The 'Useless' British Torpedo That Won the War's Most Decisive Naval Battle скачать в хорошем качестве

The 'Useless' British Torpedo That Won the War's Most Decisive Naval Battle

On the evening of May 26th, 1941, fifteen fabric-covered biplanes launched from a heaving carrier deck into a Force 9 Atlantic gale. The waves below them were running between twenty-five and forty feet high. The wind was tearing the sea into white froth. These aircraft — open-cockpit relics designed in the early 1930s, flying into weather that would have grounded most modern warplanes — were each carrying an 18-inch torpedo that a significant faction within the Royal Navy had spent years arguing should never have been built. One of those torpedoes struck the Bismarck's starboard stern and jammed both rudders at roughly twelve to fifteen degrees to port. Everything that followed — the final surface battle on the morning of May 27th, the destruction of Germany's most feared capital ship, the effective end of Germany's surface raider strategy in the Atlantic — flows directly from that single torpedo impact. And the torpedo was delivered by an aircraft so laughably behind its time that its crews flew it with affection rather than confidence, gave it a name borrowed from household errands, and somehow kept finding new ways to win with it. This is the story of the Fairey Swordfish, the weapon it carried, and why both were nearly absent from that evening entirely. The Swordfish was officially designated the TSR — Torpedo-Spotter-Reconnaissance. Designed during the early 1930s and officially named in 1936 following development contracts with Fairey Aviation, it was already trailing behind the world when it entered service. By September 1939, it was a period piece. Its maximum speed at combat altitude sat between 138 and 143 miles per hour. Not knots — miles per hour. In the era of Spitfires and Messerschmitts, a torpedo bomber doing 138 miles per hour wasn't just slow. It was the kind of slow that looks like a decision made by people who hadn't checked a calendar since 1934.