Malta Victory Page 2

  The Führer gave a sudden snort, and rubbed the tip of his nose with his index finger. ‘No matter what Major-General Ramcke thinks about the efficiency of the Duce’s airborne troops, gentlemen, you both know my views on the combat capabilities of our allies,’ he grunted. ‘If the invasion of Malta were to go ahead immediately, there is no doubt that the British fleet at Gibraltar and Alexandria would try to intervene, regardless of cost. And suppose your bombers were unable to operate for some reason, Kesselring? Suppose the British Navy got through to intercept the seaborne invasion force? The whole lot, Italian warships and all, would turn tail and run for it, leaving Student’s paratroopers sitting on Malta in splendid isolation.’

  Kesselring began to protest, but Hitler held up his hand to silence him. ‘No, Kesselring, I will hear no objection. For once I agree with the Duce. We need more time. The British Army in North Africa must be destroyed, the British Fleet in the Mediterranean must be shattered by air attack before we can contemplate an invasion of Malta. There must be no repetition of the disastrous losses your men sustained in Crete, Student. Even now, I shudder to think what might have happened had our bombers not been in a position to keep the Royal Navy at bay.’

  He glared at Student, and the latter winced. Then, unexpectedly, Hitler smiled.

  ‘Operation Hercules will take place in mid July, gentlemen,’ he said decisively. ‘In the meantime, Kesselring, II Air Corps is to maintain heavy attacks on the island and the ships endeavouring to supply it. I want every installation on Malta pounded to dust; I want the people dazed and broken, cowering in their caves like animals, so that when we do come they will throw themselves at our feet and beg for mercy.

  ‘You will no doubt have heard,’ the Führer concluded, ‘that two weeks ago the British awarded the island of Malta their highest civil decoration, the George Cross, in recognition of what they termed the people’s bravery in withstanding our air onslaught.

  ‘I want you to make it clear to them, Kesselring, that the onslaught is only just beginning.’

  Chapter Two

  The big hangar deck of the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp was a shuddering, vibrating cavern of noise. The ship had turned into wind and tremors buffeted her hull as she ploughed into the swell at full speed, her engines pounding.

  Strapped tightly in the cockpit of his Spitfire, Flight Lieutenant George Yeoman glanced up at the great black girders that stretched up into the gloom on both sides, beyond the green, spectral glow of the hangar’s electric lights, then looked around him as far as the restriction of his seat harness would permit. The hangar deck was choked with Spitfires, packed nose to tail, wingtip to wingtip, like a school of fish swept into the belly of a leviathan. There were thirty-six of them, and Yeoman knew that another thirty or so were crammed on the flight deck of the British carrier HMS Eagle, churning through the sea not far away.

  Yeoman was suddenly conscious of the date: 9 May, 1942. It was two years, all but a day, since he had first gone into action in France as a very new sergeant pilot, flying Hurricanes with No. 505 Squadron while the British Expeditionary Force carried out its famous fighting retreat to Dunkirk. A lot had happened to him since then; the Battle of Britain, the Western Desert, Crete. Now he was an old hand at the age of twenty-two, with the ribbons of the DFC and DFM on his chest and thirteen confirmed victories to his credit.

  Somewhere behind him a Merlin engine coughed into life and a wraith of blue exhaust smoke drifted slowly over his head. He looked in his rear-view mirror and saw American sailors seize a Spitfire by its wingtips, pushing it backwards on to the big hangar lift by the side of the ship. The seamen ran clear, carefully avoiding the shimmering arc of the Spitfire’s propeller, and the lift disappeared smoothly up into the shadows. Seconds later it descended once more, empty. Somewhere over Yeoman’s head the sound of the Merlin rose to a shrill crescendo, then faded as the Spitfire roared away from the flight deck.

  More engines started, and another Spitfire was dragged on to the lift. The hangar deck was partly open to the outside, which made it possible to start engines down here in relative safety. The procedure was impossible on British carriers, with their enclosed hangar decks, where the slightest spark could ignite explosive petrol fumes and tear the ship apart.

  The American procedure certainly saved time and congestion on the flight deck, thought Yeoman, as the empty lift came down again and the fighter it had carried winged out over the sea. He glanced at his watch; it was 5.20 a.m. and outside the sun was just beginning to rise. He was still quite a long way down the queue, with seven or eight Spitfires to go before him.

  He looked across at the fighter on his left and grinned at its pilot, who stuck two fingers up at him. Yeoman made a mental note to pay Flying Officer Gerry Powell the two pounds he owed him as soon as they reached their destination; there had been an almost non-stop poker school in progress on the Wasp ever since she had left the Clyde and Yeoman, who was by no means an expert at the game, had a fair-sized hole in his pocket as a result.

  He liked Powell. The pint-sized Canadian had an irrepressible sense of humour and by all accounts was a first-rate pilot with half a dozen Huns to his credit. He had fallen out with somebody somewhere along the line, however, hence his current posting. It was the same with many of the other pilots on the two carriers; they were a pretty wild bunch, all told, and their previous commanding officers had apparently been pleased to see the back of them. But there was no denying one fact: they were tough and determined, and when they were let off the leash they were killers. Their operational records and the medal ribbons they wore testified to that fact.

  As far as Yeoman was concerned, the task ahead of him was infinitely preferable to his last job. In December 1941, at the end of his time in the Middle East, he had returned to the United Kingdom for a ‘rest’ as a flying instructor, and hated every minute of it. Some people enjoyed the task, but flogging round an aerodrome circuit day in, day out, had proved more soul-destroying than Yeoman had ever imagined. Either a pilot was cut out to instruct, Yeoman had quickly concluded, or he wasn’t. His fellow instructors had been a pretty morose bunch, too, which had not helped matters, but even that would not have been so bad if it had not been for the CO of the training school, a man with whom Yeoman had found it impossible to get on at all. Both had taken an instinctive dislike to one another at first sight, and it seemed to Yeoman that from then on his superior had gone out of his way-to make life uncomfortable for him.

  He didn’t know what sort of chip lay across the man’s shoulder, and he didn’t care. All he knew, after two months, was that unless something drastic happened to change things he was going to blow his top, and to hell with the consequences.

  Then, in April, a chance to escape from the tense, unhappy atmosphere of the flying school had fallen into Yeoman’s lap, and he had seized it eagerly. Another instructor, a flight lieutenant named Gill — who, for some reason, was one of the CO’s blue-eyed boys — had looked so down in the mouth over breakfast one morning that Yeoman had asked him what was wrong. Gill, it turned out, was bewailing the fact that he had just been warned of a posting overseas. Yeoman had listened patiently to the man’s tirade; he had only been married three months, his wife was expecting a child, it wasn’t fair to send him of all people abroad just at this time, and so on.

  Ordinarily, Yeoman wouldn’t have given a damn about Gill’s fate. His Majesty paid you to take whatever was coming to you, and that was that. But this was different. He had leaned over the table and quietly asked Gill if he could go in his place. For a moment, the other had stared at him in stunned silence; then he had seized his hand and pumped it in an embarrassing show of emotion.

  Half an hour later Yeoman had been in the CO’s office, making a formal application to swap places with Gill. The CO had been in an unexpectedly genial mood, and had promised to fix everything. He had been as good as his word; indeed, Yeoman had left the office with the clear feeling that if the man had been faced with the prospect
of paying the young pilot’s fare to his unknown overseas destination, he would have done so willingly.

  Seven days later Yeoman, bowed under the weight of his personal kit, parachute pack, dinghy pack, Mae West lifejacket and the other odds and ends essential to his profession, had reported to the Rail Transport Officer on Glasgow Central station, to find that thirty-five other pilots were converging on the same spot from all points of the compass. None of them knew the nature of their destination, but they had all been told that they would have to take off from an aircraft carrier and consequently there had been a lot of rumours. Some had thought they were heading for north Russia, where a couple of RAF Hurricane squadrons had been operating alongside the Soviet Air Force for some months, but Libya was the favourite choice.

  They had joined the USS Wasp that night, and she had sailed from the River Clyde before dawn, pointing her bow southwards into the Atlantic. Only then, at a briefing the following morning, did they learn the facts. They were to be the reinforcements the besieged island of Malta needed so desperately.

  Yeoman would always remember that briefing. It was given by the senior RAF officer, Squadron Leader Roger Graham, who would command the pilots on the Wasp until they landed on the island. They would then be split up and assigned to the various airfields; Graham himself was to command a squadron at Luqa.

  Graham had been in Malta before, the previous spring. The story he told the assembled pilots, simply and without elaboration, was one of fearful privation and enormous courage. He told them how Malta, the key strategic position in the central Mediterranean, had been isolated by Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Axis in June, 1940, and how the island had been subjected to an almost continual onslaught from the air ever since by the Italian Air Force and the Luftwaffe. He spoke of the early days of the battle, when Malta had been defended solely by three old Gloster Gladiator biplanes. Then a trickle of Hawker Hurricanes had started to arrive, and they had sustained the air defences, fighting against appalling odds, until June 1941, when the Luftwaffe units in Sicily had been withdrawn for operations on the Russian front and left the Italians to continue the offensive on their own.

  The Luftwaffe’s absence, however, had been only temporary. In December 1941 the bombers returned, and over the next three months they unleashed a series of attacks whose fury made the previous raids seem almost insignificant. By the end of February, the island’s force of sixty Hurricanes had been halved, the survivors faced with the impossible task of taking on the two hundred and fifty bombers and two hundred fighters the enemy had assembled on Sicily.

  In a desperate attempt to alleviate the situation, the carrier HMS Eagle flew off fifteen Spitfires on 7 March, and these joined the Hurricanes in three weeks of hectic air fighting. By the end of the month, however, there were only eighteen serviceable fighters on the whole of the island, and only Luqa airfield was still operational. The RAF’S small bomber force, and the Royal Navy’s warships — both of which had taken a fearful toll of Rommel’s supply convoys — were forced to leave. Malta was being systematically torn apart, and although the courage of the islanders remained unbroken, the enemy was slowly but surely winning the battle.

  Only one thing could save the island, and that was fighters. So, in April, the Americans joined the struggle, sending the USS Wasp to the Mediterranean with forty-seven more Spitfires. Within twenty-four hours, thirty of them had been wiped out, mostly on the ground, and the situation was as desperate as ever.

  Now, in May, the Wasp and Eagle had joined forces in a do-or-die attempt to throw more fighters into the battle. The quietly-spoken Graham left his pilots with no illusions about the importance of the sixty-four Spitfires on the two carriers; they spelled the difference between life and death for the island, where a quarter of a million people were faced with the grim prospect of starvation. Sixty-four Spits might just be enough to turn the scales and win command of the air over Malta for long enough to enable vital supply convoys to break through to the island and unload their cargoes without being bombed to blazes. And Graham emphasized another grim possibility; if Malta fell, leaving the Axis supply lines unmolested, Rommel would very probably be in Cairo in the summer of 1942.

  Graham’s words had given Yeoman a lot to think about during the voyage southwards through the Atlantic. To think that he, together with sixty-three other young men from all over the British Commonwealth, and a few from the United States, could decide the fate of an entire people and possibly the outcome of the war in the Mediterranean, left him with an awesome weight of responsibility. He knew that once they reached Malta, they would fight as never before — and he knew that every single Spitfire had to get there.

  It would be tough. Only one pilot, a man who had transferred to the RAF from the Fleet Air Arm, had ever taken off from an aircraft-carrier before, but there must be no errors, either on the take-off or the 600-mile flight to Malta that followed. Although every effort had been made to keep the operation a secret, Yeoman knew enough about the Germans’ intelligence network to be certain that the enemy would know the Spitfires were coming. Anyway, they were bound to be picked up by radar at some point in their long flight. Navigation would have to be spot on, for if the Huns ran true to form the Messerschmitts would be lurking over the Sicilian coast, waiting to pounce on anybody who strayed off course. Also, the very length of the flight would stretch the Spitfires to their limit, despite the addition of ninety-gallon auxiliary fuel tanks. Anyone who failed to achieve the best throttle setting and cruising speed for maximum range risked running out of juice a long way short of Malta.

  Engine failure, too, was another nightmare possibility that lurked at the back of every pilot’s mind. The single-engined fighter pilot who enjoyed flying over water for long distances hadn’t been born, and if you had to ditch on this particular trip there would be no one around to fish you out. Still, they all had boundless confidence in the RAF engineering officer on board the Wasp, Squadron Leader Spence; he had fussed around the Spitfires constantly ever since they had left the Clyde, and his small team of fitters had nursed the Merlins lovingly. If anything failed, it would be no fault of theirs.

  Flanked by her screen of destroyers, the Wasp had slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar under cover of darkness and made rendezvous with the rest of the naval force, consisting of HMS Eagle — whose Spitfires had arrived at Gibraltar in crates and been assembled there — the battleship HMS Renown, a cruiser and more destroyers.

  Yeoman, as he went to his cabin to snatch a few hours’ sleep on the evening of 8 May, had been almost sorry the voyage was nearly over. The Americans had been incredibly hospitable, the accommodation comfortable, and the food was excellent. At least, thought Yeoman, if we’re heading for a starvation diet, we’ve been able to fill our bellies pretty well over the past few days.

  Sleep had eluded him and he had gone up to the flight deck, through the small oval door at the base of the ‘island’, the carrier’s superstructure. A stiff breeze was blowing and there was a heavy swell. He had ventured out some distance towards the middle of the deck, the wind whipping his clothing and refreshingly cool against his face. He had revelled in the mere task of keeping his balance on the great expanse of dipping, heaving metal. The night was moonless and the northern horizon was dark, but to the south, where the coastlines of Morocco and Algeria bordered the Mediterranean, the glittering lights of towns were clearly visible, and the sudden realization came upon him that the whole world was not at war. Yet the small section of which he formed a tiny part was, and as he strove to penetrate the darkness he could just make out the black outlines of the other ships, with the occasional phosphorescent flash of a bow wave. He was conscious, too, of eyes around him in the dark, as steel-helmeted lookouts peered at their designated sectors of sea, searching endlessly for the luminous track of a torpedo. The great ship never slept, and it was a comforting thought.

  Now, seated in his Spitfire in the vibrating hangar deck, his impressions of the night before se
emed unreal. Another glance at his watch: it was 5.25 a.m. An American air mechanic was making frantic signals to him and he snapped out of his reverie, reaching down to press the starter buttons. The big black propeller blades in front of him jerked spasmodically, then flickered and dissolved as the Merlin fired, adding its own voice to the giant roar. The needles of his instruments trembled, then crept slowly into their places, showing that all was well with temperatures and pressures in the heart of the Spitfire’s nervous system. This was the world Yeoman knew, strapped inside the narrow confines of the metal cockpit, his own human nerves and senses linked through touch and sight and rubber umbilical cords to the finely tuned mechanics of his fighter, flesh and metal forged into a single entity whose task was to kill.

  He was being pushed backwards on to the lift, a strange sensation, because he couldn’t see behind him properly and he had a sudden panicky feeling that the Spit’s tail was going to hit something. Then the mechanics disappeared, the lift gave a sudden lurch beneath him and the hangar deck began to recede.

  A few moments later he emerged on the flight deck, blinking in the golden dawn. His wings were seized once more and the Spitfire trundled forward, leaving the lift free to descend. Two men in yellow overalls grabbed the fighter’s tail, swinging it round so that the nose was pointing towards the bow. The carrier was forging ahead at twenty knots, and Yeoman could feel the wind buffeting the aircraft’s fuselage. He gave a quick glance round; overhead, a dozen Spitfires had just completed a circuit of the carrier and were setting course eastwards. That was Roger Graham’s ‘A’ Flight; they would be well on their way by the time ‘B’ Flight, which Yeoman had been selected to lead, formed up.