
(From left) Eric Margetts, Bobby Lawson, John Moffat, Buster May and Glen Evans
We recently posted about the death of John “Jock” Moffatt, at 97, the Scottish pilot credited with disabling the German battleship Bismarck with a torpedo fired from his Fairey Swordfish biplane in May 1941. In the post, we included a photo of the pilots in the Swordfish squadron that attacked the ship.
Three blog readers, Seymour Hamilton, Captain D. Peter Boucher, and Philip Brankin, commented on one important detail that I missed entirely. In the photo, the pilots of the Swordfish squadron all wore the uniform of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a corps of civilian volunteers who served alongside Royal Navy and Royal Navy Reserve personnel. The wavy stripes on RNVR officers’ sleeves differentiated them from RN/RNR officers, and gave the group the nickname, the “Wavy Navy.”
What is so remarkable is that volunteer pilots flying obsolete biplanes succeeded in crippling the mightiest battleship in the German Kriegsmarine, after it had defeated the best that the Royal Navy could put against her.