Tag Archives: Fairey Swordfish

Reading a Fullerton novel over again, this time about the Royal Navy’s travails in the eastern Mediterranean in 1941. At one point a carrier with just ten planes went into action against the Stukas of the Nazis and was humbled. Among its ten warplanes was an old biplane called the Albacore, which was supposed to be the successor to an older one called the Swordfish but nicknamed the Stringbag for the mass of wires holding it together. Oddly, the Albacore was ultimately outshone by the Stringbag–at a time of high-performance monoplanes–because the bag was so slow the Stukas and other monoplanes couldn’t fly slow enough to hold it in their sights long enough to shoot it down. So the bag’s torpedo version helped cripple the Bismarck bad enough to allow Royal Navy warships to finish the job. Pretty slick.