by Sam Moses
Churchill knew the value of Hurricanes to Malta—their 324-mph top speed could match that of the fastest Italian fighters. Even with the Battle of Britain beginning at this time, he asked the Admiralty, “As we have a number of Hurricanes surplus at the moment, could not the Malta Gladiator pilots fly the Hurricanes themselves?”
Admiral Cunningham had been putting pressure on the First Sea Lord as well, and the Admiralty finally gave in. On August 2, 1940, a dozen Hurricanes were officially sent to Malta, flown off the ancient aircraft carrier Argus from 380 miles away. They buzzed Malta in two formations, with the roar of their 1,280-horsepower Rolls-Royce V-12 engines stopping hearts; but when people realized that the powerful planes were on their side, they danced in the streets. One Hurricane crashed when it hit a bomb crater on Hal Far airfield upon landing, and two more were destroyed on the ground in an air attack forty-eight hours later, but nine new arrivals were better than none.
The pilots thought they would be going back to England the next day, to fight the Luftwaffe over London in the Battle of Britain; but again, Sammy Maynard “impressed” them. They were angry about having to stay in that hot hellhole Malta, doomed to dust, hunger, and dysentery like the rest of the islanders. But they would get their chance with the Luftwaffe over Malta soon enough.
CHAPTER 9 •••
DEBUT OF THE LUFTWAFFE
On August 30, 1940, a convoy with four merchant ships finally steamed toward Malta. Initiated and driven by Churchill, it was called Operation Hats—he liked to wear so many. The warship escort included the battleship Valiant and aircraft carrier Illustrious, the ships that introduced radar to the Mediterranean, enabling enemy planes to be located from fifty miles away. This convoy from Gibraltar rendezvoused with more warships, commanded by Cunningham and steaming from Alexandria.
The Italians saw them coming. From naval bases on Italy and Sicily, Regia Marina (the Italian Navy) sent out a fleet of warships.
The Illustrious carried twenty-four Fairey Swordfish biplanes, their forty-eight fabric wings fluttering in the breeze on the flight deck. Irreverently but affectionately called the “Stringbag,” for its fabric-and-wire construction, the Swordfish could carry a 1,500-pound torpedo slung under its belly or a combination of 500-, 250-, and 20-pound bombs. An Italian reconnaissance plane spotted the Illustrious, so the Italian warships turned away. Supermarina, the Italian admiralty, based in Rome, was afraid of the potent old Stringbags.
Regia Aeronautica (the Italian Air Force) wasn’t deterred, however, and bombers attacked Operation Hats. But Illustrious also carried a squadron of new two-seat Fairey Fulmar fighters, each with eight guns; they shot down six “flying buffalos” and more SM.79s were damaged, while others jettisoned their 2,750-pound payloads over the sea and turned for home.
The three freighters and one small tanker were escorted into Malta’s harbor, with a tugboat towing one of the freighters, which had a hole in her hull and a smashed rudder from near misses—bombs that land in the water close enough for the concussion to cause damage. The merchant ships carried 40,000 tons of supplies and were greeted by cheering Maltese lining the bastions and barrancas, five deep in some places.
But the cheery mood lasted just three days. On the evening of September 5, as Churchill was announcing the success of his Operation Hats to the House of Commons (and as Minda Larsen was having her twenty-fourth birthday, without a cake because the Nazis took all the eggs), the Junkers Ju 87—the scary Stuka—made its debut over Malta. The Luftwaffe had sent fifteen Stukas to Sicily, and five of them went looking for the battleship Valiant in Grand Harbour. She was already gone, so the Italian pilots—rushed into the cockpit after taking only half of the twenty-five-hour German training course—bombed a fort instead. There was little damage, but the writing was in the sky, and it was as ugly as the plane.
In October 1940, Malta got its first big bombers. A dozen Wellingtons, called “flying cigars,” landed at Luqa after being flown from England. There were no ground crews to prepare them, but they made a bombing run the next night anyhow, to Naples Harbor, barely getting airborne on the treacherously short and crater-filled Luqa strip. For the next mission the payload was decreased to lessen the weight, but that evening’s heat and humidity robbed the engines of power, and two of four Wellingtons went down just after takeoff, killing five crewmen and making orphans of five children whose parents were killed when one of the bombers crashed and burned on their house.
Bombers were at least as important to the war in the Mediterranean as the Hurricanes and other fighters, because bombers could cripple the enemy, while the fighters’ role was support and defense. But the fighters got the attention, because spectacular dogfights over Malta were like a spectator sport, watched by thousands. The Malta bombers rumbled away without fanfare, usually after dark, and destroyed targets in Italy and Sicily, as well as ships in convoys to North Africa that supplied the Axis’ drive toward Egypt and Persian oil. With some bombers, Malta could now shift from a defensive to an offensive position. But big bombers needed many tons of aviation fuel, which could only come on ships.
Admiral Cunningham led another convoy into Malta: five freighters escorted by four battleships, five cruisers, one aircraft carrier, and thirteen destroyers. But it was just a stop along the way to Italy’s Taranto Harbor for him.
There was also a new Photo Reconnaissance Unit on Malta, with three high-flying, American-made Martin Maryland bombers, whose range of 1,300 miles gave the Allies the ability to look down on every Italian port and airfield in the Mediterranean. Reconnaissance flights over Taranto, 350 miles northeast of Malta, had photographed six Italian battleships.
Under a nearly full moon on Sunday, November 11, twenty Swordfish flew off the Illustrious, 170 miles out to sea, toward Taranto Harbor. Eleven of the “Stringbags” carried 1,500-pound torpedoes, and the rest were armed with 250-pound bombs. Harbor defenses heard the slow, droning Stringbags coming and started firing before they even got there.
“The sky over the harbor looked like it sometimes does over Mount Etna in Sicily, when the great volcano erupts,” said Charles Lamb, one of the Stringbag pilots. “The darkness was torn apart by a firework display which spat flame into the night to a height of nearly 5000 feet.”
But the slow Stringbags flew under the barrage, skimming as low as five feet over the water. They dropped torpedoes that blew huge holes in three of the battleships, sinking them in the shallow water; the other three battleships ran from the harbor before morning. The sensational success of the Battle of Taranto was attributed to Malta’s Photo Reconnaissance Unit, flying the camera-equipped bombers.
Early on the afternoon of December 20, Admiral Cunningham steamed again into Grand Harbour, bearing Christmas gifts: eight cargo ships full of food and supplies from Alexandria. “Our reception was touchingly overwhelming,” he said. “I went all over the dockyard next morning with the Vice-Admiral, and was mobbed by crowds of excited workmen singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia.’ I had difficulty in preventing myself from being carried around.”
Meanwhile, thousands of Luftwaffe personnel were traveling through Italy on trains, showered with candy and fruit at each stop. Comando Supremo had invited the Luftwaffe to Sicily to obliterate Malta.
Warplanes arrived by the dozens in daily flights, and soon there were more than a hundred German bombers on Sicily—Junkers 88s and 87s and Heinkel 111s—with hundreds more on the way, along with squadrons of Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters.
The aircraft carrier Illustrious had enabled the Allies to rule the Mediterranean for four months. Off the Sicilian shore, Germany’s best pilots practiced on a floating mock-up of the Illustrious, with its 620-by-95-foot flight deck.
At high noon on January 10, 1941, the Luftwaffe made its Mediterranean debut, diving from 12,000 feet. Thirty Stuka dive-bombers screamed down on the Illustrious as she steamed toward Malta in a convoy. Another thirteen Stukas targeted the battleships Warspite and Valiant, on each side of
Illustrious. The Luftwaffe had caught the Royal Navy unprepared for the attack, with only four Fulmar fighters in the air at the time, covering the convoy.
The Stukas dived in synchronized waves of three, from different heights and bearings, dividing and confusing the antiaircraft fire. At angles of 60 to 90 degrees—absolutely vertical—they fell to 800 feet and dropped 500-kilogram armor-piercing bombs with delayed fuses, to penetrate the carrier’s flight deck and blow it up from the inside.
The Warspite was hit by one bomb that didn’t explode. “One of the staff officers who watched it hurtling over the bridge from astern told me it looked about the size of the wardroom sofa,” said Cunningham, commanding the convoy from Warspite.
Cunningham knew that the Luftwaffe had moved into Sicily, but he had taken the Illustrious into the highly exposed Sicilian Narrows anyhow. Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, commanding the RAF from Cairo, had told him that British fighters could easily handle the Ju 87 Stuka. But four Fulmars against forty-three Stukas in coordinated dives wasn’t what either man had in mind. The convoy’s fighters also had to deal with ten Messerschmitts and eighteen Heinkel He 111 torpedo bombers.
The Illustrious was hit seven times in six minutes, with one of the bombs falling into the open bay of the hangar, where some 50,000 gallons of aviation fuel were stored. As the burning behemoth listed toward Malta for the next nine hours, Captain Denis Boyd steered with the engines and the three screws, because the rudder was smashed. Illustrious entered the harbor just after nightfall, with hot spots glowing orange in the dark. One hundred twenty-six men were dead, with many more injured.
The convoy’s sole freighter intended for Malta made it into the harbor, carrying forty-two more antiaircraft guns along with the necessary soldiers, 4,000 tons of ammunition buried under 3,000 tons of seed potatoes, and twelve crated Hurricanes.
Two nights later, ten Wellington bombers got some revenge. They dropped 127 bombs on Sicily’s Catania airfield, destroying eleven MC.200s, nine Ju 87s, six He 111s, two Ju 52 cargo planes, one Ju 88, and one SM.79. Seven of the Wellingtons made it back. And three nights after that, nine Wellingtons repeated the attack, without loss; their crews estimated that they had put thirty-five dive-bombers—Stukas and Ju 88s—out of action.
The Luftwaffe had used up all its bombs, but a convoy to Sicily brought more. On the cloudless winter afternoon of January 16, with the sun shimmering off the still water of Grand Harbour, the sky fell in on Malta.
Forty-four Stukas escorted by ten MC.200s and ten CR.42s, and seventeen Ju 88s escorted by twenty Bf 110s, arrived over Grand Harbour, intending to finish off the Illustrious. The RAF sent up all the fighters it could: three Fulmars and four Hurricanes.
The fighters shot down five bombers and claimed another five probables, but the antiaircraft guns scored zero, because they couldn’t aim low enough to hit the Stukas when they were vulnerable, flying level at 100 feet after their dives and racing out of the harbor at more than 200 mph. The gunners on the bastions were actually looking down at the Stukas. One antiaircraft gun missed a low-flying plane and blew off part of the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor.
Malta’s “box barrage” of antiaircraft fire appeared for the first time during this attack. The ack-ack guns raised rectangular walls of flak like beaded curtains in a sixties restaurant. The box barrage was intended to foil the attackers, not really shoot them down, and it succeeded too well in misdirecting the aim of the bombers. The Three Cities along the docks, Vittoriosa, Cospicua, and Senglea, were heavily hit.
“Our instructions were clear, to sink the carrier Illustrious only,” said Johann Reiser, one of the 101 Luftwaffe pilots. “It is true we hit all round the harbor, houses, buildings, roads, and killed many civilians…but the murderous anti-aircraft fire all around, north, south, east and west, made it impossible for us to aim properly. It was like hell.”
The day also featured the debut of a new Axis weapon, as a guided missile zoomed heavily through the box barrage. It was Fritz PC 1400, an experimental secret rocket that German scientists had been working on for two years. The huge bullet-nosed bomb had four stubby wings and a tail and was guided toward Illustrious by radio. It failed to explode or kill anyone when it landed on a nunnery in Vittoriosa. Another Malta miracle.
Most of the seventy-two people killed that day were crushed by rubble, with more dying trapped under blocks of limestone in the days that followed. The devastation looked so clean afterward. Where once there had been a building, afterward there were just big white chunks of stone. Thousands of them covered the Three Cities.
Five thousand people took shelter in the old railway tunnel in Valletta that night, and it remained packed with teeming humanity for months. Tunnels that had been dug by the Knights under the city were inhabited for the Second Great Siege. There were rows upon rows of triple-high bunk beds, each wooden rack big enough for three children. Some of the boards were scorched black from futile attempts to burn out the bedbugs, fleas, and lice. Hungry rats slinked in the shadows, terrifying the children.
The brave souls who left the shelters the next day were rewarded with some good meals. The sun rose on hundreds of dead fish floating in the harbor, which were quickly scooped up and sold out of carts, cooked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over fires made from shattered furniture. The fish tasted like gunpowder, but the redolence created by their grilling helped deodorize the air, which was growing putrid with the stench of dead horses.
But the German bombers had failed: they had missed Illustrious. After nearly two weeks of round-the-clock welding of the worst holes, she sneaked away from Malta under the full moon of January 23, 1941, bound for Virginia for drydock repairs. Radio Berlin said she was at the bottom of the harbor.
The bombing of Malta by the Luftwaffe continued. The real siege had begun.
CHAPTER 10 •••
SIEGE ON THE RAF
For the first six months of 1941, no freighters got through to Malta.
The “Magic Carpet,” that trail of fast minelayers and minesweeping submarines from Alexandria, kept the island alive with foodstuffs and drums of fuel carried in their mine bays. A sub could carry eighty-eight tons of aviation fuel, enough to keep the RAF airborne for three days.
The RAF on Malta had a new commanding officer: Air Marshal Hugh Pughe Lloyd, whom everyone simply called Hew Pew (with a great deal of respect). He toured the island on his first day on the job.
“The trail of ruin was to be seen everywhere,” he said.
The small size of the three aerodromes was sufficiently depressing a spectacle, but the air-raid shelters for the airmen were woefully inadequate, while underground operations rooms, in which there might be telephones, existed only in name.
There was not one single petrol pump even such as could be seen in any British village. Our stock was kept in bulk storage of very limited capacity away from the aerodromes, but by far the greater proportion of it was distributed in five-gallon tins in small dumps spread over the island—most of them open to the sky.
How the technical personnel maintained and operated the aircraft baffled my imagination. The humble spanner [wrench], hammer, and screwdriver were as scarce as hens’ teeth; and the motor transport, had it been in Britain, would have been used for roadblocks. The engines and the airframes had to be repaired and overhauled, and if parts were unserviceable they had to be made to work, as there were no spares. Similarly with the motor transport, the air-sea rescue launches and all the thousands of items of equipment. It was never-ending.
That summer of 1941, the quality of life on Malta was affected by events elsewhere in the Mediterranean and beyond. Mussolini had invaded Greece the previous fall, but by winter the Italians were driven out; Germany invaded in April, and, taking some pressure off Malta, most of the Luftwaffe on Sicily moved to Greece in June. (The Royal Navy rescued 16,500 soldiers during the evacuation of Greece, but three cruisers, six destroyers, and 1,828 men were lost to Axis bombers.) Hitler also attacked Russia in Ju
ne, stealing more planes from the Mediterranean. With Axis airpower down, the time was ripe for a convoy to Malta, from the west.
A tough South African admiral, Neville Syfret, commanded Operation Substance, with six freighters carrying food, ammunition, troops, and thousands of tons of aviation fuel. Just before the convoy entered the Strait of Gibraltar, Syfret sent a note from one of his destroyers to the master of each merchant ship, via rocket line—a shotgun pistol that fired a canister on a rope for 250 yards, over the bow of each ship. Syfret wanted to make sure that none of his words were lost in the translation of semaphore signals.
For over 12 months Malta has resisted all attacks of the enemy. The gallantry displayed by the garrison and people of Malta has aroused admiration throughout the world. To enable their defence to be continued, it is essential that your ships, with valuable cargoes, should arrive safely in Grand Harbour. The Royal Navy will escort and assist you in this great mission: you and your part can assist the Royal Navy by giving strict attention to the following points: Don’t make smoke. Don’t show any lights at night. Keep good station. Don’t straggle. If your ship is damaged, keep her going at the best possible speed. Provided every officer and man realizes it is up to him to do his duty to the very best of his ability, I feel sure that we shall succeed. Remember that the watchword is: THE CONVOY MUST GO THROUGH.
Admiral Cunningham sent a decoy convoy from Alexandria to lure any enemy aircraft away. Syfret’s ships arrived in Grand Harbour on July 25, untouched.
Syfret came back in September with Operation Halberd. At the mouth of the Sicilian Narrows, Admiral Harold Burrough took over command and sneaked the merchantmen along the shore of the island of Pantelleria, Mussolini’s own little Malta—he had been building it into a military base for twenty years. Burrough’s boldness delivered eight of nine cargo ships, with one sunk by bombers. The Italian fleet had come out to intercept but again had returned to Naples. Some 60,000 tons of supplies reached Malta, enough to get the island through the winter.
