Raiders Read Free Page B

were kept loose. It was left to the pilots to decide on their arrival at Taranto which was the best ship to target. The battleships were the main prizes, however, and the torpedo bombers, the heavy mob of the operation, were to go for them. It didn’t matter which of the six they attacked because RAF reconnaissance images showed the Italians’ capital ships were bunched so closely together that a torpedo, dropped in their general direction, stood a good chance of hitting one of them. The bombers’ principal targets were the fleet’s heavy and light cruisers and destroyers, but they were also to go for the seaplane base and the oil installations. The flying boats were the eyes of the Italian air force and the bane of the Mediterranean Fleet; the destruction of their operating centre would raise a loud cheer back in Alexandria.
    Sitting on the instep of Italy’s ‘boot’ in the heart of the Mediterranean, Taranto was the obvious location to house the Italian Fleet. It had two large harbours. The outer harbour, known as the Mar Grande, is shaped like a backward ‘C’ and is almost three miles in diameter. It was here that the six battleships were anchored, along with three heavy cruisers and eight destroyers. Behind it, in the land-locked inner harbour, known as Mar Piccolo, there was a bomber’s feast of six cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, five torpedo boats, sixteen submarines and a variety of minor warships and support vessels. Not surprising, then, that Taranto was protected by a formidable network of defences designed to deter aircraft from attacking some of the most powerful warships afloat. Of the twenty-seven barrage balloons, sixteen were at the harbour entrance, protecting the battleships, and there would have been a further sixty had they not been wrecked in a recent storm. A shortage of hydrogen meant that they had yet to be replaced. With all the gaps between them, the balloons were expected to be more of a nuisance than a grave danger.
    The battleships in the open expanse of the main outer harbour were vulnerable to torpedo attack and almost 14,000 metres of underwater netting were needed to protect them (were a torpedo ever to enter Taranto Harbour, it would come, the Italians believed, from a submarine, not an aircraft). On the night of the raid, a little over 4,000 metres of net had been installed – and even these could be avoided thanks to a new invention known as the Duplex pistol, which gave the torpedo two opportunities of detonating. It was fitted with a conventional contact pistol that detonated when the torpedo hit the target and also a magnetic one that went off when the torpedo passed underneath. All the propeller-powered torpedoes were set to run at twenty-seven knots at thirty-three feet, a depth great enough to slip under the protective nets.
    It was more the vast array of anti-aircraft (AA) guns that the aircrews had to worry about. Strung out along the shore, as well as on the submerged breakwaters and the island of San Pietro at the mouth of the harbour, and on a series of floating pontoons, there were twenty-one batteries of 76-mm and greater calibre guns, eighty-four 17-mm and 20-mm guns and over 100 smaller weapons. There were also twenty-two searchlights to help the gunners pick out their targets. The guns of the ships doubled the weight of fire that could be brought to bear on unwanted visitors. How the crews of the lumbering Swordfish might expect to escape unscathed from the maelstrom of fire in so confined a space remained to be seen.
    Illustrious
was to leave Alexandria under cover of providing an escort for a number of convoys to reinforce Malta, Crete and the forces sent to assist the Greeks in their bitter struggle against the Italians. Alexandria was a port crawling with Axis spies and it was essential that
Illustrious
’s true objective should not be revealed. Were the Italians to pick up a whiff of suspicion that the aircraft carrier’s true target was Taranto, then