The thousandth air raid on Malta

War chronologies record under 1 December 1941 that Malta suffered its thousandth air raid on that day. The figure comes from the register of air raid alerts kept on the island, counted from the first Italian raid on 11 June 1940, and it needs two qualifications. First, according to the Malta war diary, the thousandth alert was sounded a day earlier, on Sunday 30 November, at 8.35 a.m. Second, it was not a raid in the strict sense: two Italian Macchi fighters flew over the island without bombing anything, and the diary noted that there was no damage and there were no casualties. Every appearance of enemy aircraft, however, including reconnaissance machines, meant sirens, a halt to work and people going down into the shelters, which is why the thousandth alert became a symbol in Malta of eighteen months of life under the bombs.

Eighteen months of alerts

Until the summer of 1941 the number of alerts rose rapidly. In the summer and autumn of 1940 Malta was attacked mainly by Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers from Sicily, and from January 1941 by General Hans Geisler’s German X Fliegerkorps, which in the winter and spring all but paralysed the island. When the Germans moved these units to the Balkans, to Africa and to the East, the Regia Aeronautica was left facing Malta. The Italians came over in smaller numbers, increasingly by night, and by day sent fast reconnaissance aircraft and fighters over the island. According to the Malta war diary, in the autumn of 1941 they began using the new Macchi C.202 fighters for reconnaissance, which flew so fast and so high that the Hurricanes could not intercept them. It was flights like these, usually without bombs, that drove up the count of alerts.

The Governor of the island, General William Dobbie, reported to London that from 1 to 20 November Malta had been subjected to two daylight raids and twenty night raids; seven people had been killed and four wounded. These losses were incomparably smaller than in January and February 1941, when German dive-bombers had attacked the harbour and the airfields. The population had grown used to the sirens, but still spent many nights in shelters cut into the rock, and by day worked on repairing the docks and airfields.

An autumn in which Malta attacked

The quieter skies allowed the British to turn the island into a base for attacking the supply routes of Erwin Rommel’s forces. Since the summer it had been home to the submarines of the 10th Flotilla, Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers and Bristol Blenheim bombers, which as early as August 1941 were sinking ships bound for Tripoli. In September the Operation Halberd convoy brought in supplies for the months ahead, and on 21 October Force K – the light cruisers Aurora and Penelope and two destroyers – arrived in Grand Harbour. On the night of 8–9 November this force destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy, and at the end of November it was reinforced by more cruisers and destroyers sent from Alexandria under Rear Admiral Bernard Rawlings.

In November, during the British offensive in Libya, Operation Crusader, the Axis forces lost a large part of the supplies they shipped. According to Italian figures cited in British studies, of just under 80,000 tons of fuel sent to Africa in November, less than 30,000 arrived. Rommel was fighting at Tobruk with ever less petrol and ammunition. Malta, however, paid for these successes with its first serious loss: on 13 November, returning from yet another run carrying fighters for the island, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal was torpedoed; throughout the year she had been ferrying Hurricanes to within flying range of Malta.

The day of 1 December, to which the chronologies assign the thousandth raid, shows well what Malta was at that time. On the morning of that day the Italian tanker Iridio Mantovani, carrying some 8,600 tons of fuel from Trapani to Tripoli, was sailing west of the Libyan coast escorted by the destroyer Alvise da Mosto. In the afternoon she was attacked by Blenheims from Malta, which disabled her, and a further attack set her on fire. The destroyer was trying to take the tanker in tow and rescue survivors when Force K came up: Aurora, Penelope and the destroyer Lively. The commander of Alvise da Mosto, Lieutenant Commander Francesco Dell’Anno, accepted a hopeless fight to shield the men in the water. At about 6.15 p.m., some 75 nautical miles north-west of Tripoli, the destroyer sank after a hit in her magazine; according to Italian figures 138 of her crew were killed, while 125 were later rescued by an Italian torpedo boat. The burning wreck of the tanker was finished off by the British ships. Dell’Anno was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

The Luftwaffe returns

The losses on the route to Libya convinced Berlin that the Italians could not protect it on their own. The Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, General Hans Jeschonnek, proposed moving south Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, which had until then been supporting the offensive on Moscow. Kesselring arrived in Italy at the end of November. By Directive No. 38 of 2 December 1941 Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief South (Oberbefehlshaber Süd) and set him the task of winning command of the air and sea between southern Italy and North Africa, so as to secure the route to Libya and Cyrenaica, and above all of neutralising Malta. In the conduct of operations at sea Kesselring was formally subordinate to Mussolini and the Italian Comando Supremo, but in practice the Luftwaffe waged the war against Malta in its own way.

Kesselring’s main instrument was to be General Bruno Loerzer’s II Fliegerkorps, transferred from the East to Sicily. The move took weeks: the first German units, Junkers Ju 88 bombers and Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, appeared over Malta in the second half of December, and the corps reached full strength only in the first months of 1942. That is why some studies speak of the Luftwaffe returning in December 1941 and others of II Fliegerkorps arriving in January 1942. According to the Malta war diary, 169 alerts were sounded on the island in December 1941, and the defenders spent more than 191 hours under alert. After Christmas the raids were already heavy: on 26 December some sixty aircraft attacked Luqa airfield, and on 30 December, according to the same source, some ninety came over the island.

December also brought the end of Force K’s glory. On the night of 18–19 December, while pursuing an Italian convoy bound for Tripoli, its ships ran into a minefield; the cruiser Neptune and the destroyer Kandahar were sunk, and both cruisers from Malta were damaged. From then on the island, soon to be bombed ever more heavily, could no longer maintain the surface ships that for two autumn months had been the terror of the Axis convoys.

Place in the war

The thousandth alert fell in the last days of Malta’s best period of the entire siege. The count, which had taken eighteen months to reach a thousand, rose by more than 170 in the following month, and on 1 January 1942 Kesselring began the new year with a raid recorded in the register as number 1,175. In January 1942 the island endured 263 raids, and in the spring the heaviest bombing in its history, as the Germans sought to prepare the ground for an invasion. By the time the siege was over, Malta’s alerts were counted in thousands: according to British tallies, the last, sounded in October 1942 after Kesselring’s great and unsuccessful air offensive, was number 3,340.

The German response to Malta’s autumn successes also brought Rommel temporary relief. When, at the beginning of 1942, the island’s aircraft and ships had to fight for survival, supplies began to reach Tripoli again, and in January the Afrika Korps went over to the counter-offensive. The thousandth alert was thus not so much an anniversary of endurance as a warning that the island’s hardest trial was still to come.