HMS Eagle 🦅 Sinking in background
August 11, 1942. In the Mediterranean, one of the most desperate and heroic convoy battles of the entire war is beginning, a last-ditch effort to save the island of Malta from starvation. Today the first great blow falls, an aircraft carrier torpedoed and sunk in minutes. The operation is called Pedestal, and the island's survival hangs on it.
Malta was a tiny British island fortress sitting squarely astride the Axis supply routes to North Africa, and for that reason it was the most bombed place on earth, pounded relentlessly by German and Italian aircraft. From Malta, British planes and submarines savaged the convoys carrying fuel and supplies to Rommel's army in the desert. The Axis wanted Malta dead. And by the summer of 1942, Malta was very nearly dead, not from bombs but from hunger. The island was running out of everything, food, fuel, ammunition, medicine. If a convoy did not get through soon, Malta would have to surrender, and the whole Mediterranean would swing the Axis way.
So the British threw the dice. They assembled a powerful convoy of fourteen fast merchant ships, loaded with supplies and, most crucially, one large American-built tanker called the Ohio, carrying the fuel Malta needed to keep fighting. To protect them they gathered a huge escort, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, one of the strongest escorts ever assigned to a single convoy, because everyone knew what was coming. The convoy had to run a gauntlet hundreds of miles long, through waters swarming with U-boats, packed with Italian and German aircraft, and prowled by fast torpedo boats.
The gauntlet opened on the 11th. In the early afternoon a German submarine, U-73, slipped undetected beneath the destroyer screen and fired a full salvo of torpedoes into the old aircraft carrier Eagle. The carrier was mortally hit and rolled over and sank in just a few minutes, taking many of her crew and a quarter of the convoy's precious fighter aircraft down with her. It was a shattering start, and it was only the beginning.
Over the following days the convoy was subjected to some of the most concentrated air and sea attacks in naval history, wave after wave of bombers and torpedo planes, U-boats, and swarms of Italian and German motor torpedo boats attacking at night. Ship after ship was hit. Merchant vessels blew up and sank. Cruisers were torpedoed. Of the fourteen merchant ships that set out, nine were sunk. It was, in the cold accounting, a terrible mauling.
But five got through, and above all, the Ohio got through. The tanker, hit again and again, bombed, set afire, with a crashed aircraft on her deck and her back nearly broken, refused to sink. Her engines failed. So the escorting destroyers lashed themselves to her sides, one on each flank, and physically dragged and carried the crippled, wallowing tanker the last miles to Malta, her decks awash, expecting her to break in two at any moment. On the 15th, the feast of the island's patron, the Ohio was towed into the Grand Harbour at Valletta to enormous crowds lining the ramparts and weeping, and her fuel was pumped out just as she settled onto the harbor bottom, her job done.
Pedestal cost the Royal Navy an aircraft carrier, two cruisers, a destroyer, and nine merchant ships, a fearful price. But it saved Malta. The fuel and supplies that got through kept the island alive and fighting, and Malta went on to help strangle Rommel's supply lines at the critical moment before El Alamein. The convoy was battered half to death, but it saved the island, and the image of the broken Ohio held up between two destroyers became one of the great symbols of the war at sea.
