Operation Rocket

On the morning of 6 June 1941, far to the west of Malta, Hawker Hurricane fighters began taking off from the decks of two British aircraft carriers, Ark Royal and Furious. Forty-four aircraft took off. Led by eight twin-engined Blenheims that had flown out from Gibraltar to meet them, they flew several hundred kilometres over the sea towards the island. One Hurricane turned back to its carrier with a fault; the other 43 landed safely at Malta’s three airfields – Hal Far, Luqa and Ta’ Qali. This was Operation Rocket, another of the so-called “Club Runs”, voyages in which Force H from Gibraltar carried fighters to within flying range of the besieged island.

War chronologies usually record under 6 June that further British fighters were delivered to Malta and that Luftwaffe attacks were continuing. The first part of this is accurate. The second needs correcting: at the beginning of June 1941 the German air force had just left Sicily, and the island was being attacked mainly by the Italian air force.

Where the Hurricanes came from

The method was already well tried. Hurricanes could not fly to Malta directly from Gibraltar, so from August 1940, starting with Operation Hurry, they had been brought by carrier into the western Mediterranean and flown off when the island was a few hundred kilometres away. In April and May 1941 Malta’s defences had been reinforced in this way several times, and many of the aircraft delivered flew on after refuelling to Egypt, where the RAF, fighting Rommel and over Crete, had suffered heavy losses.

According to the Malta garrison’s war diary and lists of British ferrying operations, the aircraft for Operation Rocket came from Britain by two routes. The old carrier Argus brought 29 crated Hurricanes from the Clyde, and Furious a further 48 Hurricanes of the newer Mk II version. Both ships reached Gibraltar at the end of May and the beginning of June. Some of the aircraft were unloaded ashore, and 24 were transferred to Ark Royal, which put to sea together with Furious on 4 June. They were covered by Vice-Admiral James Somerville’s Force H: the battlecruiser Renown, the cruiser Sheffield and six destroyers. The passage through the western Mediterranean passed without loss. According to the garrison diary, the 43 fighters that reached Malta included 25 Mk IIs, faster and better climbers than the worn-out Mk Is.

With the aircraft came No. 46 Squadron RAF, commanded by Alexander Rabagliati. It was supposed to stop on Malta only briefly before flying on to Egypt, but as early as 7 June the command decided to keep it on the island. By the end of the month its pilots had become the core of a new Malta fighter squadron, No. 126 Squadron RAF.

The island after Crete

The Hurricanes arrived at a moment when Malta feared the worst. A few days earlier the Germans had taken Crete by airborne assault and the British had evacuated its defenders. On 3 June the War Office warned the Governor, Lieutenant General William Dobbie, that according to reports of uncertain reliability thousands of German and Italian paratroopers were gathering in Sicily. On 5 June Dobbie sent London a lengthy telegram: Malta, he wrote, was now more important than ever for the defence of Egypt, since only from there could the route to Libya be effectively attacked. From the experience of Crete he drew the conclusion that fighters had to be kept in the air at all costs, paratroopers destroyed immediately and not a single airfield given up. He asked for three fighter squadrons, additional battalions, guns and ammunition. Winston Churchill replied on 7 June that he regarded Malta as “one of the main keys of the British Empire” and would do everything in human power to give it the means of defence.

The invasion did not come. Interrogations of shot-down Italian airmen and air reconnaissance did not confirm any concentration of airborne troops in Sicily, and after a few days Malta began to suspect that the invasion rumours had been spread by the enemy himself. Preparations went on nonetheless: the beaches were mined and place names were removed from signposts.

The air command was changing too. On 1 June Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Pughe Lloyd, until then a staff officer in Bomber Command in England, took over the RAF command on Malta. His task was not only to defend the island but above all to turn it into a base for attacks on Axis shipping. The new Hurricanes, protecting the airfields, were the precondition for Blenheim and Wellington bombers and naval torpedo aircraft to be based safely on Malta.

Who was bombing Malta

From January 1941 Malta had been attacked by General Hans Geisler’s German X Fliegerkorps, which in February and March had all but paralysed the island. In the spring its units gradually left for North Africa and the Balkans, and the corps headquarters itself moved to Greece. At the same time the Luftwaffe was pulling aircraft east, where it was massing forces against the Soviet Union. According to the British official history, the last German combat unit left Sicily on 4 June, two days before Operation Rocket.

The burden of the raids was taken on by the Regia Aeronautica. At night Fiat BR.20 and Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers came over the island singly or in small groups, dropping small high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the airfields, the harbour and the surrounding villages; by day reconnaissance aircraft flew over Malta escorted by Macchi MC.200 fighters. Even in June the garrison diary several times noted Messerschmitts in these escorts, but given the difficulty of identifying aircraft from the ground and in the air at the time, it cannot be ruled out that some of them were Italian machines. On the night of 7–8 June a night-fighter Hurricane, using the light of the searchlights, shot down a BR.20, which fell in flames between Qrendi and the megalithic temple of Ħaġar Qim; two crew members who baled out by parachute were taken prisoner.

The figures show how much the situation had changed. According to garrison statistics cited by Maltese chroniclers, 97 air-raid alerts were sounded on Malta in May 1941 and bombs killed 24 civilians. In June there were 67 alerts, seven days passed without any at all, and five civilians were killed. The Italian raids were a nuisance, but they could not compare with what the island had endured in the winter and spring. By the end of June it was increasingly the Hurricanes that were seeking combat: on 27 June, according to British reports, they shot down several Macchis escorting an Italian reconnaissance aircraft.

Further runs

Rocket opened a series of deliveries in June. On 14 June, in Operation Tracer, 47 Hurricanes took off from Ark Royal and the new carrier Victorious, led by four Hudsons from Gibraltar. According to the garrison diary, 43 reached Malta (other lists give 45); the last group lost its way and ran out of fuel, and two pilots were killed. Twenty-one aircraft flew on to the Middle East the same day. In Operation Railway on 27 June Ark Royal flew off 22 Hurricanes, of which 21 arrived, and on 30 June, in its second phase, more than thirty took off from Ark Royal and Furious. On Furious one of the aircraft struck the ship’s superstructure on take-off and started a fire on the flight deck in which several sailors and airmen were killed (sources give different figures), and the last aircraft had to return to Gibraltar. According to lists of British ferrying operations, more than 140 Hurricanes reached Malta from carriers in June 1941, though many of them did not stay on the island.

Place in the war

Operation Rocket was not a major event, but it reflects well the turning point reached in the central Mediterranean in June 1941. The Germans, busy preparing for war with the Soviet Union, left Malta to the Italians, and the British used the lull to saturate the island with fighters. Under their cover Malta once again became an offensive base. In the summer and autumn of 1941 Blenheim and Wellington bombers, Swordfish torpedo aircraft, submarines from the base on Manoel Island and, from October, the surface ships of Force K inflicted ever heavier losses on the convoys sailing to Libya. Shortages of fuel and ammunition in Africa hampered Rommel before the British offensive, Operation Crusader, in November 1941.

It was precisely these losses that brought the Germans back. In December 1941 strong Luftwaffe units arrived in Sicily under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and in the spring of 1942 Malta endured the heaviest bombing in its history, for which King George VI awarded the whole island the George Cross. By then it was Spitfires that the carriers were bringing to Malta. The method itself, however – fighters flown off the deck in the western Mediterranean to cover the rest of the way on their own – remained one of the main routes by which the island received reinforcements until the end of the siege.