It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky, throwing the anchored Italian battle fleet into silhouette. His biplane — fabric, wire and an open cockpit — clatters in low over the water, and he releases his torpedo at the great hull of the battleship Conte di Cavour.

Moments later his own aircraft is hit and goes into the harbour; Williamson and his observer survive, to be taken prisoner. But the torpedo runs true. Behind and around him, twenty other antique biplanes are doing the same thing to the most powerful fleet in the Mediterranean.

By dawn, three Italian battleships are sitting on the bottom of their own harbour. The age of the battleship has just ended — and almost nobody has realised it yet.

An impossible target

Taranto was the Regia Marina’s great naval base, and its battle fleet lay at anchor behind barrage balloons, torpedo nets, and a wall of anti-aircraft guns. Worse, the harbour was shallow — a conventional air-dropped torpedo would simply dive into the mud. The British answer was to modify their torpedoes with trim wires and breakaway fins so they would run shallow, and to attack at night, when the defences were hardest to coordinate.

Two waves, one antique biplane

The aircraft that did it looked like a relic even in 1940. The Fairey Swordfish — affectionately the “Stringbag” — was a fabric-skinned biplane with a top speed of barely 140 mph and crew sitting in the open air. Twenty-one launched in two waves, the first of twelve led by Williamson just before 21:00, the second of nine about ninety minutes later.

Coming in under their own flares, the Swordfish put torpedoes into the new battleship Littorio and the older Caio Duilio and Conte di Cavour. The Littorio was crippled for months; the Cavour was so badly damaged it never returned to service. For all of it, the Royal Navy lost just two aircraft.

The shot heard in Tokyo

In a single night, a handful of canvas biplanes had knocked out half of Italy’s battle fleet and tilted the balance of the Mediterranean. But the most consequential audience was not in Rome or London. In Japan, naval planners studied Taranto closely: here was proof that carrier aircraft could cripple a battle fleet at anchor, in shallow water, by surprise. A little over a year later, that lesson arrived over Pearl Harbor.

The battleship admirals had spent decades insisting the big gun ruled the sea. On one November night, twenty-one biplanes wrote the first line of the carrier age — and the rest of the war would spell out the rest.

Sources: Imperial War Museums; The National WWII Museum; Royal Navy (Navy Wings).