The first Spitfires over Malta

On the morning of 7 March 1942 fifteen Supermarine Spitfire Mk V fighters took off from the deck of the elderly aircraft carrier Eagle, sailing off the coast of Algeria. After a flight of about four hours over the sea, on a route variously given as 600 to 650 miles (about 1,000 kilometres), all of them landed on Malta, at Ta’ Qali airfield. This was Operation Spotter, the first of more than a dozen deliveries of Spitfires that changed the course of the struggle for the island in 1942.

Some lists record under 6 March that “Malta receives more fighters” for its continued defence. The date refers to the start of the operation: on 6 March a force from Gibraltar sailed east for the second time with the aircraft on board, and the Spitfires themselves took off and reached the island the following day. Nor were they simply “more” fighters. Until then Malta had been defended by Hurricane pilots; now, for the first time, a newer type arrived on the island, one the defenders had been waiting for for months.

Hurricanes against Messerschmitts

From December 1941 General der Flieger Bruno Loerzer’s II Air Corps had been stationed in Sicily, under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2. After the first heavy raids in December, in January the Germans moved on to the systematic bombing of the island’s airfields. The bombers were escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109 F fighters of the fighter wing JG 53, and Italian Macchi MC.202s also appeared in the skies.

The Hawker Hurricane, which in 1941 had been good enough against Italian aircraft and the first German units, was outclassed by the Messerschmitt in almost every respect that mattered in combat: it was several dozen kilometres an hour slower, climbed more slowly and performed worse at high altitude. The Germans could therefore choose when and from what height to attack. Pilots on Malta told an air force officer sent from Cairo that the German fighters deliberately flew past in front of the Hurricanes to show how much faster they were, and that the Spitfire was their only hope. The Governor, Lieutenant General William Dobbie, the island’s air commander, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Lloyd, and the air commander in the Middle East, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, had been pressing since January for newer aircraft to be sent.

On the island the defenders fell back on tactics. In February command of No. 249 Squadron passed to Squadron Leader Stanley Turner, a veteran of the fighting over France, who introduced the looser four-aircraft formation adopted from Fighter Command in England. There were successes, but losses on the ground and in the air grew faster than reinforcements arrived. At the beginning of March, according to British tallies, Malta on some days had only a dozen or so serviceable Hurricanes.

A failed first attempt

A Spitfire could not fly to Malta from Gibraltar: the distance, more than 1,100 miles, was beyond its range. That left the method proven with the Hurricanes – carrying fighters on aircraft carriers into the western Mediterranean and flying them off from there – used since Operation Hurry in August 1940 and in the spring of 1941. The carrier Ark Royal, which had flown most of these delivery runs, had sunk in November 1941, and the task fell to the venerable Eagle and Argus.

The Mk V Spitfires were prepared for tropical service: they were given a Vokes air filter to protect the engine from dust, and a 90-gallon (about 410-litre) auxiliary fuel tank under the fuselage. Argus brought the aircraft to Gibraltar; there they were partly assembled and transferred to Eagle. They would not fit in the hangar, so they stood on the flight deck, hampering the work of the ship’s own air group.

The first attempt ended in failure. At the end of February a force comprising the battleship Malaya, the carriers Eagle and Argus, the cruiser Hermione and destroyers sailed from Gibraltar, but it turned out that the auxiliary tanks would not feed fuel. The operation was called off and the ships returned to port, where mechanics spent several days putting the system right. British accounts later describe the recurring trouble with the tanks as hard to explain: the faults came back on later deliveries too.

The flight of 7 March

On 6 March the force sailed again. The next morning, off Algeria, the pilots took off from Eagle’s short deck. To get the fully fuelled aircraft off the deck, the flaps were set in the take-off position with wooden wedges; once airborne the pilot lowered the flaps fully, the wedges fell out, and the flaps were raised. According to some accounts the fighters were helped on their way by Blenheim bombers sent that day from Gibraltar to Malta. Most studies state that fifteen Spitfires took off from the carrier and all of them arrived; some speak of sixteen aircraft prepared for the operation, of which fifteen got through.

The pilots were a mixed group: according to one participant’s tally, they included eight Britons, four Australians, two New Zealanders and two Rhodesians from Southern Rhodesia, among them Johnny Plagis, the son of Greek immigrants, who in the following weeks became the first Spitfire ace over Malta. They were posted to No. 249 Squadron at Ta’ Qali. In this version their aircraft were armed with two Hispano 20 mm cannon and four machine guns; for the first time the island’s defenders had a fighter roughly equal to the Bf 109 F.

It is often written that these were the first Spitfires outside Britain. That needs qualifying: unarmed reconnaissance Spitfires had flown in France as early as 1939–1940, and individual reconnaissance aircraft had passed through Malta since September 1941. What happened on Malta in March 1942 was the first use of Spitfire fighters outside the British Isles.

The first combats

The new pilots needed a few days to get to know the island and its airfields, and the mechanics to make the aircraft ready for combat. On 10 March the Spitfires went up for the first time against a raid by Junkers Ju 88 bombers escorted by Messerschmitts. Together with the Hurricanes, nineteen fighters were scrambled. Flight Lieutenant Philip Heppell claimed a Bf 109 destroyed; one probable and several damaged were also claimed.

There were, however, too few Spitfires to break the Germans’ superiority. It was precisely in March that Kesselring began the heaviest phase of the bombing. According to British tallies, the Luftwaffe flew nearly five thousand sorties over Malta that month, and from 20 March it struck above all at the airfields. Fighters were destroyed on the ground before they could take off. On 20 March one of the Spotter pilots, the Rhodesian Doug Leggo, was killed, shot down after a morning alert. In March the RAF’s losses ran to a dozen or so fighters in combat and several dozen aircraft destroyed on the ground.

Its place in the war

Operation Spotter opened a series of delivery flights that kept Malta alive throughout 1942. On 21 March Eagle flew off nine more Spitfires to the island, and on 29 March – seven, according to most tallies. That was not enough in April, when the Germans dropped more bombs on Malta than in any other month of the siege. On 20 April the American carrier Wasp, lent by President Roosevelt at Winston Churchill’s request, flew off 47 Spitfires, but the Germans destroyed most of them within a few days, and there were days when the island was defended by a single serviceable fighter or none at all. On 15 April King George VI awarded the George Cross to the whole island.

The turning point came on 9 May with the delivery of more than sixty Spitfires from Wasp and Eagle, which were refuelled and rearmed the moment they landed. The next day the Axis air forces suffered heavy losses over the island. In the summer the new air commander on Malta, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the victor of the Battle of Britain, began intercepting the enemy over the sea before it reached the island. By the autumn the carriers had delivered about 275 Spitfires to Malta, and from October some of them flew in directly from Gibraltar with auxiliary tanks.

The first March deliveries, then, did not change the island’s position at once. Kesselring still ruled the air, and in Libya Erwin Rommel’s army, halted before the Gazala line, was receiving more and more supplies, because Malta could not attack the Axis convoys. But they showed the way forward: with Spitfires the defence could fight the Messerschmitts on equal terms, and from then on Malta’s fate would depend above all on the number of fighters that could be flown in to it.