The 'Doomed' British Carrier That Sank More Ships After It Was Written Off скачать в хорошем качестве

The 'Doomed' British Carrier That Sank More Ships After It Was Written Off

Dawn broke over the central Mediterranean on January 10, 1941, cold and clear and utterly deceptive. HMS Illustrious was making headway through the narrow channel between Sicily and the North African coast, her flight deck carrying fighters on combat air patrol, her crew at their stations for what should have been a routine transit. She was part of Operation Excess — a convoy pushing through waters the Royal Navy had, by this stage, learned to treat with the deepest caution.Eight weeks before this morning, she had performed what one contemporary account would describe as the most successful ship-to-ship naval attack in history. On the night of November 11th and 12th, 1940, her torpedo bombers crept into Taranto harbour in southern Italy and laid waste to the Italian battle fleet. Three battleships sunk or disabled in harbour, the docks turned into something between a graveyard and a navigation hazard in a single night. She was barely eight months old and had already rewritten the rules of naval warfare.So when HMS Illustrious sailed into that Mediterranean transit on January 10, 1941, she carried with her the weight of what she represented — the most battle-proven carrier the Royal Navy possessed, fresh from what the Italians considered a humiliation and the rest of the world recognised as a demonstration of what carrier aviation could achieve.The Luftwaffe's Fliegerkorps X had been specifically redeployed to the Mediterranean theatre with a single broad objective: neutralise British naval superiority in a region where the Italian fleet had conspicuously failed to do so. Their chosen method was dive bombing. Their chosen target, that morning, was HMS Illustrious.