The Race to Malta
By Sam Moses

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

Captain Hardy’s report, eight pages and sixty items, is a mass of contradiction, omission, and impossibility. The Royal Navy said he “acted throughout with con­spicuous courage and resource in the handling of his force for the protection of the convoy.” The Ad­miralty said his decision to scuttle Kentucky was justified because two freighters eventually made it to Malta.

As the remnants of the convoy straggled into Malta in the middle of the night, the fog of war swept in over the harbor. Either the minesweepers got too far ahead of the convoy, carrying with them the navigation instructions for the channel, or else they fell behind the other ships. Just outside the harbor, four ships struck mines that had either been dropped by Italian parachute, or laid by the British to keep the Italian torpedo boats out. The Polish destroyer Kujawiak was sunk, two British destroyers were damaged, and the fourth and biggest of the five freighters, the 10,400-ton Orari, was holed and lost much of its cargo just outside the breakwater. Glistening waves of oil lapped ashore in the morning sun.

It gets worse. During Harpoon, Admiral Harwood had been leading a simultaneous convoy from Alexandria, Opera­tion Vigorous. Eleven merchantmen were escorted by more than thirty warships. Almost every ship the Royal Navy had in the Mediterranean was on the water with Harpoon and Vigorous.

Air reconnaissance told Harwood that an Italian fleet consisting of two battleships, four cruisers, and about twelve destroyers had left Italy to head him off, so he turned the convoy back to Alexandria. Four more times over the next eighteen hours, he turned the convoy around, as Harwood received new information about the possible position and intent of the enemy. All that day the convoy cruised back and forth in the area called “Bomb Alley,” as bombers, torpedo boats, and submarines fed on the ships like sharks, sinking one cruiser, three destroyers, and two merchantmen. The rest ran back to Alexandria.

The Italians call Operation Harpoon/Operation Vigorous the Battle of Pantelleria, a name as pretty as their picture of it. It’s been called the “forgotten convoy,” because so little has been written about it—the British would be the authors, and there’s not a lot of motivation on their part to tell the story. A better name might be the “disowned convoy.”

Churchill didn’t care who was to blame for the loss of Ken­tucky. He knew one thing: a tanker had to get through to Malta or the island was lost. There was one more moonless period before its garrison would have to surrender.

On June 16, the day after Kentucky went down, he wrote a “Most Secret” memo to the first lord of the Admiralty, the first sea lord, and his chief of staff, Gen. H. L. “Pug” Ismay.

“It will be necessary to make another attempt to run a convoy into Malta,” began the memo. “The fate of the island is at stake, and if the effort to relieve it is worth making, it is worth making on a great scale. Strong battleship escort capable of fighting the Italian battle squadron and strong Aircraft Carrier support would seem to be required. Also at least a dozen fast supply ships, for which super-priority over all civil requirements must be given.”

The memo ended, “I shall be glad to know in the course of the day what proposals can be made, as it will be right to telegraph to Lord Gort [governor of Malta], thus preventing despair in the population. He must be able to tell them: ‘The Navy will never abandon Malta.’”

Malta’s absolute last chance came one month later, under the next dark moon. Operation Pedestal was the most heavily attacked naval convoy in history. Wolf packs of U-boats stalked the convoy, and Italian torpedo boats attacked viciously during the long night in the Sicilian Narrows. Nine of thirteen freighters went down, six of them in infernos. Kentucky’s faster sister, the SS Ohio, was bombed, torpedoed, and abandoned by her British crew. Slowly sinking, she was boarded by a volunteer crew led by two American merchant mariners whose freighter had been sunk, and towed by destroyers into Malta, where she was greeted by thousands of cheering Maltese. Her back broken, she sank in the harbor after her oil was offloaded. With the aviation fuel from four freighters and diesel carried by the American tanker, the RAF returned to the sky and the 10th Submarine Flotilla resumed its offensive action against Axis supply convoys to North Africa.

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

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.