The Operation: Taranto Long Patrol p4

Andrew Cunningham's command account and John Wellham's aircrew testimony place the raid at strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

The Taranto strike was planned as two aircraft waves, using flares, bombs, dive-bombers, and torpedo aircraft for separate but connected jobs.

Flares and diversionary bombing made it harder for Taranto's gunners to find the torpedo aircraft coming through the dark.

HMS Illustrious was built for fleet operations, but Taranto's confined harbour made two manageable waves safer than one congested mass of aircraft.

Taranto prompts a wider lesson: the useful carrier size and air group depend on the war and allied support a navy expects.

Damage to HMS Eagle turned a planned multi-carrier operation into a smaller strike from Illustrious, with only about twenty attacking aircraft available.

John Wellham's account follows a Swordfish from cockpit checks and wing spreading to a 30-knot deck run and formation above Illustrious.

The extra tank that gave a Swordfish the range for Taranto displaced its observer and could surround the rear cockpit with fuel and fumes.

The Royal Navy planned a torpedo-heavy strike because two decades of aerial-torpedo development had produced its most effective weapon against capital ships.

Removing Italy's battleships from the immediate balance could let Britain cover the Mediterranean with older ships and redirect heavier units elsewhere.

The second wave reached a harbour lit by fires and flares, then descended into dense Italian anti-aircraft fire to find its own targets.

Wellham dives steeply through Taranto's barrage, strikes a balloon cable, loses much of his lateral control, and barely pulls clear of the city.

Unable to ditch safely and determined not to waste the torpedo, Wellham reverses course and attacks a battleship with damaged controls.

Hit again after release, the Swordfish escapes between balloon defences while skimming a dark, glassy harbour with damaged controls.

The damaged aircraft's return helps explain the Swordfish reputation: it was not perfect, but it was well developed for its demanding naval role.

Cunningham judged the raid a major success: twenty aircraft badly damaged three Italian battleships and demonstrated the Fleet Air Arm's striking power.

Taranto's Swordfish legend belongs to the aircraft and to the aircrew who extracted extraordinary results from it under combat conditions.

Peacetime plans would have replaced the Swordfish with the Albacore and then the Barracuda, but wartime service kept the older aircraft in combat.