Malta in August 1941

War chronologies sometimes record under 11 August 1941 that Malta “was relieved by a convoy”. No convoy reached the island that day, however. The last large convoy, that of Operation Substance, had entered Grand Harbour on 24 July, and the soldiers and airmen who had not managed to sail with it were brought from Gibraltar by warships in the fast Operation Style between 31 July and 2 August. According to Italian and British studies, no supply ships were sent to Malta in August; the next convoy, that of Operation Halberd, reached the island only on 28 September. The entry about an August convoy is most probably a year out: on 10–15 August 1942 Malta lived through the drama of the Operation Pedestal convoy, and on 11 August 1942 the aircraft carrier Eagle was sunk while escorting it.

For Malta, August 1941 was something other than a day of rescue. It was the month in which the island, supplied for many months ahead and free of German air raids, for the first time fully changed from a besieged fortress into a base for attacks on the routes by which the Italians and Germans carried supplies to Erwin Rommel’s forces in Libya.

The island after the July convoy

In the summer of 1941 Malta was in a better position than at any time since the start of the war with Italy. The German X Air Corps (X. Fliegerkorps), which had bombed the island from Sicily from January to May, had left for the Balkans and the East, and the Italian air force (the Regia Aeronautica) came over less often and in smaller numbers. In the spring and summer aircraft carriers had brought further batches of Hawker Hurricane fighters to the western end of the Mediterranean, from where they flew on to the island themselves – among others in Operation Rocket in June. The July convoy had brought food, fuel, ammunition and bombs. According to the British official history, in August the garrison numbered more than 22,000 troops, with 112 heavy and 118 light anti-aircraft guns, about 75 serviceable Hurricanes, and stocks of most materials for eight months and of some for as many as fifteen.

From 1 June 1941 the air forces on the island were commanded by Air Commodore Hugh Pughe Lloyd, previously a bomber staff officer, who had arrived with orders that Malta should above all attack. The quieter skies allowed him to keep strike aircraft on the island that German raids would have destroyed on the ground. At the end of July Bristol Blenheim light bombers of No. 105 Squadron RAF arrived from England under Wing Commander Hughie Edwards, recently awarded the Victoria Cross for a daylight raid on Bremen. At Hal Far airfield were the Fairey Swordfish torpedo biplanes of No. 830 Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm, which had long been attacking convoys bound for Tripoli and mining the approaches to that port; from the summer some of them carried radar for detecting ships at night. The Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft of No. 69 Squadron, whose pilots included the later famous Adrian Warburton, photographed Italian ports and searched for convoys at sea.

The submarines of the 10th Flotilla

Malta’s most dangerous weapon was its submarines. Based on Manoel Island was George Simpson’s 10th Flotilla, equipped with small U-class submarines, well suited to operating in the shallow, confined waters between Sicily, Tunisia and Libya. Its most famous boat was HMS Upholder under Lieutenant Commander Malcolm David Wanklyn, which in May had sunk the troopship Conte Rosso.

Patrol records show how thickly the Malta boats swarmed over the Axis routes in August. On 19 August Urge and Unbeaten attacked, north of Pantelleria, a fast convoy of four large passenger liners carrying troops from Naples to Tripoli: Esperia, Marco Polo, Neptunia and Oceania. Both submarines missed, and Urge had to evade the destroyers’ depth charges. The next day, 20 August, the convoy found Unique waiting for it off Tripoli, commanded in place of her exhausted captain by Lieutenant Arthur Hezlet. At about ten in the morning Hezlet slipped through the screen and fired four torpedoes from a range of about 600 metres. Three hit Esperia (11,398 GRT) some 11 nautical miles from the Tripoli lighthouse. The ship sank within a quarter of an hour or so. Because the port was close and the escort strong, almost everyone was saved – more than 1,100 people, according to Italian figures cited in British compilations; the number of dead and missing varies in different sources from a dozen or so to 31.

The same day Upholder sank the small transport Enotria off Cape San Vito in Sicily, and on 22 August, in the same area, the steamer Lussin (3,988 GRT). On 27 August Urge damaged the passenger ship Aquitania north of the island of Marettimo, and on 31 August Upholder fired four torpedoes at Neptunia and Oceania east of Tripoli – this time without result.

The flotilla paid for this with losses. The approaches to Tripoli were densely mined. On 18 August P32, closing in on a convoy, struck a mine or suffered an internal explosion and settled on the bottom; only her commanding officer and one rating survived, picked up by the Italians. P33 disappeared without trace in the same area and was declared lost on 24 August, most probably also to a mine.

Aircraft over the route to Libya

The Swordfish and Blenheims complemented the submarines. The Blenheims of No. 105 Squadron attacked ships by day at masthead height, since only thus could a light bomber hit its target, but they paid a high price for these tactics: the anti-aircraft fire of the ships and their escorts shot them down one after another, and the squadron, which returned to England in the autumn, suffered heavy losses in men and aircraft on Malta. The Swordfish – biplanes of the same type that a year earlier had sunk Italian ships at Tobruk – flew at night, finding convoys by radar or by the light of flares dropped by other aircraft, and attacked with torpedoes ships at sea and in the ports of Sicily and Libya. On 11 August, in the port of Syracuse, a British aerial torpedo sank the Italian hospital ship California; according to post-war compilations about ten people were killed. Bombers from Malta also attacked the ports of Tripoli and Sicily and Italian airfields.

The effectiveness of these attacks owed much to intelligence. From the summer of 1941 the British were reading more and more German air force signals enciphered on the Enigma, as well as Italian naval signals enciphered on an Italian cipher machine. Information decrypted at Bletchley Park on the composition of convoys, their routes and their times of departure from port reached the commands in Cairo and on Malta. So that the enemy would not guess the source, a reconnaissance aircraft usually appeared over the ships before an attack, apparently “spotting” them by chance. This rule, observed very scrupulously, protected the secret later called “Ultra” and meant that for a long time the Italians suspected treachery in their own ports rather than broken ciphers.

Force H and the Italian fleet

At the end of August Admiral James Somerville’s Force H from Gibraltar also carried out an operation in the western Mediterranean which the Italians took for yet another attempt to run a convoy to Malta. In Operation Mincemeat the fast minelayer Manxman, disguised as a French destroyer, laid mines in the Gulf of Genoa, while the main body of Force H, with the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, drew the enemy’s attention. The Italian fleet put to sea with its battleships to intercept the imaginary convoy, and the submarine command on Malta sent Upholder across its path; on 24 August her two torpedoes missed an Italian cruiser north-west of Sicily. The fleets never came to blows.

Place in the war

August 1941 did not yet bring disaster for Axis shipping, but it showed the way things were heading. According to figures cited from the British official history, the proportion of ships sunk on the route to Libya rose from about 19 per cent in July to about 25 per cent in September, and a large share of these losses was inflicted by aircraft and submarines from Malta. In the summer the Germans and Italians were sending an average of more than 70,000 tons of supplies a month to Africa, yet Rommel, who was preparing to storm Tobruk, still complained of shortages, especially of fuel. At the end of August Hitler, over the objections of Karl Dönitz, who did not want to weaken the Battle of the Atlantic, decided to send the first German U-boats to the Mediterranean; they arrived there in the autumn.

The worst for the Axis was yet to come. On 18 September Upholder sank Neptunia and Oceania, which had eluded her in August, off Tripoli. On 28 September the Halberd convoy reached Valletta, and in October Force K – two light cruisers and two destroyers – arrived on Malta, and on the night of 8–9 November destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy. In November, as the British opened Operation Crusader in Libya, the Axis forces lost most of the fuel they had sent by sea. The response was the return of the Luftwaffe: in December 1941 II Air Corps was transferred to Sicily, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring set himself the goal of neutralising Malta. In 1942 the island endured the heaviest bombing in its history and came close to starvation before it was saved by the Pedestal convoy in August – and it is probably the echo of that convoy that lies behind the entry about a convoy that “relieved Malta” on 11 August.

In the summer of 1941 Malta showed that it was not merely a burden to be held at any cost but the key to the war in North Africa: whoever controlled the island decided how much fuel and ammunition reached Rommel. For that reason Malta became one of the Axis’s main targets in the Mediterranean the following year.