Operation Calendar

At dawn on 20 April 1942, 47 Supermarine Spitfire Mk V fighters took off from the deck of the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp, steaming in the western Mediterranean off the coast of Algeria. This was Operation Calendar, the largest delivery of fighters to besieged Malta so far. On the same day the island’s governor, Lieutenant General William Dobbie, sent London a telegram that convinced Prime Minister Winston Churchill that Malta needed a new commander.

It is often said that Wasp delivered 47 Spitfires of No. 603 Squadron RAF and that the aircraft were destroyed, mostly on the ground, before they could influence the fighting. This needs two qualifications. The fighters were flown in by pilots from two squadrons, No. 601 (County of London) and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh), and 46 of them reached Malta. Most were indeed destroyed or damaged within a few days, but not all on the ground and not all without a fight: for several days the Calendar pilots defended the island in the air.

An appeal to Roosevelt

After the first deliveries of Spitfires in March, the British lost the ability to reinforce Malta quickly. The old carrier Eagle was laid up to repair her steering gear, Argus was too small and too slow, and the lifts of the new Victorious could not take Spitfires. On 1 April Churchill turned to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: there were some 400 German and 200 Italian aircraft in Sicily, Malta had at most twenty or thirty serviceable fighters, and it would receive no Spitfires for a whole month. He asked that Wasp, which was just arriving in Britain with an American task force intended to strengthen the British Home Fleet, should take fifty or more fighters on board. On 3 April Roosevelt agreed.

At Glasgow, 52 tropicalised Spitfires were loaded onto Wasp. The carrier’s own air group was reduced to a dozen or so Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters to cover the force. According to British and American accounts, the aircraft were in poor condition: many of the auxiliary fuel tanks leaked or did not work, the guns were unharmonised and dirty, and a large proportion of the radios were unserviceable. American and British mechanics repaired them on the way.

The voyage and the fly-off

On 14 April Wasp sailed from the Firth of Clyde, escorted by the battlecruiser Renown and by American and British destroyers. On the night of 18/19 April the force passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, and from Gibraltar it was joined by the anti-aircraft cruisers Charybdis and Cairo. On the morning of 20 April, after a patrol of Wildcats had taken off, the Spitfires lifted off the deck one after another. They had more than a thousand kilometres to fly to Malta.

Forty-six aircraft reached the island and landed at the airfields of Ta’ Qali and Luqa. One pilot, an American serving in the RAF, force-landed in Algeria near Sétif and was interned by the Vichy authorities. The Germans, however, quickly detected the arrival, and within a few hours Junkers Ju 88 and Ju 87 bombers with a strong escort of Messerschmitts appeared over the airfields before the newly arrived aircraft could be refuelled, armed and dispersed to their pens.

Destroyed on the ground

Since 20 March the air forces of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had been conducting the heaviest phase of the bombing of Malta. According to figures cited in the literature, between 20 March and 28 April the Germans flew almost 12,000 sorties over the island and dropped about 6,500 tonnes of bombs. On 20 and 21 April they directed them above all at the airfields. According to some tallies, 27 Spitfires were still serviceable on the morning of 21 April and only 17 by the evening, and losses mounted over the following days. There were days at the end of April when Malta was defended by a single serviceable Spitfire or none at all, and some raids went unintercepted because there was nobody to send up.

The reasons were well known. Many of the protective pens of sandbags and stone had been wrecked, there were too few mechanics familiar with Spitfires, there were no spare parts at all, and the aircraft needed many hours of work after arrival. Many of the newly arrived pilots had no combat experience. The new machines therefore stood defenceless on airfields that Axis bombers attacked several times a day. Even so, the pilots of Nos. 601 and 603 Squadrons claimed victories in those days, and according to figures cited in the literature the Germans lost 173 aircraft over Malta between 20 March and 28 April.

The failure of Calendar taught the British that simply flying in fighters was not enough. For the next delivery, Operation Bowery, every Spitfire was to be directed immediately after landing to its own pen, where mechanics with fuel and ammunition would be waiting, together with an experienced pilot ready to take off.

Dobbie’s telegram

On the same day, 20 April, the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Malta, Lieutenant General William Dobbie, reported to Churchill that the situation, which in March he had called critical, had “now passed that point”. “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that the worst may happen if we cannot replenish our vital needs, especially flour and ammunition, and that very soon. It is a question of survival.” A few days later he added that bread consumption had been cut by a quarter and that stocks would last only until mid-June. The March convoy, broken up after the Second Battle of Sirte, had delivered little, and on 8 April the last ship of Force K had left the island.

According to the popular version, on this basis and in the light of other “disquieting reports”, Churchill concluded that Dobbie was not equal to so important a task and decided to replace him with Lord Gort. Churchill’s memoirs put the emphasis differently. The Prime Minister wrote that Dobbie had until then been “magnificent”, a Cromwellian figure at a key point of the Empire, but that the long strain had worn him out. The deeply religious governor, who had led the defence of the island since June 1940, was ill and utterly exhausted by April 1942. Nor was the decision taken in a single day. Churchill was at first reluctant to believe the reports reaching him, and on 25 April he sent the Governor of Gibraltar, General John Vereker, Lord Gort, a letter carried by the new Minister of State in the Middle East, Richard Casey. He wrote that a change in the command of Malta might be needed and that Gort was “the man above all others” for this service, and he promised a large convoy in the second half of June and an uninterrupted flow of Spitfires.

Place in the war

On 25 April Roosevelt agreed to a second voyage by Wasp. On 9 May the American carrier and Eagle flew off more than sixty Spitfires to Malta, and this time they went back into action as soon as they had landed. On 10 May the Axis air forces suffered heavy losses in great air battles over the island, and the intensity of the raids began to decline. Churchill sent Wasp’s crew a signal: “Who said a wasp couldn’t sting twice?” Wasp herself later moved to the Pacific and was sunk by a Japanese submarine on 15 September 1942.

On 7 May Lord Gort flew into Malta and on the same day took over from Dobbie, who left the island. Gort brought with him the George Cross, awarded to the island by the King on 15 April, and presented it to the Maltese in September. He governed the island through the worst months of hunger: the June convoys Harpoon and Vigorous brought in only two merchant ships, and relief came only with the August convoy Pedestal. Operation Calendar remained a warning in the history of the siege: Malta could not be held by the sheer number of aircraft sent to it; it needed an organisation that allowed them to fight.