Concerned about the Luftwaffe, Captain Denis Boyd and Admiral Lumley Lyster, aboard Illustrious as Fleet Air Arm commander, had repeatedly advised Cunningham it would be better if Illustrious kept its distance from the convoy while still providing air cover. But Cunningham wanted the carrier within sight as a morale booster. Regardless, mere distance wouldn’t have saved Illustrious. It was the enemy’s clear target and couldn’t have escaped the range of the Stukas. If there was a mistake, it was taking the ship into the narrow Strait of Sicily in the first place.

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Cunningham knew the Luftwaffe had moved onto Sicily, but Tedder had assured him British fighters could easily handle the Stukas. “Our fighter pilots weep for joy when they see them,” the chief air marshal had boasted. While it is true a Spitfire could handle a Stuka one-on-one, four Fulmars struggling to get airborne against 43 Stukas in coordinated dives wasn’t what either Tedder or Cunningham had in mind. So on the day of the Luftwaffe’s bombing attack, the admiral could only watch from his flagship Warspite as the German planes brutally bombed and nearly sank the all-important aircraft carrier whose flight deck of Fulmars and Swordfish might have made the difference in which side controlled the Mediterranean. It was an attack for which the convoy should have been prepared, or which should have been avoided entirely.

Following the attack, Captain Boyd steered his carrier with the engines and three screws, as its rudder had been smashed. Illustrious listed toward Malta for the next nine hours, still afire, its burned and wounded men trapped and screaming belowdecks. The ship was attacked again by 15 or 20 more Stukas in the afternoon, but the bombers were Regia Aeronautica and not Luftwaffe and thus easier to fight off, with the help of Warspite and Valiant.

Illustrious reached Malta just after nightfall, towed in by tugboats, its hotspots glowing orange in the dark. “Wherever one looked, there were the signs of violent death in an open space of twisted disorder,” said Lamb.

One hundred twenty-six bodies and assorted body parts were sewn up in canvas bags and buried at sea by a minesweeper the next day, a Sunday. The funeral service was a hurried job, and not enough weight was put in the bags. Many remained afloat, so the ship circled them at speed to sink them with its wake. Some resurfaced, only to wash up days later, a grim tide against Malta’s limestone cliffs.

The Luftwaffe blitzed Malta on January 16 in an unsuccessful attempt to sink Illustrious in the harbor. Finally, under the full moon of January 23, after nearly two weeks of around-the-clock emergency repairs, Illustrious sneaked away from Malta for extensive refitting at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia, as the Portsmouth naval yards in Britain were too exposed. Radio Berlin claimed the British carrier was at the bottom of French Creek, but Illustrious returned to service in mid-1942, later participating in the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 and of Okinawa in 1945.

The Luftwaffe continued bombing Malta; the real siege had only just begun and would continue with relentless aerial attacks on the supply convoys and on the islands. Cunningham went on, after Operation Torch, to become admiral of the fleet, then first sea lord of the admiralty and chief of naval staff.

For further reading, Sam Moses recommends A Sailor’s Odyssey: The Autobiography of Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, by Andrew Browne Cunningham.

This article by Sam Moses was originally published in the May 2007 issue of Military History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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