At All Costs

by Sam Moses

  The German High Command has just announced a naval victory in the Mediterranean. Here is the report. At 1 p.m. today, Central European time, one of our U-boats successfully torpedoed and sank a large British aircraft carrier. This carrier was part of an exceptionally heavily escorted convoy which is heading eastward toward Malta. Operations against this convoy will continue.

  CHAPTER 25 •••

  BAD DAY FOR SECRET WEAPONS

  As the men on the Santa Elisa were listening to the news from Berlin at midnight on August 11, two Liberator bombers and nine Bristol Beaufighters from Malta were raiding the Elmas and Decimomannu airfields on Sardinia. The Beaufighter had four 20 mm cannons in its thimble-shaped nose and six .30-caliber machine guns in the wings, and was excellent at night. Malta’s commanding air officer, Keith Park, loved that capability in the Beaufighter and used it whenever he could. But he was furious because more Liberators were supposed to have been sent by the RAF command in Egypt, to cover for Operation Pedestal. It was the same old story: Malta gets the hind tit.

  “It is felt that a very considerable effort could have been given to the success of this operation [Pedestal], had sufficient night bombers been able to operate over the enemy aerodromes on the required days,” he reported. “Had the hoped-for total of 30 sorties been achieved, the story of this convoy might have had a happier ending.”

  But Park was pleased with the performance of his pilots. “Added to the success of this ‘shoot-up’ was the fact that the Beaufighters were able to report the vital information that two Italian cruisers were just leaving Cagliari harbor,” he said.

  The Italian cruisers were commanded by Admiral Da Zara, gunning for the total wipeout that had escaped him after the Battle of Pantelleria, as the Italians called Operation Harpoon. Two light cruisers with six-inch guns were steaming toward a rendezvous with more warships coming from Sicily. They planned to descend on the convoy below Pantelleria at first light on August 13, to annihilate whatever was left of the merchantmen as they staggered through the Sicilian Narrows after the bombers, submarines, and fast E-boats were through with them.

  The convoy sailors never left their battle stations that night. Extra lookouts tensely searched for U-boats on the black water in the moonless night, knowing their chances of spotting a periscope were naught. Mostly they just held their breath and hoped their ship wouldn’t be seen. Some men dozed fearfully on the steel decks under their guns, using their life belts for pillows. They listened to the swish of swells against the hulls of their ships cutting giant Zs in the sea at 15 knots, and wondered when the peaceful sounds would end with a bang that might kill them.

  The thunder of a V-12 engine broke the stillness before sunrise on August 12. Admiral Lyster sent up eight planes at first pink light, and another four later in the morning to patrol in wide patterns around the convoy.

  Just after 0900, nineteen Luftwaffe Ju 88s approached, and sixteen Fleet Air Arm fighters intercepted them 20 miles from the convoy. The fighters swooped down out of the sun from behind and shot down four of the Junkers. The rest were met with an inspired antiaircraft barrage that caused some of the attackers to drop their bombs early and bank northeast, back to Sardinia. Two more were shot down, one of them by the U.S. Navy gunner at the 40 mm Bofors on the bow of the Santa Elisa.

  “Four Junkers 88s flew across our bow from port to starboard,” reported Ensign Suppiger. “Our Bofors commenced firing and hit one plane at about 1500 yards range; this aircraft was hit in the tail and began smoking. One minute later it crashed into the sea about five miles off our starboard quarter.”

  “The Bofors was a great antiaircraft weapon,” said Larsen. “I was glad I had the chance to go to school on the gun in Belfast. I liked the Oerlikons, but the Bofors had more range and power. Sometimes I wished I was shooting it, but I needed to stay on the bridge.”

  Some of the ships tuned their radios to the traffic between the fighters and aircraft carriers, and they broadcast the dialogue over the ships’ speakers. Everybody’s favorite pilot was Red Leader, a dry wit whose parodied Yankee drawl kept the sailors in stitches and caused the enemy to wonder if the U.S. carrier Wasp were along.

  “We were listening to our old friend Red Leader going for some bandits,” said Captain Hill on the destroyer Ledbury. “Then control called him: ‘Red Leader, Red Leader…’ and our hearts sank at the silence. Control called again, and then Red Two came up: ‘Red Leader has just been shot down.’”

  A parachute drifted into the sea, and Ledbury raced to rescue the pilot, hoping it would be Red Leader.

  “I put the ship alongside, and they hauled him up in the nets,” said Hill. “I leaned over the bridge. ‘What is he, Jimmy?’

  “‘A Hun, sir,’ he called back.”

  Three more parachutes drifted down together. Jimmy asked the captain if they were going to rescue them, too.

  “They’re a bomber’s crew,” replied Hill. “Let them go to hell.”

  The German prisoner was handed a jug of lime juice and a stack of sandwiches and told to go around and feed the men at their battle stations. “The most interesting thing about him was that the nails of his boots were made of wood,” said Hill, adding that Germany must have been using all of its steel for bombs.

  The straightforward air attacks weren’t working for the Luftwaffe, so the Italians took over in the afternoon, bringing motobombe. As described by Warship International magazine, the 900-pound motobomba might have been designed by Rube Goldberg. “These were self-propelled mines which were dropped by parachute, and, upon contact with the water, an automatic mercury device activated an electric motor which turned a propeller that drove the missile in an erratic circular path of about 15 km radius.”

  Admiral Syfret saw the motobomba parachutes about two miles ahead of the convoy, and sounded the siren to steer his five dozen ships hard to port. They made a gorgeous high-speed 90-degree turn to the north, swung wide of the motobombe, and left them spinning aimlessly and harmlessly around in the water, like a swarm of fat bugs.

  The planes that dropped the motobombe were escorted by new long-nosed Macchi MC.202 Folgore fighters, replacing the MC.200 Saetta that had appeared over Malta in 1940. The MC.202 was powered by an inverted V-12 Alfa Romeo engine, and it could match the 372-mph top speed of a Spitfire, while its rate of climb was faster by 700 feet per minute. But the morning’s second debut by an Italian weapon failed as badly as the first, as antiaircraft fire knocked down two of the new Folgores and damaged eight more.

  Eight Fiat CR.42 Falco fighters, a small flock of Falcons, sneaked inside the Hurricane screen. Indomitable sent some Grumman Martlets after them, and five of the Falcons either spiraled or nose-dived into the sea.

  Next came forty-three Italian torpedo bombers, escorted by thirteen Reggianne Re.2001 fighters, which also used the Alfa Romeo V-12 engine. The convoy fighters scattered the SM.79 and SM.84 torpedo bombers but couldn’t keep them away from their designated targets, the cargo ships. They skimmed over the water like dragonflies, coming at the convoy from the port bow, starboard bow, and starboard quarter. One flew so close along the Santa Elisa that Lonnie Dales casually waved at the pilot from his Oerlikon on the bridge. The pilot waved back, knowing that the Santa Elisa couldn’t fire, because there was another merchant ship on the other side of the plane. It was a daring maneuver that enemy pilots often used.

  “The sky seemed to be full of planes,” said Allan Shaw on the Ohio. “How the hell they ever got through the spider’s web of tracers being fired at them, I’ll never know.”

  At least three bombers and one fighter bit the waves during this attack. The battleship Rodney got into the act, firing her sixteen-inch guns in an attempt to bring down a bunch of aircraft all at once.

  “About fourteen torpedo planes flew down our side, well out of range, and then turned towards us and seemed to be trying to come in from the quarter,” said Captain Hill. “The Rodney trained her sixteen-inch guns and loosed off a few broadsides. There was an
eruption of huge shell splashes on the horizon, and when this had cleared there was no sign of the planes. I cannot believe they were all blown to bits, but they all had certainly veered off to find an easier gap in the defenses.”

  Eleven bombers and six fighters had been shot down that morning, and not one ship in the convoy was seriously damaged. “Cow shits,” the sailors sneered at the little bombs, even with six dead, when a 100-kilo fragmentation bomb landed on the flight deck of the Victorious.

  In an afternoon broadcast by Italian state radio, Comando Supremo claimed that Axis bombers had sunk one destroyer and two merchant ships, while damaging two more merchantmen, a battleship, and three cruisers.

  As the false boasts from Rome flew out over the airwaves, General Rino Corso Fougier, the commander of Regia Aeronautica, was sending off the next secret weapon from Sardinia. He had come up with the idea himself. A three-engined SM.79 “flying buffalo” was loaded with two 1,000-kilogram megabombs, plus another 1,000 kilos of extra fuel, and a brave pilot took off in the bulging beast. At 13,000 feet he set a course due south for the convoy and bailed out over the sea.

  From there, an escort plane guided the big buffalo by radio, with a General Gabrielli at the controls. The target was Indomitable. But the awkward missile had a mind of its own, and as the general cursed and pounded the remote control, it flew over the convoy, over the coast, and on for another 150 miles south over Algeria until it crashed into a mountainside. The crater smoked for days afterward. The Algerian French were not impressed.

  Meanwhile, Admiral Da Zara continued to steam east from Sardinia with two light cruisers and three destroyers. Two heavy cruisers and five destroyers steamed west to meet them, having left Sicily’s Messina Harbor at sunrise. They intended to rendezvous that night in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of the tiny island of Ustica, turn due south, and drop down into the Mediterranean, swing around the east side and under Pantelleria, and come out with guns blazing as the convoy cleared the west side of the island.

  Da Zara knew that the aircraft carriers and battleships were planning to turn back to Gibraltar before then, as they always did. Operation Pedestal might have dodged the attacks by motobombe and torpedo bombers and the flying buffalo loaded with explosives, but it would not be able to fight off the Italian warships.

  CHAPTER 26 •••

  ITHURIEL AND INDOMITABLE

  The afternoon air attack had scarcely ended when the eleven Italian submarines lying in wait for the convoy, just north of the island of Galita and the Algerian coast, began closing in. Admiral Burrough suggested to Admiral Syfret that each destroyer in the U-boat screen drop a depth charge at random every ten minutes, to try to keep the subs away. Maybe it helped and maybe it didn’t. Over the next two hours the convoy was harassed by Emo, which fired four bow torpedoes at a cruiser but missed; Avorio, which was depth-charged and hid motionless for five hours; and Dandolo, frustrated by the ships’ sharp zigzagging and chased by dogged destroyers with more depth charges.

  When a depth charge is launched from a destroyer, it looks like an oil drum that’s trying to fly. It’s packed with 300 pounds of TNT and thrown off the ship for 50 yards before gravity takes over and pulls it into the sea like the clumsy can it is. For a few seconds after it goes under, the water is still. The drum wobbles and tumbles as it sinks at 8.5 feet per second, until it reaches the depth where it’s been set to explode. There’s a muted whump, and a single white ring speeds out from the spot on the surface where the depth charge landed. Bursting upward from the center of the ring comes a beautiful white geyser, shooting skyward like a spire of snow 50 feet tall, with an avalanche rolling out of the top. But it’s white only if the depth charge misses. If it finds its target, the water is an ugly, oily, deathly brown.

  The Santa Elisa carried three depth charges, but they were only to be used if she got separated from the convoy and were being stalked by a U-boat. Because the compressed air launcher was mounted on the main deck and the main deck was third mate Larsen’s territory and he was curious about anything mechanical, he had the depth-charge drill all figured out, just in case. Ensign Suppiger was technically in charge of depth charging, but Suppy was in charge of a lot of things that Larsen could handle better. A .45-caliber pistol, for example, which would soon come between them.

  At 1649, the destroyer Ithuriel spotted the periscope of the Italian sub Cobalto 1,500 yards off the starboard bow. Cobalto had already been depth-charged by the destroyer Tartar and then by Zetland and then by Pathfinder and Zetland again. She’d been battered so hard that she was leaking all over and driven so deep that the crew’s noses and ears were bleeding.

  “Speed was increased to 24 knots, wheel put hard-a-starboard,” reported Ithuriel’s captain, Lieutenant Commander D. H. Maitland-Makgill-Crichton. “U-Boat alarm given. Stopwatch started for a visual attack. Asdic [sonar] put on to the bearing. Depth charges set to 50 foot. Many others had by now sighted the periscope, and the Conning Tower actually broke surface for about 10 seconds or more.”

  Cobalto quickly submerged, knowing she had been busted. Ithuriel dropped five depth charges. “One of the charges brought up oil,” said Captain Maitland-Makgill-Crichton.

  Cobalto resurfaced, desperate for air.

  As Ithuriel sped back toward Cobalto, sharp bullets from the five-inch gun on her bow blasted holes clean through the sub’s conning tower. Armor-piercing shells had been loaded into the gun by mistake. But the only weapon that mattered now was the sharp end of the destroyer.

  “Full speed ahead was ordered to Ram,” reported the young captain. “Some of the U-boat’s crew were seen to be abandoning ship.” Wide-eyed at the destroyer bearing down on them, they were diving off the deck and frantically swimming away as fast as they could.

  “Full astern was rung down so that our speed on impact was about 12 knots. We struck her at an angle of about 60 degrees, half-way between Conning Tower and Stern, the starboard side.”

  There was a terrific gnash of steel and shower of sparks, and Ithuriel pulled back. Crewmen boarded Cobalto, but not for long, as the submarine quickly sank. Ithuriel picked up forty of Cobalto’s crew, including the captain.

  Admiral Syfret didn’t think much of Maitland-Makgill-Crichton’s exuberance. “Our vigilant A/S [anti-submarine] screen had the satisfaction of achieving a ‘kill’ of one Italian submarine,” he reported. “H.M.S. Ithuriel delivered the coup-de-grace to this submarine by ramming it, and in doing so badly damaged herself and put her asdic gear out of action. The submarine, when it came to the surface after being depth-charged, was obviously ‘all in,’ and I thought the expensive method chosen by the Commanding Officer to sink it quite unnecessary. Moreover, I was disturbed at the amount of time he wasted in picking up survivors, and at his absence from the screen when an air attack was impending.”

  But an air attack was always impending. That was the state of Operation Pedestal.

  General Fougier, chief of Regia Aeronautica, wanted to be sure his air force was cocked and ready when the convoy approached Sicily. He had rushed 101 more planes from the mainland to three Sicilian airfields: Catania on the east coast, Comiso in the southeast, and especially Trapani on the tip of the west coast, 130 miles from where the convoy would appear at dusk: dive-bomb time.

  Fougier had sent every Stuka he could spare to Trapani. His scheme with the remote-controlled, megabomb-carrying flying buffalo had failed, but he was still determined to get the aircraft carrier Indomitable, which he and others among Comando Supremo still believed might be the Wasp.

  “At 1830 the first enemy formation was sighted,” reported Admiral Syfret. “It is believed that there were from 100 to 120 enemy aircraft in the vicinity, many of them fighters. Against them we had 22 fighters in the air, who continually harassed and broke up the enemy formations.”

  It’s funny how the admirals saw things differently. Syfret, the warship man, saw gallant outnumbered fighter pilots breaking up enemy formations. Lyster, the aircraft man, saw the enemy fo
rmations dividing into smaller groups and spreading out, so his fighters could only scatter to chase them, losing any protection they might have been able to give one another.

  The Axis aircraft had come from Sardinia and Sicily, joining forces in the sky. The Italian dive-bomber pilots had been trained by the Luftwaffe in their Stukas, and the German torpedo-bomber pilots had been trained by Regia Aeronautica in their SM.79s. And after getting thrashed in the morning, this time the Axis bombers had escorts, led by the swift Messerschmitt Bf 109s.

  The Indomitable’s captain, Tom Troubridge, a direct descendant of Horatio Nelson’s Captain Troubridge, was fat and fearless. He had commanded the battleship Nelson during three previous convoys to Malta. This time he watched the attack coming on the radar screen of his aircraft carrier. He thought there might have been as many as 170 enemy aircraft, lined up in layers and coming from all directions.

  “In all there were at least 11 formations at heights varying from 10,000 to 25,000 feet,” he reported. “The Ju87s appeared suddenly from up sun, out of the smoky blue sky which was rendered hazy by funnel gases, and delivered their attack before adequate gunfire could be brought to bear.”

  “We had been taken in by the oldest trick in the book,” said airman Hector Mackenzie, who had been standing on Indomitable’s stern. “A major force draws off the defenders down sun, whilst a hitting force dives out of the sun during the diversion. There, diving at us in perfect formation of two Vees, were the Junkers 87s.

  “The pilots were very brave men. They held their course straight down at us, through the flak. At around 500 feet, we could see the bombs drop away, and whilst they hit home, the Stukas pulled out of their dive at sea level and flew up the lines of the ships, in confidence that they would not be fired at for fear of hitting one’s own ships.”

  “The Indomitable looked as if she had disturbed a hive of bees,” said Roger Hill. “The dive bombers were zooming down on her, and our own fighters were following the enemy planes right into the carrier’s gunfire. It was an amazing sight to see. This synchronized attack by over 100 planes, covered by German and Italian fighters, almost swamped our fighter defense.”