Fairey Swordfish
The Fairey Swordfish was a British carrier-borne torpedo bomber flown by the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War. A fabric-covered biplane powered by a single radial engine, it looked obsolete when it entered service in 1936, but it crippled the Italian battle fleet at Taranto in 1940, helped to sink the Bismarck in 1941, and spent the rest of the war hunting U-boats over Atlantic convoys. Two Swordfish still fly today with the charity Navy Wings at Yeovilton.
Why It Mattered
The Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered biplane torpedo bomber that entered Fleet Air Arm service in 1936 already looking dated, yet it remained in frontline service throughout the Second World War. At Taranto in November 1940, Swordfish flying from HMS Illustrious crippled three Italian battleships in harbour and showed that carrier aircraft could defeat a fleet at anchor. In May 1941 a Swordfish torpedo jammed the rudder of the German battleship Bismarck, leaving her unable to escape the Royal Navy ships hunting her. Away from the headlines, the type spent the war guarding Atlantic convoys, hunting U-boats from small escort carriers and merchant aircraft carriers in weather that kept more modern aircraft on deck.
Design Notes
Fairey designed the aircraft as a three-seat torpedo-spotter-reconnaissance biplane: a fabric-covered metal airframe with folding wings, open cockpits and a single Bristol Pegasus radial engine. Its main weapon was a torpedo carried beneath the fuselage, but it could also drop bombs and naval mines, and in its later anti-submarine role it carried depth charges or eight rockets. Crews nicknamed it the Stringbag, after the string shopping bags that could hold almost anything, because of the endless variety of stores it was cleared to carry. Fairey built 692 Swordfish; the other 1,699 were built by Blackburn Aircraft at Sherburn-in-Elmet and were nicknamed Blackfish. Later marks added radar, the Swordfish III carrying a centimetric set in a fairing between the undercarriage legs at the cost of its torpedo.
Operational History
The Swordfish entered service in July 1936 with 825 Naval Air Squadron, and for nearly two years it was the Fleet Air Arm's sole torpedo bomber. It first saw combat in the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, when a floatplane launched from HMS Warspite sank U-64, the first U-boat destroyed by a Fleet Air Arm aircraft in the war. On the night of 11–12 November 1940, twenty-one Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attacked the Italian battle fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour, crippling three of its six battleships. In May 1941, Swordfish from HMS Victorious and HMS Ark Royal joined the hunt for the Bismarck; a torpedo from the second Ark Royal strike jammed her rudders, and the battleship was sunk the next day. The type's weakness against fighters was exposed in February 1942, when all six Swordfish sent against the German warships making the Channel Dash were shot down and thirteen of the eighteen crewmen were killed; their leader, Eugene Esmonde, received a posthumous Victoria Cross. As the Albacore and Barracuda took over on the fleet carriers, the Swordfish moved to anti-submarine work from escort carriers and merchant aircraft carriers, where its low stall speed suited short decks and rough Atlantic weather. Swordfish are credited with sinking fourteen U-boats in all. Operational sorties continued into January 1945, the last operational squadron disbanded that May, and the type had outlived the Albacore, the biplane built to replace it.
Afterlife
A handful of the 2,391 Swordfish built survive in museums, including a Swordfish II on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton and a Swordfish III at the Imperial War Museum Duxford. Others still fly. The Royal Navy Historic Flight kept the type in uniform for decades, and in 2021 the Navy transferred the Flight's aircraft to the charity Navy Wings at RNAS Yeovilton. Navy Wings owns and operates the Swordfish Mk I W5856 and Mk II LS326; W5856, a Blackburn-built aircraft that first flew on Trafalgar Day 1941, is the oldest surviving flying Swordfish in the world. The Royal Navy describes W5856 as one of only two flying Swordfish in the world, and the pair fly at air shows as a working memorial to the Fleet Air Arm crews who served in the type.