The sinking of HMS Eagle

In the early afternoon of 11 August 1942, in the western Mediterranean some 70 nautical miles south of Majorca, four torpedoes from the German submarine U-73 struck the British aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. The old ship, converted from a battleship ordered by Chile before the First World War, capsized and sank within a few minutes. She was one of three carriers covering the largest convoy the British sent to Malta in this war: the fourteen merchant ships of Operation Pedestal. At that very moment Spitfires for the island were taking off from the deck of another carrier, Furious. The sinking of Eagle opened three days of fighting in which the convoy lost nine merchant ships and several escorting warships.

Some war chronologies record under 3 August that the Malta convoy was “decimated” by the Luftwaffe and U-boats. That date is out of step with events. At the beginning of August the convoy was only setting out: the ships left the Clyde in Scotland on the night of 2–3 August, and the attacks on them came on 11–13 August, in the Mediterranean. Nor were they the work of German aircraft and submarines alone. Of the U-boats, only U-73 scored a success; most of the convoy’s losses were inflicted by Italian submarines, motor torpedo boats and aircraft, and by German bombers from Sicily.

Malta in the summer of 1942

After the June convoys, Harpoon and Vigorous, from which only two of seventeen merchant ships reached Malta, the island was living on the last of its stocks. Since the spring the aircraft and submarines based on Malta had barely been able to attack Axis shipping to Libya for lack of fuel, ammunition and torpedoes. The air raids were fewer than in April, when King George VI awarded the island the George Cross, and the defenders, reinforced in May by Operation Bowery and by later carrier runs, once again had several dozen Spitfires. Hunger, however, was becoming a greater threat than bombs. In August the fortnightly ration per person amounted, according to British figures, to about 400 grams of sugar, 200 grams of fat and 400 grams of corned beef. “Victory kitchens” served meals to the population, and cattle were slaughtered to save fodder. The Governor, John Vereker, Lord Gort, calculated the date after which the island would have to surrender through starvation. It fell at the turn of August and September. The air commander on Malta, Keith Park, warned that aviation fuel would last only a few weeks.

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, regarded the loss of Malta as a disaster of the first magnitude for the Empire, one which in the longer term might also decide the fate of Egypt. The Admiralty therefore decided on another attempt from Gibraltar, this time with an escort such as no convoy had yet had. The ships could be assembled partly because, after the destruction of convoy PQ 17, the summer Arctic convoys to the USSR had been suspended, which left the Home Fleet with forces to spare.

The plan of Operation Pedestal

Planning began in the second half of July. Overall command lay with Vice Admiral Neville Syfret in the battleship Nelson; the close escort of the convoy was led by Rear Admiral Harold Burrough in the cruiser Nigeria, and the carriers by Rear Admiral Lumley Lyster, author of the plan for the attack on Taranto. The convoy, designated WS 21S as a deception (the label used for troop convoys sailing round Africa), consisted of fourteen fast merchant ships able to maintain about 15 knots. Eleven were British and two – Almeria Lykes and Santa Elisa – sailed under the American flag. The fourteenth was the Texas Company tanker Ohio, the only large, fast tanker available to the Allies. Requisitioned for the operation, she sailed under the British flag with a British crew under Captain Dudley Mason and carried about 11,500 tons of fuel. In case she was lost, the other ships took fuel on board in drums.

The cover was unprecedented: two battleships, Nelson and Rodney; three fleet carriers, Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle; seven cruisers and 32 destroyers, plus submarines stationed along the route the Italian fleet might take if it came out. The three carriers had about 70 fighters between them: Sea Hurricanes (PL), Fulmars and American-built Martlets. Eagle carried sixteen of them, plus four in reserve. The heavy ships were to accompany the merchantmen only as far as the entrance to the Sicilian Channel, where, in the narrow waters between Sicily and Tunisia, they would be exposed to mines and attack from land. From there, for the last 250 miles, the convoy was to be shepherded by Burrough’s Force X: four cruisers – Nigeria, Kenya, Manchester and the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo – and a dozen or so destroyers.

Several subsidiary operations were linked to Pedestal. In Operation Bellows the old carrier Furious was to fly off 38 Spitfires to Malta. It turned out that from her short, upward-sloping deck fighters with ordinary propellers barely managed to get airborne, and constant-speed propellers were brought in for them at the last minute. Meanwhile two merchant ships that had survived Harpoon were to slip out of Malta to Gibraltar. In the eastern Mediterranean the fleet from Alexandria staged a feint convoy departure from Port Said and Haifa to tie down the Italian cruisers there and the aircraft on Crete.

From the Clyde to Gibraltar

The merchant ships left the Firth of Clyde on the evening of 2 August and the next morning joined the warships from Scapa Flow. Before sailing Burrough gathered the masters for a briefing, and each received an envelope marked not to be opened until 8 a.m. on 10 August. Inside was a message from the First Lord of the Admiralty wishing them a safe passage. Between the Azores and Gibraltar, from 6 to 9 August, the force exercised in Operation Berserk: emergency turns, changes of formation, signalling, anti-aircraft fire and fighter direction. Eagle joined from Gibraltar and Indomitable from Freetown. The merchant ships learned to manoeuvre almost like warships.

On the night of 9–10 August the whole force, which with its auxiliaries numbered several dozen vessels, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar in thick fog. Syfret hoped that on a moonless night no one would see him. But Abwehr agents on both sides of the strait reported the movement of ships, and the British knew from decrypted Enigma signals that the enemy was well informed. On the morning of 10 August a German reconnaissance aircraft spotted the convoy, and by the afternoon Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German Commander-in-Chief South, and the Italian naval command knew that a force of forty to fifty vessels with carriers and battleships was heading east.

The Axis prepares an ambush

The Germans and Italians prepared their defences separately, though they coordinated them. According to various tallies, between about 650 and 700 aircraft were assembled on Sardinia and Sicily. Kesselring brought in bombers from Crete and Africa and did not rule out that the convoy was covering a landing in North Africa. The plan provided for successive barriers: submarines between Algiers and the Balearics and at the entrance to the Sicilian Channel, massed air attacks from Sardinia and Sicily, a fresh minefield and night attacks by motor torpedo boats off Cape Bon, and finally, at dawn, a strike by two divisions of Italian cruisers against what was left of the convoy. The carriers had priority: sinking them would strip the convoy of its fighter cover before the surface ships joined the battle. From a decrypted order by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, the British learned that he regarded the destruction of the convoy as a matter “of decisive importance”.

The first to try her luck was the Italian submarine Uarsciek, which before dawn on 11 August fired three torpedoes at a carrier. They missed, and the British did not even notice the attack. From the morning, German Ju 88 reconnaissance aircraft circled high above the convoy, out of reach of the carrier fighters. Meanwhile the cruisers and destroyers were refuelling from the two oilers of the auxiliary group, since this time there would be no fuel to give them on Malta.

An old carrier

Eagle was one of the oldest carriers in the Royal Navy. Her keel had been laid in 1913 at the Armstrong Whitworth yard as the battleship Almirante Cochrane for the Chilean Navy, a sister of Almirante Latorre. Construction was halted during the First World War, and in 1918 Britain bought the hull and converted it into an aircraft carrier. She did not enter service until 1924. She was slow and carried few aircraft, and fighters without folding wings, such as Sea Hurricanes or the Spitfires being ferried to Malta, would not fit on her lifts and had to be kept on deck.

Even so, she saw very hard service in this war. In July 1940 her torpedo bombers fought in the Battle of Calabria, and in November, when she herself could not put to sea because of damage, five of her Swordfish with their crews took part in the attack on Taranto from the deck of Illustrious. After a refit she operated from Gibraltar from February 1942 and became the main supplier of fighters to Malta. In March the first Spitfires for the island took off from her deck; she then took part in Operation Bowery and, in June and July, in further runs. Altogether, according to the record of her voyages, she flew off about 180 Spitfires to Malta. In June she also covered the Harpoon convoy.

11 August: U-73

U-73 was a Type VIIB boat which had slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar in January 1942 and had been operating in the Mediterranean ever since. She was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Helmut Rosenbaum. On the morning of 11 August, on the route between the Balearics and the Algerian coast, the boat sighted the first group of merchant ships, but it was beyond the range of her torpedoes. A second group followed, and behind the merchantmen came Eagle. Slipping under the escort screen, Rosenbaum closed to about 400 metres from the carrier, whose officers had no idea she was there.

At about 1.15 p.m. four torpedoes struck Eagle. The ship heeled over at once and after a few minutes – four to eight, according to different accounts – capsized and sank. Aircraft stood on her deck and slid into the sea as she listed. Of her sixteen Sea Hurricanes only four survived, those that were airborne at the time; they later landed on the other carriers. The convoy thus lost about a fifth of its fighter cover.

The destroyers Laforey and Lookout and the tug Jaunty rescued the crew. According to the most frequently cited figures, 131 officers and men were lost, most of them from the engine and boiler rooms, and 929 were saved. Some studies give a higher death toll, of up to 160, and a slightly different number of survivors. The destroyers hunted for the attacker, but U-73 escaped. She was helped by layers of water of different temperature, which interfered with the British asdic. For the rest of the day the escort reported one false alarm after another.

At the moment Eagle was attacked, Furious was flying off her Spitfires. Between 12.30 and 3.15 p.m. 38 fighters took off from her, and 37 reached Malta after a flight of several hours. With Operation Bellows completed, Furious turned back to Gibraltar with her escort, as planned. On the way back, on the night of 11–12 August, one of her destroyers, Wolverine, rammed and sank the Italian submarine Dagabur, which was lost with all hands.

The evening raid

After the sinking of Eagle the Axis knew the composition and course of the convoy. Just after sunset, at about 9 p.m., some thirty German bombers came in: 27 Ju 88s diving out of the dusk and three He 111s carrying torpedoes. The anti-aircraft fire was so dense that no ship was hit, and two Ju 88s were shot down. In the darkness and confusion, however, the ships’ gunners damaged several of their own fighters as they landed on the carriers. That night British Beaufighters and B-24 Liberator bombers attacked the airfields on Sardinia, and a small party of commandos tried, without success, to strike at an airfield on Sicily.

That evening the Italian command sent two divisions of cruisers to sea from Cagliari, Messina and Naples to intercept the remnants of the convoy off Pantelleria on the morning of 13 August. Their fate was to be decided by a dispute over air cover, which Kesselring refused, judging that he did not have enough fighters even to protect his bombers.

Place in the war

The loss of Eagle was the heaviest blow of the first day of fighting and a foretaste of what was to come. Over the next two days bombs put Indomitable out of action, torpedoes from submarines and motor torpedo boats sank the cruisers Manchester and Cairo and the destroyer Foresight, and nine of the fourteen merchant ships went to the bottom. Five reached Valletta, the last of them – the badly damaged Ohio – on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption. The fuel, food and ammunition they brought allowed the island to hold out until November, when, after the victory at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa, the siege was broken and Malta, its strength restored, again began sinking the tankers bound for Rommel’s army.

For the Royal Navy, Eagle was the fifth fleet carrier lost in this war, after Courageous, Glorious, Ark Royal and Hermes. Her loss showed that even so strong an escort was no guarantee against a submarine that managed to slip unseen through the ring of destroyers. Furious took over the fighter runs to Malta and on 17 August flew off more Spitfires to the island. Rosenbaum received the Knight’s Cross for sinking the carrier and later took command of the U-boat flotilla in the Black Sea. He was killed in an air crash in May 1944. The wreck of Eagle lies on the floor of the Mediterranean north of Algiers.

Operation Pedestal as a whole went down in history as one of the hardest-fought convoy battles of the war. The Italians called it the “Battle of mid-August” (battaglia di mezzo agosto) and counted it as their tactical victory; the British saw it as a costly but strategic success; and the Maltese still remember it as the “Santa Marija convoy”.