Operation Pedestal

The Fleet that Battled to Malta 1942

Max Hastings

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008364946
• eBook ISBN: 9780008364960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An epic, intimate new account of one of the greatest naval dramas of World War II, from number one bestselling historian Max Hastings.

Operation Pedestal was a crucial relief mission that became an epic, bloody naval battle and a pivotal moment in the Second World War. In 1942, the Luftwaffe had a stranglehold on Malta. In the months of April and May, they dropped more bombs on the island than on London in the entire Blitz. British attempts to bring in supplies and reinforcements were failing with heavy losses, and the people on Malta were closing in on starvation as the Axis attempted to force their surrender.

Operation Pedestal saw an armada of fifty British ships, painstakingly loaded with food and medical supplies, ammunition and fuel, attempt to fight its way in convoy to the island. The ensuing battle was brutal on both sides, Italian submarines and German planes dealing serious damage alongside the naval skirmishing. Over the course of a few fierce days, Britain scraped a victory and ensured Malta’s survival – though at the loss of a horrifying number of ships and lives. It was an emblematic moment when, in the cruel accountancy of war, the price was worth paying.

In his signature brilliant style, Max Hastings gives a thrilling narrative of this little-known but crucial naval battle, retelling the intense action which perfectly encapsulates the spirit and power of the Royal Navy, surely the fiercest and most iconic fighting force of WW2.

1

‘It Would Be a Disaster of the First Magnitude’

1 MALTA

The Second World War evolved in some ways that none of the belligerents wished or anticipated, even those who started it. Hitler, preoccupied with his Slavonic and Anglo-Saxon foes, had no desire to fight a campaign around the Inland Sea. While he relished the direction of continental and race wars, in the words of Douglas Porch ‘the Mediterranean bored and exasperated him’. Mussolini’s flatulent ambitions were responsible for the launching of Italian campaigns in Libya, Albania and Greece, from which his forces had to be rescued by the Wehrmacht. Yet Hitler’s folly was that, having felt obliged to save his fellow dictator from humiliation, he declined to support the consequent operations in the Mediterranean theatre sufficiently strongly to secure a victory there, though this was probably within his reach.

Germany’s admirals had been attracted since 1940 to a belief that here was a region in which, alongside the paper-powerful Italian Navy, they could achieve a big success. The Kriegsmarine’s staff asserted at a conference with Hitler that the British fleet must be ‘driven out of the whole Mediterranean … destroyed’. To that end, in late 1941 more than twenty U-boats, a quarter of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s operational strength, were shifted from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and still more boats to the West African coast, to attack shipping destined for the Middle East. This change of priorities delighted the British Admiralty, preoccupied with protecting convoys from North America. In December, the primacy of the Atlantic was once again recognized in Berlin. But the Kriegsmarine’s faith persisted, in the possibility of a Mediterranean triumph.

Hitler’s admirals may have been right. It is possible to imagine a scenario whereby in May 1941 German paratroops seized Malta in place of Crete, the latter being strategically virtually worthless to both sides. With air superiority over almost the entire Mediterranean and a mere two or three extra divisions for Rommel, Axis forces could almost certainly have driven the British out of Egypt, crushed their last active field army and inflicted a humiliation that might have brought down Churchill’s government.

Instead, however, Germany invaded Russia while Malta remained in British hands, albeit precariously. A combination of intelligence about sailings provided by Ultra decrypts; Gibraltar-, Malta- and Egypt-based surface warships, submarines and aircraft; the Axis shortage of oil; together with attrition of Italy’s cargo shipping, kept Gen. Erwin Rommel’s forces in North Africa on short commons. The war cost Italy three-quarters of its merchant fleet, prompting an ailing Mussolini to say ‘my illness has a name: convoys’.

The little campaign fought by the British Eighth Army against the Afrika Korps and Italian troops sufficed to sustain an illusion of momentum in the British war effort, though until November 1942 never much more than twenty divisions were engaged on the two sides, compared with the four hundred Axis and Soviet formations locked in a death grapple in Russia. Though there were moments when the British feared that they faced absolute defeat in North Africa, Rommel was never quite strong enough to impose this at the end of an overstretched supply line. As long as the ‘Desert Fox’ was kept out of Alexandria and Cairo, the Royal Navy sustained warships and especially submarines in the Mediterranean, and the RAF denied mastery of the desert sky to the Axis, the struggle in the theatre served allied interests better than those of Hitler or Mussolini. This seldom seemed the case, however, to those charged with defending allied bastions by land, sea and air.

The British sentimentalize relations between themselves and the subject peoples of their empire, often with little justification. Nonetheless the affection and loyalty displayed towards the ‘Mother Country’ by the three hundred thousand inhabitants of Malta seemed sincere, indeed enthusiastic. Their feelings were strengthened by disdain for their northerly neighbours, though pre-war Malta depended upon Italy for 70 per cent of its food, fertilizer and animal fodder. As for the colonial masters, they cherished this rocky pimple as one of the few places in the Mediterranean and Middle East where they were liked. A London-born resident described the Maltese people as ‘kindly and smiling and good-mannered, tolerant of the strangeness of the British (“we have got used to you, you have been with us a long time now”)’. For Malta, as a community conscious of its smallness and isolation, even in the last years of empire the instinct was to cling to nurse for fear of something worse.

On 20 December 1940, twenty thousand Maltese lined Grand Harbour to cheer the arrival of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, aboard the battleship Warspite. By contrast, in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and other countries subject to wartime British thraldom, troops often had to be deployed to maintain control in the face of local hostility. In North Africa, following the 1942 allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria, some Arabs volunteered to fight alongside the Germans.

The novelist and traveller Paul Theroux has written, probably only half in jest, that Malta glories in war, because only then does this island eighteen miles by eight show its full worth. Before 1939, however, of Britain’s three services the navy alone considered it defensible if Mussolini declared war. And even the admirals preferred to fight from their French ally’s bases at Toulon, Tunis, Corsica, rather than from an anchorage within twenty minutes’ flight time of Italian airfields. Malta’s 1941–2 RAF chief, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Pughe Lloyd, wrote: ‘I could not imagine fighting without France as our friend. When we entered the war with her, I thought we should see it through together.’

After the French ports were lost in 1940, however, followed by those of Greece, Malta became the only haven between Gibraltar and Alexandria to which the Royal Navy retained access. ‘To Italian seamen’, wrote Mussolini’s Admiral Aldo Cocchia, ‘it seemed an act of historical injustice that this hostile island should exist in the middle of Mare Nostrum and on the direct route between Sicily and North Africa.’ Hugh Lloyd, ‘Huff-Puff’ as he was nicknamed by his aircrew, saw matters the other way around: ‘Malta was a lonely place. There was not a friend at any point of our compass – there was hostility everywhere.’

Until the winter of 1941, the perils and privations that war imposed upon the islanders seemed bearable. Mussolini’s bombing inflicted only intermittent pain. Britain closed Malta’s two Italian schools, forbade use of the Italian language in the law courts. In the first nine months of 1941, twenty-four British ships delivered 146,000 tons of cargo. The Maltese even contrived to admire the stoicism of their British governor, Major-Gen. William Dobbie, a Plymouth Brother who once retired to his balcony during a conference on air-raid precautions and fell to his knees, before returning to report, ‘God has spoken. So be it.’ Dobbie was not without wit, however. A much decorated veteran of both the Boer War and the Great War, on 11 November 1918 he chanced to have been duty staff officer at Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s headquarters on the Western Front and thus signed the ceasefire order signalled to all units of the British Army. When asked later what he had done during the struggle, Dobbie replied, ‘I stopped the bloody thing!’

But if Malta’s predicament seemed endurable for most of 1941, when confronting the Italians alone, it became infinitely less so thereafter as the Germans infused their accustomed dynamism into the Mediterranean campaign. Hitler’s regional commander, Albert Kesselring, wrote: ‘The war … was not being taken by the Italians with the seriousness demanded by their responsibility to the soldiers at the front … Peacetime working conditions prevailed even during the most critical periods … Their submarines’ exhibition diving and the stunt flying of their airmen were no fit preparation for the real thing … One had only to watch a simple guard change to see that the Italian soldier had no enthusiasm for his profession.’

Kesselring, a Bavarian schoolmaster’s son born in 1885, was a much abler campaign director than Rommel, though lacking the latter’s charisma. His skills as a soldier – he had been a First World War gunner officer on the Western Front – exceeded his grasp of air strategy. He had transferred to the Luftwaffe only in 1933, and bore a considerable share of blame for its failure in the Battle of Britain. He was nonetheless a brilliant organizer, of iron will. An ardent, if non-ideological Nazi, he remained loyal to Hitler to the end, partly because of an obsessive loathing of communists. His personal life remains an enigma. His memoirs make no mention of Pauline, the wife he acquired in a curious 1910 arranged marriage. When they remained childless, he adopted a son.

He was commanding the Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 2 in Russia when abruptly summoned to Berlin in November 1941, to receive orders for a new posting as Commander-in-chief South. He was briefed by Hitler personally, in the presence of Göring. Malta, said the Führer, must be neutralized, to secure the passage of Axis supply convoys across the Mediterranean. Kesselring responded that the obvious answer was to occupy the island, only to be silenced by Hitler, who said that no forces were available to accomplish this: air power must instead suffice, to render the island untenable by British naval and air forces. Kesselring later testified that he did not know that Germany’s navy chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, shared his own belief that occupation was the only solution to the Malta problem: the Führer took care not to tell him.

The field-marshal, as Kesselring now became, commanded Hitler’s confidence because he possessed the quality esteemed above all others at his conference table: optimism. He never despaired. On arrival in Rome on 28 November, however, he immediately encountered the difficulties of coalition command. Count Ugo Cavallero, the Italian chief of staff, declined to surrender his air resources to German control. The Regia Aeronautica doggedly insisted upon communicating through its own wireless wavelengths, even when its aircraft were airborne alongside those of the Luftwaffe. Initially, Kesselring could provide only limited air support for southbound Axis convoys to North Africa, which suffered severely from British attacks. He raged at obvious allied foreknowledge of shipping movements, which he attributed to Italian traitors: ‘though we could not prove it, we suspected that the times of our convoy sailings were betrayed … We know now that the treachery of Admiral [Franco] Maugeri [chief of Italian naval intelligence] was responsible for the sinking of many ships and the loss of many lives.’ The German C-in-C never guessed the truth, about the triumphs of allied codebreaking at Bletchley Park.

It was a contradiction in Kesselring that, despite the many war crimes against Italian civilians which he presided over, he was among the few Germans who liked Mussolini’s country and people, and handled Italian commanders with charm and skill. One night in January 1942, the airman piloted through darkness to a conference a visibly nervous Cavallero in his tiny Storch, because no other plane was available. Kesselring wrote: ‘the abracci – embraces – and baci – kisses – that followed our safe landing are no fancy of my imagination’.

From the day that he assumed command until August 1942, he continued to lobby for the seizure of Malta by amphibious landings spearheaded by Fallschirmjäger – paratroops. There were meetings in Berlin at which he argued the case passionately, influenced by a dislike of Rommel, whose prestige he considered to outweigh his real ability. Kesselring was frustrated by the fact that despite his title as C-in-C he lacked direct authority over the ‘Desert Fox’, who supposedly reported to the Italian Comando Supremo. At one point Hitler was moved to soothe his southern warlord with a disingenuous assurance about the capture of Malta: ‘Keep your shirt on, Field-Marshal Kesselring. I’m going to do it!’

On 31 December 1941, Kesselring issued a ‘directive for the battle against Malta’. He later claimed that he would never have thought of launching an air blitz had he not assumed that his bombers would be blasting open the way for a subsequent invasion. His order asserted that neutralization of the island was ‘the indispensable precondition … for establishing secure lines of communication between Italy and North Africa’. Two bomber and two fighter Geschwader were committed. The German and Italian navies were ordered to cordon off the island, blocking its sea supply routes with mines and submarines.

Kesselring unleashed 250 bombers and 160 fighters, flying from three airfields in Sicily, all within a hundred miles of Malta. The island’s people afterwards called the last months of 1941 and first of 1942 the ‘Black Winter’. The Italians bombed them by day and the Germans by night, devastating great swathes of the island and destroying 15,500 houses. Over a thousand people were killed, 4,500 injured. On the three airfields, anti-blast pens for the RAF’s planes were built from petrol tins filled with the rubble of Maltese homes.

Far more bombs rained down on the island than the Luftwaffe had unleashed on London: Valletta escaped the fires that erupted during Britain’s blitz only because its buildings were almost entirely constructed of rock. After the war, Kesselring asserted sanctimoniously that his orders for Malta included a directive that the town was to be spared, writing: ‘it is to the credit of the Luftwaffe that it restricted the battle to purely military targets, a fact that has been acknowledged by the British’. This was a travesty. The Nazi warlord’s claim was set at naught by the damage or destruction visited upon seventy-eight churches, thirteen hospitals, twenty-one schools and the opera house that was Valletta’s pride, together with five hundred civilian deaths in April 1942 alone. ‘The destruction is inconceivable,’ wrote army chief Gen. Sir Alan Brooke during a visit, ‘and reminds one of Ypres, Arras, Lens at their worst during the last war.’

The plight of the Maltese was pitiable, beneath this sustained onslaught. Late in March 1942, an air-raid shelter received a direct hit from a 500-pound bomb, which killed 122 people. Anti-aircraft fire was no more effective on the island than anywhere else in the world, while obsolescent Hurricanes and Beaufighters were no match for the Germans’ Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts. By 1 April the RAF had lost only twenty fighters in the air but 126 on the ground. Grand Harbour became a lagoon of stagnant oil from sunken ships, amid which bobbed debris and decomposing corpses. The air bombardment rendered Malta unusable for British air and naval attacks on the Axis supply line from Italy to North Africa: as a result, in February and March, 90 per cent of supplies shipped south across the Mediterranean reached Rommel safely. A Maltese wrote that his island had been reduced to ‘the great kingdom of terror’.

In February 2,099 German and 791 Italian sorties were flown against the island. During Kesselring’s ‘big April’, the assault intensified dramatically: the island was sometimes attacked by two hundred aircraft within twenty-four hours – twice by three hundred. The RAF’s sixty operational fighters were by the middle of the month reduced to six. On the 20th, forty-six Spitfires flown from the US carrier Wasp, generously loaned by President Franklin Roosevelt, landed successfully on the island, but bombing promptly destroyed almost all of them on the ground – a disaster that was scarcely an endorsement for Hugh Lloyd’s direction of the air defences. The picture brightened for the British only on 28 April, when many of Kesselring’s squadrons were sent north to support Hitler’s summer offensive in Russia. Moreover, on 9 May a second consignment of sixty Spitfires flown from Wasp arrived, and survived. But routine attrition, in the harsh operating conditions prevailing on the island, caused its RAF strength to be depleted by an average of seventeen aircraft a week, almost heedless of the level of enemy activity.

On 15 April, King George VI paid homage to Maltese staunchness by awarding the entire island the medal for courage that bore his name. Yet graffiti appeared on ruined walls in Valletta: ‘Hobz, mux George Cross’ – bread, not medals. Far more even than bombing, starvation threatened to break the spirit and resistance of Malta, its garrison and people alike. The island lies some eight hundred miles north-west of Alexandria – over nine hundred miles from Gibraltar – fifty hours’ fast steaming, at least a hundred hours for ships zigzagging and fighting.

The passage from the west was menaced by Axis air bases on the islands of Sardinia, Sicily, Pantelleria; also on the North African mainland and the toe of Italy. In the eastern Mediterranean, the enemy held Greece and Crete, and varying portions of the Libyan littoral. British transport aircraft could deliver small quantities of urgent medical stores and mail. Big Thames-class submarines ferried eighty tons apiece of torpedoes, ammunition and special lubricants. The fast minelayers Welshman and Manxman each carried 350 tons, making five runs between them, at speeds of almost forty knots. But none of these expedients could feed three hundred thousand people. Only large merchant-ships could do that, and it was impossible for them to sail to Malta save in convoys protected by powerful escorts. Between February and August 1942, eighty-five British cargo vessels sailed for the island, of which twenty-four were sunk and eleven forced to turn back. One-third of all food and war materiel dispatched from Egypt was lost, and 43 per cent of those shipped from Britain.

In the months preceding Operation Pedestal, a February attempt to run three merchantmen to the island from Alexandria failed miserably, all being lost to air attack. In March, another such sally was made from the east, four ships setting forth escorted by Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Vian’s cruiser squadron and a bevy of destroyers. Two cargoes reached Grand Harbour intact, and some oil was salvaged from a third before she sank inshore. The fourth vessel foundered after being bombed just twenty miles from safety. Worse followed: the two arriving ships fell victim to air attack before they could be unloaded. To achieve this unhappy outcome, the navy lost one destroyer sunk, another fourteen warships damaged.

The offload calamity exacerbated tensions between the three services, and intensified criticism of Malta’s leadership. The clever, sharp-tongued Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, RAF supremo in the Mediterranean, thought the naval staff on the island ‘deplorably weak’. Hugh Lloyd sent an outspoken signal to his chief, highlighting failure to organize the harbour, to handle the incoming ships with the necessary urgency: ‘Too many old and worn-out men, some far too bomb-shy. Civilian stevedores did practically no work. They must be conscripted and worked under guard. Suggest impartial investigation to wake this place up. People want a leader and someone with energy. Excuses are given for failure to take off cargo, but I accept none.’

Dobbie, disgusted in turn by what he saw as the airman’s disloyalty, demanded that Lloyd should be sacked. Tedder refused.

A local woman wrote, ‘Only those who have suffered hunger can understand what this really means. Mothers went from door to door with young children begging for food … Rations for two weeks lasted for only four days. We were allowed four ounces of bread per day for women and children and six ounces for men.’ Pasta ran out in April. In the absence of Italian manure, potatoes could no longer be grown. The Maltese diet had been reduced to bread, a little olive oil and tomato paste, some preserved fish and rice, home-brewed wine known as ‘screech’. The island’s fruit trees were stripped bare.

Every inhabitant, after almost interminable queueing, qualified for a daily free meal from so-called Victory Kitchens, ‘if you can call a piece of goat floating in muggy gravy a meal!’ as a local woman wrote. ‘The bravest thing I ever did was to eat that goat.’ She described how working members of a family returned home of an evening for their suppers: ‘this in itself was an ordeal because while eating one had to suffer the eyes of the young children sitting around … They never asked for f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• The Pedestal Fleet
• Glossary
• 1 ‘It Would Be a Disaster of the First Magnitude’
• 2 Men and Ships
• 3 Sailing
• 4 First Blood
• 5 ‘Stand By to Ram’
• 6 The Twelfth
• 7 Cruel Sea
• 8 Force X
• 9 Scuttling Charges
• 10 Retribution
• 11 Blenheim Day
• 12 Ohio
• 13 Grand Harbour
• Appendix: Losses during Operation Pedestal
• Picture Section
• Acknowledgements
• References and Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Also by Max Hastings
• About the Author
• About the Publisher