Conte di Cavour<\/em> sank and was never returned to service. A cruiser and a destroyer were also damaged. Two Swordfish were lost \u2014 both to anti-aircraft fire. Two of the four crew members survived as prisoners of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Aftermath: Half a Fleet Gone in One Night<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In a single night, twenty-one biplanes had achieved what the entire Royal Navy surface fleet could not: they had neutralised half the Italian battle line. The surviving Italian ships were withdrawn to Naples, 300 miles further from the contested waters of the central Mediterranean. Malta's supply convoys, though still perilous, became survivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cost-exchange ratio was staggering. Two aircraft and two lives lost, against three capital ships put out of action \u2014 a result that no surface engagement of the war would match for sheer efficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Admiral Cunningham, in his typically understated way, signalled the Admiralty: \"By this gruelling night's work the Royal Navy has received a most valuable addition to its forces.\" Churchill was less restrained. He called it \"a crippling blow.\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Student in Tokyo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Thirteen months after Taranto, on 7 December 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The operational concept was almost identical: carrier-launched aircraft, modified shallow-running torpedoes, a dawn strike on warships at anchor in a harbour considered too shallow for aerial torpedoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was not a coincidence. Commander Minoru Genda, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, studied the Taranto raid in detail. Japanese naval attach\u00e9s in Rome had reported extensively on the British tactics, the torpedo modifications, and the vulnerability of ships at anchor to air attack. Taranto was the proof of concept; Pearl Harbor was the production version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The irony is complete: a fabric-covered biplane designed in 1933, flown by the Royal Navy at 139 mph through a wall of Italian anti-aircraft fire, demonstrated a technique that Japan would use to bring the United States into the Second World War \u2014 the event that ultimately decided its outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Death of the Battleship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Taranto proved what Billy Mitchell had argued and been court-martialled for: that aircraft could sink battleships. The lesson was confirmed at Pearl Harbor, reinforced when Japanese aircraft sank HMS Prince of Wales<\/em> and Repulse<\/em> off Malaya three days later, and became unchallengeable after the carrier battles of Coral Sea and Midway in 1942.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe battleship \u2014 the most expensive, most powerful, most prestigious weapon system in the world for three centuries \u2014 was rendered obsolete by an aircraft that cost a fraction of a percent of the ships it destroyed. The parallel to today's drone warfare debate is impossible to ignore: cheap platforms, intelligently employed, can defeat systems that cost a thousand times more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Swordfish that flew into Taranto harbour on 11 November 1940 did not know they were ending an era. They were just doing their job \u2014 slowly, bravely, and with devastating effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n