by Sam Moses
His restrained words were a discreet way of calling the situation a “balzup,” which was a favorite British expression during the war, akin to the American “snafu” (situation normal, all fouled up). Syfret knew Malta needed the thirty-eight Spitfires carried by Furious, but he told the Admiralty he wished they had thought of it sooner.
There were a number of problems with Operation Bellows. Spitfires had never flown off the ancient Furious before—not once. She had been the first aircraft carrier in history to land a plane while under way, in 1917, and since then her flight deck had been extended to fly off more powerful planes, leaving a sharp hump in the middle. The thirty-eight Spitfires for Malta were fitted with older propellers that spun at a lazy 2,650 rpm, making barely enough speed for the planes to get airborne.
Back in the Clyde, the Spitfires’ RAF group captain had made a test takeoff. He had twisted the boost of his supercharged V-12 Rolls-Royce Merlin engine up to an eye-popping 18 psi (“pulling the tit of the Spit”), and even with 30 knots of wind over the deck and his plane backed all the way to the far edge of the flight deck, he avoided by only feet what the pilots called a “splash over the sharp end.”
So the Air Ministry combed the country for forty new airscrews, or propellers, which were delivered to Glasgow; but it took three days, and in the meantime, Operation Pedestal had left without the Furious. Airplane mechanics worked around the clock for ten days to install the new airscrews, as Furious raced to catch up. They also adjusted and tested the engines, radio transmitters, cannons, machine guns, hydraulics, electrical and compressed air systems, oxygen, and instruments, any one or more of which the Spitfire pilots knew might still malfunction.
A pilot might climb into his cockpit on the flight deck, give his mechanic a final serious look, and ask, “Are you sure everything will work?” And the petty officer might cheerfully reply, “Maybe, sir!”
The Spitfires were painted desert camouflage and fitted with a huge tropical air filter under the sharp nose, giving the plane a strong chin. They carried long-distance fuel tanks, aerodynamic 100-gallon cans strapped under the fuselage between the wheels, to be dropped into the sea when empty, like a beer can tossed off a redneck’s fishing boat. Later in the war, the auxiliary fuel tanks were actually filled with beer for the troops fighting in France. The delivery system evolved until finally wooden beer kegs were attached under the wings in place of depth charges.
There wasn’t much room for error in the 550 or 600 miles between the Furious and Malta. Pilots carried only a scroll map, compass, and watch, and radio silence had to be maintained. They were told to point the plane east at an economical 165 mph for three and a half hours, and look for a twelve-mile-wide limestone strip that looked like a golden leaf floating on a big blue lake. Hug the North African coast, and fly at 20,000 feet in the areas where Messerschmitt 109s were known to roam. Watch your back around the Hobgoblin—the island of Pantelleria. And if you wander toward Sicily, you’re dead.
Some of the pilots were the best in the RAF, because after the Battle of Britain they wanted to go where the action was. But most of them were fresh meat and very young. They were told that if their plane didn’t lift off the flight deck, suffered a splash over the sharp end, and didn’t immediately sink, they were not to climb out of the cockpit and try to swim away, because the ship would run over them. It’s better to sink with your plane, hold your breath while the aircraft carrier passes above, and then swim out of the cockpit to the surface. The advice was delivered with a straight face and met with a combination of awe and appropriate irreverence.
In the Clyde, there was one successful takeoff with a Spitfire using one of the new 3,100-rpm airscrews, and that was a relief, but no one had taken off with the extra 750 pounds that the full belly tank added. So the Spitfires’ ammunition was removed to lighten the load, which Lieutenant Geoffrey Wellum, age twenty-one, discovered when he was in the hangar with his plane, carefully packing his parachute for the next day’s flight to Malta.
Whilst absorbing this, a voice from behind me says: “Everything all right, Geoffrey?”
I look round to see Group Captain Walter Churchill, who is obviously generally keeping his eye on things.
“Yes thank you, sir. I’m still learning. As you can see, I’m watching my guns being loaded with cigarettes.”
“Bloody marvellous, isn’t it? To make absolutely sure of this take-off, it has been decided to take all the ammunition out so as to save considerable weight. I agreed because fags don’t weigh very much and things on Malta have been pretty tough. It’ll do the troops’ morale a power of good to get some cheap smokes.”
“That’s very kind and considerate of us, sir. I hope the Germans and Italians don’t know.”
“What if they do? You couldn’t hit any of them even if you did have ammunition, Geoffrey.”
“I know you to be right, sir, but it would be nice to be in a position to keep on trying.”
Operation Pedestal was 584 miles from Malta when the first Spitfires flew off Furious, at 1230 hours on August 11. At 1508 a final group of seven planes took off, and with the landing of thirty-six Spitfires at Takali and Luqa airfields, Operation Bellows was complete. Only one was lost, without a trace.
At 1830 Furious began steaming at high speed back to Gibraltar, with an escort of six destroyers: Amazon, Wrestler, and Venomous on the port wing and Keppel, Wolverine, and Malcolm on the starboard wing. That night the small convoy was steaming with no lights when Wolverine’s radar picked up a submarine on the surface.
“0054½, dark night, no moon, bright stars, speed 21 knots, on port leg of zig-zag No. 12, R.D./F Type 271 contact was obtained, range 5,000 yds,” reported its young captain, Lieutenant Commander Peter Gretton.
He didn’t hesitate. The crew of the 700-ton Italian sub Dagabur never saw the snarling jaws of the Wolverine coming at them broadside at 26 knots. “We climbed all over the sub’s conning tower and cut her in half,” said Gretton. “We lost thirty feet of our bow, but by miracle the forepeak was bent over to the waterline and it sealed most of the damage.”
The destroyer Malcolm said they heard survivors yelling in the water but didn’t pick them up. They thought it was a German U-boat.
Furious wasted no time taking on twenty-three more Spitfires in Gibraltar and going back into the Mediterranean to fly them off. Malta was going to need them.
CHAPTER 23 •••
DIVE OF THE EAGLE
German intelligence had seen Operation Pedestal coming a week earlier. On August 4, U-73 had been undergoing repairs at its cave in La Spezia, Italy, when urgent orders came from Admiral Karl Dönitz to go after the convoy: find an aircraft carrier and sink it.
Kapitanleutnant Helmut Rosenbaum of U-73 knew the Eagle. Nine years earlier, in the Chinese port of Tsingtau, when he had been a cadet on the cruiser Königsberg, he had been invited aboard the Eagle for cocktails and dinner by some of the British officers. Now he was trying to kill them.
As he lay in wait sixty miles off the coast of North Africa, he heard the propellers of the British ships on his hydrophones. The convoy was right on schedule. When he raised the periscope of U-73, he saw five destroyers and knew their sonar would locate his boat if he allowed them to come much closer. But beyond the destroyers he could see the Eagle, about four miles away, which he recognized by her unique high pilothouse on a tall tripod mast.
As he peered through the U-73’s leaking periscope—he had rushed out of La Spezia before the repairs were finished—he ordered a brandy to calm himself down. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen him like this,” said the first mate, Helmut Spieler.
He submerged to 100 feet and sped away. Eagle was at the tail end of the starboard column, and he stalked her for two and a half hours. When a destroyer dashed past U-73 at a distance of 200 feet, Rosenbaum made his move. He boldly slipped between two destroyers and passed in front of the battleship Nelson, at a depth of about 100 feet. He fully expected the destroyers to discover U
-73 and start dropping depth charges. He was prepared to die for the fatherland, although maybe not for the Führer; like so many German officers, he separated the two.
He gulped a second brandy.
But the destroyers’ sonar failed to pick up the 750-ton U-boat, because of the layered density in the water from currents of different temperatures. U-73 passed under the fourth column of the convoy, under the cruiser Charybdis, and sneaked down between the third and fourth columns, splitting the Ohio and the Santa Elisa.
Rosenbaum raised the periscope very slowly, because the water was calm and lookouts on the ships could see the slightest ripple. The Eagle was right before his eyes, a mere 500 meters away. He said it looked like a giant matchbox floating on a pond.
Eagle was zigging and zagging at 13 knots. She zigged away from him, hard to starboard. He knew she would come back. He tossed down a third brandy.
Finally the Eagle zagged toward him, hard to port, perfectly exposing all 667 feet of her port beam. He instructed four torpedoes to be set in a fan pattern and gave the command to fire. They were kissed good-bye and shot from the bow tubes of U-73 by a nineteen-year-old, the youngest man on the boat. U-73 was so close to the Eagle that only about 40 feet separated the torpedoes when they hit, sending rivers of oily brown water laced with debris and shards of metal hundreds of feet into the air.
The instant the teenager fired the torpedoes from the bow of U-73, Kapitan Rosenbaum took her down to 500 feet, a dangerous depth, nearly 200 feet more than the boat’s textbook maximum, and ordered silence. Icy water squirted from unfixed leaks. The Eagle’s last gasps and creaks and spooky moans carried underwater to the U-boat, whose crew listened in amazement, awe, and fear. Soon depth charges shook their ship. Three hours would pass before Rosenbaum could creep back to the surface. He raised the periscope, saw an empty sea, and sent a signal to Berlin announcing his success.
Convoy—15 destroyers and escort ships, 2 cruisers, 9 to 10 freighters, one aircraft carrier, probably one battleship. Fan shot against aircraft carrier. 4 hits from 500 meters distance. Strongly audible sinking noises.
—All clear!—
Rosenbaum
The morning after the sinking of the Eagle, Kapitan Rosenbaum of U-73 was a national hero in Germany and was called back to Berlin, where Hitler decorated him with the Iron Cross.
Two images have been fixed for more than six decades in the fading memories of the dwindling numbers of veterans of Operation Pedestal, from that still summer afternoon in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. One of them is surreal, a vivid and unbelievable picture of an aircraft carrier suddenly on its port side, with scores of men and a dozen airplanes sliding down the big flat deck like matchsticks and toys, pitching over the edge and tumbling into the sea.
The veterans say they can close their eyes and see it clearly, as if it were happening at this very moment. Their minds can’t erase the image of hundreds of shouting heads in the oily water, along with the dead bodies. The men and the flotsam and the ugly black slick, glistening under the midday sun on the dead flat sea. That was all that was left, eight minutes after the torpedoes hit.
Few of the ships in the convoy saw much of the sinking because they were far ahead, but both the Santa Elisa and Ohio were nearby. Santa Elisa’s liaison officer reported that the Eagle was 10 cables (1.15 land miles) off his ship’s starboard quarter, and Captain Mason said the Eagle was 1.5 miles off the starboard quarter of the Ohio.
Just before the torpedoes hit, said Lonnie Dales, “The weather was beautiful and the Mediterranean was flat calm. Right after lunch, we had a general alarm. We all dashed for our gun stations. This was the real thing!”
The general alarm was three long blasts, three shorts, three longs, three shorts. On the bridge, Captain Thomson shouted, “Keep your eyes peeled out there! One of the ships just spotted a torpedo wake!”
“I had been assigned a 20 mm Oerlikon on the port side of the bridge,” said Dales. “Upon coming out of the wardroom to run to the gun station, I witnessed the HMS Eagle being hit by three torpedoes, before turning over and sinking immediately. It was a very, very sad and pathetic sight to see the sailors and planes all sliding off the deck as she rolled over and went under. In a matter of minutes she was gone. There wasn’t even enough time to lower the lifeboats.”
“Eagle was turning hard to port, and I could see her planes warming up on her flight deck,” added the purser, Follansbee. “She was probably about to send off a patrol squadron, I thought. One of her planes had just started down her deck. Suddenly a huge geyser of water rose from the carrier’s port quarter. Then a second geyser rose amidships and a third rose from her bow. Three muffled explosions then came across the water. Automatically I looked at my watch. It was quarter past one. No one spoke as we stood hypnotized by the sight before us.
“The carrier was listing heavily to port, and the plane which had started to take off was roaring down the crazily sloping flight deck in a desperate effort to leave the stricken ship. I watched breathlessly as the plane approached the end of the flight deck. Then the carrier’s list increased and the plane slipped off the port side of the flight deck and plunged into the sea with a sickening splash. It was like a bad dream.”
Captain Lachlan Donald Mackintosh had been skipper of the Eagle for only a couple of months, but he had already endeared himself to the crew by wearing his kilt and playing his bagpipe when the Eagle entered port. He was the chief of Scotland’s Clan Mackintosh, fierce fighters whose Inverness roots reached back nearly eight hundred years. His great-grandfather, General Lachlan Mackintosh, had fought with George Washington against the hated redcoats after being driven out of the clan’s Highlands.
Now, as his ship listed, he clung to a bulkhead on the starboard gun deck, shouting commands to lower some ropes so the men could climb down to the antitorpedo bulge on the hull and drop into the sea. Captain Mackintosh finally climbed down the rope himself and held on to his gold-braided cap as he leaped into the water, because he was still the captain of the men, if no longer of a ship. He swam to a Carley raft, about four by six feet and made of canvas and wood, with a bottom of meshed rope stiffened by battens. The men who were crammed on the raft greeted him with the ship’s war cry, “Up the Eagle’s!,” before they pulled him aboard and paddled away as fast as they could.
“I jumped from the gun deck, where Captain Mackintosh was,” said petty officer George Amyes, now eighty-four, living in Hull on the North Sea, the town where he grew up and where his parents were killed by German bombs during the war. “When the first torpedo hit, I hadn’t the faintest idea what the thump was—I thought we hit a whale or something like that. Then the ship began to list, and I saw Marines jumping from the flight deck, hurtling past the gun deck, and I figured it out.
“There were two nonswimmers sitting on the antitorpedo blister who were too petrified to jump. An officer came along and told them, ‘Now’s your chance to learn,’ and he grabbed them by the hands and the three of them leaped together about thirty feet into the water.”
The flight deck of the Eagle, just above the gun deck, was more than 50 feet above water when the ship was level, and its starboard edge got higher and higher as the nineteen-year-old Les Goodenough found himself perched there. “It had never entered ’me head that we’d get sunk,” he said from his home in Reading, outside London. He’d been manning the starboard quarter Oerlikon when the torpedoes hit, and he struggled to release a Carley raft. But just below him a sailor was sitting in another Carley raft that was dangling from a ring bolt, and he was yelling for someone to release it, so Goodenough climbed down and joined him.
They cut the raft loose and glided 90 feet down a slope that was nearly 45 degrees by now. The port edge of the flight deck was already submerged, and the raft splashed into the thick oil on top of the water. Goodenough shouted, “Paddle!” as the suction from the sinking ship pulled them back, but they got away. They became known as the “toboggan team” in the stories they shared wit
h their mates afterward.
Two hundred and thirty-one men were lost. Many of the victims were nonswimmers who were afraid to leap; they clung to the ship and went down with her. Others were trapped inside. The Eagle was no bigger inside than a battleship, having been built as one in 1914, so there wasn’t a lot of room—sailors slung their hammocks wherever they could and competed for space with cockroaches and rats, which scurried along the beams in the hangars, staring defiantly down at them. When the ship began listing and the lights went out and the water rushed in, new sailors were frantically disoriented and prayed in the darkness for someone to lead them. The Eagle had four boiler rooms and three engine rooms, and all of the stokers in the B boiler room were lost, along with all of the greasers in the port engine room. There were other desperately lonely deaths. One sailor died behind bars in the brig. Compartments became steel coffins, which today hold skeletons on the floor of the sea, a thousand feet down.
No one will know how many were killed by the depth charges dropped by the warship escorts, aimlessly if not pointlessly—the navy had no idea where U-73 had come from or where she had gone. Immediately after the hits, the cruiser Charybdis, Eagle’s protector and partner for so long, angrily raced around and blindly launched depth charges. Destroyers followed. “Two destroyers were charging up and down dropping depth charges, and their obvious priority was killing submarines, not saving us,” said one survivor.
“It happened a lot in the war,” said Dr. Nixon of the destroyer Ledbury. “The destroyer captains didn’t understand. I think I was the only one who really understood the effect of a depth charge on a man in the water.”
