#dudley pound

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Find out here about the destruction of Convoy PQ 17, a self-inflicted defeat and one of World War II's worst Allied naval disasters

The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17: One of WWII's Worst Allied Naval Disasters

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Egeo. Operazione "Abstention". Il disastro di Castelrosso

Egeo. Operazione “Abstention”. Il disastro di Castelrosso

Dopo la sconfitta in Africa settentrionale ed il disastro della 10^ Armata, sommato al catastrofico intervento in Grecia, la “Mediterranean Fleet” inglese sembrava aver preso il controllo del Mediterraneo a dispetto delle forze navali italiane della Regia Marina. L’Italia, tuttavia, era ben lontana dal crollo che l’avrebbe investita negli ultimi anni del conflitto e aspettava solo l’occasione…

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November 11th, 1940 | The Battle of Taranto

What’s 740 ft. long, 95 ft. wide, displaces 23,000 tons, plays home to 1,229 men, can hit speeds of 30 knots from 83,000 kW boilers driving 3 omg propellers of absolute sex, while simultaneously catapulting 36 aircraft into your face. This lady: HMS Illustrious.

And why is she so special? Can you say “the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history?”

World War II is raging. It’s early days, but England is in Africa fighting the Italians, and the two of them have the same problem: supplies. Now for Italy things should be a little easier, considering the proximity to their base of operations in Libya, but the simple fact was: he who controlled the Mediterranean would end up controlling the supply routes. And both sides knew it.

So even before the war England had been planning on how to knock out the Italians if shit kicked off, and most of these plans orientated around mauling the living crap out of Taranto harbor. You see the Italians had a pretty powerful bloody fleet and were not to be sniffed at, but they didn’t spend their days just scudding about on the warm waters of the Med. looking for a fight and taking in the sun; they sat their asses in harbor and thus exerted a zone of influence without actually doing anything. The simple proximity of six battleships, seven heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eight destroyers, is enough to have you make plans accordingly, and if you do take your eye off the ball, you can be sure that they’d be all up in your grill, sinking your ships, and stealing your canned spam.

So if England was going to control the Mediterranean, and therefore secure their supply lines, the Italian fleet would have to be knocked out, and knocked out in Taranto harbor.

Enter into the room one Sir Dudley Pound.

Dudley wasn’t a pencil pusher. Dudley not only had the most English name in the universe - Sir Alfred Dudley Pickman Rogers Pound – but he had been a battleship commander in the First World War, and had taken part in the Battle of Jutland with great success. And you don’t get to say “I was in the battle of Jutland and sank the Wiesbaden” without the entire room stopping, staring at you, and paying all kinds of homage.

In WWII old Dudley’s hobbies include “sinking the living crap out of German U-Boats” and “Winning the Battle of the Atlantic.” There were to be sad times ahead and an eventual retirement, but back in 1938 Dudley is predicting shit is going to go down with the Italians, and he orders a renewal of the investigation for an attack on Taranto.

But there are all kinds of problems with something of this magnitude at the time.

For starters you can’t just fly into harbor one sunny little day and drop a bomb on an Italian’s head; without a doubt the flak entering into your rear posterior at an unpleasant rate would reduce you and your beloved little plane to a fine red mist.

So this would have to be a night attack. Oh fun.

Secondly, one of the most effective ways to deal with a ship if you happen to be in a plane is either sharing a 1,000lb baby of explosive joy from a great height – inaccurate – or torpedoing the living crap out of it. And torpedoes really, really liked to leave very, very big holes in the hull of things. But Taranto was only 39 ft. deep … torpedoes needed 75 ft. of water: when you drop the torp., it tends to nose-dive first, and here it was going to nose dive straight into the bottom of the seabed. This was a problem.

For the first part, HMS Glorious’ captain Arthur L. St.G. Lyster informed Dudley that the Fairey TSR Swordfish was capable of performing a night attack using aerial torpedoes; in fact the Fleet Air Arm was then the only naval aviation arm capable of performing such daring-do. Dudley was sold on the idea and immediately ordered plans to kick Taranto’s balls.

But that still left the whole “I think my torpedo hit the bottom of the Med.” thing. To solve this the Brits revealed the type of ingenuity that WWII was laced with: they fixed a spool of wire under the planes and attached it to the nose of the torpedo. The resulting drag from the wire helped keep the torpedoes nose up, thus enabling it to work in shallower waters. Bloody brilliant.

I assume they cut the wire with scissors, or something.

So we have a night-flying, torpedo dropping plane, and torpedoes capable of swimming in the shallow end; what we need now is a plan! And I’m a talking super-secret plan; the type of plan that is so super-secret that nothing is ever written down about it.

HMS Illustrious is selected as the base for the aerial attack, replacing HMS Eagle, after Eagle started coughing up fuel and generally misbehaving. Plus HMS Illustrious was brand spanking new and all kinds of kick-ass, so if you can use this baby to spread the pain, you might as well!

Twenty four Swordfish biplanes were crammed into her hold and a small flotilla of covering ships gathered around her; Rear Admiral Lyster had a convoy, a convoy of steel-hurling, Michael Bay Explosion inducing, flesh tearing mayhem.

HALF of the Swordfish were expected to be lost in this attack, and who can blame them? Ahead lay 101 anti-aircraft guns, 193 machine-guns, 87 barrage balloons, 13 aerophonic stations, and 22 searchlights. The slow flying Swordfish were about to fly into hell. At night.

The Italians for their part knew something was coming, because the day before English reconnaissance planes were seen overhead. But they didn’t know what was coming or when.

Nine at night 12 Swordfish are catapulted off the deck of Illustrious. Ninety minutes later and a second wave is thrown into the night air. It was almost eleven at night before the first wave approached the harbor and all shit broke loose.

The Italians for their part did not turn on the search lights, doubtlessly trying to use the cover of night as protection. But they did throw over 13,000 shells into the air. THIRTEEN THOUSAND. And that was the flak just from the ground batteries.

The Brits dropped a flare near some fuel containers and started bombing the crap out of it, while another three Swordfish skimmed over San Pietro Island and gave the battleship Conte di Cavour a small present wrapped in the joyous shape of a torpedo. The resulting blast tore a TWENTY SEVEN foot hole in her side. And I’m typing that in caps, because I’m pretty damn sure that it’s bigger than my living room.

One British plane went down.

Swordfish are dodging and weaving everywhere, flak is filling the skies, barrage balloons threaten to tear up wings; the battleship Andrea Doria escapes hurt, but Littorio is hit TWICE. And just when the Italians don’t think it can get any worse, the second wave of Swordsfish arrive. Littorio is hit again, while battleship Caio Duilio starts to flood from a 36 ft. x 23 ft. hole.  One other English plane goes down.

By 2:30 in the morning both waves are back on the Illustrious with only two planes down in all. Behind them they have left CARNAGE.

Conte di Cavour is sportinga 39 ft. x 26 ft. after-market window extension below the waterline. All attempts to prevent her from sinking failed. Caio Duilio was saved by running her aground, but Littorio was tore the fuck up from three direct hits. She too was run aground to save her, but come morning she was in part completely submerged.

The Italian fleet had lost half of its capital ships in one day, and while repairs would save some in the long run, overall it had been a punch to the throat.

Cunningham wrote after the attack: "The Taranto show has freed up our hands considerably & I hope now to shake these damned Itiys up a bit. I don't think their remaining three battleships will face us and if they do I'm quite prepared to take them on with only two." 

But while the Brits had earned themselves a little operational wiggle room in the Med. he was wrong on how the Italians would react and how quickly. Only five days after Taranto, Campioni sortied with two battleships, six cruisers and 14 destroyers to disrupt a supply convoy to Malta. The follow-up to this operation led to the Battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940.

Italian shipping to Libya actually INCREASED by 10,000 tons a month, and control of the Mediterranean theater would swing back and forth until the Italians finally dropped out of the war in ’43. So the Brits hadn’t really knocked the Italians out of the war, but they did open up a whole new way of going about naval warfare. The Battleship had seen its day; the rise of the carrier was assured.

They also probably influenced the Imperial Japanese Navy’s staff, because a certain location known as Pearl Harbor was also particularly shallow. The Japanese visited Taranto several times and doubtlessly learned quite a bit from there, although – ultimately – their shallow-water aerial torpedo solution would be considerably more elegant than a spool of wire.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Illustrious_(87)

http://www.ovguide.com/battle-of-taranto-9202a8c04000641f80000000001c71ab