I Sank The Bismarck (14 page)

After both waves had landed it was clear that two
Swordfish were missing, although nobody in
Illustrious
knew
that two of the men were alive and taken prisoner. The
casualties were remarkably low considering the strength of
the defences and the fact that they had inadvertently been
alerted. The Swordfish as well had spent more time than they
had wanted over the target.

Next morning the Italians came out to see what the damage
was, and RAF reconnaissance planes flew over, their big
cameras clicking.
Littorio
had been seriously damaged and
rested on the bottom.
Duilio
's magazines were flooded
and she had been beached.
Cavour
was also flooded, with her
decks awash.
Trento
was leaking oil, which was covering
the waters of the harbour, hampering any salvage efforts. The
destroyers
Libeccio
and
Pessagno
were damaged and could
not put to sea. The seaplane base was a mass of twisted
girders, still smoking in the dawn light, and smashed seaplanes
lay crumpled on the concrete ramp and apron.

It was a magnificent success, and news of the raid spread
around the world. Many think that the success of the attack
on Taranto influenced the Japanese
Admiral Yamamoto, convincing
him that the surprise attack on the US navy at
Pearl
Harbor would also succeed. We knew nothing of this, of
course. At home, where we all thought that we had proved
ourselves in spades, Taranto was a magnificent advert for the
Fleet Air Arm. It showed what could be achieved if sufficient
planning and preparation were devoted to an operation, and
moreover if there was plenty of reconnaissance prior to the
day. Without this, the lives of many of the crews might have
been squandered. As it was, some of them did not have much
longer to live.

I had arrived on
Ark Royal
after an intense period of activity
in which she, and the other carriers in the eastern
Mediterranean, had for the first time been fighting the warships
of large enemy fleets. In this short space of time a lot of
lessons had been learned, and a lot of changes were being
made to the way we did things. Simple changes to the way aircraft
were taken down to the hangar decks, the way
maintenance crews and armourers were organized, could
improve turnaround times and keep more aircraft in the air
for longer. The Mediterranean was still a dangerous place.

After the Italian navy had been hit at Taranto, they moved
the rest of their fleet to ports along the western Italian coast –
Naples, of course, and La Spezia further north. This may have
removed them from the area of operations of the
Mediterranean Fleet, but put them much closer, merely a day's
sailing away, to the route taken by convoys from Gibraltar to
Malta for which we in Force H were responsible. In January
1941 we had to escort a convoy of nine transports to Malta,
and also fly off six Swordfish that had been brought down to
Gibraltar by
Argus
to be permanently stationed on the island.
The operation was known as Excess. The route was fairly
predictable and we had to keep a sharp lookout. Once again
I was flying long patrols searching for ships, or hoping to spot
the telltale wake of a submarine's periscope.

Even in the midst of a war, on active service, life was very
much one of routine and sometimes agonizing boredom.
Much of my time flying was not the heart-stopping drama of
a dive-bombing attack, or the stomach-churning tension of a
torpedo run, but long uneventful patrols over mile after mile
of flat, featureless ocean. At times, if the sun was just striking
the tops of the mountains of Spain and beginning to burn
off the haze lying over the surface of the Mediterranean, then
I would feel that upsurge of exhilaration that I have always
associated with flying – in particular joy at my ability to pilot
the plane that is taking me up so that I can see for hundreds
of miles around me. The open cockpit of the Swordfish was
marvellous for the full experience, which really did sometimes
seem like a miracle.

But when the clouds were low and dark, and the sea was a
cold, white-flecked steel grey, and the rain beat against my
face, the patrols became an endurance test.

Anti-submarine patrols would often start just before daybreak,
when the
Ark
slipped out of Gibraltar. Very often these
would need a launch from one of the
catapults mounted in the
front of the flight deck. They had quite a kick – I remember
that first time I had a catapult launch, the deck officer warned
me to brace myself in the seat otherwise my head would be
thrown back. The observer and TAG in the back had a more
uncomfortable ride. The TAG had to lean down and fold his
arms in front of his face over the breach of his stowed Lewis
gun.

Before a patrol we would get dressed in very warm clothes,
with three layers of gloves, starting with silk ones, then
woollen ones, then our sheepskin flying gloves; similarly with
layers of socks under our flying boots. We wore specially
made sheepskin suits over our flying overalls. I felt like the
Michelin man at the end of it. Then we, my observer and TAG
and I, would walk out to the aircraft. The flight deck could be
very slippery, especially early in the morning, so you needed
to watch your step. Not only would it be wet from dew, but
after a few days at sea it would get salty and then a layer of
rubber from aircraft tyres would be deposited, so it could be
very dangerous. The armourers and riggers would be waiting
to start strapping us in. My rigger was a character. He would
sit astride the fuselage behind me, shouting at me to 'get yourself
in here', yanking away at my shoulder straps and singing
at the top of his voice, 'Oh Ma, I like your apple pie', some
song I had never heard before, but he was one of those
regular navy ratings who would look you in the eye with the
utmost confidence and I trusted him, as every pilot had to
trust the mechanics and riggers who worked on their plane. I
never had any qualms about them: they were thoroughly
reliable.

Several planes would be ranged up according to the flying
orders for the day, but if you were the first anti-submarine
patrol, then your Swordfish would be at the front. This
shortened the take-off distance slightly, and you knew that
there would be a slight dip as you went off the front of the
flight deck, but you would then start to gain height.

I always found starting the Swordfish a bit nerve-racking.
There was no electric starter motor, and the nine-cylinder
radial with its three-bladed propeller was far too big to be
turned over by hand. Instead, the engine was turned over
prior to ignition using an inertial starter. This was a large flywheel
mounted in the nose, which was cranked up to speed by
two of the aircraft handlers, one of whom had to stand on the
leading edge of the port lower wing. They had to turn a
handle that was inserted in a hole in the side of the aircraft. It
took quite an effort. When the flywheel was spinning fast
enough they would shout 'Now!', and I had to flick a switch
in the cockpit to fire the sparkplugs and move a lever to
engage the flywheel, which would then turn the engine over.
If you didn't time it exactly right, the engine wouldn't fire and
they would have to start winding up the flywheel all over
again. If that happened there would be quite a lot of muttering,
which of course I was not meant to hear. Everyone knew
that I
could
hear, but I couldn't respond without making a
complete arse of myself. I made damn sure that I got the
timing right though.

I would go through the checks automatically. The elevator
was set for 3 degrees nose-up attitude; the mixture was at
rich; flaps were fully down; and the oil bypass was set on the
'in' position. Then open the throttle to 1,000 revs and wait for
the oil temperature to settle. With the engine running and the
oil pressure and revs looking OK, the rigger and the aircraft
handlers would crouch down by the wheels waiting to remove
the chocks. At a signal from the deck officer I would set full
throttle and the plane would roll down the flight deck. It was
best to stay level as long as possible to gain the most effect
from the pressure build-up between the deck and the lower
wing, although really, depending on the load and the wind
speed over the deck, you could be airborne by the time you
got past the bridge.

Then it would be a case of reaching the required height,
depending on the cloud base, and starting a patrol pattern
over the sea for the next two and a half hours. I didn't enjoy
these early-morning patrols. I was still a young lad in many
ways and found it hard to wake up at four o'clock in
the morning. Our squadron writer, a decent chap, Percy
North, who was just a few years older than me, was
responsible for issuing the flying orders and would often
make his way down to my cabin to wake me up. One morning
he rushed in, shouting at me to get up because I was very
late. 'I came in twenty minutes ago, you lazy sod. The CO'll
have your guts!' I swore he hadn't woken me, and in a
desperate attempt to make it in time, got dressed over my
pyjamas. It didn't fool anybody: as I walked out on to the
flight deck everyone could see what I was wearing and I was
given extra watch-keeping duties for the next month as a
punishment. But I found it so hard to get up in the mornings.

The roar of the engine and the cold sea wind in my face,
however, were enough to get the blood stirring, although I did
long for some action, an opportunity to drop my depth-charges.
But in all the time I was flying Swordfish I never saw
a periscope, or better still a U-boat running on the surface, a
'floater' as we called them.

During these patrols, the busiest man in many ways was the
observer, whose job it was to navigate the aircraft, making
sure that we carried out the proper patrol pattern and also
that we made it back to the aircraft carrier safely. He carried
a lot of equipment with him: a small mechanical cipher
machine, codebooks, a Very signal pistol and Aldis lamp,
maps and briefing notes, and a
Bigsworth Board – a square
piece of wood fitted with parallel rulers and protractors so
that he could calculate the course back to the carrier and
offset our heading against the wind speed. The
Ark
would
have travelled more than 60 miles from the position where we
took off by the time our patrol was finished. We knew what
her intended course was going to be and our landing-on point
was prearranged at the briefing, although of course anything
could happen while we were in the air. But the task of running
a complicated search pattern and making it back to a very
small point on the ocean after two and a half or three hours
is not as easy as it sounds.

I had to make sure that we stuck to the course given me by
my observer, and he had to make sure that he recorded the
changes of direction and their duration correctly. Of course, if
there was a wind, and there always was, this had to be taken
into account, particularly if it changed during the flight. After
a while you developed a sixth sense, so that it was possible to
detect any changes of wind through the controls. We carried
smoke floats on racks under our wings. I would drop one of
these and, once it had started smoking, I would fly right over
the top of it, then turn and do a 180-degree course back
over it in a timed run so that the observer could measure the
rate of drift and the angle. With this he could calculate on his
charts the necessary changes to our course back to the
rendezvous point. It was not easy in an open cockpit, but
most of the Fleet Air Arm navigators were good, and my
observer, Dusty Miller, was really spot on. Once our calculations
had been made it was the job of the TAG to sink the
smoke float. You couldn't leave something like that bobbing
about in the ocean, because it was obviously a clue that a
carrier was in the vicinity and it could help build up an
intelligence picture for a U-boat trying to track a convoy and
its escort. So the TAG would sink it with machine-gun fire.
My TAG, Hayman, would manage this with a single burst
from his Vickers.

I got
lost only once. We had been on a long patrol – I think it
was nearly three hours – but when we got to our rendezvous
point there was no sign of the carrier. I did feel anxious at that
point. It was vital to keep radio silence, of course, because any
transmission would have given away the carrier's position. I
took us up to 3,000 feet, but still we could see nothing.

'I think we've made a mistake,' I said. Dusty didn't reply, or
at least I can't remember one. It was pretty obvious. So I said
to him, 'Now will you go back to your chart again, and make
sure you've laid the winds off in the right direction.'

After a while he said, 'My God, you're right.' He roughly
corrected it and within five minutes the carrier was in sight.

After a long patrol, the strain of maintaining a level height
and course against the wind, plus the incessant noise of the
engine and the slipstream whistling through the spars for two
and a half hours sapped my energy. It was always a relief to
see the
Ark,
a tiny ship in the distance, growing bigger as we
approached. Landing on required all my attention, under the
strict gaze of the deck landing officer, Lt Commander Pat
Stringer. I had to check that the brakes were off, set the
mixture for rich again, because you could often lean it out to
conserve fuel on a long flight, and then set the carburettor
intake to 'cold'. I would lower the arrestor hook and come in
over the round down – the end of the flight deck at the stern
– keeping my eye on the batman and trying to hit the first or
second arrestor wire; hitting the last one was seen as a bit of
a last-ditch effort. By the time I was waiting for the tug of the
hook against the wire there was not enough speed to take off
and go round again. Use the brakes at this point and it would
be disaster: the plane would flip over and crash. All you could
do was switch off the engine and hope the crash barrier would
stop you. Then I would climb out of the cockpit while the
wings were folded and the plane was moved to the deck-lift.
Tired and stiff, we had made it again.

There is a story that I was told by another
Swordfish pilot,
Pat Jackson, who took a short-service commission when the
war started. He was flying off
Victorious
and he too got lost,
but his observer's error did not end as easily as mine. He flew
back to the point where he should have seen the carrier, and
there was nothing.

They were in the North Atlantic, with low cloud and poor
visibility. It was a devilish place in which to navigate, with a
lot of variable winds at different altitudes, and it was an even
worse place in which to get lost. They flew around, but
naturally at the end of a patrol fuel is low, and it was getting
lower. The observer then spotted a boat in the sea; it was a
lifeboat, submerged up to its gunwales, with the waves breaking
over it. The Swordfish was equipped with an inflatable
liferaft, which was stowed in the centre section of the upper
wing. When seawater penetrated a cartridge it released carbon
dioxide, which then inflated the raft, breaking open the hatch
that covered it. Although it saved many people, the liferaft
was not something in which you would want to spend a lot of
time in the North Atlantic. Pat had about ten minutes' fuel left
at that point, with not a clue where his carrier was. There was
this swamped boat, more solid and bigger than the liferaft, so
down they went. They ditched as close to it as they could, got
into the liferaft and drifted down to the submerged boat.
There was a big tarpaulin covering the bottom planks and
they half expected to find some bodies under it, but it was
empty. There were some emergency rations and a sail. They
baled the water out with their flying boots, rigged a mast and
set the sail. They were closest to Greenland, but the thought
of trying to land there, on a rocky coast with strong winds
and ice, was not appealing, so they turned east.