The end of Force K

On the evening of 8 April 1942 the light cruiser Penelope left the Grand Harbour in Malta. Her hull was patched with wooden plugs, which her crew had hammered into hundreds of holes made by bomb splinters; the sailors called their ship “HMS Pepperpot” and, as the plugs multiplied, “HMS Porcupine” as well. She sailed alone westwards, for Gibraltar. The next day German aircraft attacked her for many hours, but on 10 April she reached her destination, with further damage from near misses. The admiral commanding at Malta sent her a brief signal: “As usual in form. Congratulations.”

Penelope’s departure closed the story of Force K, a small force of cruisers and destroyers which in the autumn of 1941 had wreaked havoc from Malta on the convoys sailing from Italy to Libya. Not a single large surface warship capable of fighting now remained on the island.

The force that stopped the convoys

Force K was formed on 21 October 1941, when two sister ships, the Arethusa-class light cruisers Aurora and Penelope, arrived in Malta from Scapa Flow, together with the destroyers Lance and Lively. It was commanded by Captain William Agnew in Aurora; Penelope was commanded by Captain Angus Nicholl. It had a single task: using intelligence and air reconnaissance, to sail at night onto the Axis convoy routes and destroy the ships before they reached Tripoli and Benghazi.

On the night of 8–9 November the force destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy: seven merchant ships and the destroyer Fulmine, without losing a single ship of its own. On 24 November, west of Crete, it sank two German ships carrying aviation fuel, and on 1 December the transport Adriatico, the tanker Iridio Mantovani and her escorting destroyer, Alvise da Mosto. At the end of November a second force, called Force B, arrived in Malta with the cruisers Ajax and Neptune. Axis shipping losses on the route to Africa then reached a level that Rome and Berlin could not bear: according to frequently cited figures, more than half the cargo sent to Libya in November 1941 went to the bottom. The shortage of fuel and ammunition weighed heavily on Rommel during the British Operation Crusader, after which he had to give up Cyrenaica.

The success lasted less than two months. On the night of 18–19 December 1941 the combined forces were pursuing an Italian convoy bound for Tripoli and, some twenty miles off the port, ran into a minefield laid by the Italians back in June. The cruiser Neptune sank – of her crew of about 765, one man survived – as did the destroyer Kandahar. Aurora was badly damaged and had to go for repairs away from Malta, while Penelope was less seriously hit, because the mine exploded in her paravane, at some distance from the hull.

Malta ceases to be a base

At the same time the situation in the air changed. The convoy losses prompted Hitler to transfer General Bruno Loerzer’s II Air Corps to Sicily. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South since December, set himself the goal of neutralising Malta. The first massed raids in December were followed in January by systematic bombing of the airfields and the harbour.

Penelope returned to service at the beginning of January 1942 and, with a few destroyers, still bore the name Force K, but she was no longer a striking force. Her role became the protection of ships sailing to and from Malta. In January and February she went out to meet convoys from Alexandria and escorted the supply ship Breconshire there, fighting off aircraft almost continuously as she did so. On 22 March, together with the destroyer Legion, she joined convoy MW 10 during the Second Battle of Sirte, and the next day she tried to tow Breconshire, immobilised by bombs, inshore.

The disaster that befell this convoy, most of whose ships were sunk off Malta or in its harbours, left a cluster of damaged warships in the Grand Harbour. On 26 March Legion capsized and sank alongside the quay when her forward magazine exploded. The destroyer Havock, damaged off Sirte and again in harbour and sent to Gibraltar with her repairs unfinished, ran aground off the Tunisian coast on 6 April and was lost. Lance, lying in dry dock, was hit by a bomb on 5 April and slipped off her supports, and on 9 April Ju 87 dive-bombers damaged her so badly that work on her was abandoned; the wreck was later towed to England and judged not worth repairing. The destroyer Kingston, hit off Sirte by a shell from the battleship Littorio, lost fourteen men, her captain among them, on 4 April to a bomb that fell at the entrance to a tunnel shelter, and on 11 April, still in dock, she was destroyed. On 1 April bombs sank two submarines, Pandora and P36, in the island’s harbours. The Polish submarine ORP Sokół was also badly damaged; in April she left for Gibraltar, sailing the whole way on the surface because her shattered batteries would not allow her to dive.

The Pepperpot’s escape

At the end of March Penelope was caught by near misses that holed her hull fore and aft. She was taken into dry dock, where she became one of the main targets of the raids. Day after day her crew patched new holes, while her anti-aircraft guns fired at the raiders alongside the island’s batteries. According to some sources, Captain Nicholl was also wounded in the harbour.

The British command decided that all ships unable to fight must leave Malta before they were destroyed in dock. Temporarily repaired, Penelope slipped out on the evening of 8 April. Gibraltar was some thousand nautical miles away, and the first part of the route lay within range of aircraft from Sicily and Sardinia. Attacked by bombers on 9 April, the cruiser reached her destination a day later. Her repairs were beyond Gibraltar’s capacity; in May Penelope sailed for the New York Navy Yard, where she was under repair until September. King George VI later decorated 21 of her officers and men as “heroes of Malta”.

A clear road to Libya

The consequences of the departure of the last surface ships were immediate. Malta, from which only a few months earlier cruisers, torpedo aircraft and submarines had sallied forth, was by April 1942 merely defending itself against its own destruction. Between 20 March and 28 April, according to figures cited in the literature, the Germans flew almost 11,900 sorties over the island and dropped some 6,500 tons of bombs, losing 173 aircraft in the process. The submarines of the 10th Flotilla had to lie on the bottom of the harbour by day. On 14 April Lieutenant Commander Malcolm David Wanklyn’s Upholder, the most successful British submarine of the war, was lost, and at the turn of April and May the flotilla was moved to Alexandria.

For the Axis this meant the opening of the route to Africa. According to Italian naval figures, of more than 150,000 tons of supplies sent from Italy to North Africa in April 1942, all but less than two hundred tons reached their destination. Kesselring is said to have reported that there was “nothing left to bomb” on Malta. Well supplied, Rommel, whose second offensive had come to a halt in February before the British line at Ain el Gazala, could prepare his next attack.

Place in the war

The end of Force K was one of the lowest points of Britain’s war in the Mediterranean. Since the autumn of 1941 Britain had lost the carrier Ark Royal, the battleship Barham, and several cruisers and destroyers there, while two battleships lay damaged at Alexandria. Without ships and with its air force exhausted, Malta ceased for several months to threaten the convoys. At the end of April Hitler and Mussolini approved a plan to capture the island, which the Germans called Operation Herkules, but at the end of May Rommel struck at Gazala, in June he took Tobruk and advanced into Egypt, and the invasion was postponed and never carried out.

Malta got its teeth back gradually: from May thanks to further deliveries of Spitfires, in the summer thanks to the return of the submarines, and in August thanks to the Pedestal convoy. After the convoy of Operation Stoneage got through in November 1942, a new Force K was formed in the Grand Harbour, this time of Dido-class cruisers, and once again hunted the convoys bound for Tunisia. Penelope returned to the Mediterranean in 1943, bombarded Pantelleria and Sicily, and supported the landings at Salerno and Anzio. On 18 February 1944, on her way from Naples to Anzio, she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-410; more than four hundred of her crew were killed, her captain among them. In 1943 C. S. Forester dedicated his novel The Ship, based on the Battle of Sirte, to her officers and men.