Malta under air attack in January 1942

War chronologies record heavy air raids on Malta under 7 January 1942, adding that by some estimates twice as many bombs fell on the island as on London. The first part of this statement captures well what happened on Malta throughout January: the German air force, back in Sicily, began a systematic campaign against the island’s airfields, harbour and dockyard, and the number of air-raid alerts rose to 263 in the course of the month. The 7th of January itself, however, was not a particularly heavy day. The command on Malta expected the Germans to begin massed dive-bomber attacks on the airfields on that very day and put every infantry machine gun on alert, but downpours and low cloud upset these plans. According to the Malta war diary, several small formations of Ju 88s with fighter escort came over the island that day and dropped bombs on the airfields at Ta’ Qali and Luqa, the dockyard and the village of Dingli. The second part of the statement, the comparison with London, refers to the spring of 1942, not to January.

Kesselring and II Air Corps

The return of the Luftwaffe was a response to Malta’s successes in the autumn. Since the summer of 1941 submarines, torpedo aircraft and bombers from the island, and from October also the cruisers of Force K, had been sinking ships sailing from Italy to Libya; in November they destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy. Short of fuel and ammunition, Erwin Rommel had been forced in December to withdraw from Gazala deep into Cyrenaica. At the beginning of December Hitler appointed Field Marshal Albert Kesselring Commander-in-Chief South and gave him the task of securing the route to Africa and, above all, neutralising Malta.

Kesselring’s instrument was General Bruno Loerzer’s II Air Corps (II. Fliegerkorps), transferred from the Eastern Front, where it had supported the advance on Moscow. The move took weeks, and the units arrived worn out by the fighting and the Russian winter. According to figures cited in British and German studies, in January the corps fielded only about 120 aircraft against Malta, and by March around 390. The core of its strength consisted of Junkers Ju 88 bombers and F-model Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, including those of fighter wing JG 53, supported by night fighters and reconnaissance aircraft. Alongside them the Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica, continued to operate over the island.

Kesselring’s plan did not call for a great bombardment straight away. In January and February the Germans carried out continuous harassing attacks with small groups of bombers under strong fighter escort. Their aim was to destroy aircraft on the ground, crater the runways and force the defenders to scramble their fighters constantly, thereby wearing them down. According to the summary in the Malta war diary, only ten raids in January involved thirty or more aircraft, and 36 attacks were directed at the airfields.

The first week of January

Kesselring opened the year with a raid that was given the number 1175 in Malta’s register of alerts. The most tragic proved to be the attack shortly before midnight on 1 January: according to the war diary, observers saw bombs falling over the harbour “with a fiery tail”, and one of them hit houses in Gżira. The Governor of the island, General William Dobbie, reported to London that 27 people had been killed in Gżira on the night of 1–2 January; the list of victims in the war diary includes children aged from seven months to fifteen years. Sappers who recovered one of the unexploded bombs the next day judged it to be of a previously unknown type, probably rocket-propelled. References to German bombs with additional rocket propulsion used over Malta in 1942 also appear in later studies.

On 3 January a series of attacks on the airfields began that went on for a day and a half. In the morning about thirty aircraft came over Luqa; the runway was badly cratered and several Wellington bombers were damaged on the ground. In the evening and through the night bombs fell on Luqa, Hal Far, Ta’ Qali, the dockyard and the surrounding villages; in the harbour three sailors of the destroyer HMS Havock were killed. The next day ten Bristol Blenheim bombers took off from Luqa, repaired by soldiers, and attacked the airfield at Castelvetrano in Sicily; according to British reports several dozen aircraft were destroyed on the ground there, although figures in such reports were often inflated. The interrogation of German airmen who had been shot down and news of aircraft concentrating in Sicily led the command to declare a state of readiness against an airborne landing. No invasion came, but the fear of one stayed with the defenders throughout the winter and spring.

Winter proved as dangerous to the defence as the bombs. Torrential rain turned the unsurfaced dispersal areas at Ta’ Qali and Hal Far into mud, and the airfields were sometimes out of action for days on end. On 7 January the Air Officer Commanding on Malta, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Lloyd, sent two squadrons of Wellingtons back to Egypt because there was nowhere to park them safely. In the course of the month the army provided some 2,500 soldiers to work on the airfields, filling craters and building new taxiways and stone pens to shelter the aircraft. Thanks to them, the airfields were rarely put out of use by bombing for more than a few hours.

Hurricanes against Messerschmitts

The island’s defence rested on a few squadrons of Hawker Hurricane fighters, on anti-aircraft artillery and on searchlights. Against the new Messerschmitt Bf 109Fs the Hurricanes proved distinctly inferior. The German fighters were faster, climbed better and usually attacked with the advantage of height, while the Ju 88s could outrun their pursuers. In their summary for January the commanders on Malta wrote plainly that their aircraft were “clearly outclassed by the German machines”, that the Ju 88s were so heavily armoured that they were hard to shoot down, and that their own fighters lacked cannon. They added, however, that the enemy had not achieved his aim of neutralising Malta.

Losses mounted quickly, especially on the ground. According to some studies, about fifty Hurricanes were destroyed on the airfields in January and several more were lost in air combat; by the end of the month, of the more than three hundred fighters that had passed through the island since the start of the war, 28 remained there. On 25 January, according to the war diary, 69 enemy aircraft attacked Hal Far, destroying five Hurricanes and a Swordfish torpedo aircraft. Bombers and reconnaissance aircraft from Malta, flying over the sea without fighter cover, fell prey to German fighters and Ju 88 night fighters. The Hurricane pilots were demanding more modern machines ever more loudly, and the commanders in Malta and Cairo were calling for Supermarine Spitfire fighters, none of which had yet been sent to Malta.

Convoys

Despite the raids the British managed in January to bring several ships through to Malta from Alexandria. At the beginning of the month, in Operation MF2, the fast transport Glengyle sailed for the island under the cover of Rear Admiral Philip Vian’s 15th Cruiser Squadron, while the empty supply ship Breconshire left Malta for Alexandria at the same time. The two groups met at sea on 7 January, and on 8 January Glengyle, escorted by four destroyers, entered Grand Harbour with fuel, food and ammunition.

In Operation MF3 four merchant ships left Alexandria on 16 January. On 17 January the German submarine U-133 torpedoed one of their escorts, the destroyer HMS Gurkha; the Dutch destroyer Isaac Sweers towed her clear of the burning oil slick and rescued most of her crew, but the ship sank. The merchant ship Thermopylae, after developing a defect, was diverted to Benghazi but was badly damaged by bombs on the way and sunk. The remaining three – Ajax, Clan Ferguson and City of Calcutta – covered by Force K and by Hurricanes from the island, reached Grand Harbour on 19 January. That day 72 enemy aircraft came over Malta; they did not hit the convoy, but bombs aimed at Ta’ Qali airfield also fell on nearby Mosta, where sixteen people were killed. Dobbie reported that this was the first convoy for almost four months and that it had brought, among other things, grain, coal and kerosene. At the end of January, in a similar operation, Breconshire once again reached the island from Alexandria.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the struggle for which the Germans had come to Sicily in the first place was being fought out. Malta could no longer stop the Axis convoys. A large Italian convoy covered by battleships (Operation M43) reached Tripoli without loss on 5 January, and in the second half of the month another convoy (Operation T18) brought through four of its five ships; on 23 January British aircraft managed to sink only the fast merchant ship Victoria, one of the largest transports on that route. Force K had been weakened by the December disaster in a minefield, and after the Italian human-torpedo attack on Alexandria the Mediterranean Fleet did not have a single serviceable battleship in the eastern part of the sea.

The month’s toll

According to the summary in the Malta war diary, 263 air-raid alerts were sounded on the island in January 1942, about a hundred more than in December, and bombs fell on land in the course of 54 raids. The alerts followed one another so often that seventeen were sounded within twenty-four hours on 14 January. Dobbie stated in his report of 24 January that during the previous month 91 civilians (including 32 children) had been killed and 99 seriously injured; 430 houses and 35 other buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged. By then 421 civilians had been killed on Malta since the start of the war with Italy. The Governor stressed that the heaviest losses had been where people had not reached the shelters in time, and that the civil defence services were working efficiently, although the incessant raids were a severe trial for the population.

Malta and London

The comparison between Malta and London that chronologies attach to 7 January circulates in many versions. Studies relate it to March and April 1942, when II Air Corps had reached full strength and began the heaviest bombing in the island’s history. According to British figures, in April 1942 alone the Germans and Italians dropped about 6,700 tons of bombs on Malta, three times as much as in March, and some authors write that in March and April more bombs fell on the island than on London in the heaviest year of the Blitz. Others restrict the comparison to the worst months of the bombing of London. Whatever the version, it does not apply to January 1942, when the formations coming over the island usually numbered from two to a dozen or so bombers. The comparison also makes sense chiefly as a measure of the density of the bombing: Malta covers less than 250 square kilometres, and its population was concentrated largely around the harbour and dockyard at which the Germans were aiming.

Place in the war

January 1942 marked the beginning of the hardest period of the siege of Malta. The Germans had not yet managed to neutralise the island, but they had achieved an intermediate aim: for several months aircraft and ships from Malta could not effectively attack the routes to Libya. The Axis convoys that reached Tripoli around the turn of the year enabled Rommel to launch a counter-offensive on 21 January, in which he recovered western Cyrenaica with Benghazi. On the island itself February and March brought a further intensification of the raids, and March and April the bombardments that reduced much of Valletta and the harbour area to rubble. On 7 March the first Spitfires flew in to Malta from an aircraft carrier, on 27 March Breconshire sank, and on 15 April King George VI awarded the George Cross to the whole island.

In May Kesselring judged that Malta had been neutralised, and Hitler and Mussolini prepared to capture it from the air and the sea. The landing never took place, however, and when in the summer the Luftwaffe moved most of its forces to Africa and the east, the island recovered and once again began sinking the ships bound for Rommel. The January raids, though much lighter than those of the spring, already displayed every element of this struggle: the superiority of the Messerschmitts over the Hurricanes, the dependence of the defence on convoys, the suffering of the civilian population, and the close link between the fate of Malta and the course of the war in North Africa.