A Review of "Taranto: the Raid, the Observers, the Aftermath" by Christopher O'Conner, 2011

This short book provides an extraordinary detailed look at the British navy's raid with aircraft from the British carrier Illustrious on the Italian navy in its harbor at Taranto in November 1940. A successful attack that sank or crippled one half of the available Italian battleships. The attack improved British morale both in the Mediterranean and in Britain. It may have provided ideas for the later Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Unfortunately there are some problems with facts and organization of the book. More on these later.

Although there have been several previous books on this single topic, none of them provide the degree of details on background planning and the movement of British task forces in the Mediterranean which greatly confused the Italians. None give as much information about the attacks delivered by individual aircraft.

FAA Swordfish that carried out the attack on Taranto


If you want to know how the British were able to launch and recover aircraft from carriers at night this is an excellent source. Colored landing lights visible from only directly behind the carrier and lighted floats dropped overboard to guide landings are part of the answer. If you want to know more about how British torpedoes were made to work in the relatively shallow water of Taranto harbor this is the book to read.

Also emphasized is background on the training of British navy carriers and Fleet Air Arm pilots which was ahead of both the United States and Japan in its capability to attack at night. When I finished this book I was much more impressed with the performance of the Royal Navy early in World War II than I had been. The RN had understood its limitations and turned some of them into strengths, although it took the experience of being bombed off Norway and Crete by the Germans to bring home the weakness of its anti-aircraft artillery and the importance of fighter protection to the fleet at sea.

Still this book has disappoints in two ways. First, the editing is poor. For example, on the first page of the first chapter the appeasement at Munich is dated to 1939 instead of 1938. On page 16, the Italian base of Cagliari raided by British naval aircraft just days before Taranto is placed in Sicily, when it actually in Sardinia. Occasionally British leaders and ships are thrown into the narration a few pages before the reader is told what role they play or what type of ships they are. Later in the book the author seems not to know that the carrier Illustrious suffered damage to her interior space when one German bomb exploded in a lowered aircraft hoist. One day of careful editing by a knowledgeable reader would have made this a better book.

The second disappoint is that they author wants to tell the story of an American naval officer who was able to break neutrality laws and sail aboard British warships before the US declared war on Germany. This man, then Lt. Commander John Opie, was on Illustrious, during the Taranto attack. He had been on other British warships before that. His reports to the US navy about actual combat operations were of great potential value to the US navy before the war. The author feels that if they had been better used they could have been of almost invaluable. Especially given that Taranto should have caused great doubt about the safety of Pearl Harbor as a protected harbor for the US Pacific Fleet. That the author wanted to tell this story is not the problem.

Unfortunately the story of Lt. Commander Opie, is like a second, independent half of the the author's book, I would have liked them to be tied together more closely. A few days of editing could have accomplished this task. That being written, the author's insights on the handling – or mishandling - of Opie's reports and those of other US officers familiar with British naval operations early in World War II is not encouraging. They did not lead to much operational learning from our British friends. In fact decisions by everyone from Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Kimmel, to the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark, led to the American disaster at Pearl Harbor, where we learned the hard way from our enemies.

The story of Lt, Commander Opie was largely forgotten, until the publication of this book. I am glad that someone has told his story.