The Race to Malta
By Sam Moses

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

By the summer of 1942, the small Mediterranean island of Malta had been under Axis siege for two years. That April and May, more bombs fell on Malta than fell on London during the Battle of Britain. Like ants, the Maltese moved by the thousands into man-made caves and tunnels in the island’s limestone, some remaining from the Great Siege in 1565, when the Ottoman Turks attacked the Knights of Malta—Muslims vs. Christians, an earlier round.

Flying from airfields in nearby Sicily, the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica made relentless bombing runs in synchronized waves, flying steady Savoia-Marchetti 79s, versatile Ju 88s, and fearsome Ju 87 Stukas. There were nine thousand sorties in April alone. Gallant pilots of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm engaged them, struggling to take off from the island’s dirt airstrips, riddled with craters and littered with planes that had been destroyed on the ground or crash-landed after being hit. Maltese boys perched on rooftops like crows and watched the dogfights as spectator sport, cheering for the home team, which was often outnumbered by ten or more to one.

Lacking a river, forests, or rich soil, Malta could provide little of its own food or fuel. Supplies from Gibraltar, 999 miles to the west, and Alexandria, 866 miles east, had been stopped by the German and Italian air forces and navies. Small amounts of cargo came in over the “magic carpet”—a slim trail of fast minesweepers and mine-laying submarines from Alexandria—but not nearly enough to sustain the island.

By June, it had been nine months since a convoy had made it to Valletta. Eight cargo ships had trickled through in that time, but that was not enough. The RAF was running on empty. Spitfires lacked rivets to patch shot-up skins. The few remaining submarines of the 10th Flotilla had been sent to Alexandria for lack of diesel fuel. Antiaircraft guns of the Royal Malta Artil­lery were rationed to fifteen shells per day. Soldiers hid in trees with Browning machine guns to defend against enemy aircraft.

Malta’s days seemed numbered, literally. “By July 1, we calculated, we should be out of business,” said the RAF commander, Air Marshal Hugh Lloyd.

Yet Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed that Malta had to survive for the war to be won. “Its effective action against the enemy communications with Libya and Egypt is essential to the whole strategic position in the Middle East,” he told the House of Commons.

“The Navy had always regarded the island as the keystone of victory in the Mediterranean, and considered it should be held at all costs,” wrote Adm. Andrew Browne Cunningham, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean and Britain’s greatest admiral since Horatio Nelson.

“Malta must be held at all costs,” said her military governor, Lt. Gen. William G. S. Dobbie. “Its loss would obviously open the door to disasters of the first magnitude, the outcome of which was not good to contemplate.”

It was all about oil, as usual. Oil from the fields in Iraq and Iran (then Persia) powered the Allies’ effort. Churchill called Malta the “windlass of the tourniquet” on the supply lines of Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and Rommel was moving across North Africa in pursuit of the Mideast oil. If Hitler got the oil, it would all be over—before the United States even had a chance to get there.

Churchill didn’t believe that the British Eighth Army would be able to stop Rommel without Malta’s support. Axis convoys from Italy to North Africa kept Rommel in supplies, and submarines and bombers from Malta attacked those convoys. Bombers from Malta also flew sorties over North Africa, striking truck convoys. General Dobbie’s “disaster of the first magnitude” would be the Luftwaffe and Italian navy moving in where the RAF and Royal Navy now held out.

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

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