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Taranto 1940: The Fleet Air Arm’s precursor to Pearl Harbor
By Angus Konstam and Peter Dennis
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About this ebook
The Royal Navy's attack on Taranto in 1940 heralded a new age of warfare. It was the decisive moment in a struggle for dominance of the Mediterranean that had gone on for months, as the British and Italian navies both looked to secure maritime supply routes for their colonies. With the enormous demands of a global war beginning to tell, the British capital ships were simply too thinly spread for a large fleet action against Taranto, where the bulk of the Italian fleet lay menacingly. How was the Royal Navy to eliminate the threat of the Regia Marina? This is the story of one of World War II's most devastating raids, recounting how a handful of obsolete Fairey Swordfish biplanes swooped in and destroyed an Italian battleship and badly damaged two more. With expert analysis, detailed colour illustrations and a gripping narrative, this book explains the origins of the attack, its planning and execution, and what happened in the aftermath.
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Author
Angus Konstam
Angus Konstam is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has written widely on naval history, with well over a hundred books in print. He is a former Royal Navy officer, maritime archaeologist and museum curator, who has worked in the Royal Armouries, Tower of London, and Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. Now a full-time author and historian, he lives in Orkney.
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Reviews for Taranto 1940
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Although I have to admit that Angus Konstam is not one of favorite Osprey writers what he does do very well is to put the attack on Taranto into both strategic and operational perspective, before moving on to examine the actual raid itself. There might be just a touch of the influence of the legend that the results of the attack resulted in a permanent British ascendancy over the Italians in the Mediterranean, which has been significantly debunked in the years since this booklet was published.