The Race to Malta
By Sam Moses

World War II  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

True to Admiral Harwood’s intentions, the convoy left the disabled Kentucky behind—“like a stranded whale,” said the third mate. But the threat from enemy surface vessels wasn’t really so considerable—especially not after Malta sent out three Albacore torpedo bombers after the Italian ships. As Hardy reported, “From 0930 onwards fighters from Malta provided continuous escort except for two short periods.”

At 11:20 a.m., a near miss by a bomb from a Ju 88 disabled the third of five freighters, Burdwan, with a jammed rudder and flooded engine room. Operation Harpoon was now down to two merchantmen out of six, and it had lost its biggest destroyer and newest cruiser. The bombers weren’t going away, and Hardy believed that at any minute the Italian cruisers would be on top of what was left of the convoy, still 150 miles from Malta.

Captain Hardy appears to have changed his mind about orders to the convoy three times in three hours. He finally took a page out of Harwood’s manual. “I decided to cut my losses and at 1142 ordered Badsworth and Hebe to scuttle Burdwan and Kentucky, at the same time ordering the remaining merchant ships to proceed at their utmost speed. I believe Masters had received instructions regarding scuttling in the event of damage, but I do not know what these orders were,” he reported, remarkably.

Captain Roberts makes it clear in his report that it wasn’t his idea to scuttle the Kentucky. “The next order I received was to abandon and scuttle the ship,” he said. “By this time there were only 2 other merchant vessels left in the convoy and as the Senior Naval Officer [Hardy] was in a hurry to reach Malta before all the Merchant ships in the convoy were lost, we scuttled the ship. The Rye came alongside to take off the crew and told us to hurry because more bombers were coming. We abandoned ship at 1200 and set her on fire, but we could not get into the engine-room to open the sea cocks.”

There were no explosive charges in the holds for scuttling, because there hadn’t been time in Gibraltar to install them. The Kentucky was a state-of-the-art tanker, with her honeycomb structure and welded seams. The minesweepers Badsworth and Hebe couldn’t sink her.

Admiral da Zara sent his light cruiser Montecuccoli with the destroyers Oriani and Ascari around to the rear of the convoy, where the Kentucky drifted, abandoned. The minesweepers sped away when Montecuccoli’s mast appeared on the horizon, leaving Kentucky and her load of precious fuel to the enemy. Except for scorching, a broken steam line, and some destroyed wiring, there wasn’t a scratch on her. All da Zara needed to do was hook up his two destroyers to Kentucky and tow her, along with thirteen thousand tons of fuel oil, back to Pantelleria. The Italians needed the fuel for warships, but Malta needed it to survive. Captain Hardy had handed the fate of Malta to the Axis.

But da Zara blew it—literally. “Arriving at the scene, the Italians saw the sea strewn with debris, and all over the horizon were the burning ships and those left behind to help them,” stated the official Italian history. “The tanker Kentucky had only a small fire aboard, but several shells from the Montecuccoli and then a torpedo from the Oriani caused her to explode in flames like a huge funeral pyre, and shortly thereafter she sank.”

Da Zara had perfectly executed Admiral Harwood’s orders after Captain Hardy’s own failure. The irony was “most convenient,” said Hardy. Da Zara was given a medal by Mussolini.

Admiral da Zara could have then run down the rest of the British ships, but he ordered his fleet home, for a number of dubious reasons: low ammunition, not knowing how many British warships there were, thinking that maybe the bombers had already sunk all the merchant ships anyhow, and so on. The Italians say they sent out a rescue ship into the Sicilian Narrows, and picked up 217 sailors and made them prisoners of war.

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

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