On the night of November 11–12, 1940, Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers of the British Fleet Air Arm sank three Italian battleships at the Battle of Taranto using a combination of torpedoes and bombs. In the course of the chase of the German battleship "Bismarck", torpedo strikes were attempted in very bad seas, and one of these damaged her rudder allowing the British fleet to catch her. The standard British airborne torpedo for the first half of World War II was the 18-inch Mark XII, a 450 mm-diameter design weighing with an explosive charge of of trinitrotoluene (TNT).