The Race to Malta

By Sam Moses | World War II  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

“With Malta in our hands, the British would have had little chance of exercising any further control over convoy traffic in the Central Mediterranean,” wrote Rommel, who pushed Hitler for an invasion of the island. It was planned for late June, and code-named Operation Hercules.

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, chief of the Luftwaffe’s Mediterranean force, agreed with Rommel. “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,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Vice Adm. Eberhard Weichold, the German commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean, wrote in a report to Hitler, “I see only one possibility, and that is a thorough strategical offensive against the British Air Force in the Central Mediterranean. That is, Malta must be obliterated.”

But Hitler decided that it was enough for Malta to be rendered ineffective by blockade. A naval invasion of the island was too risky. Operation Hercules was called off. “I am a coward at sea,” he once told Weichold.

“It was the greatest mistake of the Axis in the whole war in this theater,” Weichold would later write from his cell at Nuremberg.

Churchill had been working his friend and ally Franklin D. Roosevelt for all the ships he could get, including some of the best freighters America could sacrifice. What he needed now was a big, fast tanker.

The glistening new SS Kentucky had never seen action. Built for the Texas Company (to be named Texaco after the war) by Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pennsylvania, she had made just one test run before getting orders to Gibraltar. She steamed solo across the Atlantic with a load of aviation fuel, insanely exposed without an escort. She was armed, but her only defense against U-boats was speed. The lookouts were motivated by terror. The captain ran her powerful Westing­house steam turbine engines flat-out all the way, averaging 15.8 knots despite a four-day gale.

Her aviation fuel was offloaded in Gibraltar, and she was turned over to the British Ministry of War Transport. Her American crew had been trained in the operation of the ship’s high-tech boilers and other systems, and they wanted to stay with her, but politics—in the form of Adm. Ernest J. King, commander of the U.S. fleet—intervened. King, a first-generation Irishman who instinctively distrusted the British and didn’t think Malta was worth fighting for, insisted that she be taken over by a British crew. The new crew knew little about her—just that she was a luxury liner compared to the tubs they were used to.

At midnight on the moonless night of June 11, 1942, after exactly two years of bombing on Malta, the Kentucky stole away from Gibraltar toward Malta to join the convoy called Operation Harpoon. The convoy included one battleship, two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, seventeen destroyers, four minesweepers, an oiler, a minelayer, two corvettes, and six motor patrol boats, all to escort the Kentucky, which carried thirteen thousand tons of oil in her thirty-three honeycombed compartments; and five freighters carrying grain, ammunition, and about two thousand tons each of aviation fuel.

Convoys to Malta were always kept a tight secret—as if the Axis didn’t know they were coming. For one thing, convoys only happened during a dark moon; for another, spies in Gibraltar could clearly see the activity. So to intercept Harpoon when it came within range of Sardinia, the Regia Aeronautica had lined up 81 fighters, 61 bombers, and 50 torpedo bombers. The Luftwaffe had added 40 bombers.

They began to attack at daybreak on Sunday, June 14, flying in dozens of formations of three to six planes each. “It was impossible to count the number of planes, as they circled round and over the convoy, bombing continuously,” reported Capt. C. R. J. Roberts, Kentucky’s new master.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Naval Battles, World War II

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