At All Costs (7 page)
CHAPTER 9 •••
DEBUT OF THE LUFTWAFFE
O
n 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
F
or 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 June, 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.
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 days 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.