One of her escorts, the destroyer Wolverine, spotted an Italian submarine and raced in to ram; the Axis boat sank, but Wolverine suffered severe damage.
At 2045 the first enemy air attack was launched against Pedestal, by thirty-six Heinkel 111s and Ju88s flying from Sicily. These achieved no hits, and four German aircraft fell to the intense AA barrage. Next day at noon, a much more serious strike took place, by seventy bombers and torpedo-carriers with fighter escort. The ensuing battle lasted two hours. The freighter Deucalion was damaged and later sunk off the Tunisian coast by a torpedo-bomber, despite gallant efforts to save the ship by her master, Captain Ramsay Brown. During the afternoon, the convoy survived a submarine ambush unscathed. The destroyer Ithuriel rammed and sank another Italian boat, at the cost of crippling herself.
That evening of the 12th, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force came again. A hundred bombers and torpedo-carriers launched attacks from every direction and altitude, designed to swamp the defence. Ships’ AA crews fired almost continuously; empty cases massed in heaps beside gun mountings; the brilliant sky became pockmarked with thousands of black puffs; the noise of screaming aircraft engines competed with the stammer and thud of every calibre of armament. The destroyer Foresight was sunk, the carrier Indomitable badly damaged by three armour-piercing bombs. Still short of the Sicilian Narrows, Syfret withdrew his capital ships westwards, leaving a close escort headed by six cruisers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Harold Burrough, to fight the convoy through to Malta.
Pedestal’s agony now began in earnest. Within an hour of Syfret parting company, the Italian submarine Axum achieved a brilliant triple success: in a single attack, it sank Burrough’s flagship Nigeria and the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo, also hitting the tanker Ohio. These losses wiped out the convoy’s Fighter Direction capability, for the two cruisers carried the only radio sets capable of voice communication with Malta-based planes. Then, as the light began to fade, with British ships losing formation and huddling into a scrum, the Luftwaffe came again. Ju88s sank the merchant ships Empire Hope and Clan Ferguson and crippled Brisbane Star. Soon afterwards, a submarine torpedo damaged the cruiser Kenya. In darkness in the early hours of 13 August, German and Italian motor torpedo boats launched a series of attacks which persisted for hours. The defence was feeble, because Burrough decided that to illuminate the battlefield with starshell would help the enemy more than his own gunners. The cruiser Manchester was fatally damaged, four more merchantmen sunk and a fifth hit. The only compensation for suffering such losses in the Mediterranean’s warm summer waters was that far more survivors could be rescued than in the Arctic or even the Atlantic.
At daybreak the Luftwaffe returned, sinking another merchantman. Ohio suffered further damage, but limped onward until renewed attacks later in the morning stopped her engines. Two more merchantmen were crippled, and had to be left behind with a destroyer escort. At 1600, in accordance with orders Burrough’s three surviving cruisers turned back for Gibraltar. Three merchantmen – Port Chalmers, Melbourne Star and Rochester Castle, the last with its deck almost awash – struggled to cover the final miles into Malta shepherded by small craft from the island. At 1800 on 13 August, as cheering crowds lined the old fortifications, they steamed into Grand Harbour. The Germans set about demolishing the stragglers, sinking the damaged Dorset and hitting Ohio yet again. By a miracle attributable partly to its rugged American construction, the tanker maintained way, towed by a destroyer and two minesweepers. On the morning of 15 August, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, Ohio reached safety and began to offload. Her master, Captain Dudley Mason, was awarded the George Cross; Brisbane Star also completed the passage.
The Pedestal convoy delivered 32,000 tons of stores, 12,000 tons of coal and two months’ supply of oil; five merchantmen survived out of fourteen. The navy’s aggressive posturing dissuaded the Italian fleet from joining the battle. Mussolini’s battleships were anyway immobilised by lack of fuel, and RAF aircraft dropped flares over five cruisers which put to sea, convincing them that they faced unacceptable risk if they persevered. Lieutenant Alastair Mars, commanding the submarine Unbroken, extracted some revenge for British warship losses by torpedoing the Bolzano and Muzio Attendolo. But after the Pedestal battle was over, Commander George Blundell of the battleship Nelson looked back in deep gloom: ‘Most of us felt depressed by the party. Operation “M” for Murder we call it. “The navy thrives on impossibilities,” said the BBC. Yes, but how long can it go on doing so?’
The three-day drama of Pedestal was almost matched by the experiences and sufferings of other Malta convoys and their escorts. Not all those who sailed distinguished themselves: there were shameful cases of merchant ship crews abandoning their ships unnecessarily, of seamen scuttling for lifeboats while their vessels were still steaming. A disgusted Captain Brown of Deucalion, some of whose men quit their posts prematurely, said later, ‘I could never have imagined that any Britishers could have shown up in such poor colours.’ But the overall story is one of a fine endeavour. By the winter of 1942, the worst of Britain’s Mediterranean travails were over. Ultra decrypts enabled Allied warships and aircraft to wreak increasing havoc on Rommel’s supply line: Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean rose from 15,386 tons in July to 33,791 in September, 56,303 in October, and 170,000 in the two months that followed. In November, Montgomery was victorious at El Alamein and the Americans landed in North Africa. The siege of Malta was relieved soon afterwards.
Holding the island since 1940 had cost the Royal Navy one battleship, two carriers, four cruisers, one minelayer, twenty destroyers and minesweepers and forty submarines. The RAF lost 547 aircraft in the air and another 160 destroyed on the ground. Ashore, Malta’s defence forfeited the lives of 1,600 civilians, seven hundred soldiers and nine hundred RAF personnel. Afloat, 2,200 warship crewmen, 1,700 submariners and two hundred merchant seamen perished. Thereafter, in 1943 and 1944, Allied dominance of the Mediterranean remained contested and imposed continuing losses, but strategic advantage tilted relentlessly away from the Axis. The Royal Navy’s critical responsibilities in the last two years of the war became those of escorting Allied armies to new battlefields, organising and protecting a succession of massive amphibious landings. If the threat from Germany’s submarines and aircraft persisted to the end – British warships suffered severely in the ill-fated autumn 1943 Dodecanese campaign – the Royal Navy had won the decisive battles of the European war at sea; not in actions between fleets, but by sustaining Britain’s global rights of passage in the face of air power and U-boats. In fulfilment of this responsibility, most of its captains and crews upheld the service’s highest traditions.
12
The Furnace: Russia in 1942
A phenomenon created by the strong emotions and fantastical experiences war brought upon Russia was a resurgence of religious worship, which Stalin did not seek to suppress. At Easter 1942, Moscow’s overnight curfew was lifted, and Dr Sof’ya Skopina attended the great Orthodox cathedral in Moscow’s Elokhovskaya Square. ‘We arrived at 8 p.m. There was a small queue to bless the kulich [Easter bread] and eggs. An hour later there was such a crowd that one couldn’t turn and no air to breathe. Amid the throng, women screamed, “They’ve crushed me! I’m going to faint!” The atmosphere grew so humid that moisture ran down the columns. Candles passed from one person to another sent smoke curling into spirals. There were many young people (I don’t know why they had come there). Some mums came with their kids, and a lot of military men. There were people even sitting on the cross with the picture of Christ. It was like a football crowd. At 11 p.m. a priest appeared and announced that “Our friends the British are about to arrive.” We could no longer breathe and went outside, where we saw several cars drive up. It was the British [Embassy delegation].’
Army nurse Evdokiya Kalinichenko wrote in May: ‘We’re having a little break, for the first time this month. We’ve made the wounded men comfortable, dried ourselves out, had a wash in a real banya [bath house]. We’ve been on so many roads. All kinds of roads…Mostly country roads, often mud-bound, rutted and degraded by rain, holes, bumps. One’s heart breaks when the vehicle jolts: most of the passengers are gravely wounded, and for some such jolting can be fatal. Now, however, it is so quiet around
