The Fairey Swordfish biplanes that attacked the Bismarck on the night of May twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-one

On the night of May 24, 1941, nine Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from HMS Victorious to attack the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic. Flying open-cockpit biplanes made of fabric and wire at barely 110 miles per hour, the crews pressed home their torpedo runs against one of the most heavily armed warships ever built. Every single aircraft returned. The attack proved that air-launched torpedoes could reach the Bismarck, setting the stage for the strike two days later that sealed the battleship’s fate.

What Happened That Morning in the Denmark Strait

Hours before the Swordfish launched, the Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen had fought a gunnery exchange with British capital ships in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. In barely eight minutes, Bismarck’s fifth salvo struck HMS Hood in her aft magazines. The battlecruiser exploded, broke in half, and sank in under three minutes. Of her crew of more than 1,400 men, only three survived.

Hood had been the pride of the Royal Navy for two decades, the largest warship in the British fleet. Churchill later wrote that in all the war, he never received a more direct shock. The Admiralty issued a single order to every available ship: sink the Bismarck.

The problem was finding her. After the battle, Bismarck turned south into the open Atlantic. British cruisers struggled to maintain contact in worsening weather — fog, rain squalls, heavy seas. The fleet was scattered across hundreds of miles of ocean, and the only carrier close enough to act was HMS Victorious.

Why HMS Victorious Was Barely Ready

Victorious had been commissioned barely a month earlier. Her crew was still learning the ship, and the air group embarked was not even her own. 825 Naval Air Squadron was flying the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber, an aircraft that was, by every reasonable measure, already obsolete.

The Swordfish first flew in 1934. By 1941 it was a biplane with an open cockpit, a crew of three exposed to the elements, a fuselage of metal tube and fabric, and wings of fabric over a wooden frame braced with flying wires. Fixed undercarriage. Top speed of roughly 140 mph in clean configuration — closer to 110–120 mph with an eighteen-inch torpedo weighing over 1,600 pounds slung underneath. For comparison, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was doing 350 mph by then.

But specifications never captured what made the Swordfish effective. She was tough, honest in the air, and capable of flying in weather that kept everything else on deck. Her crews called her the Stringbag — not because she was fragile, but because, like an old string shopping bag, you could fit anything into her and she would carry it without complaint.

The Attack on the Night of May 24

The squadron was led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, an Irish-born, quiet, experienced officer who had already seen action earlier in the war. His orders: take nine Swordfish into the fading light of a North Atlantic evening, find the Bismarck in deteriorating weather, and put torpedoes into her.

Victorious turned into the wind around 10:00 PM. The seas were rough, the deck pitching. One by one, nine Swordfish staggered off the flight deck and formed up in near-zero visibility. Cloud base sat around a thousand feet with rain squalls everywhere. Navigation was by dead reckoning. Finding a single ship in the North Atlantic at night, in weather, was an act of faith.

Esmonde led the squadron through clouds and descended when he estimated they were close. They broke out beneath the overcast and spotted a warship — but the first ship some crews lined up on was the United States Coast Guard cutter Modoc, a neutral vessel on ocean station patrol. They recognized the error before releasing weapons, pulled off, reformed, and searched again.

Then they found Bismarck.

Flying Into a Wall of Fire

Bismarck stretched over 800 feet long, bristling with antiaircraft guns including devastating 3.7 cm flak batteries capable of putting up a wall of steel. Every gun opened up as the Swordfish came in low over the water. Surviving crews described the antiaircraft fire as the most intense they had ever experienced.

The Swordfish pressed their attack from different angles to split the defensive fire, flying at roughly 90 feet above the waves. Some rear-seat observers fired back with single Vickers guns — essentially useless against a battleship, but they fired anyway.

One torpedo hit, striking Bismarck amidships on the starboard side near the bridge. It detonated against the armored belt. The belt held. Damage was minor: a slight reduction in speed, some flooding quickly handled by damage control teams. Tactically, the attack was not decisive.

Why Every Swordfish Survived

What mattered far more than the damage assessment was this: all nine Swordfish returned to Victorious. Through that wall of fire, at ninety feet above the sea, not one was shot down. Several were damaged — some had holes in the fabric large enough to put a fist through, and one observer had been wounded — but every aircraft found the carrier in the dark and landed on a pitching deck in conditions that would have been dangerous even in daylight.

The German gunnery crews were baffled. Their fire control systems were designed to track fast, modern aircraft. The Swordfish were so slow that the predictors overcompensated, placing shell bursts ahead of the biplanes where a faster aircraft would have been. The very obsolescence of the Swordfish had become a kind of armor.

How This Attack Led to Bismarck’s End

This was not the torpedo strike that decided the Bismarck’s fate. That came two days later, on May 26, when Swordfish from HMS Ark Royal scored the critical hit that jammed Bismarck’s rudder hard to port, leaving her steaming in circles until the fleet caught up and sank her the following morning.

But the May 24 attack proved something essential: the Swordfish could get through. Flesh, fabric, and wire could challenge steel and fire and survive. It gave the Admiralty the confidence that an air-launched torpedo attack was the way to slow Bismarck when gunfire alone could not close the gap.

Eugene Esmonde and the Channel Dash

Nine months later, on February 12, 1942, Esmonde led six Swordfish from 825 Squadron against the German battleships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen during the Channel Dash. This time there was no cloud cover, no darkness. The Swordfish went in at wave height in broad daylight against three capital ships and their escorts, with Bf 109s and Fw 190s attacking from above.

Every Swordfish was shot down. Esmonde was killed. Only five of eighteen aircrew survived. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. The citation noted his outstanding courage and resolution. In plain terms, Eugene Esmonde flew an aircraft made of wood and fabric into the teeth of the most powerful navy in Europe — and he did it twice, because the mission required it.

The Swordfish Legacy

The Fairey Swordfish served throughout the entire war and sank more enemy tonnage than any other Allied aircraft. She outlasted every aircraft meant to replace her. The Albacore was supposed to retire the Swordfish — the Swordfish outlasted it. The Barracuda arrived, and the Swordfish kept flying. The last operational Swordfish sortie was flown in June 1945, an airframe designed in 1934 still flying combat missions when jets were already in service.

A handful of Swordfish survive today. The Royal Navy Historic Flight maintains one in airworthy condition. At airshows in England, the sound of her Pegasus radial engine is unmistakable — slow, steady, and from another century entirely.

Key Takeaways

• Nine Fairey Swordfish attacked the Bismarck on the night of May 24, 1941, and all nine returned despite intense antiaircraft fire, proving that the obsolete biplane could penetrate a battleship’s defenses.
• The Swordfish’s slow speed inadvertently defeated German fire control, which was calibrated for faster modern aircraft, causing shells to burst ahead of the biplanes.
• The single torpedo hit caused only minor damage, but the attack gave the Admiralty confidence to order the decisive Ark Royal strike two days later that crippled Bismarck’s rudder.
• Lt. Cdr. Eugene Esmonde, who led the attack, was killed nine months later leading an even more desperate Swordfish strike during the Channel Dash and received a posthumous Victoria Cross.
• The Swordfish sank more enemy tonnage than any other Allied aircraft and remained in frontline service from 1934 until June 1945, outlasting every replacement designed to retire her.