The Fleet That Battled to Malta, 1942

By Max Hastings

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A note of caution: any history or biography that announces itself as definitive should be consigned to the waste bin, because such accolades are never justified.

A note of caution: any history or biography that announces itself as definitive should be consigned to the waste bin, because such accolades are never justified. This narrative relies significantly on personal accounts, often contradictory and sometimes demonstrably wrong. Modern oral historians and TV documentary-makers treat with reverence the tales of very old men and women, but the memories of such witnesses often play them false. Reading the testimony given by Pedestal survivors to twentieth – and early twenty-first-century authors, a skeptic, such as every decent historian should be, guesses that some men embroidered their own roles, indeed fabricated anecdotes. At this distance of time, a writer can only use instinct and experience to guess whose words deserve belief. 

The official documents and reports on Pedestal omit or skate over several contentious issues and episodes. It was much easier for an admiral to lament, for instance, the navy’s lack of good carrier fighters than to criticize the behaviour of named officers. Doubts persist about exact timings of some events. Thus this narrative offers a plausible version of one of the most significant naval actions of the Second World War, which readers may find as thrilling and moving as I do. Not for a moment, however, can it be considered definitive. Only the angels can aspire to achieve that. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.xxii)

The little campaign fought by the British Eighth Army against the Afrika Korps and Italian troops sufficed to sustain an illusion of momentum in the British war effort, though until November 1942 never much more than twenty decisions were engaged on the two sides, compared with the four hundred Axis and Soviet formations locked in a death grapple in Russia. Though there were moments when the British feared that they faced absolute defeat in North Africa, Rommel was never quite strong enough to impose this at the end of an overstretched supply line. As long as the ‘Desert Fox’ was kept out of Alexandria and Cairo, the Royal Navy sustained warships and especially submarines in the Mediterranean, and the RAF denied mastery of the desert sky to the Axis, the struggle in the theatre served allied interests better than those of Hitler or Mussolini. This seldom seemed the case, however, to those charged with defending allied bastions by land, sea and air. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.2-3)

The British sentimentalize relations between themselves and the subject peoples of their empire, often with little justification. Nonetheless the affection and loyalty displayed towards the ‘Mother Country’ by the three hundred thousand inhabitants of Malta seemed sincere, indeed enthusiastic. Their feelings were strengthened by disdain for their northerly neighbours, though pre-war Malta depended upon Italy for 70 per cent of its food, fertilizer and animal fodder. As for the colonial masters, they cherished this rocky pimple as one of the few places in the Mediterranean and Middle East where they were liked. A London-born resident described the Maltese people as ‘kindly and smiling and good-mannered, tolerant of the strangeness of the British (“we have got used to you, you have been with us a long time now”)’. For Malta, as a community conscious of its smallness and isolation, even in the last years of empire the instinct was to cling to nurse for fear of something worse.

(Hastings 2021, pp.3)

Men’s destinies in action were entirely determined by their captains’ decisions

Men’s destinies in action were entirely determined by their captains’ decisions: even the most senior subordinate officers were almost as much prisoners as were galley slaves of old. If a ship’s commanding officer decided to be brave his sailors, unlike soldiers who might flee, had no choice save to accompany him to their common fate. It is unknown how the crew of the little destroyer Glowworm felt on 8 April 1940 when their captain decided to ram the huge German cruiser Admiral Hipper, winning himself a posthumous VC; but it seems reasonable to guess that, on a free vote, not all would have endorsed his decision. Contrarily if a captain flinched, the ship’s company were inescapably complicit in his disgrace. Senior officers, especially aboard the smaller vessels, never forgot that the eyes of every man were upon them; that the example from the top was critical, to make a ship an effective fighting unit.

(Hastings 2021, pp.47)

In those early stages of the passage, there was still plentiful hot food. And pipes and Player’s: cigarettes sold for just sixpence for twenty, so most men smoked prodigiously. And drink: with Plymouth gin at twopence a shot. Phil Rambaut, and engineering officer aboard a cruiser, thought that some of his older comrades drank too much; he himself favoured brandy with creme de menthe. 

And every man of the Royal Navy, of course, received a daily ration of rum, unless he chose to forgo it in exchange for an extra threepence a day in pay. Following the daily 1100 hours order to parade for ‘up spirits’, which was deferred only in action, men queued to receive their formidable tipple, the equivalent of a pub treble measure of 95 per cent spirit, which in one rating’s words was ‘portioned out like a holy oblation’. Only a few dangerous radicals dared to suggest that men might better perform their duties ice-cold sober. Meanwhile sailors on the brink of action, unlike soldiers ashore, also had entertainment. Jazz and swing were their passions, which meant overwhelmingly American music. Many ships sailed towards balled serenaded by Arite Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.72)

George Blundell, Commander of Nelson, who had been born in the reign of King Edward VII, wrote with awe in his diary about all the new-age technology fitted to his ship. His generation sometimes struggled to comprehend radar – RDF, as it was then known. In their ignorance, they were prone to endow its 1942 manifestation with almost mystical powers: ‘When an aircraft comes in the director is trained on it, the pip comes along the “Scan” and when the pip is in line with the range mark previously calibrated, the RDF operator presses his trigger. Being down in the office, it is an uncanny feeling watching the scan, hearing the hum of the transmitter valve blowers, seeing a man press a trigger, hearing the six-inch guns go off. Properly calibrated and operated, it ought to be an aircraft every time!’

(Hastings 2021, pp.76-77)

Bletchley Park provided the navy with plentiful general information about the Luftwaffe’s deployments, but could offer little that assisted fighter-direction officers on the carriers. The official historians of wartime intelligence wrote: ‘There was a great volume of Enigma evidence about the high priority the German Air Force gave to stopping this convoy, but very little of it was of immediate operational value’. There is a twenty-first-century delusion that Bletchley’s codebreakers gave the allied high command an ever-open window upon the motions of the enemy. This is untrue. Ultra indeed provided critical information, but its output was patchy and often behind the curve of events. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.94)

Yet on returning from a patrol Hugh Popham never lost his delight in the first glimpse of his beloved home carrier, ‘the white water curving away from her hull, her attendant destroyers to port and starboard. For all her lopsidedness, her proportions are so rakish, the strength of her lines so exact, each fresh sight of her from the air has the same compelling excitement. The squadron breaks up, the [landing arrester] hooks go downs. For a moment or two, as one pushes back the hood and lets in a blast of cold air that sends the dust in the bottom of the cockpit swirling, the pleasure of flying, the strangeness and the wonder, obliterate anxiety. This is something to have done, to have flown so easily over a great ship on a glittering sea, to have this liberty. This is our everyday, our humdrum marvel.’ 

Here were sensations such as inspired a host of young men of all nations to brave extreme hazard.

(Hastings 2021, pp.141)

‘I did not then, nor at any time subsequently, feel any personal animosity towards the chaps that were trying to sink us and I cannot remember anyone expressing any. We were all doing our job … it seemed so dispassionate, and it was that which seemed to me so frightening.’

‘Danger is relative,’ wrote a destroyer captain, ‘and listening to the pilots reporting their sightings and actions with enemy aircraft – sometimes we could hear the guns firing – made the odd bombs falling around us seem quite safe compared to their repeated engagements.’ Thus far, though explosive near-misses had prompted moments of terror for a few men on a few ships, most had found the day more thrilling than daunting. Hereafter, however, it became progressively grimmer. A cruiser’s surgeon wrote ruefully: ‘I would like to lash to the deck of an a/c carrier, going to Malta, those politicians and brasshats who say that the dive-bomber is a useless machine.’ Yet hate was absent from most men’s feelings, even amid terrifying experiences. Engineer Tom Brunskill, a veteran of almost twenty years at sea who was not aboard Glenorchy, reflected later: ‘I did not then, nor at any time subsequently, feel any personal animosity towards the chaps that were trying to sink us and I cannot remember anyone expressing any. We were all doing our job … it seemed so dispassionate, and it was that which seemed to me so frightening.’

(Hastings 2021, pp.162)

For much of his life, the admiral cherished a private prayer that began: ‘Most merciful God, grant we pray thee that we may never forget that as followers of Christ we are the observed of all men, and that our failures may cause other to stumble, that in a measure God places his nour in our hands … Grant to us the royal gift of courage, that we do each duty at once, however disagreeable it may be.’ In an increasingly irreligious twenty-first century, it is easy to make light of such sentiments. They mattered deeply, however, to such a man as Burrough at such a crisis as his command now faced. Aboard Nigeria steering control was regained within ten minutes, but the cruiser was listing, down by the head, and had lost forty-four dead, among them two seventeen-year-old midshipmen. Some ghastly scenes took place below, mercifully beyond sight of those on the free side of locked hatches and watertight doors. Damage control was a brutal science, its disciplines dictated by the greatest good of the greatest number. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.206)

‘It is not in the rule-book to save shipwrecked mariners, but the good seaman of our race is humane even to his enemies, who are both sailors and men.’

Dawn revealed the survivors divided between four Carleys. Around noon, there was a sudden eruption of the sea beside them as the Italian submarine Bronzo, identified later by the paintings on her conning-tower of the Disney cartoon character Pinocchio, surfaced and examined them. An English-speaking member of its crew shouted down to ask if they were in distress. The question was arguably superfluous, but on receiving an affirmative Bronzo signalled Italian air-sea rescue headquarters on Sicily, giving their position, before disappearing towards Tunisia. Submariner Livio Villa wrote sententiously, but with some justice, ‘It is not in the rule-book to save shipwrecked mariners, but the good seaman of our race is humane even to his enemies, who are both sailors and men.’ When two years earlier the Italian submarine Alessandro Malaspina sank the tanker British Fame, it towed the survivors in their lifeboats within reach of shore, before cutting them loose and submerging.

(Hastings 2021, pp.274-275)

The three, unable to communicate in  any common language, drifted together for the ensuing sixty hours

Shortly afterwards an Italian Stuka crashed in the same area, after being shot down by a Malta-based Spitfire. Its crew, Guido Savini and Nicola Patella, escaped from the cockpit before the wreck sank.

The latter managed to clamber aboard the plane’s dinghy, but Savini found himself drifting away in his Mae West, tossing unhappily on a gentle swell. A passing Italian aircraft failed to see the two red flares that he fired, but they were spotted by Patella, who paddled to Savini’s position and dragged him aboard. After some hours, in dading light they heard a whistle being blown and propelled themselves clumsily towards the sound. They glimpsed a red-headed swimmer whom they pulled into the dinghy, and found to be their fellow distressed  airman Jock McFarlane. The three, unable to communicate in  any common language, drifted together for the ensuing sixty hours, until they were picked up by a passing Dornier flying boat, which McFarlane vainly attempted to resist boarding. The Scottish airman spent the rest of the war as a PoW. Here was yet another extraordinary miniature within the huge canvas of Pedestal.

(Hastings 2021, pp.278-279)

The pay of many British merchant seamen was stopped from the moment their ships sank, and this harsh rule was applied to some Pedestal survivors. Jim Parry of Empire Hope was  awarded a mere £14 ‘and a few shillings’ in compensation for the loss of all his clothes and personal possessions, ‘and for that you lose your socks, your slippers, overcoat, raincoat, suits, ties, underpants, handkerchiefs. People don’t know just how much you have with you.’

(Hastings 2021, pp.334)

Posterity, and in particular students of the Second World War, remain divided in judgements upon Pedestal.

Posterity, and in particular students of the Second World War, remain divided in judgements upon Pedestal. American historian Vincent O’Hara has described the battle as ‘the largest aero-naval victory won by Axis forces during the Mediterranean war.’ He highlights the fact that while German air and naval units made an important contribution, the Italians inflicted most damage upon Syfret’s fleet. British writer Simon Ball characterizes the convoy as a desperate throw which failed, by a Royal Navy at its last gasp in the Mediterranean. The operation, he writes, provided Malta with a bare sufficiency of supplies to subsist until November, when its salvation was secured not by British sea power but instead by Torch and El Alamein.

Martin Van Creveld asserts that the importance attached by many historians to the Mediterranean convoy battles is ‘grossly exaggerated. At no time, except perhaps November-December 1941, did the aero-naval struggle in the central Mediterranean play a decisive part in events in North Africa.’ Rommel’s difficulties, argues Creveld, derived from his ‘impossibly long’ supply lines inside Africa. Likewise Correli Barnett brands Malta a ‘strategic burden and moral obligation glorified into a heroic myth.’

(Hastings 2021, pp.346)

‘Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

The prime minister understood better than did some of his admirals that warships existed to fight, and if necessary to sink, in pursuit of national purposes. It was British acceptance of the imperative, contrasted with Italian rejection of it, that made Mussolini’s fleet an object of scorn despite the personal courage of many of its seamen. On 10 November, at the Mansion House in London, Churchill delivered his great speech applauding the victory of Montgomery’s eighth Army at El Alamein, and assering memorably: ‘Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

(Hastings 2021, pp.350-351)

It is hard to imagine a more grim and terrifying role in which to serve the King than within the engine-room of one of his ships.

As for the Royal Navy, as always a disproportionate share of awards went to officers, and especially captains – the men who made the decisions, directed the fighting of their ships. This practice was rational, but bore hardly on those who kept the warships afloat, manned guns, sustained machinery and technology. It is hard to imagine a more grim and terrifying role in which to serve the King than within the engine-room of one of his ships. Yet relatively few such men received more than a Mention in Dispatches: it seems dismaying that, for instance, the engineers on Indomitable who laboured so hard to restore power and order after the carrier had been crippled went almost unrecognized. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.356)

Only those who know no history can today be foolish enough to express nostalgia for its experiences, glorious or no.

In chronicling such extraordinary tales as that of Pedestal, I have often reflected that, whatever troubles oppress us in our own times, they are less terrible than those which encompassed the men and women who participated in the Second World War or fell victim to it. Only those who know no history can today be foolish enough to express nostalgia for its experiences, glorious or no. And few could forbear to pay homage to the men of the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy, who fought such battles as this one, and ultimately prevailed. 

(Hastings 2021, pp.364)

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References

Hastings, Max. 2021. Operation Pedestal: The Fleet that Battled to Malta, 1942. N.p.: HarperCollinsPublishers.

ISBN 978-0-06-298015-1