Raiders (4 page)

Almost instantaneously, the Swordfish slammed into the water.

The official reports suggest they had been hit by AA fire, which might have been the case, but the Swordfish might also have dipped a wing tip in the water as Williamson made to turn away.
The flight commander, semi-delirious after cracking his head on impact, struggled to get out of the cockpit and he was under water when he finally managed to wrestle free from his parachute and harness.
When he reached the surface, at first he thought it had started to rain until he realised he was swimming through machine-gun fire.
‘Blood’ Scarlett recalled: ‘I just fell out of the back into the sea.
We were only about twenty feet up.
It wasn’t very far to drop.
I never tie myself in on these occasions.
Then old Williamson came up a bit later and we hung about by the aircraft, which had its tail sticking out of the water.
Chaps ashore were shooting at it.’
For half an hour, the two men clung to the tail of the Swordfish and watched the rest of the raid unfold
before they swam off to a floating dock 100 yards away and clambered into the clutches of some very angry dockworkers.

The two other aircraft in the subflight, piloted by Sub-Lts Julian Sparke and Douglas Macauley, survived the approach into the harbour, and managed to get their torpedoes away.
But both narrowly missed the
Conte di Cavour
and exploded close to the
Andrea Doria
, without causing any damage.

The second subflight were assigned to attack the
Littorio
, which was anchored a mile to the north of the
Cavour
, closer to the town of Taranto and the entrance to the inner harbour.
The first two, piloted by Kemp and Swayne, approached from the west and came under the heaviest fire yet as they swept down into the harbour.
Having survived the barrage from the shore defences, they were at mast height when the cruisers lowered their guns and added their considerable weight to the fire.
The guns were elevated so low that many of the rounds were seen to riddle some of the other ships in the harbour.
Kemp dropped his torpedo about a thousand yards short of the
Littorio
and watched it streak towards the battleship.
As always after dropping the 1,600-lb torpedo, the Swordfish bucked upwards, and Kemp corrected the attitude of the aircraft before climbing steeply back into the streams of AA fire.

Swayne had managed to drop his torpedo 400 yards short of the
Littorio
, a range so close that he almost careered into the battleship’s rigging as he made his escape.
There was a matter of seconds between the two explosions: Kemp’s struck the starboard bow, Swayne’s the port quarter.
A column of smoke shooting
out of the ship’s smokestacks confirmed that
Littorio
had been struck a deadly blow.
The third Swordfish, with Lt Michael Maund at the controls, was not so fortunate.
He decided to attack the
Vittorio Veneto
anchored close by, but his torpedo ran aground in shallow water.

While the torpedo-bombers laid siege to the capital ships in the main harbour, the other six Swordfish swept towards the Mar Piccolo, the inner harbour where cruisers and destroyers were stacked up ‘Mediterranean-style’ in a neat row along the jetty.
If the bombers could negotiate the flak, they could barely miss.
Ollie Patch, the only Royal Marine in the attacking force, was the first to arrive over the harbour, but he could barely see the ships for all the smoke and flames from the AA fire.
When he finally picked out a target through the haze, he dropped the nose of his Swordfish into a dive so steep he was virtually standing on the pedals.
He released his six bombs and made his escape.
He twisted and turned the aerobatic Swordfish so sharply to avoid the streaks of tracer heading their way that his observer Goodwin was lifted from his seat and was only saved from plunging to his death by the ‘monkey’s tail’ wire that attached him to the aircraft.

In the space of ten minutes or so, the Italians had filled the air with thousands of rounds of various calibre and the smoke was so thick that when Sub-Lt Sarra dived from 8,000 to 1,500 feet over the Mar Piccolo, he was unable to identify clearly a single ship of the four dozen or so moored there.
Dropping even lower to 500 feet, where the concentration of fire was even
greater, he attacked the hangars and slipways of the seaplane base.
All six bombs exploded and the hangars erupted in flames as he fled from the scene with AA flak and rounds of all description bursting around his tail and wings, shredding the cloth fabric as the biplane climbed as fast as it could to safety.
Sarra and Sub-Lt Forde, who had only recently qualified as a pilot, were the most junior pilots of the twenty-one who took part in the Taranto raid and both showed remarkable courage and cool-headedness on the night.
Forde, who had become split up from the rest of the bombers shortly before they went in, dived through murderous flak and dropped his bombs from 1,500 feet.
Unsure whether all of his bombs had been released, he circled the harbour and plunged back into the firestorm again for a second attack.
The last of the bombers, crewed by Murray and Paine, attacked the neat line of destroyers from 3,000 feet, dropping their bombs as they swept from east to west.
One landed square on the destroyer
Libeccio
but, to their fury, it failed to detonate.

Having sensibly decided not to drop his flares, Lamb had circled the harbour, watching the inferno rage below.
Keen to make his own contribution before leaving, he headed for the oil storage tanks, which had already been attacked by the other flare-droppers, Kiggell and Janvrin.
His bombs found their target, but with no results observed; either the bombs had failed to go off or they had exploded deep inside the storage containers.
Lamb’s was the last of the Swordfish to leave the scene of the attack and, as he turned the aircraft back in the rough direction of Cephalonia, he was convinced that he and Grieve, his observer,
were the only survivors of the attack.
The raid had taken little more than five minutes, but for two and a half hours, the two young airmen flew through the darkness in gloomy silence.

At 2123, an hour after Williamson’s force had set out,
Illustrious
was ploughing into the wind again when the first of nine aircraft in the second flight roared down the flight deck.
The flight comprised five torpedo bombers, two bombers and two carrying a mixture of flares and bombs.
There was certainly going to be no element of surprise in their attack.
Taranto was already ablaze, the AA gunners now had their eye in and the early warning posts along the coast had alerted the Italian Fleet to the fact that a second wave of attackers was on its way.
The pause between the two attacks also gave the defenders the opportunity to gather and reorganise themselves.

The second strike was led by the CO of 819 Squadron, Lt Commander ‘Ginger’ Hale, an excellent rugby player who had played for England before the war.
Other notables in the second striking force included Lt Wellham, who had won a DSC for a daylight attack on Italian shipping at Bomba Bay in Libya, in which he had torpedoed and sunk an enemy supply ship.
(The Royal Marine Ollie Patch sank a submarine in the same raid.) Wellham’s observer, Lt Pat Humphreys, had been awarded the George Cross in 1937 (then called the Empire Gallantry Medal) during the Spanish Civil War.
After his destroyer had struck a mine, he had helped rescue seriously injured men from a compartment flooded with water and oil.

The undisputed flying ace of the force, however, was a lanky Ulsterman, Lt Michael Torrens-Spence, the senior pilot, and second-in-command of 819 Squadron.
Every memoir or account of Fleet Air Arm operations in the Second World War stresses his remarkable flying skills and courage.
He pressed home his attacks with an almost suicidal disregard for his own safety.

Illustrious
’s aircraft had been bedevilled by problems from the moment plans for the raid were laid down, and it was no surprise when the second flight suffered a last-minute setback.
The aircraft crewed by Clifford and Going – the same two who had been plucked from the sea the day before after ditching – was badly damaged when it was caught by another aircraft as it taxied across the flight deck.
The cloth of the wings was badly torn and, worse still, several of the supporting ribs had snapped in half.
There was no chance of it taking to the air in that state and she was taken down in the lift hangar.
Clifford and Going were distraught at the prospect of missing the raid and ran straight to the island and begged Captain Boyd and Rear Admiral Lyster to let them catch up the rest of the force.
Reluctantly, the commanders agreed.
Working with incredible speed and skill, the riggers completed the extensive repairs; thirty minutes later, Clifford and Going climbed into the night and banked towards Taranto.

Passing them somewhere in the darkness were their colleagues, Lt Morford and Sub-Lt Green, who were returning to
Illustrious
after developing serious problems of their own.
Their long-range fuel tank had fallen off and, in the process, damaged some
fittings, which were now smashing against the fuselage.
They had already turned back when the engine suddenly cut and the Swordfish began losing height.
Morford managed to restart the engine, but the danger hadn’t passed.
Observing the strict W/T silence that had been ordered, they were unable to inform
Illustrious
they were arriving and, as they approached the ship, the gunners on the carrier and the escorting cruiser
Berwick
opened fire.
Green quickly fired the two-star identification signal of the day, the firing ceased at once,
Illustrious
turned back into the wind and they landed on.

The cloud had lifted as the formation of seven Swordfish slowly climbed to 8,000 feet.
Shortly after 1100, still more than fifty miles from Taranto, the observers/navigators in the rear cockpits were able to stow their clipboards of navigational charts.
The first wave had just launched their attack, turning the skies over the harbour into a ball of fire that acted like a homing beacon, growing bigger and brighter as they rumbled towards it.
At five minutes to midnight, a few miles short of the coast, the two flare-droppers, piloted by Lts Hamilton and Skelton, peeled off from the main attacking force.
Coming in from the south, they released twenty-four parachutes in rapid succession before turning their attentions to the oil depot a mile inland from the southern end of the Mar Grande.

In this attack, all the torpedo-bombers flew into the north of the harbour, avoiding the gun emplacements on San Pietro Island and the floating batteries at the harbour entrance, but the reception from the Italian gunners, now on full alert, was even more
ferocious than that which greeted the first wave.
One Swordfish, crewed by Lts Bayley and Slaughter, swooped to torpedo the heavy cruiser
Gorizia
, but was caught up in the intense volleys of flak, burst into flames and careered into the harbour.
Both young officers were killed.
The torpedo that was found floating near the crash location the following morning was thought to have been theirs.
Its striking head had been crushed but had failed to detonate, suggesting they had managed to hit their target.

Simultaneously, Flight Leader Hale and Lt Torrens-Spence both dived into the intense flak to attack the
Littorio
, Italy’s newest battleship, whose beleaguered crew were busy trying to contain the damage sustained in the first assault.
The Swordfish screeched and strained violently as they fell out of the sky almost vertically before their pilots pulled them hard out of the dive.
When they levelled up to make their final approach, they were so low that the undercarriages were almost touching the water.
Both pilots flicked the release buttons on the throttle at the same time, roughly 700 yards from the 40,000-ton warship.
Both torpedoes found their target on the starboard side and yet another booming explosion added to the already deafening uproar.
The other torpedo failed to go off having slapped into the muddy seabed directly below the ship.

Seconds away from smashing straight into the severely wounded battleship, Hale banked sharply, missing a barrage balloon cable by just a few yards before disappearing into the night as fast as his lumbering biplane would allow.
Torrens-Spence was flying so low that, as he fled the scene of destruction,
the wheels of his aircraft actually dipped into the water.
With less skilled aviators at the controls, the Swordfish would have cartwheeled on impact, but in that split second Torrens-Spence showed why he had come to be regarded as one of the best in the Fleet Air Arm.
By immediately pulling back on the controls, the Ulsterman saved himself and his observer Lt Alfie Sutton from certain death.