Operation Bowery

On the morning of 9 May 1942, in the western Mediterranean north of the coast of Algeria, 64 Supermarine Spitfire Mk V fighters took off from the decks of two carriers, the American USS Wasp and the British HMS Eagle. This was Operation Bowery, the second delivery of fighters to besieged Malta in three weeks with the participation of an American ship. A dozen or so days earlier, most of the Spitfires brought by Wasp in Operation Calendar had been destroyed on the ground before they could influence the fighting. This time their reception was prepared so that the aircraft were back in action within minutes of landing. The next morning the fast minelayer Welshman entered Grand Harbour with a cargo of supplies, and over the island an air battle was fought that the defenders later called “the Battle of Malta”.

War chronologies associate three dates with Operation Bowery: 9 May (the Spitfires’ take-off), 10 May (Field Marshal Kesselring’s report that Malta had been neutralised) and 31 May (a tally according to which Kesselring had only 83 serviceable aircraft left, against more than four hundred at the peak). The figure of 83 needs qualifying.

Wasp’s second voyage

After the failure of Calendar the British had nothing with which to reinforce the island quickly. On 25 April President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed that Wasp should sail into the Mediterranean once more. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who feared that Malta would be “pounded to bits”, had asked him outright to let the “wasp” have “another good sting”. On 29 April the carrier returned to Glasgow and took on 47 tropicalised Spitfire Mk Vcs. Loading again went badly: the auxiliary fuel tanks leaked, and many of the aircraft had faulty radios and neglected guns. The ship’s captain, Captain John W. Reeves, refused to continue loading until the tanks were repaired, and some of the work was done by American sailors on passage.

Wasp, as part of the British Force W with the battlecruiser Renown, left Scapa Flow on 3 May. On the night of 7/8 May she was joined from Gibraltar by Eagle with several destroyers. The old British carrier, which in March had delivered the first Spitfires for Malta, carried 17 fighters left over from earlier, unsuccessful runs.

Take-off on 9 May

At 6.30 a.m. on 9 May eleven Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters took off from Wasp to cover the force. First 17 Spitfires rose from Eagle in two waves, then 47 from Wasp. The twenty-third aircraft from the American carrier, probably because its propeller pitch was wrongly set, failed to gather speed and fell into the sea ahead of the ship’s bow, killing its pilot, the Canadian Sergeant R. D. Sherrington. Another Canadian, Pilot Officer Jerrold Smith, found after take-off that fuel from his auxiliary tank was not reaching the engine and that he could not make Malta. Rather than ditch, he landed back on Wasp, although the Spitfire had no arrester hook for carrier landings, and came to a stop a few metres from the edge of the deck.

One aircraft was lost on the way. According to most tallies 61 Spitfires reached Malta (some sources give 60 or 62). Between 10.20 and 11 a.m. they landed at Luqa and Ta’ Qali. German radio announced in those days that Wasp had been sunk. The carrier, however, returned unscathed to Britain, and on 11 May Churchill sent her crew a signal: “Many thanks to you all for the timely help. Who said a wasp couldn’t sting twice?” Other versions give the words in a slightly different form (“Who says a Wasp can’t sting twice?”), but the meaning is the same.

A few minutes on the airfield

The most important change took place on Malta itself. The island’s air commander, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Lloyd, and his staff had prepared the kind of reception that had been missing in April. The Spitfires circled low under the cover of the anti-aircraft guns, waiting their turn to land. Each aircraft had been allotted a number and its own pen walled with sandbags and stone blocks. After landing it was met by a runner, who guided the pilot to that pen. There mechanics and the soldiers helping them removed the auxiliary tank, refuelled and rearmed the aircraft, and an experienced combat pilot took the place of the ferry pilot. The aircraft was to be ready for take-off within ten minutes. For this period the limits on ammunition expenditure by the anti-aircraft artillery were lifted, and extra men and materials were made ready to repair the runways.

The Germans, as on 20 April, quickly detected the arrival, and before noon Junkers Ju 88 and Ju 87 bombers escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109s appeared over the airfields. By then about half of the newly arrived Spitfires were already in the air. With the reinforcements Malta had five Spitfire squadrons – Nos. 126, 185, 249, 601 and 603 – and for the first time since the start of the Luftwaffe’s spring offensive the defenders could send several dozen fighters into battle at once. The older Hurricanes could now attack bombers at lower altitudes, while the faster-climbing Spitfires fought the fighters higher up.

Welshman and the battle of 10 May

Alongside Operation Bowery the Admiralty sent the fast minelayer HMS Welshman, under Captain William Friedberger, to Malta alone. Churchill wrote that the ship might be lost, but that given the island’s situation there was no other choice. At Gibraltar Welshman took on, according to various tallies, between 240 and 340 tons of cargo: food, medical supplies, spare parts and engines for Spitfires, ammunition, smoke canisters for laying screens, and more than a hundred passengers, mostly RAF mechanics familiar with Spitfires. At sea the crew fitted dummy superstructure and funnel caps, making the ship resemble the French destroyer Léopard. The ruse worked: on 9 May the ship was inspected at close range by two German Ju 88s and a French seaplane, but none raised the alarm. During the night Welshman, at nearly 30 knots, passed south of Cape Bon and close to Pantelleria, and at dawn on 10 May she entered Grand Harbour.

Unloading went on under a smokescreen, amid heavy air raids. Bombs bursting beside the ship damaged her hull and deck, but the cargo was taken off within a few hours, and in the evening Welshman put to sea, arriving back at Gibraltar on 12 May. Over the harbour and the airfields, meanwhile, a battle raged all day. Spitfires and Hurricanes took off again and again against bombers coming in waves, and the fire of the anti-aircraft artillery, which for the first time in weeks did not have to husband its shells, was very heavy. British reports of 10 May spoke of several dozen Axis aircraft shot down or damaged – from 37 to 65, depending on the tally – for the loss of only a few Spitfires. Comparison with German and Italian records later showed that actual Axis losses were clearly lower than these figures, but they were still severe, especially among the bomber units. The great raid expected in the evening did not come.

Kesselring’s report

On that same 10 May Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South, reported to Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia that the enemy’s naval and air bases on Malta had been eliminated. In his memoirs too he held that by 10 May the task set for his air force had been accomplished. He had reasons for this: between 20 March and 28 April the Germans had flown nearly 12,000 sorties over Malta and dropped some 6,500 tons of bombs, the 10th Submarine Flotilla had left the island at the end of April, and ships sailing from Italy to Libya were reaching their destination almost without loss. This assessment also underpinned the plans for a landing on the island agreed by Hitler and Mussolini at Salzburg at the end of April.

Kesselring reported success at the very moment the situation was turning. On 10–12 May the Luftwaffe suffered heavy losses in bombers over Malta, and from 13 May the intensity of the German raids fell markedly. According to British studies the Germans cut back their daylight bomber raids, more often sent fighters alone or fighter-bombers over the island, and shifted their attacks to the night. The Italian air force continued to bomb Malta by day as well, but in small groups with a strong fighter escort. The claim that the Axis “had to give up daylight raids” is therefore a simplification: the raids continued, but they ceased to paralyse the island.

The balance at the end of May

The decline in Luftwaffe strength in Sicily was not, however, solely the result of fighting the Spitfires. Even before Bowery the German command had begun moving units of General Bruno Loerzer’s II Air Corps to other fronts: some bomber and fighter groups went to the Eastern Front ahead of the summer offensive in southern Russia, others to North Africa, where Erwin Rommel was preparing his blow against the Gazala Line. Under the plans agreed at Salzburg the air units were to return to Sicily before the landing on Malta.

According to tallies cited in the literature, at the end of May Kesselring had 83 serviceable German aircraft in Sicily: 13 reconnaissance aircraft, 6 Messerschmitt Bf 110s, 30 Bf 109s and 34 bombers, mainly Ju 88s. In March II Air Corps alone had numbered about four hundred aircraft. The figure of 83 is therefore true, but it refers only to serviceable German machines. It does not include the Italian air force in Sicily, which still had numerous units there, including the new Macchi MC.202 fighters, and the comparison sets “serviceable” strength on one side against total strength on the other. There is no doubt, though, that in May 1942 air superiority over Malta passed to the defenders, and fighter deliveries continued: on 18 May Eagle flew off another 17 Spitfires for the island, and in June several dozen more.

Place in the war

Operation Bowery is regarded as a turning point in the siege of Malta. On 7 May, two days before the Spitfires arrived, a new governor, General John Vereker, Lord Gort, took office on the island, bringing with him the George Cross awarded to the island in April. Regaining air superiority did not, however, solve the most important problem. The British official historian Stephen Roskill pointed out that the fighter deliveries brought neither flour nor fuel, and in May the island’s rations were cut to a level close to starvation. The Spitfires merely created the conditions in which a convoy could get through. The June convoys Harpoon and Vigorous brought in only two ships, and relief came only with the August convoy, Pedestal. On 14 July Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park took over the air command on Malta and ordered Axis raids to be intercepted over the sea.

The slackening of the raids in May also had another side. The aircraft transferred from Sicily supported Rommel’s offensive at Gazala and the advance in the east, and Malta, though it defended itself more effectively, could not for several months effectively attack the convoys sailing to Libya. Kesselring, convinced that the island had been neutralised, pressed for its capture, but Hitler soon shelved the landing plans. Wasp herself, after returning from the Mediterranean, moved to the Pacific, where in May the US fleet had lost the carrier Lexington in the Coral Sea. In August she covered the landing on Guadalcanal, and on 15 September 1942 she was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-19. Eagle went to the bottom on 11 August 1942, torpedoed by U-73 during Operation Pedestal.