Raiders by Ross Kemp Read Free Book Online Page A

And, to his credit, soon afterwards he tacitly admitted that he had failed to acknowledge the airmen’s achievements: ‘Admirably planned and most gallantly executed in the face of intense anti-aircraft fire, Operation Judgement was a great success,’ he wrote in a report four months later.
    While
Illustrious
steamed eastwards to Egypt, as soon as there was sufficient light, three Cantieri flying boats were dispatched to pinpoint her location so that Italian bombers might deliver immediate revenge. All three were shot out of the sky by
Illustrious
’s Fulmar fighters and the carrier was spared the efforts of a fighting retreat. Lt Cdr Williamson and Lt Scarlett, meanwhile, were getting used to life as prisoners of war. Their crewmates back on
Illustrious
had no idea whether they were dead or alive, but the widespread assumption was that they had perished in the crash. After clambering ashore into the clutches of an angry mob of dockyard workers, they were roughly treated at first – perhaps understandably given the destruction being wrought all around them. Their clothes were torn from their backs and they were bundled into a hut. But their captors soon calmed down and gave them a blanket and some cigarettes. They were taken for questioning to the destroyer
Fulmine
, whose gunners were firing at them when they were downed. Their interrogation could not have been more civilised. They were handed glasses of cognac and issued with clean clothes, and then given a hot meal, beer and a comfortable bed for the night.
    ‘In fact,’ recalled Williamson, ‘we were almost popular heroes. Two nights after our raid the RAF came over and we were put into an air-raid shelter full of seamen. They all pressed cigarettes on us and towards the end of the raid about twenty of them sang “Tipperary” for our benefit.’ After a short spell in a prisoner-of-war camp at Sulmona, they were transferred to Germany where they saw out the war in less hospitable and comfortable circumstances. In 1945 Scarlett was mentioned in dispatches for organising a bid to escape from his Stalag. The other crew not to return from Taranto were not so fortunate. The body of the observer Lt Slaughter was never found. Lt Bayley is buried in the Imperial War Graves Cemetery at Bari.
    As the sun rose over Taranto, thousands of sailors and dockyard workers were working furiously to salvage their crippled ships. The full details of the damage would not be known for a further twenty-four hours but, as he surveyed the scene, Admiral Riccardi, the Chief of the Italian Naval Staff, did not need a team of engineering experts to tell him that his fleet had suffered a catastrophic blow. As an expert in air warfare, he might even have privately admired the skill of the British raiders. In the Mar Grande, the battleships
Littorio
,
Caio Duilio
and
Cavour
were either sunk or beached to prevent them sinking. Three cruisers and two destroyers and two fleet auxiliaries suffered significant damage, mainly from near-misses by the bombs, while the seaplane hangar had been gutted by fire and two aircraft destroyed. The oil depot had also been damaged; it was only the faulty mechanisms of the bombs that had prevented its total destruction.
    Between them, the Swordfish dropped eleven torpedoes and over forty 250-lb bombs. The Italian shore defences alone had fired over 13,000 regular flak rounds as well as 1,750 rounds of four-inch and 7,000 rounds of three-inch shells. There are no records of the ammunition expended by the fleet’s gunners, but the aircrews reported that the volume of fire from the warships was even greater than that from the fixed-gun emplacements. Many of these rounds hit the merchant vessels, the dock installations and the city itself, adding considerably to the scale of the damage. Italian casualties, however, were remarkably light: twenty-three killed aboard
Littorio
, sixteen in the
Conte di Cavour
, and just one on
Caio Duilio
.
    The
Littorio
had