New Hurricanes for Malta

On the morning of 27 April 1941 three flights of Hawker Hurricane fighters took off from the deck of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, steaming far to the west of Malta. Led by two-seat naval aircraft, they flew several hundred kilometres over the sea and landed on the island before eleven o’clock. According to the Malta air force diary, 23 aircraft arrived; tables of British ferry operations state that 24 took off from the carrier. This was Operation Dunlop, the second delivery of fighters that month by way of the western Mediterranean and the largest since the start of the war. It came just in time: April 1941 was the month in which more German bombs fell on Malta than in any other.

Under 13 April war chronologies record that “Malta is bombed again” and still remains a “thorn in the side” of German supply in the Mediterranean, and under 27 April that the Hurricanes arrived as important reinforcements for the besieged island. The two events are connected, and their background is an April under the bombs, two deliveries of fighters from a carrier and Malta’s growing role in the struggle against the Axis convoys.

April under the bombs

Since January 1941 Malta had been attacked by General Hans Geisler’s German X Air Corps (X. Fliegerkorps), transferred to Sicily to neutralise the island and cover the troop transports to Libya. After the attack on the carrier Illustrious in January and months of night raids and fighting against the Messerschmitts, the island had lost its bombers and flying boats, and its only fighter squadron, No. 261 Squadron RAF, was dwindling. At the beginning of April some of the German aircraft left for Africa to support Erwin Rommel’s offensive, and others for the Balkans, where on 6 April the Germans attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. The raids did not slacken, however. According to the British official history, the weight of bombs dropped on Malta was greatest precisely in April; contemporary estimates ranged from 350 to 650 tons – a great deal for so small an island, though still little compared with what was to come in 1942.

The Germans bombed above all the airfields and the harbour, and at night they dropped mines in the Grand Harbour and its approaches. On 8 April the boom defence vessel Moor sank on an air-dropped mine inside the harbour itself; one man survived. According to the British official history, the naval commander on Malta, Vice Admiral Wilbraham Ford, was finding it increasingly difficult to keep the harbour open, and as his command’s war diary recorded, on 21 April the Grand Harbour, in which many mines lay, had to be closed for a time and only the neighbouring Marsamxett Harbour used.

13 April was Easter Sunday. In the morning twelve Messerschmitt Bf 109s flew over the island, followed by Ju 88 bombers, which bombed the area around Luqa airfield. A flight commander of No. 261 Squadron, Flight Lieutenant Ernest Mason, shot down a Messerschmitt according to British reports, but was himself shot down into the sea; wounded in the arm, leg and head, he was picked up by a high-speed rescue launch. The heaviest raid came just after midnight: according to the garrison war diary, some 25 aircraft came over in waves for an hour and a half and bombed Rabat, the island’s old capital Mdina, the military hospital at Mtarfa, Ta’ Qali airfield, Attard, St Julian’s, Fort St Elmo and Luqa once more. Around Rabat alone 70 craters were counted, and eight civilian houses were reduced to rubble. According to the Maltese chronicler Joseph Micallef, two parachute mines struck a large shelter in Valletta in which about a hundred people had taken cover; the buildings above it collapsed, but the shelter held and no one was killed. The Maltese remembered that Easter as the night of “miraculous misses”.

The anti-aircraft guns fired almost without pause. The Governor warned the commanders in the Middle East that the barrels were wearing out a fifth faster than normal and asked for spare parts, which were hard to bring in; there was also a shortage of trained gunners, so some of the heavy guns were manned by soldiers from the infantry battalions. On 14 April an incident over Malta captured the nervousness of those weeks: a Hurricane scrambled to intercept a German reconnaissance aircraft mistook for the enemy and fired on a British Maryland of No. 69 Squadron flown by Adrian Warburton, who made a forced landing at Luqa with a damaged engine and undercarriage.

Operation Winch

The salvation of Malta’s fighter force lay in aircraft carriers. Hurricanes could not fly to the island from Gibraltar, and the route across West Africa and Egypt took weeks. The quickest way was to carry them by ship into the western Mediterranean and fly them off the deck when Malta was a few hundred kilometres away. That was how Operation Hurry had given the island its first Hurricanes in August 1940. The Admiralty was reluctant to divert its few carriers from duties in the Atlantic, where German surface warships were on the prowl, but after alarming cables in March from the Governor, General William Dobbie, it concluded that Malta must have fighters as soon as possible.

At the end of March the carrier Argus brought to Gibraltar twelve Hurricanes of the new Mk II version, faster than the worn-out Mk Is, with a better rate of climb and able to carry extra fuel tanks. They were transferred to Ark Royal, which put to sea on 2 April with Admiral James Somerville’s Force H – the battlecruiser Renown, the cruiser Sheffield and destroyers of the 8th Flotilla. On the morning of 3 April, some 400 miles from Malta, the Hurricanes took off from the deck and, led by Fleet Air Arm Blackburn Skua aircraft, reached the island at about ten o’clock. All of them arrived; one was damaged on landing. Italian fighters and bombers attacked only the high-speed rescue launch waiting at sea in case of a ditching.

Twelve aircraft did not change the course of the fighting, but for the first time since February the pilots of No. 261 Squadron had machines with which they could take on the Bf 109. Thanks to them Malta regained some of its capacity for offensive operations. Admiral Andrew Cunningham judged that the air threat had diminished somewhat and on 8 April sent the 14th Destroyer Flotilla to the island. Nine Wellington bombers also returned to Malta and bombed Tripoli five times between 13 and 20 April.

A thorn in Rommel’s side

It was Malta’s role as an offensive base that made it impossible for the Germans to leave it alone. On the night of 15–16 April destroyers from Malta destroyed an entire convoy carrying troops and supplies for the Afrika Korps off the Kerkennah Islands. On 14 April Winston Churchill issued a directive in which he made the interruption of shipping to Libya the first task of the Mediterranean Fleet and demanded that Malta be given as many first-class fighters as its airfields could hold, so that they could protect the ships based there. That same day the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, reportedly argued before the War Cabinet that an island lying so close to the Sicilian airfields would hold out only if it were “filled with fighters”.

The Germans answered with more raids. When on the night of 20–21 April the British fleet bombarded Tripoli, X Air Corps struck hard at Malta instead, and on 21 April the fast supply ship Breconshire broke through from Alexandria into the Grand Harbour with aviation fuel and ammunition. Further heavy night raids combined with minelaying came on 22 and 24 April; in the second of them the cruiser Gloucester, which had just arrived to support the destroyers, was very nearly hit.

Operation Dunlop

The second delivery required longer preparations. In the second half of April Argus, escorted by the cruiser London, brought another batch of Hurricanes from the Clyde, which were again transferred to Ark Royal at Gibraltar. The operation was combined with the transfer of warships to the Mediterranean Fleet (Operation Salient). Late on the evening of Friday 25 April Force S – the anti-aircraft cruiser Dido, the fast minelayer Abdiel and six destroyers of Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten’s 5th Flotilla – left Gibraltar first and, to deceive observers, headed west towards the Atlantic at first. An hour later Force H set off eastwards: Renown, Ark Royal, Sheffield and five destroyers.

On 26 April the carrier reached the appointed flying-off position, but bad weather prevented the aircraft from taking off, and the ships had to wait out the night in waters where they could expect to be attacked. On the morning of 27 April, at about 5.15 a.m., the first flight of eight Hurricanes took off, followed by two more. They were guided by two-seat Fairey Fulmar naval fighters, and on the last leg of the route a Sunderland flying boat and two Marylands from Malta came out to meet them. The Germans were close by: as the aircraft approached, a Ju 88 escorted by Messerschmitts was circling over the island on reconnaissance, and afterwards twelve more Bf 109s circled off the east coast for an hour. The Hurricanes landed without loss – the last at 10.45 a.m. – but two Messerschmitts dived on Marsaxlokk Bay and set on fire with their guns the Sunderland, which had only just alighted by the Kalafrana base. The flying boat burned and sank.

According to the air force diary, 23 Hurricanes arrived on Malta that day – six of the Mk II version and seventeen older Mk Is – together with three Fulmars. Fifteen fighters were allotted to Hal Far airfield. According to the British official history, this delivery raised the number of serviceable fighters on the island to more than forty, which made it possible in May to form a second fighter squadron, No. 185 Squadron RAF. That same day six Bristol Blenheim bombers of No. 21 Squadron flew in to Malta; their crews had experience of attacking shipping in the North Sea, and with them began the series of low-level attacks on Axis convoys flown from Malta throughout the summer. On 28 April the ships of Force S entered the Grand Harbour. Mountbatten remained on the island with six destroyers and the cruiser Gloucester as a new strike force, and Captain Mack’s flotilla left for Alexandria.

The last weeks of X Air Corps

The Germans did not give up. On the nights of 28–29 and 29–30 April, according to the war diary of the naval command on Malta, 60–70 aircraft at a time came over the harbour, dropping bombs and mines. In dry dock the destroyer Encounter and the minesweeper Fermoy were badly damaged, and the island’s only minesweeper fitted to deal with magnetic mines was sunk. These attacks, however, were the last spurt of an exhausted enemy. According to the British official history, based on German documents, at the end of April Geisler reported to the Luftwaffe high command that he could not sustain such a rate of losses any longer: the proportion of serviceable aircraft had fallen very low, and the crews were losing confidence. Maritime reconnaissance, convoy cover, attacks on British warships and support for Rommel all called for long-range flights over the sea, and in those very days the Luftwaffe also needed aircraft in Greece, from which the British were just then evacuating their corps.

The British looked for other routes too. At the end of April the merchant ship Parracombe, with 21 Hurricanes in her holds, tried to slip through the western Mediterranean alone, disguised and unescorted, keeping to Vichy French territorial waters. On 2 May she struck a mine off Cape Bon and sank with her aircraft.

Place in the war

Winch and Dunlop began a series of operations in which, according to the British official history, 224 fighters flew to Malta from carriers between April and June 1941. Of these, 109 remained on the island, and the rest, after refuelling, flew on to Egypt. In May Operation Splice brought 48 Hurricanes at once from two carriers. Experienced flight commanders, controllers and modern radio sets for the fighter control station were also sent to the island, and the tired pilots of No. 261 Squadron were replaced by fresh airmen of No. 249 Squadron. In May most of the units of X Air Corps left Sicily for Africa and Greece, replacing aircraft withdrawn ahead of the attack on the USSR, and on 4 June the last German combat unit left the island. According to the British official history, from January to June 1941 the Luftwaffe lost 60 aircraft in attacks on Malta and the Regia Aeronautica 16; the British lost 42 fighters.

April 1941 was thus a turning point in the first phase of the siege: the island survived the heaviest month of German raids, rebuilt its air defences and began once again to strike at the route to Libya. As Churchill and Portal had foreseen, the more fighters Malta had, the more effectively bombers, torpedo aircraft, submarines and destroyers could operate from its airfields and harbours. In the summer and autumn of 1941 Rommel felt their effects ever more painfully, and the losses to the convoys led the Germans to transfer strong air forces to Sicily again in December 1941. The Hurricanes, which in 1941 were sufficient against the Italians and the worn-out X Air Corps, were no match for the new Messerschmitts in 1942, and in the spring of that year Spitfires began to fly in to Malta from carriers. The method itself – fighters flown off a carrier deck in the western Mediterranean and making their own way to the island – lasted until the end of the siege as one of the main routes by which Malta received reinforcements.