Nobody ever called the Fairey Barracuda beautiful. With its high shoulder-mounted wing, spindly legs and a clutter of struts and flaps hanging beneath it, the Fleet Air Arm's torpedo and dive bomber looked like it had been assembled from spare parts in the dark. And yet this ungainly machine flew one of the most successful carrier strikes of the war — the day it fell out of a Norwegian sky and crippled the battleship Tirpitz.

The Barracuda is proof that in aviation, looks and results have nothing to do with each other.

An awkward answer to a hard job

The Barracuda was the first all-metal torpedo bomber the Fleet Air Arm ever fielded, and it had to do everything: drop torpedoes, dive-bomb, scout, even carry radar. Fairey hung the wing high so the crew could see down and out, and fitted the trailing edge with large Fairey-Youngman flaps that swung below the wing. Set one way they added lift for a slow carrier take-off; angled further, they became dive brakes that let the Barracuda plummet at a steep, controlled angle onto a target.

It was clever engineering wrapped in an unlovely airframe. Early on the type also earned a grim reputation for unexplained crashes — aircraft diving into the sea for no clear reason — before the causes were understood and fixed. But once sorted, the Barracuda was a genuinely capable dive bomber, and the Navy had exactly the target in mind to prove it.

A full profile of the Fleet Air Arm's ungainly workhorse.

Operation Tungsten: the Tirpitz strike

The Tirpitz was Germany's last great battleship, holed up in Kaafjord in northern Norway, tying down British naval strength just by existing. On 3 April 1944 the Royal Navy came for her. Barracudas flew off the carriers HMS Victorious and Furious in two waves, escorted by fighters, and dived on the anchored battleship out of the low Arctic sun.

The bombs could not sink the heavily armoured ship outright, but they wrecked her upper works, killed and wounded hundreds of her crew, and put Tirpitz out of action for months at almost no cost to the attackers. For a carrier air strike against a battleship at anchor, it was about as good as it got — and the ugly Barracuda had delivered it.

How the Barracuda targeted Tirpitz in Operation Tungsten.

The workhorse nobody remembers

After Tungsten the Barracuda kept working, striking Japanese targets in the Indian Ocean and soldiering on in second-line roles after the war. More than 2,600 were built — hardly a footnote — yet it has been almost entirely forgotten, overshadowed by the glamorous Swordfish before it and the American types that followed.

That is a little unfair. The Barracuda was awkward, unloved and briefly dangerous to its own crews. It was also the aircraft that flew one of the Fleet Air Arm's cleanest, most important strikes of the war. Beauty is overrated; the Barracuda hit the Tirpitz.

The Fairey Barracuda in detail.

Sources: Wikipedia (Fairey Barracuda, Operation Tungsten); Naval Encyclopedia; Imperial War Museums; historyofwar.org.