'There was a delightful phrase used by one of our Admirals describing a bomb hit on the battleship Rod-hey. He said quite casually: 'It just bounced off.' Where the Air Arm has done damage io big ships at sea, it has been by means of the air borne torpedo, The first notable success of this method was the hitting of the French battle-cruiser Strasbourg by a Fleet Air Arm machine as she was escaping from Oran to "Toulon. Then followed the dramatic night attack on the Italian Fleet in Taranto harbour, though it was recognized at the time that in that case the airmen had stationary targets. Since then we have had the Battle of Cape Màtapan -in the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto was torpedoed from the air in the course of three attacks, was hit more than once, and was compelled to slow up. More recently we have - had the similar case. of the German battleship Bismarck whose fate might have been very different had the aircraft from the Victorious not succeeded in getting in a torpedo hit on the evening of May 24, and so reducing her speed.
This seems to be the great tactical of the air borne torpedo—this for slowing up an enemy ships is in quite a different category. Here one successful hit may be sufficient to upset the stability of the ship to such an extent that she capsizes or founders, The reason is that the merchant ship cannot be so completely subdivided into watertight compartments as is the fighting ship.
£5,000 a Time On the other hand the merchant Ship is by no means so resistant to bombs as the battleship, and since a torpedo costs—well, let us use the pre-war figure and say £5,000—torpedo-dropping against anything but the most valuable merchant ships such as tankers is not encouraged. Bombs will probably do the work quite as effectively.
We trust, however, keep a sense of proportion in discussing air attack against ships. There are many attacks which fail Yue may recall that during the hunt for the Bismarck one wave of torpedo planes launched from the Ark Royal was unable to find the target owing to low visibility. And it must not be upposed for a moment that a ship at sea is a sitting target. 'Avoiding-action.' as we have come to call it, can always be taken and is always taken as soon as the direction from which the attack will develop can! be foreseen And there is always the warship's anti-aircraft armament to bear in mind. The torpedo-dropping plane must come down almost to water level and within half a mile of the target in carrying out an attack, It doesn't require very much imagina-ition to picture the inferno of explosive shell through which the pilot has to dive to get into position. The air borne torpedo is certainly a menace to the big ship. but so is every other offensive weapon.
Remember it was the gun which annihilated the Hood. It was the ann that crippled the Graf Spee. We must keep a sense of proportion in estimating the effect of any form of offensive power.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.