Operation Herkules postponed

On 21 May 1942 the commander of the German airborne forces, General Kurt Student, presented at Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair a plan for the capture of Malta, which the Germans called Operation Herkules and the Italians C3. Student was confident of success, and he was supported by representatives of the navy and by the Luftwaffe chief of staff, General Hans Jeschonnek. Hitler was not persuaded. According to German documents cited by, among others, the German historian Ralf Georg Reuth, he ordered that the landing should from then on be prepared “only in thought” – that is, on paper. Formally the plan was not cancelled, and the Italians went on preparing it, but in practice from that day Herkules ceased to be an operation for which a date was being set.

War chronologies record under 21 May that the invasion of Malta was postponed indefinitely. That is a good summary of the consequences, but not of the event itself. No decision was announced that day, and none was passed to the allies. Officially the arrangements of April still stood, under which the landing was to follow the capture of Tobruk. An indefinite postponement can be spoken of only from the turn of June and July, but on 21 May Hitler made it clear that he did not believe in the landing.

The plan

The Italian General Staff had been preparing studies for a landing on Malta since the mid-1930s, regarding the capture of the island as a condition of secure communications with Libya. In the spring of 1942 the plan was revived by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, whose aircraft had been bombing Malta since December 1941. In February he won Hitler over to it, and on 29 and 30 April, at Klessheim Palace near Salzburg, Hitler and Benito Mussolini agreed on the sequence of operations: first Rommel was to attack the British Eighth Army at Gazala and take Tobruk, and then, around mid-July, Axis forces were to land on Malta. A German directive of 4 May set the date for July.

The plan provided for an airborne landing on the southern part of the island. The German 7th Air Division (PL) and an Italian parachute division, trained with the help of German instructors under General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke and later named Folgore, together with the Italian La Spezia air-landing division – some 30,000 men in all – were to be carried by about 500 Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft and about two hundred Italian ones, as well as hundreds of gliders. The paratroopers were to seize the heights above Marsaxlokk Bay and one of the airfields. That same night the first Italian divisions were to land from the sea in the bay, followed by others over the next few days, including on Gozo. The seaborne landing force was estimated at some 70,000 men. Cover was to be provided by the Italian fleet with four battleships, and dozens of landing craft, built in Italy on German models, were being prepared for the landing.

Why Hitler had doubts

Hitler had been unenthusiastic about the plan from the start. He remembered the airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941, in which Student’s paratroopers had taken the island but suffered enormous losses. Since then he had refused to sanction large airborne operations. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who feared a second Crete, was also opposed. Above all, however, Hitler did not trust the Italian navy. Student related after the war that Hitler had predicted that at the news of British warships approaching from Gibraltar and Alexandria the Italian ships would return to port and the German paratroopers would be left alone on the island. This account must be treated with caution, since it was given years later, but Hitler’s mistrust of the Italians is confirmed by other sources too.

There were also immediate reasons. In May the Wehrmacht was preparing its great summer offensive in Russia, and aircraft were being moved from Sicily to the east and to Africa. Malta, bombed for weeks, seemed to have been neutralised – on 10 May Kesselring reported that the island’s bases had been eliminated – and if so, a landing might look like an unnecessary risk. That report, however, was already out of date: in Operation Bowery on 9 May more than sixty Spitfires had flown in to Malta, and the defenders were beginning to regain the upper hand in the air. Kesselring, Jeschonnek, the naval command and the Italian Comando Supremo under General Ugo Cavallero still regarded the capture of the island as a condition of victory in Africa. Rommel too supported the plan at that time and even asked to command the landing.

Preparations go on

Hitler’s “only in thought” did not halt the preparations. The Italians trained paratroopers and built landing craft and glider strips in Sicily, and Student assembled his units. For the British, who knew of the preparations from decrypted signals, the threat of invasion remained real. The garrison of Malta numbered some 30,000 British and Maltese soldiers, roughly as many as the airborne landing alone was to number. The island was covered with a network of pillboxes, machine-gun posts and beach obstacles, and fields on which gliders might land were divided up by low stone walls. The defenders, however, were short of everything: fuel for tanks and lorries, artillery ammunition and, above all, food. The new governor, General John Vereker, Lord Gort, who took office on 7 May, reckoned that if no convoy got through, hunger would force him to surrender within a few months even without a landing. For Malta in May 1942, invasion and blockade were two sides of the same threat. In London, meanwhile, Churchill was pressing Auchinleck to attack in Libya and cover the June convoys to Malta. Rommel forestalled him. On 26 May he attacked at Gazala, and from then on the fate of Herkules depended on the outcome of that battle.

Place in the war

On 21 June 1942 Rommel took Tobruk and some 33,000 prisoners. Instead of halting on the Egyptian frontier, as agreed at Salzburg, he demanded permission to pursue into Egypt, claiming that the captured stores would allow him to reach the Suez Canal. Kesselring and Cavallero objected, pointing out that without Malta the supply of an army in Egypt would collapse. Hitler backed Rommel and on 23 June wrote to Mussolini that the goddess of fortune in war passes by a commander only once. Mussolini agreed. Herkules was put back to September, after the capture of the Suez Canal, and the aircraft and some of the units earmarked for the landing went to Africa. In the summer, after Rommel had been halted at El Alamein, Ramcke’s paratroopers and the Italian Folgore division, which fought in the Second Battle of El Alamein that autumn, were also sent to Africa. The Italian Comando Supremo postponed C3 in July, and in the autumn of 1942 the landing was finally abandoned.

Malta survived. In the summer its aircraft and submarines again began sinking ships bound for Libya, depriving Rommel of part of the fuel he needed in the decisive battles in Egypt. Many historians – and after the war Kesselring and Student too – have regarded the abandonment of Herkules as one of the Axis’s greatest strategic mistakes in the Mediterranean. Others point out that a landing on a strongly defended island, given the Italian navy’s lack of fuel and uncertain air cover, might have ended in a defeat worse than Crete. The debate remains unresolved, because the operation was never carried out.