Attack on Taranto

by Thomas P. Lowry, John Wellham

On November 11, 1940, 21 slow, canvas-covered British warplanes, launched from the carrier Illustrious, attacked the harbor at the Italian port of Taranto and put most of the Italian navy out of commission. This all-but-forgotten operation, the authors argue, deserves historical recognition as an inspirational precedent for the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor 13 months later. Taranto demonstrated that battleships in a shallow, heavily defended harbor could be sunk by a handful of torpedo-bombers. That lesson Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese fleet, learned well-while the American military virtually ignored it.

“By this single stroke the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered.” –Winston S. Churchill

Genres: Military Fiction, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Thomas P. Lowry is a retired psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. He is the author of Curmudgeons, Drunkards, and Outright Fools: Courts-Martial of Civil War Union Colonels, available in a Bison Books edition, and The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.

Reviews

[Robin Braysher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lively account of the incredible Swordfish attack on the Italian fleet in Taranto; that one of the author's (John Wellham) participated is a bonus. The book leans heavily into the raid being influential on the attack on Pearl Harbour - not that it hadn't already been thought of - but that it gave the Japanese Navy the idea that it was feasible and provided some practical pointers. The book looks at the Japanese and Italian navies, Pearl Harbour, Midway and British naval aviation, so more than just the raid itsef. An interesting read.

[Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

What you didn't realize, this book told me, was that the idea of modifying aerial torpedoes delivered by carrier-based torpedo planes to run shallow in harbors to sink capital ships at anchor came first from the British Fleet Air Arm in 1940 against the Italian Navy, not by the Japanese against the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Taranto was the template used.

Walker

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

the detailed analysis of weapons a tactics at the outbreak of WWII that will lay the groundwork for Pearl Harbor