Just past noon on January 10, 1941, German Air Marshal Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe made its Mediterranean debut, its Ju-87 dive bombers screaming off the high board from 12,000 feet and falling all the way to 800 feet for bombs away. The Stukas bore down on Illustrious, the Royal Navy’s lone carrier in the Mediterranean, as it steamed toward Malta with an essential resupply convoy. They dived in synchronized waves of three from different heights and bearings, dividing and confusing the ships’ anti-aircraft fire. They fell at angles of 60 to 90 degrees — actually vertical — first dropping 250-kilo fragmentation bombs intended to knock out the anti-aircraft guns, especially the quad-barreled “pom-poms.” These were followed by 500-kilo armor-piercing bombs with delayed fuses, to penetrate the flight deck and rupture the carrier from the inside out.

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“We opened up with every AA gun we had as one by one the Stukas peeled off into their dives, concentrating almost the whole venom of their attack upon the Illustrious,’’ said Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, who watched and fought from the bridge of his battleship Warspite. “At times she became almost completely hidden in a forest of great bomb splashes.”

There were 43 Stukas in all. About a dozen targeted the battleships Warspite and Valiant, which flanked Illustrious. 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.

“One was too interested in this new form of dive-bombing attack really to be frightened, and there was no doubt we were watching complete experts,” he wrote in his memoir. “We could not but admire the skill and precision of it all.”

But the convoy, under Cunningham’s command, was grossly and tragically unprepared for the Luftwaffe’s attack. Four Fairey Fulmar fighter planes from Illustrious’ complement of 15 had been on defensive patrol, but five minutes before the Stukas blipped across the radar at a distance of 28 miles, the Fulmars had gone off in pursuit of two Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.M.79 torpedo bombers, which had been sent in early as decoys. Illustrious would launch four more Fulmars and three Swordfish torpedo bomber biplanes — affectionately called “Stringbags” for their fabric and wire construction — but not before the Stukas arrived unchallenged.

Lieutenant Charles Lamb, a fresh hero of Illustrious’ surprise night attack in November 1940 that crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto, was already airborne in his Stringbag, on antisubmarine patrol ahead of the Malta-bound convoy. “From the moment I opened the throttle and climbed to starboard, I was amongst Stukas, traveling at lightning speed,” he wrote in his classic memoir War in a Stringbag:

Their flying was very skilled, and they pressed home their attacks with no thought for their own safety. The difference between the Germans’ methods and those of the Italians could never have been demonstrated more clearly. They had only one bomb per aircraft, so they had to come right down to deliver it personally. Since it was enormous — it weighed 500 kilograms — their determination not to waste their one big egg was understandable.

A strange aircraft came into view, flying from port to starboard, right in front of me, across the flight deck. Its huge swastika was painted red on the starboard side of the grey fuselage. It dipped as though in salute and dropped an enormous great bomb right down the after lift well, which was still gaping.

The first shot was a lucky one, the bomb bouncing off bulkheads like a silver pinball and falling into the jackpot hole.

By the flames which shot out of the hole in the deck, I realized that it had rolled off the lift and exploded in the hangar. Then the lift itself burst out of the deck, all 300 tons of it, and shot a few feet into the air and sank back into the lift well on its side, like a giant wedge-shaped hunk of cheese.

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