Savoia-Marchetti S.M.79 Sparviero

The Savoia-Marchetti S.M.79 Sparviero (“Sparrowhawk”) began life not as a weapon but as a racer. In 1934 the engineer Alessandro Marchetti drew up a fast, eight-passenger trimotor airliner intended to contest the prestigious MacRobertson air race from England to Australia. Though the prototype, registered I-MAGO, was not ready in time for the race, it proved astonishingly fast for its day — and the Regia Aeronautica saw at once that a civil speed machine could be turned into a bomber faster than the fighters meant to stop it.

Over the following two years the slim record-breaker shattered a string of international point-to-point speed marks, flying showpiece routes such as Rome–Damascus–Paris and Istres–Damascus–Paris and carrying the Italian tricolour across the Mediterranean world. By the time the militarised version flew in 1936, the S.79 already carried an aura of glamour and performance that few bombers of any nation could match — a reputation Fascist propaganda was only too eager to exploit.

Converting the airliner into a bomber gave the aircraft its unmistakable silhouette. A bombardier's gondola was slung beneath the fuselage, and — most distinctively of all — a large dorsal fairing was raised behind the cockpit to house a forward-firing machine gun. That hump earned the Sparviero its enduring nickname among its own crews: “il Gobbo Maledetto”, the Damned Hunchback. Far from a term of contempt, it was spoken with the rough affection of men who trusted the machine with their lives.

Structurally the S.79 was a product of its time and place: a hybrid of welded steel tube, wood and fabric, with a plywood-skinned wooden wing and a metal-and-fabric fuselage. It was simple to build and easy to repair in the field, and the mixed structure proved remarkably able to soak up battle damage. Power came from three Alfa Romeo 126 RC.34 radials of roughly 780 hp apiece — later machines used the more powerful Piaggio P.XI — giving the bomber a turn of speed that, on its debut, embarrassed many contemporary fighters.

The type was blooded early. As part of the Aviazione Legionaria in the Spanish Civil War, the S.79 demonstrated that a fast medium bomber could press home daylight raids and frequently outrun interception, lessons that shaped Italian bomber doctrine — for good and ill — on the eve of the wider war.

The baseline land bomber, the three-engined S.79-I, was joined from 1939 by the definitive S.79-II, which fitted uprated engines and the racks and release gear to carry torpedoes — the role in which the Sparviero would win lasting fame. A twin-engined derivative, the S.79B, was developed primarily for export and dispensed with the dorsal hump and central engine for a glazed bombardier's nose.

Export sales were brisk for an Italian type: variants flew with Yugoslavia, Romania, Iraq and Brazil. The Romanian-built version, designated JRS-79B, used twin Junkers Jumo or domestic engines and served on the Eastern Front. A final wartime refinement, the S.79bis (S.79-III), deleted the under-fuselage gondola and added heavier defensive armament for the dedicated torpedo mission.

When Italy entered the war in June 1940 the S.79 was the backbone of the Regia Aeronautica’s bomber force, equipping the majority of its medium-bomber squadrons. It flew level-bombing missions over Malta, the Western Desert, the Balkans and East Africa, ranging across the whole Mediterranean theatre.

On its debut the Sparviero’s speed had been a real asset — a bomber that could outrun many fighters. But by 1941 the fast interceptors of the RAF had caught up, and in daylight the slow, lightly defended trimotor grew increasingly vulnerable. It was in another role entirely that the S.79 would find its legend.

From 1940 the elite torpedo units — the Aerosiluranti — turned the S.79 into the most feared anti-shipping aircraft in the Mediterranean. Pressing in low and fast, often through ferocious flak, crews led by aces such as Carlo Emanuele Buscaglia attacked Royal Navy warships and the vital Malta convoys, damaging cruisers, sinking merchantmen and forcing the British to fight every supply run through a gauntlet of torpedoes. The bravery of these crews — running straight at battle fleets in slow, vulnerable aircraft — earned the grudging respect of their enemies.

After the armistice of September 1943 the Sparviero, like the men who flew it, was split between the two Italies. Surviving aircraft served on with the Aeronautica Co-Belligerante Italiana in the south and the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana in the north, soldiering on as bombers, torpedo aircraft and transports until the end of the war.

Around 1,350 Sparvieri were built, making it by far the most-produced Italian bomber of the Second World War and the symbol of the Regia Aeronautica's offensive arm. By 1943 its wood-and-fabric construction and modest defensive armament had been overtaken by faster, better-protected designs, and daylight level-bombing had become a costly business against radar-directed fighters and massed flak.

Yet its place in history was already secure. As a torpedo bomber the S.79 achieved more against Allied shipping than any other Axis aircraft in the theatre, and it did so in the hands of crews whose courage became proverbial. Fast, handsome and dangerous, the Damned Hunchback remains the definitive Italian aircraft of the war — and one of the finest torpedo bombers any nation fielded.

• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• Giorgio Apostolo, Savoia-Marchetti S.79 (Ali d’Italia, La Bancarella Aeronautica).