Fairey Swordfish

The Swordfish flew for the first time on 17 April 1934 as Fairey’s T.S.R. — Torpedo, Spotter, Reconnaissance — a three-role aircraft for the Royal Navy built to the conservative logic of the biplane era: sturdy fixed undercarriage, open cockpits for a crew of three, and fabric-covered metal structure braced by the wires and struts that later earned it the affectionate nickname “Stringbag” — like the housewife’s string bag, it could carry anything.

It entered Fleet Air Arm service in 1936, and by September 1939 it was already an anachronism: a 224 km/h biplane in a war of 500 km/h monoplanes. Every air arm in the world would have retired it. Instead, the Swordfish was about to deliver two of the most consequential naval air strikes ever flown — and outlive the aircraft designed to replace it.

A Bristol Pegasus nine-cylinder radial of 690–750 hp pulled the Swordfish along at a stately cruise; its main weapon was a single 457 mm torpedo of ~730 kg, or an equivalent load of bombs, mines or depth charges. Defensive armament — one fixed Vickers gun forward, one flexible gun aft — was little more than a gesture.

Yet the qualities that made it look obsolete made it lethal in its niche. Its enormous wing area gave a stalling speed near 90 km/h: it could lumber off short, pitching carrier decks in weather that grounded everything else, and hold a rock-steady torpedo run at wave height. It was viceless to fly, nearly impossible to break, and endlessly adaptable — later Mk IIIs carried ASV radar and eight RP-3 rockets, turning the old biplane into a submarine-killer.

On the night of 11–12 November 1940, twenty-one Swordfish flew off HMS Illustrious in two waves against the Italian fleet in its heavily defended anchorage at Taranto — the first carrier air strike against a fleet in harbour in history. Attacking by flare-light through balloon cables and the fire of hundreds of guns, the torpedo aircraft came in at mast height.

By morning the battleship Conte di Cavour was on the bottom and Littorio and Caio Duilio were beached and out of action — half the Italian battle line disabled in one night, for the loss of two aircraft. Naval staffs everywhere took note; the Japanese studied Taranto closely as they planned Pearl Harbor.

On 26 May 1941, with Bismarck a night’s steaming from Luftwaffe cover and the Home Fleet losing the chase, Swordfish from HMS Ark Royal took off into a full Atlantic gale — cloud at 180 m, the flight deck rising and falling 15 m — for a last-chance torpedo attack.

One torpedo struck home aft, jamming Bismarck’s rudders at 12° to port. Legend holds that her fire-control predictors struggled with attackers so slow; whatever the truth, not one Swordfish was lost. The great battleship could only circle into the wind until King George V and Rodney arrived at dawn to finish her — a single torpedo from a fabric biplane having sealed the fate of the most powerful warship in the Atlantic.

Nine months later the Swordfish met the other side of that obsolescence. During the Channel Dash of 12 February 1942, six aircraft of 825 Squadron, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, flew against Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen as the German squadron raced through the Strait of Dover.

Without their promised fighter escort, the slow biplanes were torn apart by flak and Fw 190s before they could reach the ships; all six were shot down, and only five of the eighteen aircrew survived. Esmonde, killed pressing his attack home, received a posthumous Victoria Cross — the same aircraft that had crippled Bismarck now wiped out to a man in daylight, against defended warships, in exactly the fight it could not survive.

The Swordfish’s longest campaign was its least glamorous. From 1943 it flew anti-submarine patrols from small escort carriers and the makeshift decks of MAC ships — grain carriers and tankers with a flight deck grafted on top — protecting the Atlantic and Arctic convoys in conditions no other carrier aircraft could work in. With radar, rockets and depth charges, Swordfish crews helped sink more than a dozen U-boats.

2,391 were built before production ended in August 1944 — most of them, fittingly, by Blackburn Aircraft, whose products crews nicknamed “Blackfish”. The Swordfish outlived the Fairey Albacore, the biplane meant to replace it, and the last front-line squadron stood down only in May 1945, with the war in Europe won.

The Swordfish is the great rebuke to every specification sheet. By the numbers it was the most obsolete front-line aircraft of the war; by results it was among the most effective naval aircraft ever flown, often credited with sinking a greater tonnage of Axis shipping than any other Allied type.

Taranto rewrote naval warfare a year before Pearl Harbor, and it was a Swordfish torpedo that doomed the Bismarck. The Fleet Air Arm kept the old biplane in front-line service to the last month of the war in Europe — an aircraft that outlived its intended replacement and earned a place among the decisive weapons of the naval war.

• Owen Thetford, British Naval Aircraft since 1912 (Putnam).
• David Wragg, The Fleet Air Arm Handbook 1939–1945 (Sutton Publishing).
• Bill Gunston, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Combat Aircraft of World War II (Salamander Books).
• Charles Lamb, War in a Stringbag (Cassell) — memoir of a Fleet Air Arm Swordfish pilot.