The Stringbags

If you do the incredible often enough, they’ll want you to do the impossible.

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy began the Second World War with fast, modern torpedo bombers that could devastate enemy warships and merchantmen at will. Britain’s Royal Navy squadrons went to war equipped with the Fairey Swordfish.

A biplane in an age of monoplanes, the Swordfish was underpowered and undergunned; an obsolete museum piece, an embarrassment. Its crews fully expected to be shot from the skies. Instead, they flew the ancient Stringbag into legend.

Writer Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, War Stories) and artist PJ Holden (Battlefields, World of Tanks) present the story of the men who crewed the Swordfish: from their triumphs against the Italian Fleet at Taranto and the mighty German battleship Bismarck in the mid-Atlantic, to the deadly challenge of the Channel Dash in the bleak winter waters of their homeland. They lived as they flew, without a second to lose- and the greatest tributes to their courage would come from the enemy who strove to kill them.

Based on the true story of the Royal Navy’s Swordfish crews, The Stringbags is an epic tale of young men facing death in an aircraft almost out of time.