The Battle of Taranto, the Fairey Swordfish Stringbag, and the Night Attack That Changed Naval Warfare Forever

On November 11, 1940, twenty-one Royal Navy Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from HMS Illustrious and attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto. In a single night, they knocked three of Italy’s six capital ships out of the war using an aircraft widely considered obsolete. Within thirteen months, Japan had studied and replicated the raid at Pearl Harbor.

What Was the Strategic Situation in the Mediterranean in 1940?

Britain in late 1940 was under enormous strain. France had fallen. Atlantic convoys were under constant threat. In the Mediterranean, Italy possessed the second-largest battleship fleet in the world - six capital ships that dominated the sea lanes connecting Malta to North Africa.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commanding the British Mediterranean Fleet, understood he could not defeat that fleet in a conventional surface engagement. The Italian ships were faster and more numerous. But Cunningham had one asset the Italians hadn’t properly accounted for: HMS Illustrious, the Royal Navy’s newest fleet carrier, with a torpedo bomber squadron embarked.

What Was the Fairey Swordfish?

The Fairey Swordfish - universally called the Stringbag by its crews - was a biplane. A genuine, fabric-covered biplane with two open cockpits, fixed landing gear, and folding wings for carrier stowage. Designed in the early 1930s, it had a top speed of approximately 138 mph in clean configuration. By 1939, the Royal Air Force had written it off as obsolete.

The Fleet Air Arm flew it anyway. And the Swordfish possessed one counterintuitive quality that none of its critics had accounted for.

Why Was a Slow Biplane So Hard to Shoot Down?

At low altitude, in darkness, flying at 80 knots, the Swordfish was nearly impossible to engage with the anti-aircraft fire control systems of 1940. Those systems were calibrated for fast aircraft. The fire control solutions assumed a target traveling at speed. When a Swordfish came in low over the water at that pace, the guns couldn’t track it accurately - it flew between the solutions.

This was not by design. It was a discovered advantage. It mattered enormously at Taranto.

How Did the British Solve the Shallow Harbor Problem?

Taranto was well defended. Barrage balloons moored above the anchorage. Anti-torpedo nets around the most valuable ships. Extensive shore-based anti-aircraft batteries. And the Italians had a deeper confidence: the harbor was only about 40 feet deep. The conventional wisdom of 1940 held that aerial torpedoes, set to run at roughly 30 feet, would bury themselves in a shallow mudfloor before reaching any target.

The Americans believed this. The Italians believed this.

The British had been working on a solution. Cunningham’s staff, coordinating with Royal Navy experimental programs, modified the air-launch settings to bring the torpedo running depth down to 10 to 11 feet. They also fitted wooden drogues to the tail of each weapon - stabilizing devices that controlled the torpedo’s entry angle into the water so it leveled off correctly in a confined space.

Getting a 700-pound weapon traveling at aircraft speeds to enter water at the right angle and run straight in a 40-foot-deep harbor is a precise engineering problem. They solved it.

What Happened During the Attack on November 11, 1940?

Twenty-one Swordfish were armed and launched in two waves from HMS Illustrious, approximately 170 miles from the target - over an hour of flight in a Swordfish, navigating by dead reckoning and the stars. No radar, no moving maps, no GPS. Stars, compass, airspeed, and time.

The first wave of twelve aircraft launched at 9:30 PM, led by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Williamson, a 41-year-old career Fleet Air Arm pilot who had spent months planning the raid. Six aircraft carried the modified torpedoes. The others carried bombs and parachute flares.

Flares cascaded down over the Mar Grande, the outer harbor, illuminating the Italian fleet exactly as reconnaissance photographs had shown it. The torpedo aircraft came in at 20 to 30 feet above the water. The flak was immediate and intense; barrage balloon cables were invisible hazards in the dark. Williamson’s aircraft struck a cable and went down in the harbor. He and his observer survived and were taken prisoner. His torpedo had already hit the Conte di Cavour.

The second wave of nine aircraft arrived roughly an hour later, led by Lieutenant Commander John Hale. The harbor was still in chaos. The guns were still firing.

The Littorio took three torpedo hits. The anti-torpedo nets around her had not been fully deployed, and the modified British weapons ran shallow enough to pass under the gaps. The Caio Duilio took one hit and was deliberately beached by her crew to prevent sinking.

What Were the Results at Taranto?

By the morning of November 12, 1940, three of Italy’s six battleships were out of action. The Conte di Cavour had settled to the harbor floor and would never sail again. The Littorio and the Caio Duilio were down at the bow, their crews fighting flooding below decks.

British losses: two aircraft out of twenty-one - a loss rate under 10 percent against one of the most heavily defended harbors in the Mediterranean. All four aircrew from the two downed aircraft survived and were taken prisoner.

Admiral Cunningham signaled the Admiralty. Twenty-one biplanes had achieved in one night what a surface fleet engagement might not have managed in a year.

How Did Taranto Directly Shape the Attack on Pearl Harbor?

The connection is not inference. It is documented in Japanese naval records captured after the war and confirmed by Japanese officer testimony.

Japan’s Naval Attaché in Rome moved within days of the attack. Japanese naval officers arrived at Taranto, interviewed Italian officers, examined the damage, took measurements, and filed detailed reports to Tokyo. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto read those reports.

Yamamoto had been arguing for years that the decisive weapon of the next naval war was the aircraft carrier, not the battleship. He had studied the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii - a harbor 40 to 50 feet deep along Battleship Row. The United States Navy believed, as the Italians had believed, that aerial torpedo attack in such shallow water was not operationally feasible.

The British had just proven otherwise with 21 fabric-covered biplanes.

Yamamoto accelerated planning for Operation Z. His engineers studied and adapted the British torpedo modifications. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 - thirteen months after Taranto - the shallow-water torpedo techniques first demonstrated over the Regia Marina were deployed against the Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma, California, and Arizona.

What Became of the Fairey Swordfish?

The Swordfish was scheduled for replacement by the Fairey Albacore, a more modern torpedo bomber. The Albacore turned out to be only marginally superior and was retired before the Swordfish. The aircraft meant to make the Stringbag obsolete became obsolete first.

The Swordfish served through the entire war. It sank more Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft type. It put a torpedo into the steering gear of the German battleship Bismarck, leaving her unmaneuverable and contributing directly to her loss - the second time the type changed the course of the war.

The last airworthy Swordfish is maintained by the Royal Navy Historic Flight at RNAS Yeovilton in Somerset, England.

Key Takeaways

• On November 11, 1940, 21 Fairey Swordfish biplanes from HMS Illustrious crippled three of Italy’s six battleships at Taranto in a single night, losing only two aircraft in the process.
• The British solved the shallow-harbor torpedo problem by reducing running depth to 10–11 feet and fitting wooden drogues for water-entry stabilization - a capability the Italians and Americans both believed was impossible.
• The Swordfish’s greatest vulnerability - extreme slowness at 80 knots - was an operational advantage against 1940-era anti-aircraft fire control systems calibrated for faster targets.
• Japanese naval officers were on the ground at Taranto within days of the attack. Admiral Yamamoto applied those lessons directly to the planning of Pearl Harbor, thirteen months later.
• The Swordfish outlasted the aircraft designed to replace it, sank more Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft type, and helped sink the Bismarck - an aircraft dismissed as obsolete before the war even began.