The Royal Navy accounted the Russian convoys among its most formidable wartime challenges. It was the service’s misfortune that the professionalism and courage which characterised its performance were tarnished by the memory of PQ17. The Fleet Air Arm never distinguished itself in the north, partly for lack of good aircraft. Some of the navy’s most senior officers failed to display imagination to match the courage and seamanship of their subordinates. They refused to acknowledge, as Churchill and Roosevelt always acknowledged, that at any cost aid must be seen to be sent to Russia. If the supplies shipped in 1941–42 were of greater symbolic than material importance to the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, they were a vital earnest of Western Allied support for the decisive campaign to destroy Hitler.
3 THE ORDEAL OF PEDESTAL
Between 1940 and 1943, the Mediterranean witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the Royal Navy’s war. British submarines, based on Malta when conditions there allowed, attacked Axis supply lines to North Africa with some success. Battle squadrons sought to assert themselves in the face of the Italian navy, U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham inflicted severe damage on the Italian fleet in his November 1940 carrier air strike against Taranto, and in the surface action off Cape Matapan on 28–29 March 1941. But every capital ship sortie into open waters within range of the enemy was a perilous venture, which took a harrowing toll. The carrier Illustrious was badly damaged by German bombing in January 1941. On 25 November that year, the battleship Barham blew up, with the loss of most of its crew, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant rested for seven months on the floor of Alexandria harbour after falling victim to an attack by courageous Italian human-torpedo crews on 19 December 1941. The Royal Navy, having lost five capital ships in a month, was for a time obliged to cede the central Mediterranean to the Axis. There was a steady drain of British cruiser and destroyer losses to mines, bombs and torpedoes. For some months in 1941, the navy suffered severely while holding open a sea link to besieged Tobruk, which was deemed symbolically if not militarily important.
The pervasive strategic reality was that the Royal Navy remained vulnerable in the Mediterranean until the British Army could gain control of the North African littoral, providing the RAF with bases. In 1942, the hazards were increased by German deployment of U-boat reinforcements. But Winston Churchill conducted the war effort on the basis that Britain must be seen to challenge the enemy at every opportunity, especially when the army accomplished so little for so long. Malta, within easy range of Axis Sicilian air bases, suffered almost three years of intermittent bombardment. In March and April 1942 the little island received twice the bomb tonnage dropped on London during the entire blitz; its people almost starved, and its resident submarine flotilla had to be withdrawn. The requirement to sustain Malta became a priority for the Royal Navy, and every supply ship had to be fought through in the face of air, U-boat and surface attack. Each convoy demanded a supporting fleet operation: there must be battleships in case Italian heavy units sortied, carriers to provide air cover, and cruiser and destroyer escorts. Each venture precipitated an epic battle. The most famous, or notorious, took place in August 1942, when Malta’s shortages of oil, aircraft and food attained desperate proportions: Operation Pedestal was launched to bring succour.
Vice-Admiral Edward Syfret took command of the battlefleet that sailed from the Clyde on 3 August, escorting fourteen merchantmen. Several of these were chartered American ships, notably the tanker Ohio, provided with British crews. All had been fitted with anti-aircraft armament manned by soldiers, and on the passage to Gibraltar the convoy intensively exercised both gunnery and manoeuvre. The ships that set forth on 10 August to make the Malta passage formed a mighty array: the battleships Nelson and Rodney; fleet carriers Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle; the old carrier Furious, ferrying Spitfires to reinforce the island as soon as the range narrowed sufficiently to fly them off; six cruisers; twenty-four destroyers and a flotilla of smaller craft. To one cadet aboard a merchantman it was ‘a fantastically wonderful sight’.
Only weeks had elapsed since the Royal Navy’s Arctic humiliation, and the service felt on its mettle: a destroyer captain, Lt. Cmdr. David Hill, said: ‘There was a strong touch of desperation and bloody-mindedness following PQ17.’ One of the Pedestal destroyer flotillas, led by ‘Jackie’ Broome, had endured that ghastly experience. A host of German and Italian eyes, watching Gibraltar from Spain and North Africa, saw the fleet sail. Axis commanders were undeceived by a feint convoy which sailed simultaneously from Alexandria, trailing its coat in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘I felt indeed that some of our party were entering the narrow seas on a desperate venture,’ wrote George Blundell of the battleship Nelson, ‘and prayed to the Ruler of Destiny for his favour.’
On the 11th, amid a still, azure sea Furious began flying off its Spitfires, which set course for Malta, 550 miles distant, where most arrived safely. But now the first disaster struck. In the western Mediterranean, Asdic was confused by freak underwater conditions created by the confluence of warm seas with colder Atlantic currents: ships were thus acutely vulnerable to submarine attack. Even as the fighters were being launched, a salvo of torpedoes fired by U-73 struck Eagle, which sank in eight minutes with the loss of 260 of her complement of 1,160 men. ‘She presented a terrible sight as she heeled over, turned bottom up and sank with horrible speed,’ wrote an awestruck witness. ‘Men and aircraft could be seen falling off her flight deck as she capsized…It makes one tremble. If anyone took a good film of it, it should be shown throughout the country…I remember thinking of the trapped men.’ That evening Furious, its flight deck now empty, turned for home and safety. One of her escorts, the destroyer Wolverine, spotted an Italian submarine and raced in to ram; the Axis boat sank, but Wolverine suffered severe damage.
At 2045 the first enemy air attack was launched against Pedestal, by thirty-six Heinkel 111s and Ju88s flying from Sicily. These achieved no hits, and four German aircraft fell to the intense AA barrage. Next day at noon, a much more serious strike took place, by seventy bombers and torpedo-carriers with fighter escort. The ensuing battle lasted two hours. The freighter Deucalion was damaged and later sunk off the Tunisian coast by a torpedo-bomber, despite gallant efforts to save the ship by her master, Captain Ramsay Brown. During the afternoon, the convoy survived a submarine ambush unscathed. The destroyer Ithuriel rammed and sank another Italian boat, at the cost of crippling herself.
That evening of the 12th, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force came again. A hundred bombers and torpedo-carriers launched attacks from every direction and altitude, designed to swamp the defence. Ships’ AA crews fired almost continuously; empty cases massed in heaps beside gun mountings; the brilliant sky became pockmarked with thousands of black puffs; the noise of screaming aircraft engines competed with the stammer and thud of every calibre of armament. The destroyer Foresight was sunk, the carrier Indomitable badly damaged by three armour-piercing bombs. Still short of the Sicilian Narrows, Syfret withdrew his capital ships westwards, leaving a close escort headed by six cruisers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Harold Burrough, to fight the convoy through to Malta.
Pedestal’s agony now began in earnest. Within an hour of Syfret parting company, the Italian submarine Axum achieved a brilliant triple success: in a single attack, it sank Burrough’s flagship Nigeria and the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo, also hitting the tanker Ohio. These losses wiped out the convoy’s Fighter Direction capability, for the two cruisers carried the only radio sets capable of voice communication with Malta-based planes. Then, as the light began to fade, with British ships losing formation and huddling into a scrum, the Luftwaffe came again. Ju88s sank the merchant ships Empire Hope and Clan Ferguson and crippled Brisbane Star. Soon afterwards, a submarine torpedo damaged the cruiser Kenya. In darkness in the early hours of 13 August, German and Italian motor torpedo boats launched a series of attacks which persisted for hours. The defence was feeble, because Burrough decided that to illuminate the battlefield with starshell would help the enemy more than his own gunners. The cruiser Manchester was fatally damaged, four more merchantmen sunk and a fifth hit. The only compensation for suffering