursuing British fleet had lost the scent.

The sequence which led to her destruction began with a coup by Coastal Command. At 10.30 a.m. a Catalina operated by 209 Squadron from Lough Erne saw
Bismarck
through a hole in the
ragged clouds, about 790 miles north-west of Brest. The men at the controls were not British but Americans. US Navy Flying Officer Dennis Briggs and Ensign Leonard B. Smith had volunteered to go
with an assignment of Catalinas supplied to the RAF under the Lend-Lease agreement and help train crews. In their anxiety to get close they came under fire from the battleship. Bullets and shells
punched through wings and fuselage and one round smashed through the floor of the pilot’s cabin, but then they were swallowed up in cloud and radioing back the sensational news. From then on
Bismarck
was under constant air surveillance.

Ark Royal
was about a hundred miles away when news of the sighting came through. Swordfish were flown off and soon located the target. Admiral James ‘Slim’ Somerville, the
commander of the force, reckoned his own ships were too slow and old to be able to offer battle with any chance of success.
The best hope was to slow
Bismarck
down
until the pursuing fleet could catch up and deal with her. At 2.50 p.m. fifteen Swordfish from 818 and 820 Squadrons took off to attempt an attack. The weather had been foul all day. Even
Ark
Royal
, which stood sixty feet above the water, had waves coursing over her bow and down the flight deck. The business of getting to their aircraft was a trial. ‘The after-end of the
flight deck was pitching something like fifty feet up and down,’ said Charles Friend. ‘The take-offs were awesome in the extreme. The aircraft, as their throttles were opened, instead
of charging forward on a level deck were at one moment breasting a slippery slope and the next plunging downhill towards the huge seas ahead and below.’
¹²

The force was led by Lieutenant Commander James Stewart-Moore, who flew as an observer. He was a pre-war professional and it seemed to him that the mission was ‘fairly
straightforward’. One of the Swordfish carried radar that would help the hunt, which appeared to have been simplified by the assurance, given in the pre-operational briefing, that there were
no friendly ships in the area.

Despite the Force 8 gale, all aircraft got off safely with the radar-equipped machine leading. It was operated by the observer, Sub-Lieutenant N. C. Cooper. There was no wireless link between
the aircraft and they had to use hand signals. Stewart-Moore recalled that ‘after a while I saw Cooper waving to me’.
¹³
He managed
to convey the message that something was showing up twenty miles to starboard. This was unexpected.
Bismarck
had not been heading in that direction.
As no other ships
were meant to be in the area Stewart-Moore ordered the force to begin their attack.

Descending through the cloud they sighted the ship and prepared to drop their torpedoes. ‘Everything looked promising,’ remembered Stewart-Moore. It was then that his pilot,
Lieutenant Hugh de Graff Hunter, realized their mistake. It was not
Bismarck
, but the cruiser
Sheffield
, which Somerville had detached to shadow the battleships at a distance.
Hunter waggled his wings to try and warn the others, but it was too late. Their torpedoes were plunging into the sea and racing off towards the cruiser, while Stewart-Moore ‘watched from
above, horrified and praying for a miracle’. God was listening. ‘Without any apparent reason, all the torpedoes except one or two, blew up within half a minute of striking the
water.’

Back on board they were met with ‘profuse apologies’ and another attack was prepared. The dud torpedoes had been fitted with ‘Duplex’ firing pistols, which were supposed
to be activated by the magnetic field of a ship’s hull. Stewart-Moore persuaded Somerville to let them use torpedoes with conventional pistols for the next attempt.

Six sub-flights of Swordfish, fifteen aircraft in all, were ranged for the attack. It would be led by Lieutenant Commander Tim Coode of 818 Squadron. John Moffat was his wing man. ‘It was
all on us now,’ he remembered. ‘It was a question of salvaging our reputations . . . We were under no illusions about how important this was to the navy and to Churchill and we felt
under enormous pressure to pull it off.’
¹⁴

The weather had not improved. On the flight deck ‘the wind hit you like a hammer threatening to knock you down . . . the deck crews were really struggling with the
aircraft, spray was coming over the side and the waves were breaking over the front of the flight deck.’ He felt he was ‘thrown into the air rather than lifting off’. They were
helped on their way by the Deck Control Officer, Lieutenant Commander Pat Stringer, who stood well over six feet and had to be harnessed to a stanchion to avoid being blown overboard. He seemed to
be able to gauge the ship’s surges and plunges to perfection. ‘He would signal to start the take-off when he sensed that the ship was at the bottom of a big wave, so that even if I
thought that I was taking-off downhill, the bows would swing up at the last moment and I would be flying above the big Atlantic swell rather than into it.’

Eventually all the aircraft were airborne and they formed up and headed off. On their way to the target they passed
Sheffield
, which this time they correctly identified. From the deck a
lamp winked the signal that
Bismarck
was only twelve miles ahead. They approached at 6,000 feet above a thick blanket of murk. Coode ordered them into line astern and they dived down. When
he emerged from the cloud at 300 feet Moffat was alone.
Bismarck
was about two miles away and ‘even at this distance the brute seemed enormous to me’. He turned to starboard
and towards her. Immediately there was ‘a red glow in the clouds ahead of me about a hundred yards away as anti-aircraft shells exploded’. The gunners were aiming just ahead of him and
their fire threw up ‘walls of water’. Two
shells exploded below him, knocking him off course, but he pressed on, only fifty feet above the waves, sure that
‘every gun on the ship was aiming at me’.

He retained enough composure to calculate the amount he would have to lay off when aiming to be sure of hitting the target and, with
Bismarck
looming, he felt he could not miss. He was
about to press the release button when he heard his observer Sub-Lieutenant John ‘Dusty’ Miller shouting, ‘Not yet, John, not yet!’ It dawned on Moffat that Miller was
waiting for a trough in the waves, so the torpedo would not get knocked off-track. ‘Then he shouted, “Let her go!” and the next [moment he] was saying, “John, we’ve
got a runner.”’

As the torpedo fell away the Swordfish leapt upwards. Moffat was desperate to keep it below the trajectory of the
Bismarck
’s guns and managed to execute a ski turn. The slow speed
of the machine allowed him to skid round and set off, skimming the wavetops until he felt it safe enough to climb into the cover of the clouds.

At the debriefing it emerged that two and possibly three torpedoes had found the target. This did not mean success, as
Bismarck
’s flanks were thickly armoured and a torpedo strike earlier in the pursuit had failed to do fatal damage.
But then news began to filter in of astonishing developments.
Bismarck
had turned round and was heading straight into the path of the battleship
King George V
.

One of the torpedoes had hit the stern, jamming her rudders at 12 degrees and making steering impossible. All she could do was await the end, which came after a night of
torpedo attacks and three-quarters of an hour of battering by the fleet’s big guns before she went down, with the loss of all but 118 of the 2,224 men on board.

The essential part that the FAA had played in the removal of the
Bismarck
menace was acknowledged. But the poor quality of its equipment meant that the courage and skill of its crews
were often employed in vain. Its performance was exemplified by the heroic failure of Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde and 825 Squadron to stop the cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
as they made their ‘Channel Dash’ from the Atlantic to home waters in February 1942. Esmonde was killed and received a posthumous VC, but the German ships got
through.

When modern dive-bombers such as the Fairey Barracuda came into service on the carriers, they failed to deliver ostentatious results. Churchill’s natural impatience led to an unfortunate
outburst in which he appeared to accuse the FAA of not trying hard enough. In July 1943 he sent a memo to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Albert Alexander, noting the ‘rather pregnant
fact’ that out of the 45,000 officers and ratings in the service ‘only thirty should have been killed, missing or prisoners during the three months ending April 30’. This was
despite the ‘immense demands . . . made on us by the Fleet Air Arm in respect of men and machines’.
¹⁵