The 'Obsolete' British Biplane From 1934 That Crippled Half Of Mussolini's Battle Fleet In One Night

The Fairey Swordfish should not have worked. It was a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit and a fixed undercarriage, designed in 1934 and already considered a generation out of date the year it entered service. On the night of 11 November 1940, twenty-one of them flew into the most heavily defended naval base in the Mediterranean and, in roughly ninety minutes, put three Italian battleships out of action at the cost of two aircraft. This is the story of why the Battle of Taranto happened, and why the aircraft everyone had written off was the only one in the world capable of carrying it out. The answer has very little to do with speed. The Swordfish had an unusually low wing loading, which gave it control authority almost all the way down to a stall in the region of 55–60 mph. That single characteristic solved the two hardest problems in carrier torpedo work: it could be flown off a deck in weather that grounded everything else afloat, and it could deliver the British 18-inch Mark XII torpedo inside the narrow envelope that weapon demanded — low and slow, broadly under 100 feet and under 100 knots — without spending long seconds straight and level inside defensive fire. The aircraft's most obvious weakness was its delivery envelope. Taranto itself was an engineering problem before it was a flying one. The Mar Grande, where the battleships lay, was only about thirty-nine feet deep, and a standard air-dropped torpedo buried itself in the mud. The solution was additional fins, a carefully controlled shallow release, and Duplex magnetic pistols designed to detonate beneath a ship's keel. Reconnaissance flown from Malta gave the Fleet Air Arm the exact berthing plan of every capital ship before Operation Judgement launched from HMS Illustrious. The video also covers what the Swordfish could not do. In February 1942, six Swordfish of 825 Naval Air Squadron attacked the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in full daylight during the Channel Dash. Every aircraft was shot down and only five of eighteen aircrew survived — the same aircraft type, the same torpedoes, a different doctrine, and a catastrophic result. Night and bad weather were not incidental to the Swordfish's success; they were the operational condition without which it had no survivability at all. Six months after Taranto, the same type flew off HMS Ark Royal into an Atlantic gale with the flight deck reported to be pitching through more than fifty feet, and put a torpedo into the Bismarck's stern that jammed her rudders roughly twelve degrees to port. A contribution at Cape Matapan in March 1941 followed the same pattern: a torpedo that stopped the cruiser Pola created the conditions a surface fleet then exploited. The Swordfish outlived its own intended replacement. The Fairey Albacore was faster, had an enclosed cockpit, and was ordered specifically to succeed it — and was withdrawn from front-line use in 1943 while the Swordfish served to the end of the war in Europe. Roughly 2,391 were built. In the second half of the war the type changed role entirely, flying from escort carriers and Merchant Aircraft Carriers on the Atlantic and Arctic convoy routes with ASV radar, depth charges and rocket projectiles, hunting U-boats from decks barely four hundred feet long. What the Swordfish demonstrates is narrower, and more interesting, than the idea that old equipment is secretly good. Fast and slow, modern and obsolete, mean very little on their own. A weapon is matched or mismatched to a specific operational problem — and measured against the problem the Royal Navy actually faced in 1940, the aircraft that looked most out of date on paper was the only one that could solve it. Taranto was studied closely in Tokyo. Thirteen months later the same principle — shallow-water torpedoes, a night approach, carrier aircraft against battleships at anchor — was applied at Pearl Harbor on a far larger scale. Chapters below. If you're interested in Fleet Air Arm doctrine, Royal Navy carrier aviation and the Mediterranean naval war, subscribing genuinely helps the channel. 00:00 The Obsolete Biplane That Crippled a Fleet 01:55 The Aircraft the Navy Was Given 02:55 Why It Looked Hopelessly Outdated 03:32 Why They Called It the Stringbag 03:50 Every Weakness Was the Point 04:19 The Hidden Advantage of Flying Slowly 05:04 Low and Slow: The Torpedo Problem 05:35 What Daylight Proved 06:38 The Channel Dash Disaster 07:32 Operation Judgement 08:22 Thirty-Nine Feet of Water 09:13 Ninety Minutes 09:44 Three Battleships Are Hit 10:17 What Taranto Cost the Regia Marina 11:08 The Swordfish at Cape Matapan 11:58 A Gale and a Jammed Rudder 12:56 The Decision That Caught the Bismarck 13:47 The Replacement It Outlived 14:29 Hunting U-Boats From Tiny Decks 15:02 What the Swordfish Actually Proved 15:41 Thirteen Months Later: Pearl Harbor https://nickswwiiarchive.com/ contact@nickswwiiarchive.com