Stringbag: The Fairey Swordfish at War

By David Wragg

This is a narrative account of the operations of the Fairey Swordfish throughout World War Two. The most famous of these was the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, crippling three battleships and damaging several other ships as well as the seaplane base and an oil storage depot. The Swordfish played a prominent part in the Battle of Matapan and in the sinking of the Bismarck. Less happily, Swordfish were used in the unsuccessful and ill-prepared raid on the Germans at Petsamo and in the abortive attack on the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during the Channel Dash in 1942.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781473818699

Book preview

STRINGBAG

STRINGBAG

The Fairey Swordfish

at War

DAVID WRAGG

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

Pen & Sword Aviation

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © David Wragg, 2004

ISBN 1 84415 130 1

The right of David Wragg to be identified as Author of this Work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical

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Typeset in 11/13 Meridien by

Phoenix Typesetting, Auldgirth, Dumfriesshire

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1

Giving the Carrier Force Teeth

2

Flying the Stringbag

3

An Unpromising Start

4

Serving Ashore

5

The Stringbags’ Finest Hour

6

Taking the Offensive with Force H

7

Dark Days in the Eastern Mediterranean

8

Fighting Vichy France

9

Behind Enemy Lines

10

Hunting Germany’s Capital Ships

11

Attacking Enemy Shipping

12

With the Merchant Navy in the Atlantic

13

Fighting the Convoy War

14

Hunter-Killers

Appendix I

The Fairey Swordfish

Appendix II

Training Air Crew and Maintainers

Appendix III

Fairey Swordfish Squadrons in the Second World War

Appendix IV

Standard Convoy Air Patrol Code-names

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

In writing any book such as this, the author is indebted to those who make his life so much easier. I am very grateful to Jerry Shore and his enthusiastic team at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at RNAS Yeovilton, and for the help always so willingly provided by Ian Carter and his team at the Photographic Archive, and John Stopford-Pickering at the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Royal Netherlands Navy Maritime Institute. It is only fair also to remember those naval aviators who committed their own experiences to print, people such as Charles Lamb with his classic War in a String bag, Lord Kilbracken with Bring Back My String bag, and Gerald Woods with Wings at Sea.

David Wragg

Edinburgh

May 2004

INTRODUCTION

Lots of struts in all directions,

Curved and cut-out centre-sections –

Stringbag the sailor’s had his day,

But in his own inimitable way

He’s left his mark on history’s page,

The Champion of the biplane age!

This is how The Aeroplane’s great cartoonist Wren paid tribute to the Fairey Swordfish. The irony of the situation was that the Royal Navy entered the Second World War anticipating the arrival of six fast armoured carriers that were to prove themselves the best in any navy throughout the war years, but its aircraft showed the years of neglect of British naval aviation. This was the price paid for having all British service aviation transferred to a single service, appropriately enough on All Fools’ Day, 1 April 1918, something that was only remedied as the war clouds gathered over Europe. While the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy had modern monoplanes, the Royal Navy was still in the biplane age. The Gloster Sea Gladiator fighter was soon to go, but the Fleet’s air strike element had no option but to persist with the venerable Fairey Swordfish, known in naval circles as the ‘Stringbag’ since its long list of armaments was akin to the contents of the pre-war housewife’s stringbag. This was soon to become a term of affection, however, as the aircraft proved its worth time and time again while its successors failed to live up to their promise. As a result, the Royal Navy ended the war in Europe as it had begun it, flying biplanes.

What follows is a narrative account of the operations of the Fairey Swordfish throughout the Second World War. Undoubtedly, the most successful but unfortunately not the most famous of these operations was the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, which left three battleships crippled and several other ships damaged, as well as a seaplane base and an oil storage depot, for the loss of just two out of the twenty-one aircraft sent against the target. The Swordfish also played a prominent role in the Battle of Matapan and, perhaps most famously of all, in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. Less happily, Swordfish were used in the unsuccessful and ill-conceived raid on the Germans at Petsamo and Kirkenes, and in the abortive and ill-starred attack on the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during the ‘Channel Dash’ episode in 1942. Stringbags played an important role in several theatres of war, including working under RAF Coastal Command control to cover the Dunkirk evacuation and supporting the British Eighth Army in the Western Desert, with attacks on German and Italian airfields and shipping in the Mediterranean. For many, its greatest achievement was its role in protecting convoys from German U-boats, operating from the small merchant aircraft carriers, or MAC-ships, which could only carry three or four aircraft depending on whether the ship was a tanker or a grain carrier, as well as from escort carriers on both the North Atlantic and the Arctic convoys.

To those from other navies seeing the aircraft for the first time, it came as a shock. One American naval officer stared in disbelief at the aircraft.

‘Where did that come from?’ he asked.

‘Fairey’s,’ came the reply from a British naval officer standing nearby.

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘That figures,’ he replied.

I

GIVING THE CARRIER

FORCE TEETH

A question people sometimes ask those interested in aviation is, ‘When did aircraft stop having two wings?’ It is always tempting to point out that the great rival of the Wright brothers, Samuel Langley, favoured the monoplane, but his tandem-wing ‘Aerodrome A’ was a flop and, having been built with taxpayers’ money, it did the cause of aviation no good at all. More to the point, Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel in 1909 in a monoplane, while the Germans had many monoplanes in service during the First World War.

But, of course, these aren’t the kind of monoplanes people have in mind when they pose the question. With the drag of their extensive external bracing, many designers felt that the early monoplane had little to offer and the biplane remained supreme for many years. It was to take cantilever construction to make the monoplane viable, but how viable? How resilient would it be to the stresses and strains of aerobatics, to the harsh buffeting of turbulence, or to the grim damage of combat? The indications were not good. During the preparations for the 1925 Schneider Trophy contest, held at Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, the Supermarine S4 cantilever monoplane crashed during trials because of wing flutter. It mattered not at all that Italian Macchi M39 monoplanes won the 1926 contest; it was the structural failure of the S4 that was remembered, not least because the M39 had limited competition after the American team had suffered a series of mishaps that led to the withdrawal of their most promising aircraft and its substitution with a plodding, though reliable, standard Curtiss Hawk biplane.

The next three Schneider contests, held biannually after 1927, saw first the Supermarine S5, then the S6 and finally the S6B romp home with the trophy, with an outright win on the third occasion – a tribute to Supermarine’s chief designer, Reginald Mitchell. Despite this, when the RAF decided on its next fighter during the early 1930s, it rejected Mitchell’s offer of a monoplane and opted instead for the Gloster Gladiator and, for operations from aircraft carriers, the Sea Gladiator. The Gladiator’s one concession to modernity was an enclosed cockpit.

While much has been made of the fact that British naval aviation between the two world wars was, almost until the last moment, in the hands of the Royal Air Force, this was not the sole reason for the lack of high-performance aircraft aboard the Royal Navy’s carriers. None of the armed forces received the funding they needed, with the inter-war governments following the so-called ‘Ten Year Rule’ which stated that there would be ten years in which to prepare for war. These were the years of the Great Depression and recession afterwards. Moreover, many senior naval officers believed that high-performance aircraft could not be operated from aircraft carriers. This was the real penalty of having naval aviation under air force control: the lack of senior officers with first-hand experience of aviation. The cream of the former Royal Naval Air Service had been included in the 55,000 naval airmen and maintainers who had passed into the RAF on 1 April 1918.

The six aircraft carriers in service with the Royal Navy during the early 1930s were not the most inspiring. They included a converted liner that had originally been ordered by an Italian company, HMS Argus, and Eagle, converted from a battleship that had been building for Chile at the start of the First World War. The first purpose-designed carrier, Hermes, was too small. The best of the ships were the two converted battlecruisers Courageous and Glorious, which had started their lives as sisters of the first aircraft carrier, Furious; but like her, their suitability as aircraft weights and speeds rose was seriously compromised by having the main flight deck foreshortened to accommodate a take-off deck at hangar deck level - a feature that soon fell into disuse.

It was not surprising that when a new strike aircraft was required for operations from the Royal Navy’s carriers, a biplane should be chosen.

The Swordfish

As it had control of all British service aviation at the time, it was the Air Ministry, not the Admiralty, that was responsible for the specification of the Fairey Swordfish, issuing its requirement in October 1930. The winner of the resulting contest was Fairey Aviation, whose prototype was designated S9/30, and which was given the go-ahead in the late summer of the following year. Meanwhile, Fairey had received an order from the Hellenic Navy for an aircraft for the torpedo-spotter-reconnaissance role, which was designated TSR I, and the prototype was powered by a Bristol Pegasus II radial engine. The TSR I first flew on 21 March 1933, taking off from Fairey’s Great West Road Aerodrome, near Hayes, and almost a year later the prototype S9/30 made its first flight, powered by a Rolls-Royce Kestrel II in-line engine, which gave it a very streamlined nose similar to that of a Hawker Hart.

Early trials with the TSR I had gone well, but the test pilots found that they could not get the aircraft to spin. On 11 September 1933, C.S. Staniland, Fairey’s chief test pilot, took the ‘Greek machine’ up for its spinning trials. After several attempts he succeeded in getting the aircraft into a flat spin, with the nose pointing slightly below the horizon, but then found that the aircraft would simply not come out of it. Staniland persisted, but after a dozen revolutions he decided that it was time to bale out; but as the aircraft continued to spin he succeeded only in jumping from the pilot’s cockpit into that of the observer, and it was from here that he eventually made his escape before the aircraft crashed to the ground. Any pilot who couldn’t correct a spin after so many revolutions was not only fully justified in getting out, as a test pilot he had a duty to do so to pass on his account of the problem. The incident meant that Staniland had the distinction of being the only pilot known to have baled out twice from the same aircraft.

With the loss of the prototype, Marcel Lobelle, the company’s chief designer, abandoned the TSR I and combined features from it and the S9/30 to produce what was almost a hybrid of the two, admittedly similar, designs, using the Pegasus III engine and initially known as the TSR II. The new aircraft first flew with Staniland at the controls on 17 April 1934. It differed from the later production machines in a number of respects, most notably through having a two-bladed wooden propeller.

The Air Ministry was sufficiently impressed with the aircraft to order eighty-nine – a large order given the straitened circumstances of the day – and the first examples reached the RAF in July 1936. Production aircraft had the Pegasus II engine and a three-bladed constant pitch propeller. Swordfish replaced Fairey Seals in No. 825 Squadron aboard HMS Glorious, at the time serving a long stint as the Mediterranean Fleet’s aircraft carrier, and in No. 811 aboard Furious, which had been flying Blackburn Baffins while serving with the Home Fleet. By 1940, with all financial restraints on arms procurement well gone, Fairey had delivered 692 Swordfish and had turned to concentrate on the aircraft’s supposed successor, the Fairey Albacore. The original Swordfish I continued in production with Blackburn, which built a further 300 before introducing the Swordfish II. Operating from a variety of decks, many of which did not have catapults, or ‘accelerators’ as these were known at the time, the Swordfish II introduced a strengthened lower mainplane for rocket-assisted take-off, known as RP or rocket-projectile assistance, and 1,080 of this version were built by Blackburn, many of them having the more powerful Pegasus XXX engine, which also powered a further development, the Pegasus III, nicknamed the ‘pregnant Stringbag’, of which a further 320 were built.

Later versions didn’t simply have stronger mainplanes and more power, they also introduced airborne radar, making the Swordfish the only biplane to be so fitted – a museum piece with the latest technology. The radar helped in the search for surface vessels, the most significant of which to a Stringbag were to be enemy submarines caught on the surface, either cruising or charging their batteries. First in use in May 1941, the radar was a big improvement in capability, but it had its limitations. While early versions could detect a large surface vessel at distances of up to twenty-five miles and pick up a coastline, so that it was an aid to navigation as well as to attack, the low-lying shape of a U-boat could not be detected beyond four or five miles. In addition, Mk III Swordfish lost their guns, doubtless those in authority finally appreciating that there was no way the single machine gun in the hands of the telegraphist/air-gunner, or TAG in naval parlance, could protect the aircraft (and as for the single forward-firing gun …).

It was not simply the biplane configuration that marked the Swordfish down as an anachronism. Other features added to the impression, including the three open cockpits: one for the pilot, another for the observer – as the Fleet Air Arm designated the navigator, who in truth had to do much more than simply navigate – and a third for the TAG, with communication between the crew effected by means of a simple tube, known as a Gosport tube, dating from before the First World War, although in the early versions the TAG normally had to communicate via the observer in the middle cockpit with shouts and gestures. For the pilot, instruments were primitive, little better than the basics of compass, altimeter and air speed indicator (ASI), although the aircraft could home in on the carrier’s beacon for a safe return. Checking the fuel in the air meant the pilot gazing through a hole in the instrument panel to see the fuel indicator, which was situated some distance ahead over the engine. It was not always reliable, and the best method of actually being sure of how much fuel remained was to use a dipstick, something that could only be done on the ground or on the deck. Later aircraft did have blind flying panels for operations at night, but flying through cloud in formation remained risky.

The Spartan open cockpits may well have saved at least one Stringbag. One pilot wishing to give his aircraft a test flight after repairs offered his rigger what would today be called an ‘air experience flight’. As the aircraft gained height, the rigger, wearing only his cotton overalls, slunk down inside the cockpit to avoid the cold and discovered that the floor of the cockpit was sticky from leaking oil. He immediately alerted the pilot and they were able to make an emergency landing back on the carrier before the engine seized up. On another occasion, Gerard Woods, an observer, flew off from Ark Royal on an anti-submarine patrol in a brand-new Blackburn-built Swordfish but returned after fifteen minutes as a main oil line had broken leaving him two inches deep in oil in his rear cockpit. As the crew got out for a replacement aircraft, they left a trail of oily footprints along the deck.

If communication between the crew was primitive, on the early versions so was that with the ground or the ship. There was no voice communication for Stringbags for the first couple of years of wartime flying, when Morse transmissions remained essential, so perhaps it was a blessing that often radio silence was ordered. Communications between aircraft were often by means of an Aldis lamp, especially at night when a gesture from a pilot or observer could not be seen. By 1944, however, radio was available.

The Swordfish was also among the last service aircraft not to have an automatic cartridge starter; instead it was started by a manual starting handle, sometimes known as a ‘Hucks’, that was inserted into the engine and wound furiously by two mechanics until a flywheel had gained sufficient momentum to start the airscrew revolving. ‘When, as often happened, the engine misfired,’ recalled Gerard Woods, ‘the groundcrews’ cursing would have made an Irish navvy blush as this tiring performance recommenced.’

Range of the Swordfish could be increased considerably using an additional fuel tank, usually slung under the aircraft on a bombing mission, but for torpedo dropping it needed to be inserted into the observer’s cockpit as the torpedo was always mounted under the fuselage. On some missions, this meant dispensing with the observer, especially if enemy fighters were expected, but usually the observer was decamped into the TAG’s cockpit – no easy move given that it was less spacious and the observer had to take with him his instruments plus the bulky ‘Bigsworth’ chart board. Operating with an additional fuel tank in the middle cockpit had another drawback, as fuel tended to overflow into the rear cockpit during take-off and whenever the aircraft climbed. Flying into heavy AA fire up to one’s ankles, or even one’s knees, in aviation fuel was not to be recommended. It certainly did nothing for peace of mind.

In many ways the Swordfish was intended to be a ‘maid of all work’, and in line with this a floatplane version was also developed to operate from battleships and cruisers. A few floatplane versions also served with the Royal Air Force in Gibraltar. Given the simplicity of the aircraft’s design, there was little delay in preparing the floatplane variant, which flew for the first time on 10 November 1934 at Hamble, near Southampton; later catapult trials took place aboard the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, a veteran of the First World War. Stringbags could easily be converted from floats to wheeled undercarriage, and vice versa, but there was never an amphibian variant.

When first ordered, even though the age of the monoplane was clearly imminent, it was still not so outrageous to consider a biplane. Indeed, even the mighty German Luftwaffe had biplane fighters in the mid-1930s and some saw service during the Spanish Civil War with the Condor Legion, though by the outbreak of war in Europe other, much sturdier and faster aircraft were in service with the Luftwaffe. Most notable among these was the Junkers Ju87 Stuka, a dive-bomber that struck fear into its opponents and of which a carrier-borne version was developed for the abortive Graf Zeppelin aircraft carrier project. The cruel truth was that in 1939, the Swordfish was obsolete. Still, altogether some 2,392 were built before the aircraft was finally taken out of production in mid-1944, and it remained in service until July 1945. In the final year of the war, the Swordfish was absent from the British Pacific Fleet, as indeed was the Barracuda, effectively sent home in disgrace after its performance in tropical conditions failed to impress. The Fleet Air Arm had at last found a replacement for its venerable and much-loved Stringbag in the Grumman Avenger.

Fairey’s inability to design and develop a suitable successor could well have been due to the pressures of wartime, but the truth was also that the company, small even by the fragmented standards of the British aircraft industry of the day, and which had been starved of work during the 1920s and indeed up to the mid-1930s, had a very uneven performance. Its most remarkable inter-war aircraft was the Fox, a single-engined biplane day bomber with a maximum speed of 150mph from its single 480hp Curtiss D-12 engine. This aircraft so impressed Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, the ‘father of the RAF’, when demonstrated in 1925 that he immediately ordered a squadron, and the first examples were delivered within a year, but given the financial constraints of the day, that was it. The Swordfish was a complete contrast: slow, plodding and reliable, with a far heavier warload than the Fox. In addition, Fairey attracted considerable official displeasure for importing US engines instead of supporting the British industry. Between the wars, the arms trade was parochial and protectionist to an extent that seems astonishing today. In the UK, and in many other countries, the aircraft industry was often little more than a cottage industry. The entrepreneurs behind the industry were more often enthusiasts rather than industrialists.

The company’s first monoplane for the RAF was the Battle, a true contemporary of the Swordfish as it was ordered in 1933, although it did not enter service for another four years. When first ordered, the Battle may have seemed to be that elusive beast, a light bomber with fighter performance, but by 1937 it was also obsolescent, and as the Battle of France developed it was found wanting and paid the price in high loss rates. Fairey, meanwhile, had produced the Fulmar as a carrier-borne fighter, but burdened with the naval insistence on carrying an observer and on longer range it rarely justified itself, even in the hands of the most skilled and experienced pilots. Even the Hurricane, supposedly outclassed by the Messerschmitt Bfl09 during the Battle of Britain, was a big improvement when it joined the fleet as the Sea Hurricane. In persisting with the biplane configuration, the Albacore would have been a disappointment, even if its Taurus engine had been reliable. The Barracuda was a maintenance nightmare, it failed in the tropics, and it was disliked by pilots as this dive-bomber sometimes showed a marked disinclination to pull out of a dive.

Stringbag’s flexibility and good manners in difficult conditions meant that this was one aircraft that could operate from the slow and confined decks of the merchant aircraft carriers, the MAC-ships, and probably the only one that could have done so. Once in the air, the Swordfish could loiter, conserving fuel and forcing the U-boat commanders to remain submerged. Even in attack, its slow speed may have been a blessing in disguise. In the congested confines of the two harbours at Taranto, would a faster aircraft have managed to operate successfully at such low levels, making an accurate torpedo attack possible?

September 1939

By September 1939, Swordfish were already embarked in six of the Royal Navy’s seven aircraft carriers. The new Ark Royal, with her tremendous aircraft capacity, had no fewer th an four squadrons – 810, 820 and 821, as well as 818, which had replaced 814, transferred on the outbreak of war to the diminutive Hermes – while the remaining four ships had two squadrons apiece: Courageous with 811 and 822; her sister Glorious with 823 and 825; their half-sister, the recently refitted Furious, with 816 and 818; and the elderly Eagle with 813 and 824. Argus was used for carrier deck training at this time.

On the battleships, battlecruisers and cruisers of the fleet, the pre-war policy of maintaining separate squadrons for each ‘fleet’ or station was abandoned and all catapult flights became part of No. 700 Squadron, whose initial strength of twelve Swordfish floatplanes was heavily outnumbered by no fewer than forty-two Supermarine Walrus amphibians, and there were still eleven Seafoxes in service in 1940.

At the outset of the war, the Fairey Swordfish was in the frontline on fleet reconnaissance and anti-submarine duties, but was not to be involved in offensive action until the Norwegian campaign, which started in April 1940. This does not mean that Swordfish did not see action elsewhere, and when on the receiving end, as aboard