Considerations about the raid on Bomba, of 22 August, 1940, and more on Taranto.
There is some mystery about Bomba. Italy admits only two ships lost [still quite a score for three torpedoes],
the submarine Iride and the supply ship Monte Gargano. They deny the
presence of other ships at the time. Only J. Valerio Borghese, commander of the Italian Navy's special section of manned torpedoes, reports the presence
of the large torpedo boat Calipso, saying it detached itself quickly from the supply-ship and helped in the
salvage of part of Iride's trapped crew, and that the submarine was down in 15 meters [45 ft.] of water. This
means the other ships, further South-East, were in shallower water. In his book, Decima Flottiglia MAS, Ed. Garzanti, 1965
[Tenth Light Flotilla MAS], Borghese also tells of Italian submarines visually detected by Allied aircraft
at a depth of 150 ft. in those waters.The sea is Carribean-clear there, but not politically healthy. Some satellite close-up pictures of the area could help as maritime charts indicate wrecks at the spot in about 8 meters of water. Could there be more wrecks besides the Monte Gargano? [Click here to see Bomba Bay maps] The raid on Bomba leads further. Maybe the Fleet Air Arm was extremely lucky in every sense there, and then maybe it was a business as usual. Did they carry the Taranto equipment? At Taranto the Swordfish were carrying special equipment, but standard special equipment at that. So standard it wasn't even worth mentioning in the reports, and so standard to appear normal to Lt. Cmdr. Opie, USN observer aboard HMS Illustrious, the lone Taranto aircraft carrier. So standard, again, to be per force well known, before Taranto, to anyone high up in the US Navy involved with torpedoes or harbor protection, and Opie, whose duty was to not hold secrets from his superiors, had seen the device... Look at it another way: John Opie addressed his report to the CNO c/o Naval Intelligence.
Taranto was no trivia, so we might say the CNO himself, Adm. Stark, read the report avidly. May we suppose he understood what he was reading? So did a score of naval officers in Washington, including Capt. Richmond Kelly Turner. Churchill wrote about it to FDR a few days after the raid, enclosing the report from Illustrious. FDR must have discussed it with the Navy he was so close to. Again, Taranto was no trivia: it jolted every navy in the world at the time.
Ordnance can be faulty. There were duds or strays at Taranto and the Royal Navy knew it and reported it. Opie knew about them first hand, being on the Illustrious. It follows that intact ordnance was in the hands of the enemy, and that the enemy, besides the US Navy, knew how and why the British shallow-water torpedoes worked so well and... there was an Axis Pact, wasn't there? The Japanese may be copiers, but good ones at that. They usually improve. Let's also consider that a Taranto raid had been in Royal Navy plans several times since 1935, as a reaction to Mussolini's Abyssinian war. How did the RN expect to execute it then? Continues on page 3
