On the grey afternoon of 12 February 1942, six ancient-looking biplanes lumbered off the runway at RAF Manston, near Dover, and turned out over a freezing sea. They were Fairey Swordfish — fabric-and-wire torpedo bombers with open cockpits and a top speed slower than a modern car on a motorway. Ahead of them, steaming up the English Channel in broad daylight, were three of the most powerful warships in the German navy, ringed by destroyers, flak ships and swarms of fighters.

Every man in those cockpits knew the maths. Within about twenty minutes, all six Swordfish would be gone, and thirteen of the eighteen airmen with them. It remains one of the most heartbreaking acts of deliberate courage in the history of air combat — and it was a defeat.

The dash the British never saw coming

For months the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen had been bottled up in the French port of Brest, hammered by RAF bombers. Rather than keep them there, Hitler ordered them home to Germany by the most audacious route imaginable: straight up the English Channel, under the enemy’s nose. The codename was Operation Cerberus.

The Germans slipped out of Brest under cover of darkness on the night of 11 February and were well up the Channel before Britain grasped what was happening. Jammed radar, muddled reporting and plain bad luck meant the alarm went up hours late. Overhead, the Luftwaffe flew a rolling fighter umbrella — Operation Donnerkeil, orchestrated by the ace Adolf Galland — that kept hundreds of fighters over the ships at all times.

Six Stringbags at Manston

When the British finally reacted, the response was chaos. The nearest strike aircraft were six Swordfish of 825 Naval Air Squadron at Manston, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde. They were promised a strong Spitfire escort and the support of destroyers and motor torpedo boats. Almost none of it arrived in time.

Esmonde was no stranger to desperate odds. Less than a year earlier he had led Swordfish off HMS Ark Royal against the battleship Bismarck, helping to cripple her steering and seal her fate. Now, with only a handful of Spitfires overhead and the enemy already past, he led his six “Stringbags” out to sea anyway. He knew what it meant.

Twenty minutes

They pressed in low over the water. About ten minutes out, the German fighters fell on them. The Swordfish had no answer — too slow to run, too flimsy to take punishment. One by one they were shot to pieces. A few crews held their course long enough to drop their torpedoes; every one missed. All six aircraft went into the sea.

Esmonde was killed. Of the eighteen men who took off, only five were pulled alive from the Channel. One survivor, observer Edgar Lee, watched his pilot Brian Rose ditch their riddled biplane after aiming a torpedo at Gneisenau; their third crewman, “Ginger” Johnson, died in the cockpit. Lee, the last living Swordfish survivor of the action, died in 2009.

A defeat that became a legend

By any cold measure, the Channel Dash was a British humiliation. The German squadron reached home waters; the only real damage came from mines that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau struck on the way. For the first time in centuries, a hostile fleet had steamed the length of the English Channel and got away with it, and the British press was scathing.

And yet the memory that endured was not the failure of the defences but the sacrifice of the men who flew into it anyway. Esmonde was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross; his aircrew shared four Distinguished Service Orders, a Conspicuous Gallantry Medal and a string of Mentions in Despatches. The doomed attack of the six Swordfish became, and remains, one of the Fleet Air Arm’s proudest and saddest stories.

Sources: London Gazette (3 March 1942); Royal Navy; HistoryNet / Aviation History (Nan Siegel); Commonwealth War Graves Commission; Imperial War Museum.