THE LITTLE AIRCRAFT THAT COULD
On the evening of Nov. 11, 1940, a small fleet of British warships detached from a much larger task force operating in the western Mediterranean and steamed north into the Ionian Sea toward Salento, the bootheel of Italy. The fleet comprised four cruisers, four destroyers and the newly commissioned aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. Its mission, code-named Operation Judgment, was a presumptuous one: to attack the main Italian fleet, the Regia Marina, in its storied home port of Taranto. At night.
In his memoir War in a Stringbag Royal Air Force Lt. Charles Lamb, who piloted a Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber during the strike, recalled the approach to the Italian port:
For the last 15 minutes of our passage across the Ionian Sea [we] had no navigational problems, for Taranto could be seen from a distance of 50 miles or more because of the welcome awaiting us. The sky over the harbor looked as it sometimes does over Mount Etna, in Sicily, when the great volcano erupts. The darkness was being torn apart by a firework display which spat flame into the night to a height of nearly 5,000 feet. “I think our hosts are expecting us,” I said.
The matchup between British attackers and Italian defenders seemed almost laughably lopsided. This would not be a ship-to-ship slugfest Jutland; the was more than four times the size of the small British fleet. Instead, the attackers would strike by air, in 21 slow and manifestly obsolete carrier aircraft bearing torpedoes and bombs. The fleet in their sights comprised six battleships, nine cruisers, more than two dozen destroyers and numerous other vessels at anchor in one of the world’s best-protected harbors, with submerged breakwaters, submarine nets, barrage balloons dangling steel cables and hundreds of antiaircraft guns. The
