I have been sitting on this story for several years, ever since Gary Gaudet contacted me through the Samizdata comments section after a story I published about a Swordfish from the HMS Ark Royal being spotted on the ocean bottom near the sunken carrier. Since that time I have spoken with him several times as well as trading emails.
His Swordfish is in a somewhat drier and slightly more reachable location in the wilds of Nova Scotia. It will soon be brought in from the cold after resting where it ended its flying career after a walk-away crash in 1944. I spoke with him again this afternoon and with his permission I am bringing this story to a wider audience. It has been known locally for some time, but there has been an understandable desire not to attract undue attention until the aircraft recovery was at least imminent.
It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but to those of us who are Warbird afficionados, it is incredibly complete. There have been rebuilds to fly from wrecks recently dragged out of the Russian wilderness which were found in worse condition that this.
Fairy Swordfish Mk IV in Digby County, Nova Scotia.
Photo: Gary Gaudet
Although the Swordfish is a biplane, it used very modern construction methods and was an incredibly rugged aircraft. The ‘stringbag’ was still in use at the end of WWII and is much loved by those who flew her and all the youngsters like myself who built the Airfix model of this beautiful bit of British Naval Aviation history.
PS: There is ever so much more to this story than I have time to write this afternoon. I have hopes Gary Gaudet will drop by the comment section and regale you with more of the story: he has been in contact with the family of the fellow who happened to have flown this very particular airframe!
sadly, none of the links appear to work.
Combination of cut and paste problem and a url with a space in it that got line wrapped… Sorted now.
There’s a plane in there?
As much as I like vintage aircraft, wasn’t the Swordfish an embarrassment to British aviation? An aged biplane in a monoplane war? A sad tribute to the bureaucrats at the Admiralty?
Of course I could be wrong. I wish them good luck with the recovery project.
Well a Swordfish bagged the Bismark, not all that embarrassing surely!
Good point, RAB. But how did the Swordfish, a good-looking plane, compare to the Japanese Kate/Jill series or the American Devastator/Avenger aircraft? It seemed like a throwback compared to the Spitfires and Hurricanes that we Yanks are familiar with.
Dunno, Spectre765. What I do know is my old man thought they were good carrier planes and he flew them for 3 years on the Arctic convoys and elsewhere.
The Swordfish was a torpedo bomber with a very low stall speed which made it an ideal carrier aircraft for the time and, particularly, for Arctic work when landings took place on a deck which rose up and down by 60 feet. Spitfires and Hurricanes were (almost entirely) land based fighter aircraft with a very different role.
I cleared out my mother’s house a couple of weeks ago and kept a very dogeared copy of “War in a Stringbag” which I’m looking forward to reading. You can probably find a copy on ebay. I suggest you read it before judging that Stringbag battle honours were an embarrassment to British aviation. The alternative view is that they represented one of the greatest chapters in naval airborne warfare. But then I’m prejudiced.
Postwar, Swordfish were even equipped with radar:
http://11uboat.net/allies/aircraft/photos/swordfish.jpg
Sorry, don’t know where the link went.
A minor point; there is no Digy County in Nova Scotia. There is, however, a Digby County.
Typo fixed.
And that is not to mention the kerfuffle at Taranto.,,
That’s right, Dale. Taranto and the Stringbag put the skids to the battleship, which was then dead before almost anyone knew it.
Great to see one of these found and restored. Hopefully, they’ll take it on a tour after it’s restored.
Nowadays Navies use frigate based helicopters for anti shipping strike. The helos probably don’t perform that much differently from the Swordfish it’s just that they have stand off missiles.