by Sam Moses
During the time the Luftwaffe was away, Malta’s bombers (including some new fast Bristol Blenheims) and submarines from the 10th Flotilla were also productive. Some forty freighters delivering supplies to North Africa were sunk in September and October, and 63 percent of Axis shipping was sunk in November.
It was all too much for Hitler. Germany’s occupation of Greece no longer needed the full attention of the Luftwaffe, so he sent the air force back to Sicily. He brought in Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, giving him the title Commander in Chief, South, with control over Germany’s land and air forces in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
“I lost no time in familiarizing myself with my new front,” said Kesselring, a former fighter pilot—shot down five times, he said—who got around by flying his own light plane, a two-seat Fieseler Storch, which had gangly legs for landing on rough terrain. “The result of these informative flights was to confirm my view that the menace to our communication from Malta must be removed, and to bring home to me the decisive importance of the Mediterranean to the war.
“Over and over again, sometimes with the support of the Comando Supremo, I urged Göring and Hitler to stabilize our position in the Mediterranean by taking Malta.”
Kesselring had a plan to invade Malta, beginning with two thousand Axis paratroopers dropped from two hundred gliders over the edge of the island in the dead of night, followed by ten thousand commandos brought in by sea, climbing rope ladders up the 120-foot-high cliffs on Malta’s southeast coast. It was called Operation Hercules, and it had the enthusiastic support of Admiral Erich Raeder (C in C, Navy) and Admiral Eberhard Weichold (C in C, Mediterranean).
Mussolini figured it would be an easy conquest, but Count Ciano expressed realistic fears in his diary:
Malta’s anti-aircraft defense is still very efficient, and their naval defense is entirely intact. The interior of the island is one solid nest of machine guns. The landing of paratroops would be very difficult; a great part of the planes are bound to be shot down before they can deposit their human cargo. The same must be said for landing by sea. It must be remembered that only two days of minor aerial bombardment by us was enough to make their defense more stubborn. In these last attacks we, as well as the Germans, have lost many feathers.
And then there were the Maltese farmers, who were known to skewer bailed-out Axis pilots to the earth with their pitchforks.
Churchill was aware that an invasion was in the wind, if not carried by it. It was a no-brainer. The War Cabinet studied and discussed the probabilities for a month, finally deciding that it would take the enemy three weeks to assemble the troops and equipment for such a large operation, so they would worry about it when reconnaissance saw some signs of preparation.
Hitler had once confided to Admiral Raeder, “I am a hero on land and a coward at sea.” Operation Hercules was largely a naval operation—an Italian one, at that—and he never really liked it. And so he killed it.
“The German High Command failed altogether to understand the importance of the Mediterranean and the inherent difficulties of the war in Africa,” said Raeder. “The calling off of this undertaking was a mortal blow to the whole North African undertaking.”
“It was the greatest mistake of the Axis in the whole war in this theater,” added Admiral Weichold.
Kesselring was disappointed that he wasn’t allowed to take Malta—Rommel had eagerly offered to do the job—but he did the next best thing: he began to obliterate the island.
The Luftwaffe had a new weapon: the Messerschmitt Bf 109F. With its 1,350-horsepower Daimler-Benz engine, the 109 could fly much higher and faster than a Hurricane. In the first encounter between the two planes, twelve Hurricanes were attacked by an equal number of 109s; eight of the Hurricanes were shot down, with no loss to the enemy fighters.
With Bf 109F escorts, the Axis bombers over Malta were all but untouchable. Some eight hundred bombs were dropped on Hal Far, Luqa, and Takali airfields in January 1942, destroying fifty Hurricanes on the ground. Frantically, more pens for the aircraft were built. Every available body was drafted; thousands of soldiers, sailors, and Maltese volunteers worked around the clock filling empty petrol cans with dirt or limestone rubble, stacking them 14 feet high, into three walls each 90 feet long: that was one pen for a Wellington bomber, built by 200 men and women working eighteen hours.
“In January and February 1942,” said Kesselring, “the tide had turned: Our shipping losses had been reduced from 70–80 percent to 20–30 percent.”
Four British freighters were sent in a convoy from Alexandria in March, with three reaching the harbor. Hew Pew immediately sent scores of RAF men down to the docks to unload the aircraft materials, and they worked all that night, digging for the crates containing Hurricane engines and spare parts; by the next afternoon there were eighteen more serviceable fighters. Governor-General Dobbie didn’t have the same sense of urgency; available troops were not used, and the stevedores didn’t work around the clock. Two days later, all three freighters were sunk, with only about 5,000 of 25,000 tons unloaded. Without actually naming Dobbie, at least not on the record, Lloyd blamed the grievous loss on “sheer ineptitude, lack of resolution and bomb-stunned brains incapable of thought.”
Dobbie believed it was God’s will.
The prime minister could see that Dobbie was losing his grip and needed a rest. “The long strain had worn him down,” said Churchill, who replaced him with General John Prendergast, 6th Viscount Gort, the heroic leader of Dunkirk. The new Governor Gort landed in a flying boat at Kalafrana seaplane base during a bombing raid, bringing the George Cross medal to the island. His Majesty the King had awarded the highest civilian honor to the 270,000 people of Malta, “to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.”
It was finally time for the Supermarine Spitfire, which brought new levels of power, elegance, grace, and violence to the air over Malta on its distinctive elliptical wings. The new Spitfire Mark V boasted a 1,470-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 supercharged engine, could hit 374 mph at 20,000 feet, and could usually take the Messerschmitt 109 in a dogfight. The trusty old aircraft carrier Eagle flew off thirty-one Spitfires in three runs into the Mediterranean in March, but adding just thirty-one planes was like adding teardrops to the sea. They were were lost as fast as they came in, often bombed on the ground.
“I now appealed to the President, who clearly saw that the island was the key to all our hopes in the Mediterranean,” said Churchill.
On April 1, he cabled FDR:
1. Air attack on Malta is very heavy. There are now in Sicily about four hundred German and two hundred Italian fighters and bombers. Malta can only now muster twenty or thirty serviceable fighters.
2. It seems likely, from extraordinary enemy concentration on Malta, that they hope to exterminate our air defence in time to reinforce either Libya or their Russian offensive. This would mean that Malta would be at the best powerless to interfere with reinforcements of armour to Rommel, and our chances of resuming offensive against him at an early date ruined.
3. Would you be willing to allow your Carrier Wasp to do one of these trips? With her broad lifts, capacity and length, we estimate the Wasp could take 50 or more Spitfires.
4. Thus instead of not being able to give Malta any further Spitfires during April, a powerful Spitfire force could be flown into Malta at a stroke and give us a chance of inflicting a very severe and possible decisive check on enemy.
On April 20, forty-six Spitfires were flown off the USS Wasp. They were attacked by eighty-eight dive-bombers within twenty minutes of their landing on Malta. “Wave after wave dived down, until it was impossible to count any more in the failing light,” said AOC Lloyd. “It was an unforgettable sight of holes, smoke, dust and fire. The newly arrived pilots were speechless. They had never seen anything like it.”
When the dust cleared, only twenty-seven Spitfires could be mustered for battle the next morning.
Four da
ys later Churchill was at it again with Roosevelt. He cabled:
I am deeply anxious about Malta under the unceasing bombardment of 450 1st line German aircraft. If the island fortress is to hold out till the June convoy, which is the earliest possible, it must have a continued flow of Spitfires…. I shall be grateful if you will allow Wasp to do a 2nd trip…. Without this aid I fear Malta will be pounded to bits.
FDR agreed again. Back at the Clyde, the Wasp was loaded with forty-six more Spitfires.
General Rommel had been brought into North Africa by Hitler, to push back the British Eighth Army, whose Western Desert Force of 30,000 soldiers—including many New Zealanders, Indians, and Australians—had destroyed the much larger but poorly equipped Italian Army.
“At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive!” cried a delighted Churchill when the British advance began. “Wars are won by superior willpower. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.”
But Churchill had had to take most of the Western Desert Force out of Libya and send them to Greece. Unfortunately, the withdrawal had begun on the same day Rommel had arrived in North Africa. Since then, Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been steadily pushing back what was left of the Eighth Army.
The Luftwaffe blitz over Malta continued, neutralizing the RAF and enabling an even higher percentage of supplies to reach Rommel, by both land and sea. Axis aircraft flew nearly nine thousand sorties in April, dropping 6,730 tons of bombs on the three airfields as well as the cities around the harbor.
The lack of fuel meant that the Hurricanes and Spitfires couldn’t patrol; they had to wait for an enemy attack and then scramble up to meet it, which was a deadly disadvantage. Fighters were grounded for lack of rivets to repair their shot-up skins. Radio operators directed make-believe squadrons in the sky, hoping that the listening Axis would send their fighters to 20,000 feet to chase nonexistent planes.
Pilots with time on their hands manned the Bofors antiaircraft guns on the cliffs around Takali, but they still couldn’t do much because ammunition was rationed to fifteen shells per day. Soldiers with Browning machine guns hid in the trees, to defend against raiding enemy aircraft.
The bombing was so focused that sailors with the 10th Submarine Flotilla at Lazzaretto were ordered not to wear their white caps during the day, because the caps could be targets. The five remaining submarines were spending their daylight hours at the bottom of Marsamxett Harbor, along with the skeletons of many dead warriors. But that wasn’t safe either, because the water was shallow and a bomb on the surface would still be destructive.
But hiding was futile. With great despair, the last of the “Fighting Tenth” was sent off to safe harbor in Alexandria, resulting in the cessation of its attacks on Axis convoys in the central Mediterranean. At least the submarine flotilla had run out of fuel oil anyhow. The submarine P-35 got in a parting shot off Pantelleria, sinking a 4,200-ton freighter with two torpedoes fired from 11,000 yards.
With little resistance from Malta, Rommel received 237,000 tons of supplies out of 244,000 tons shipped in April, tripling the March amount. That was 97 percent.
“Kesselring was setting a cruel pace,” said AOC Lloyd. “By the end of April we were back to seven serviceable Spitfires. By July 1, we calculated, we should be out of business.
“For us, the siege of Malta had taken an ugly turn. The specter of famine stalked the island.”
PART III •••
ALLIES
CHAPTER 11 •••
OUT OF NORWAY
On the evening of June 11, 1942, exactly two years after the beginning of the siege on Malta, Fred Larsen made fast the Santa Elisa to the Newport pier. The ship had steamed down from Belfast in a small convoy protected by Spitfires, through the Irish Sea, and deep into the Bristol Channel to the busy and secure port of Newport, Wales.
She’d been sent there to load coal from the Welsh mines, much to the dismay of Captain Thomson, because the coal was so dirty and his ship so clean. But at least coal wasn’t explosive, and it was a cargo often carried on the homeward journey, so the crew was happy to see it.
Then they heard that coal was usually taken to London, which burned some 30,000 tons a day. If the Santa Elisa were going to London, she’d have to curve around Land’s End and run east into the English Channel through “E-boat Alley,” where German torpedo boats could race out of French ports at 40 knots and blow them to smithereens; and if they got through E-boat Alley they’d have to pass Cape Gris-Nez, where the German shore batteries, twenty-two big guns that could fire all the bloody way across the channel to Dover, were waiting to blow them to smithereens; and if they got past Cape Gris-Nez they’d have to round Hell-fire Corner and navigate the Goodwin Sands, 11 miles of shallow water and wide sandbars that had trapped some two thousand ships over centuries. More E-boats lurked in these shallows, along with Stukas diving out of the clouds to blow the merchantmen to smithereens.
Larsen listened to the gripes and fears of the men on his deck crew and said he didn’t care where they were going, it was all the same to him. He just hoped that wherever it was, there would be Germans.
After meeting Minda and Jan at the Oslo train station, the Red Cross lawyer, Mr. Nansen, walked them through more paperwork and presented a travel itinerary to Lisbon. Minda learned that they weren’t alone; they would be traveling to New York with seventy-six others, all of them with American roots or connections—like Minda and Jan, they were noncombatants being exchanged by the Red Cross for German prisoners of war.
The group was under the control of the Gestapo, watching at every turn. Minda wouldn’t let go of Jan, in fear that he would be snatched away. A fellow exchangee named Erling Andersen offered to carry her two suitcases, and for the rest of the way he looked after the two of them, in addition to taking care of his own family, including a child about Jan’s age. He was American-born, like Fred Larsen, but had been unlucky enough to be in Norway on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, working as an engineer. When the Germans had declared war on the United States, they had arrested the Americans in Norway and put them in Grini, the concentration camp near Oslo. Andersen was used as a cook in the camp, so at least he didn’t go hungry like the others. His wife, Johanna, had gotten him out after six months, using the same kind of perseverance that Larsen had used to get Minda and Jan out of Norway.
At least twenty thousand Norwegians were made prisoners at Grini during the war. It didn’t take much to get arrested: a radio, a rumor, a glance, being Jewish. Grini was infamous for its high-voltage and barbed-wire fences. The camp’s SS commander believed in “exercise” as punishment for offenses, such as failure to snap to attention with your hands clasping your thighs when an SS officer passed. Some died with their faces in the dirt. Some froze. They all starved.
“We tried to beat the pigs to their troughs,” said Odd Westeng, a Resistance leader who was held in Grini. “We listened into the stillness of night, and heard heartbreaking screams coming from the interrogation chamber.”
Westeng escaped through the fence and helped Norwegian Jews get out of the country before they were sent to Grini. It’s not known how many Jews went to Grini, but about 750 were moved from Grini to Auschwitz, and 12 survived. Another 850 were led by the Resistance through the forest to Sweden. Children were hidden in carts and told to pretend that they were potatoes under a tarp. Jan might have been one of them, if Larsen had succeeded in joining the Resistance when he tried.
Minda Larsen and the other fleeing Norwegians took an all-night train from Oslo to Trelleborg, Sweden, with their Gestapo escort. There was only one of them on that train, at least only one that the Norwegians knew of, and he sat in the forward row while they ignored him. In the morning they looked out the windows; Minda remembers the vivid yellow flowers in the sweet Swedish sun.
From the Trelleborg station they were taken by bus to a ferry that crossed the Baltic Sea. The sky was blue and the water smooth, and the boa
t might have floated on the sighs of relief of its passengers, except they knew they were going to Germany. But it was an easy landing at the small port of Sassnitz, where there were no warships and few soldiers. The group was shuffled straight to a train to Berlin, 150 miles south. They arrived after dark, their blacked-out train squeaking spookily into the blacked-out city. For nearly four hours they were stuck at the station while bombs fell over Germany, as Britain had begun raids with hundreds of RAF planes at a time. When the bombers droned back to England, the train sped southwest across the dark heart of Germany, all that night.
Over the next two days, another train took them across France and Spain. At nine in the evening on June 11, at the same time that Fred Larsen made fast the Santa Elisa to the Newport pier, Minda arrived safely in neutral Lisbon with her son and their seventy-six new friends. The hard part of her journey was over. She’d had her two years of hell with Hitler.
CHAPTER 12 •••
OPERATION HARPOON
On that same moonless night of June 11, about three hours after Fred Larsen had docked in Newport and Minda had arrived in Lisbon, the SS Kentucky steamed away from Gibraltar. She was the queen bee of a convoy called Operation Harpoon, which included one battleship, two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, seventeen destroyers, four minesweepers, an oiler, a minelayer, two corvettes, and six motor patrol boats, all to escort the Kentucky and five freighters 996 miles to Malta. Heavy enemy attack was predictable, and the mission was critical.
