Air raid sirens blared and curtains of tracer rounds rose into the sky as the ominous drone of aircraft engines grew ever closer. Suddenly, a flight of enemy aircraft swooped low over the sleeping anchorage, unleashing their deadly cargo of torpedoes and bombs onto an unsuspecting fleet. All around, geysers of water and flame erupted into the air, lighting up the harbour in infernal shades of yellow and orange. Anti-aircraft gunners desperately filled the air with a hail of steel and explosives, but still the aircraft kept coming. In little more than an hour, it was all over. When the smoke finally cleared, three mighty battleships – the pride of the fleet – lay at bottom of the harbour.

While this scene might sound familiar, it did not take place on December 7, 1941 in Hawaii. The ships were not American but Italian, and the attacking aircraft not Japanese but British. On November 11, 1940, more than a year before America’s Day of Infamy, the Royal Navy launched the first-ever carrier airstrike against an enemy fleet at anchorage, attacking the Italian Navy’s home port of Taranto. The raid forever changed naval warfare, heralding the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier and setting the blueprint for a later, more well-known surprise attack. This is the story of Operation Judgement, Italy’s forgotten Pearl Harbor.

While today the armed forces Fascist Italy are remembered as little more than a punchline, the country did possess one formidable military asset: its Navy. In 1939, the Regia Marina numbered some 560 ships, including 60 destroyers, 26 cruisers, and 7 battleships like ultra-modern Littorio and Vittorio Veneto. While Italy’s ally Nazi Germany had a powerful land army, its surface navy was very small and posed little threat to Britain and its overseas empire. However, on June 10, 1940, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. That same day, Italian forces invaded the south of France, while four months later Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece. Italy’s entry into the Second World War dramatically upset the balance of power in the Mediterranean, threatening Britain’s access to her colonies via the Suez Canal and placing supply lines between Egypt, Malta, and Greece within range of Italian aircraft. Not only did this force British shipping was to take the long route to India, Asia, and Egypt around the Cape of Good Hope – greatly hampering logistics – but the British Mediterranean fleet was forced to operate as a single unit lest smaller combat groups be picked off by the Italians.

Yet despite its strategic advantage, the Regia Marina was reluctant to sail out and engage British naval forces directly. This hesitance was due to Italy’s weak industrial base, which was unable to quickly replace any losses sustained in combat – especially the large battleships. As a result, Italian Fleet largely remained in its main anchorage of Taranto in the “heel” of the Italian peninsula serving as a fleet in being.

This strategy had been used by navies for more than 300 years, allowing fleets to exert influence over an area without risking its destruction by engaging in direct conflict.

For the British, this state of affairs was untenable. If the Regia Marina would not sail out and fight, then the Royal Navy would have to bring the fight to them. Plans to attack the Italian fleet at Taranto dated all the way back to Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia – today Ethiopia – in 1935. During the Munich Crisis of 1938, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, grew concerned about the threat posed by Italian forces in the region, and advised his staff to review all existing plans for attacking Taranto. Soon after, Pound was approached by Sir Arthur Lyster, captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, who suggested an aerial attack by carrier-borne torpedo bombers as the best means of crippling the Italian fleet. Pound agreed with this assessment, and in August 1939 advised his replacement, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, to carry on planning the attack, now known as Operation Judgement.

The challenges facing the Royal Navy were immense. For one thing, the Royal Navy’s primary torpedo bomber in 1940 was the ungainly-looking Fairey Swordfish. Though introduced in 1936, the Swordfish was a relic of the previous war: an old-fashioned, three-seat fabric-covered biplane with a top speed of barely 230 kilometres per hour. Yet despite this, the Swordfish proved surprisingly robust, reliable, and versatile, capable of carrying such a seemingly limitless variety of ordnance and equipment that its crews affectionately nicknamed it the “stringbag.” To maximize surprise and aircrew survival, planners decided to attack Taranto under the cover of darkness. Still, casualties as high as 50% were predicted.

The aircraft carrier HMS Eagle was selected for the operation, her 24 Swordfish aircraft being fitted with 270 litre auxiliary fuel tanks to allow them to reach their target. These tanks were installed in the centre observer’s position, with the observer being moved to the rear gunner’s position. Half the aircraft were armed with torpedoes and the other half with 250-pound bombs and flares, with the latter instructed to drop their payloads around the harbour to backlight the ships for the torpedo bombers and distract Italian air defences.

However, there was another, more practical problem. Aerial torpedoes of the period could only be used in water at least 23 metres deep, otherwise they would bury themselves in the seafloor before levelling off. Taranto harbour, meanwhile, was only 12 metres deep. Thankfully, the British developed an elegant solution to this problem in the form of a spool of wire connected to the nose of the torpedo. When the torpedo was released, the wire pulled up on the nose, causing it to hit the water horizontally and level off at a much shallower depth.

Operation Judgement was originally scheduled for October 21, 1940 – the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. However, on October 18, a mechanic aboard HMS Eagle was fitting an auxiliary fuel tank to a Swordfish when he dropped one of his tools, striking a spark and setting off an aviation fuel fire that destroyed two aircraft and damaged three more. The operation was thus postponed to November 11 – the date of the next full moon. More bad luck came on November 5 when HMS Eagle’s aviation fuel system was discovered to be faulty. Her air arm was thus transferred to the more modern carrier HMS Illustrious. Then, on November 9 and 10, contaminated fuel in one of Illustrious’s fuel tanks caused three of her Swordfish to experience engine failure and drop into the sea, leaving 21 aircraft to carry out the Taranto attack.

But there was some good news. In the weeks leading up to the attack, British Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft based on Malta flew over Taranto to photograph the harbour and its defences. These photographs revealed that the bulk of the Italian Fleet was present, including the battleships Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, Andrea Doria, Conte di Cavour, Giulio Cesare, and Caio Duilio; the cruisers Pola, Zara, Goriza, Fiume, Trento, Trieste, and Bolzano; and eight destroyers. The battleships were moored in the large outer harbour, while most of the cruisers and destroyers were berthed in the smaller inner harbour, connected to the outer harbour by a small canal. Not only that, but the ships were far less well-defended than the British had anticipated. While the harbour was originally protected by 90 barrage balloons, 60 of these had been destroyed in a storm on November 6 and not yet replaced. And while ships at anchor are typically protected by screens of anti-torpedo nets, the Italians had scheduled a gunnery exercise at sea for November 11 and spent much of that morning removing the nets. The exercise was ultimately cancelled, but most of the nets had not been reinstalled. The British would never have a better chance.

To disguise the movements of the raiding force, Operation Judgement was integrated into the much larger Operation MB8, a series escorted convoys carrying 2,000 reinforcements and hundreds of tons of supplies from Alexandria and Gibraltar to the beleaguered island of Malta. The main strike force, composed of HMS Illustrious and the battleships HMS Ramillies, Warspite, Valiant, and Malaya, sailed from Alexandria on November 4 and met up with the cruisers HMS York and Gloucester and three destroyers then escorting Convoy MW3. This convoy then linked up with the task force for Operation Coat, comprising the battleship HMS Barham, the cruisers HMS Berwick and Glasgow, and three destroyers; whereupon Illustrious, Berwick, York, Gloucester, and Glasgow along with the destroyers HMS Hyperion, Ilex, Hasty, and Havelock split off and gathered off the Greek island of Cephalonia, around 270 kilometres from Taranto. As planned, the complexity of this operation succeeded in confusing the Italians. However, a final reconnaissance flight by a Short Sunderland flying boat on the day of the operation made it clear that some kind of attack was imminent. But with the Regia Marina still reluctant to sail out and face the Royal Navy directly and Taranto harbour lacking radar, the defenders could do little but watch and wait.

The first wave of 12 Swordfish aircraft, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson, took off from Illustrious just before 9 P.M. on November 11. Though the flight soon encountered thick fog, they managed to hold formation – except, that is, for the aircraft flown by Lieutenant Ian Swayne. Finding himself separated from the flight and believing he had fallen behind, Swayne accelerated in an attempt to catch up. In reality, he pulled far ahead, reaching Taranto a full 15 minutes ahead of the other aircraft. The sound of his aircraft’s engine was picked up by Italian sonic detectors and alerted the harbour’s defences, whose nearly 300 anti-aircraft guns began lighting up the sky with tracer rounds. But the trailing 11 aircraft pressed on, as pilot Richard Janvrin later recalled:

“We just had to get through it and it didn’t do much to us. You didn’t think you could be hit by it.”

The main force reached Taranto at 10:58, whereupon one of the bombers dropped sixteen parachute flares east of the harbour before attacking an oil tank farm. Next, three torpedo bombers led by Commander Williamson attacked the battleship Conte de Cavour, with the lead aircraft scoring one hit that blasted an 8-metre hole beneath the waterline. But while banking away, Williamson’s wingtip struck the water and the aircraft crashed:

“I fell out of the plane. We were six feet above the water, so it wasn’t a long fall. The anti-aircraft fire from the shore batteries was so heavy and the water was swirling.”

Williamson and his observer, Lieutenant N.J. ‘Blood’ Scarlett (now how’s that for a badass nickname?) survived by clinging to the wreckage of their aircraft and were soon captured, spending the rest of the conflict as Prisoners of War.

Under heavy fire from Italian shore batteries, the remaining two aircraft pressed home a torpedo attack against the battleship Andrea Doria, but were unsuccessful. Then, three more Swordfish attacked from the north, hitting the battleship Littorio with two torpedoes and narrowly missing the Vittorio Veneto. Meanwhile, the bomber force hit two cruisers with one bomb each and straddled four destroyers.

Back near Cephalonia, the second wave, led by Lieutenant Commander J.W. Hale, began launching from Illustrious around 9:20. While lining up for takeoff, the last two aircraft, flown by Lieutenant W.D. Morford and Lieutenant E.W. Clifford, bumped into each other. While Morford was able to take off, Clifford was held back so repair crews could fix his damaged aircraft. This took around 15 minutes, whereupon Clifford took off and headed for Taranto, confident that he could catch up with the rest of the flight. Meanwhile, the damage to Morford’s aircraft proved more serious than initially thought, and shortly after takeoff his auxiliary fuel tank broke loose and plunged into the sea. Unable to make it to the target, Morford returned to Illustrious.

The first seven aircraft of the second wave arrived at Taranto shortly before midnight. As the bombers dropped their flares around the harbour, three torpedo bombers descended on the battleships, hitting the Littorio again and narrowly missing the Vittorio Veneto. Another aircraft attacked the Duilio and scored a hit, flooding both her forward magazines. One aircraft, crewed by Lieutenant G. Baylet and Lieutenant H. Slaughter, was struck by anti-aircraft fire from the cruiser Goriza and plunged into the harbour. Unlike Williamson and Scarlett, however, both airmen perished. 15 minutes later, as the rest of the aircraft were departing, Lieutenant Clifford finally arrived and made a dive-bombing attack on the cruiser Trento. Unfortunately, his bomb was defective, punching a hole in the ship’s deck but failing to explode. Nonetheless, Clifford managed to escape the harbour in one piece and, at 2:39 AM, was the last to land aboard Illustrious. The raid on Taranto was over – or so the exhausted airmen thought. To their horror, Admiral Cunningham and Captain Lyster announced their intention to attack again the following night, prompting one airmen to remark: “They only asked the Light Brigade to do it once!” Mercifully, foul weather prevented the remaining aircraft from launching, and the task force returned to Alexandria.

Operation Judgement was a stunning success. In only 65 minutes, 20 aircraft and eleven torpedoes sank the Littorio, Conte de Cavour, and Duilio, knocking out half of Italy’s battleship force at a stroke. The bombers were less successful, destroying a seaplane hangar and lightly damaging an oil tank farm, three cruisers, and two destroyers. And while anti-aircraft batteries on shore and aboard the ships had fired nearly 13,500 shells, they only succeeded in shooting down two aircraft and killing two British airmen. Meanwhile, 59 Italian personnel were killed and 600 wounded. Significantly, the Italians failed to turn on their searchlights or get any fighters into the air, aiding the British success. The attack was a significant turning point in naval warfare, demonstrating that the aircraft carrier, not the battleship, was now king of the seas. No longer were ships safe in home port, rendering the age-old concept of the fleet in being completely obsolete. As Admiral Cunningham later remarked:

“In a total flying time of six and a half hours—carrier to carrier—twenty aircraft had inflicted more damage upon the Italian fleet than was inflicted upon the German High Seas Fleet in the daylight action at the Battle of Jutland….[the battle] should be remembered forever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon.”

The attack also demonstrated the surprising effectiveness of the supposedly obsolete Fairey Swordfish, which would later play a key role in sinking the German battleship Bismarck and became a formidable weapon in the fight against German U-boats in the North Atlantic. Indeed, the venerable “stringbag” even proved superior to the aircraft designed to replace it, the larger and more modern Fairey Albacore.

Yet despite its historical importance, in strategic terms Operation Judgement was less successful than had been hoped. Cunningham’s intention was to cripple both the Italian fleet and the Regia Marina’s morale, discouraging them from sortieing against the Royal Navy and allowing the Mediterranean fleet to be more effectively split into two carrier battlegroups. As he put it:

“The Taranto show has freed up our hands considerably & I hope now to shake these damned Eyeties 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.”

Initially, at least, this goal appeared to have been achieved. In the wake of the attack, the Italians moved their undamaged ships to Naples until the defences at Taranto could be sufficiently bolstered. Meanwhile, salvage and repair work began on the Littorio, which re-entered service four months later. Due to lack of resources, repairs to the other two battleships took considerably longer. Duilio returned to service after seven months, while Conte de Cavour was not yet ready when Italy capitulated and switched sides in September 1943.

But if Cunningham hoped to knock the Italian Navy out of the war and disrupt Axis supply convoys to North Africa, he was to be bitterly disappointed. In fact, between October 1940 and January 1941 Italian shipments to Libya increased by more than 12,000 tons per month. And while the attack on Taranto had made Admiral Inigo Campioni, commander of the Regia Marina, more cautious, he nonetheless launched numerous destructive raids against allied supply convoys in the Mediterranean – the first such action taking place just five days later on November 17. Nevertheless, the Regia Marina would never again be the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean.

It is often claimed that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 was directly inspired by Operation Judgement. Indeed, in the wake of the attack, Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Naito, assistant Japanese naval attaché to Berlin, flew to Taranto to investigate the damage first-hand. In October 1941, Naito discussed his findings with Commander Minoru Genda, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, and Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air armada. However, the connection between the two attacks is often exaggerated, for by this point planning for the Pearl Harbor operation was already well underway. Furthermore, the Imperial Navy had solved the problem of torpedoing ships in shallow harbours long before Taranto, though instead of attaching a wire to the nose like the British, they fitted their torpedoes with breakaway wooden noses and tail fins to make them run shallower. Indeed, about the only thing Japanese planners gained from Takeshi Naito’s report was confirmation that a torpedo attack against a shallow harbour was feasible – a fact confirmed by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida in a 1964 interview.

But while the Japanese had little to learn from the lessons of Taranto, the United States most certainly did. But for various reasons the U.S. Navy failed to act on these lessons – with tragic results. On November 22, just ten days after the Taranto raid, Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark wrote to Admiral James O. Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, requesting the installation of additional torpedo netting around ships at Pearl Harbour. Richardson refused, citing a lack of space and resources. Stark continued to express concern about a Taranto-style attack, and in early December tasked Commander Walter C. Ansel of the Navy’s War Plans Division with preparing a comprehensive report on the security of Pearl Harbor. This report, submitted on January 24, painted a sad picture of Pearl Harbor’s defences and included a long list of recommended improvements. In response, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson approved the stationing of more radar sets, fighter aircraft, and antiaircraft guns around the harbour.

Stark’s concerns were shared by several others in the Navy hierarchy, including Rear Admiral Aubrey W. Fitch, Lieutenant Commander Herbert F. Eckberg, and Lieutenant Commander John Opie, who had been a naval attaché aboard HMS Illustrious during Operation Judgement and had submitted a detailed report on the attack to the Navy Department immediately after docking in Alexandria. Yet despite these concerted efforts to jolt the Navy out of its complacency, practical measures to improve Pearl Harbor’s defences soon became mired in a tangle of bureaucratic inertia and outdated thinking. Admiral Richardson downplayed the risk of an aerial attack, citing factors such as the steep hills surrounding the harbour, the abundance of antiaircraft guns and – astoundingly – the shallow depth of the harbour itself. Admiral Husband Kimmel, who replaced Richardson on January 7, 1941, repeated these arguments, further stating that extra torpedo nets were too expensive and inconvenient and maintaining, against all evidence, that aerial torpedoes could only be dropped in water at least 22 metres deep. He maintained this position all the way up to the morning of December 7, 1941, when he was proven completely, catastrophically wrong – but that , dear viewers, is a subject for another video.

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