by Sam Moses
Admiral Cunningham had scanned the American merchant fleet looking for tankers, and the SS Kentucky, owned by the Texas Company (soon to become Texaco), was the clear choice. She was one of the biggest and fastest tankers in the world, and was state of the art—her hull was welded, rather than riveted. She had only recently been launched and had made just one brief run, Philadelphia to the Delaware Capes and back.
Britain had been getting some of the best freighters America could sacrifice, although not always willingly and too often to the sea. The Kentucky hadn’t earned the Texas Company a dime before the U.S. government claimed her for the British, after the request from Cunningham came through channels. Some on the American side weren’t happy about it—most notably Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet—but it was understood that FDR wanted to do all he could for Churchill.
The Kentucky was the third welded-hull tanker built for the Texas Company by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, of Chester, Pennsylvania. The first was the SS Ohio, followed by the SS Oklahoma, which had recently been torpedoed and sunk off Savannah, Georgia. Kapitan Reinhard Hardegen, whose U-123 had claimed nine freighters off the U.S. coast in January, had returned for a second unchallenged raid in April.
The Kentucky was sent to Gibraltar with 103,000 barrels of aviation fuel, steaming across the Atlantic without an escort, an astonishing risk. She used her powerful new steam turbine engines to average 15.8 knots, despite a four-day gale. In Gibraltar she was unceremoniously transferred to the Ministry of War Transport. The Yanks were yanked and put on a tub back to New York, and a crew from the British Merchant Navy moved into the luxurious quarters on the new tanker.
The Kentucky’s aviation fuel was off-loaded in Gibraltar, and she took on 2,000 tons of diesel, needed for the generators that drove Malta’s antiaircraft guns; 2,000 tons of kerosene, needed for heat and cooking by the suffering islanders; and 9,000 tons of fuel oil, most desperately needed so the 10th Submarine Flotilla might return to Malta and resume its attacks on the Axis convoys supplying Rommel in North Africa.
Governor Dobbie had cabled the War Department that there were 920 tons of black and white oils left, good enough for five weeks. That had been nine weeks earlier—before he had been replaced by Gort. Now Malta was down to the sludge in its storage tanks.
If the Axis didn’t know that all it had to do to force the surrender of Malta was keep a tanker from delivering oil, it should have. Thanks to the American attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers, Axis commanders sometimes knew as much as Churchill himself.
Fellers reported to General George C. Marshall, President Roosevelt’s chief of staff, who was looking ahead toward American infantry combat in Europe and wanted to learn all he could. Because Churchill wanted to keep FDR and Marshall happy, the British Eighth Army was encouraged to open its gates for the diligent Fellers. He attended staff meetings; he drove to the front in a camouflaged van he called the Hearse and greeted British officers with bottles of Johnnie Walker; he moved in social circles in Cairo and milked contacts for information.
From the embassy in Cairo, using a secret code, Fellers sent radio messages with descriptions of military actions and plans in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and North Africa. He also sent details about Malta’s dire straits to Marshall, indicating that surrender was imminent.
Unfortunately, the Axis had the code. It was called the Black Code, and had been stolen by an Italian spy. Eager to flaunt the coup, Mussolini had shared some of Fellers’s early messages with the Germans, who used them to break the code themselves. For about nine critical months, everything Fellers told Marshall and FDR, he unwittingly told Rommel and Hitler as well.
Hitler appreciated the messages—“our good source,” he called Fellers—but it was Rommel who studied each word. The information from Fellers was “stupefying in its openness,” said one of Rommel’s staff officers after the war, and it “contributed decisively to our victories in North Africa.”
“Any friend of Bonner Fellers is no friend of mine,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower later told a beautiful British socialite who was enamored with Fellers, before turning his back to her at a Cairo dinner party.
Thanks to Fellers’s messages, the Axis knew that Operation Harpoon was coming, and that Malta needed the oil from the tanker to survive. Regia Aeronautica lined up eighty-one fighters, sixty-one bombers, and fifty torpedo bombers, and the Luftwaffe added another forty bombers.
In the first attack, at daybreak on Sunday, June 14, the Kentucky shot down one bomber. “One of the destroyers picked up three German airmen who stated that they knew all about the convoy sailing, and had been waiting for us,” reported Captain Roberts, the Kentucky’s new master. “Personally, I had not known until two hours before sailing where or when my ship was to proceed.”
In the second attack, a torpedo bomber came in at 200 feet, half a mile off the Kentucky’s port beam. “I saw three splashes in the water,” said Roberts, “and could faintly see the wakes approaching the convoy. I immediately altered course hard to starboard and managed to avoid them. The cruiser HMS Liverpool and the Dutch merchant vessel Tanimbar were both struck by these torpedoes.”
The Tanimbar, which was carrying ammunition and aviation fuel in five-gallon cans, sank in seven minutes, with thirty men killed. The second torpedo blew a huge hole in the new cruiser Liverpool, and she had to be towed back to Gibraltar. Volunteers were given an extra tot of rum for retrieving the bodies of the twelve men who were steamed to death in the engine room.
After the Illustrious disaster, the Admiralty had stopped sending its most valuable ships into the treacherous Sicilian Narrows, which pinch the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and the island of Pantelleria. Stukas flew into the narrows from the nearby North African airfields that Rommel had taken back, U-boats gathered just inside the mouth of the narrows, and fast E-boats lurked in the dark shallows in the middle of the night.
At dusk, as planned, the battleship, both aircraft carriers, three of the four cruisers, and seven destroyers turned back to Gibraltar. The remaining ships maneuvered from two columns to one as they steamed into the narrows, with the Kentucky last in the line of five merchantmen, moving at 12 knots and zigzagging to dodge torpedoes.
As Operation Harpoon was steaming in blackness toward Malta, Admiral Cunningham was in London, packing for his new job behind a desk in Washington, and he wasn’t happy about it. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, had insisted to a reluctant Churchill that he needed Cunningham as head of the Admiralty delegation there. It didn’t help that Cunningham felt that the man replacing him as C in C of the Mediterranean, Admiral Henry Harwood, was not up to the job.
“So as to free our naval forces if the convoy is cornered,” Harwood had cabled Churchill before Operation Harpoon began, “I intend to arrange for the merchant ships to be scuttled, as by doing this they will release the warships for offensive purposes against the enemy, or, if this is impossible, for a rapid return through the bombing areas. What I particularly want to avoid is the loss of both escorts and convoy.”
What Churchill wanted to avoid was the loss of Malta. The whole point of the warships was to protect the merchant ships, not attack the enemy. And how could a man like Churchill read the words “rapid return” without hearing “run from the fight” ring in his ears like the boom of a fifteen-inch gun?
The dark night in the Sicilian Narrows passed without any attacks on Operation Harpoon. But as the sun rose on the Kentucky, shells from six-inch guns started flying from the east, as if El Sol were spitting bullets at her bow. Admiral Alberto Da Zara had raced overnight from Palermo on the north side of Sicily, with two cruisers and five destroyers, to stand between the convoy and Malta.
Captain C. C. Hardy, commanding Operation Harpoon in the antiaircraft cruiser Cairo, sent his five largest destroyers ahead to fight off the Italian warships. The leading destroyer took twelve hits, and Cairo was hit twice as she tried to hide the merchant ships behind a smoke screen.
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sp; Then, in perfect coordination with the shelling from the warships, the Italian bombers arrived.
A Stuka dive-bombed the MS Chant, a 5,600-ton Danish freighter with an American crew carrying aviation gas, ammunition, and coal. All but three men jumped overboard before her superstructure collapsed from the explosions, and she quickly sank. Another merchantman, the Burdwan, was disabled and abandoned.
From “Monkey Island,” the platform over the bridge, Captain Roberts watched a Ju 88 dive at the Kentucky and drop two bombs that “straddled the poop,” said the third mate. Giant columns of water crashed on deck.
The chief engineer reported that the main generator steam pipe was fractured and that without electricity, he could neither fill the boilers nor raise steam. He was overwhelmed by the complexity of the Kentucky’s engine room, having had just three days in Gibraltar to learn the Westinghouse steam turbine engines, the Brown-Curtiss water tube boilers, and the elaborate electrical system. The fracture in the steam pipe was repairable, but he didn’t have the know-how. He desperately needed the help of the Texas Company’s American engineer, who had been with the Kentucky for nearly a year, all during its construction and trials, and had wanted to stay with the ship to Malta. But when the Ministry of War Transport took over a ship, it became an all-British affair. Politics and protocol doomed the Kentucky and threatened the survival of Malta.
The minesweeper Hebe began to tow Kentucky but could make only 5 knots, so Captain Hardy sent back a destroyer to help. Then, he reported, “I reconsidered and cancelled this order as I came to the conclusion that I could not afford to immobilise one of the three remaining fleet destroyers for this purpose, while the threat from enemy surface vessels was considerable.”
True to Admiral Harwood’s intentions, the convoy left the disabled Kentucky behind, “like a stranded whale,” said the third mate.
It appears from Captain Hardy’s report, a rambling jumble of sixty items full of contradictions and impossibilities, that he changed his mind about orders to the convoy three times in three hours. He finally took a page out of Harwood’s manual and ordered the Kentucky’s master, Captain Roberts, to scuttle his ship.
But there were no explosive charges in any spaces for scuttling, because there hadn’t been time in Gibraltar to install them. The Kentucky had a strong honeycomb structure with welded seams. The minesweepers Badsworth and Hebe, sent by Captain Hardy to sink her, didn’t have the firepower for the job.
Meanwhile, Admiral Da Zara had sent a cruiser and two destroyers around to the rear of the convoy, where the Kentucky drifted, abandoned. The British minesweepers cut out when the mast of the Italian cruiser Montecuccoli appeared on the horizon, leaving the Kentucky and her load of precious fuel to the enemy. Except for a few scorches, a broken steam line, and some destroyed wiring, there wasn’t a scratch on her. All Da Zara needed to do was hook up the two destroyers to Kentucky and tow her back to Pantelleria. Captain Hardy had effectively handed Malta to the Axis.
But Admiral Da Zara dropped it. “Arriving at the scene, the Italians saw the sea strewn with debris, and all over the horizon were the burning ships and those left behind to help them,” reveals the official Italian history. “The tanker Kentucky had only a small fire aboard, but several shells from the Montecuccoli and then a torpedo from the Oriani caused her to explode in flames like a huge funeral pyre, and shortly thereafter she sank.”
The irony was “most convenient,” said Hardy. Admiral Da Zara was given a medal by Mussolini.
The remains of the convoy reached Malta in the middle of the night. Just outside the harbor, four ships struck mines; one destroyer sank, two were damaged, and the fourth and biggest of the five freighters, the 10,400-ton Orari, was holed and lost much of her cargo just outside the breakwater. Glistening waves of oil lapped ashore in the morning sun.
The Admiralty said that Captain Hardy’s decision to scuttle the Kentucky had been justified by the safe arrival of one and a half freighters. The Royal Navy said that he had “acted throughout with conspicuous courage and resource in the handling of his force for the protection of the convoy.”
There’s no record of what Churchill might have said about the abandonment, botched scuttling, and ultimate loss of the Kentucky to Italian guns. He must have believed the sorry story would have been different if Cunningham had been there, but at this point he didn’t care who was at fault. He knew one thing: a tanker had to get through to Malta or the island was lost. There was one more moonless period before Malta would have to be evacuated.
On June 16, the day after Kentucky went down, he wrote a “Most Secret” message to the First Lord, the First Sea Lord, and his chief of staff, General Lord Ismay.
“It will be necessary to make another attempt to run a convoy into Malta,” began the memo. “The fate of the island is at stake, and if the effort to relieve it is worth making, it is worth making on a great scale. Strong battleship escort capable of fighting the Italian battle squadron and strong Aircraft Carrier support would seem to be required. Also at least a dozen fast supply ships, for which super-priority over all civil requirements must be given.”
The memo ended, “I shall be glad to know in the course of the day what proposals can be made, as it will be right to telegraph to Lord Gort, thus preventing despair in the population. He must be able to tell them: ‘The Navy will never abandon Malta.’”
CHAPTER 13 •••
MALTA’S LAST HOPE
Five days had passed since the Santa Elisa had arrived in Newport and been loaded with coal. On June 16, the day that Winston Churchill told the Admiralty that there would be another convoy to Malta under the next dark moon, the Santa Elisa’s coal was off-loaded, “without a word of explanation,” said Captain Thomson.
The next morning, before leaving 10 Downing Street and boarding his special train, Churchill dictated a note to the king that began, “In case of my death in the journey I am about to undertake…” He was bound for the Firth of Clyde, where there was a Yankee Clipper flying boat waiting to take him to Washington.
Churchill’s death on such a strenuous journey in time of war was always a possibility. On this trip there was the added risk of attack by enemy fighters, especially since the Germans would have intercepted any messages from Colonel Fellers about the trip. The British had finally figured out that intelligence was being stolen from Fellers, so they had ordered him back to Washington, but that had occurred only on the previous day.
Churchill wrote another note, to Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee:
The First Sea Lord has given me four alternative schemes for a further attempt to victual Malta from the West. You should obtain this paper from him. Of these schemes the first is the most satisfactory, but it depends upon American help for which I will ask the President. Meanwhile I have told the First Sea Lord to begin loading the ten supply ships.
We are absolutely bound to save Malta in one way or the other. I am relying upon you to treat the whole question of the relief of Malta as vitally urgent, and to keep at it with the Admiralty till a solution is reached. Keep me advised so that I can do my best with the President.
The message reveals that it had been Churchill’s order to load the Santa Elisa. These words were Captain Thomson’s missing explanation.
Churchill feared that President Roosevelt was “getting a little off the rails,” meaning that FDR was clinging to the idea that the United States should enter the war in Europe with an invasion of France from the English Channel, instead of North Africa from the Mediterranean. Churchill believed that a premature invasion of France was “the only way in which we could possibly lose this war” and that the trip to Washington to advance this argument was necessary.
While he was flying across the Atlantic, messages were sent ahead for him. On June 18, the Chiefs of Staff wrote to General Ismay:
1. We have considered the means of getting oil to Malta in the next convoy. The only really satisfactory solution is to ask the President to lend a 15 knot Am
erican oiler for this purpose. The “OHIO” is due in the Clyde on the 20th June, which would give time for her to be fitted with paravanes, A.A. armament, confidential books etc. British gun crews would be provided but it is highly desirable to retain American crew who are trained to work the Diesel engines.
The final item:
5. We attach greatest importance to obtaining “OHIO” with crew and request that Prime Minister approaches President as soon as possible.
The SS Ohio, Kentucky’s faster big sister, was Malta’s last hope.
The prime minister’s entourage included his doctor, Sir Charles Wilson; his secretary, his clerk, his valet, Frank Sawyers (finder and keeper of the Turkish cigars), a bodyguard from Scotland Yard, and stewards. The seventy-four seats in the spacious Clipper cabin had been replaced by a dining saloon and bunks, so everyone got a good night’s sleep during the twenty-seven-hour flight. There was also a galley serving delicious meals washed down by brandy and champagne. Shortly before landing, Churchill asked, “Where’s dinner?” He was told that meals were now being served on “sun time,” and the prime minister replied, “I go by tummy time, and I want my dinner!” He got it—they all did—and he ate a second dinner at the British Embassy that evening, after the pilot passed near the Washington Monument so Churchill could get a good look, before landing on the Potomac.
The next morning Churchill flew up to Roosevelt’s estate, in Hyde Park, New York, on the steep banks of the Hudson River, where the president immediately took him on a tour. They had planned to talk that afternoon about how to cooperate on the research and building of the atom bomb, but Roosevelt needed more information from Washington, so it was postponed until the next day.
Churchill got along famously with Harry Hopkins, FDR’s curious right-hand man. “I told Harry Hopkins about the different points on which I wanted decisions, and he talked them over with the President, so that the ground was prepared and the President’s mind armed upon each subject.”
