Malta had already become an offensive base for the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Air Force; in 1941 it became a base for submarines. This was not without its difficulties, since most of the necessary supplies had been taken to Alexandria, but submarines operated from Gibraltar to Malta overloaded with torpedoes and other equipment until stocks were built up. Submarines were also set to become an important link in the attempts to supply Malta.
Throughout 1941, Malta continued to develop its offensive capability, helped in February by the arrival of the first of a new class of submarines, the U-class, while Grand Harbour also was the base for four destroyers. The destroyers were more powerful ships than earlier classes, marking the continuing evolution of the destroyer from the relatively small torpedo-boat destroyer of the early years of the century to a ship with broader potential, and included the ‘J’-class fleet destroyers, HMS Janus and Jervis, and the Tribal-class fleet destroyers Mohawk and Nubian.
The clear waters of the Mediterranean had proved fatal for larger submarines, but the new U-class of smaller submarines was better suited to the Mediterranean, and of these, nine were deployed to Malta; Undaunted, Union, Upholder, Upright, Utmost, Unique, Urge, Ursula and Usk. The first two, Usk and Undaunted, nevertheless, did not survive long, but their place was soon taken by others of the same class. In addition to attacking Axis convoys and warships, these submarines were also ideal for landing raiding parties on the Italian coast, and on one occasion wrecked a railway line along which trains carrying munitions for the Luftwaffe bases in Sicily travelled.
The submarines were based at Manoel Island, which lay in the Marsamxett Harbour and was approached by a causeway just off the main road to Sliema, the island effectively dividing Sliema Creek from Lazzaretto Creek. Originally a fort designed to protect the outskirts of Valletta, which towered over the other side of the harbour, Manoel Island was now a naval base, with workshops and accommodation for resting submariners and for the artificers, the Royal Navy’s skilled tradesmen. The submarines were moored alongside. Substantial AA defences were placed on Manoel Island, but being on the other side of Valletta from Grand Harbour did not spare the base from heavy aerial attack, and at the worst of the raids, the submarines found it safer to rest on the bottom, fully submerged.
The Malta-based submarines and Swordfish embarked on a campaign to sever the Axis supply lines between Italy and North Africa. The favoured hunting ground for the submarine commanders was the area off the Kerkenah Bank, even though it was heavily mined and contained many natural hazards to safe navigation. On the plus side, the Italians could only listen using hydrophones, but had nothing as effective as the British sonar, known at the time as Asdic, and also lacked radar. The campaign started in February 1941 with offensive patrols by Unique, Upright and Utmost. The first significant operation was in late February, when Upright, commanded by Lieutenant E. D. Norman, sunk the Italian cruiser Armando Diaz, one of two cruisers escorting a large German convoy. No doubt the Italians had committed two cruisers to this role to put on a show for their allies, but there were no major British warships in the area, and the cruiser, which posed no threat at all to a submarine, proved an ideal target. The effect on British and Maltese morale can be imagined!
Reconnaissance reports of large-scale shipping movements, received on 8 March, resulted in these three boats being sent to sea, even though Utmost, commanded by Lieutenant Commander C. D. Caylet, had only been in harbour for twenty-four hours. Despite this, the following day, Utmost found and sank the Italian merchantman Capo Vita. On 10 March, Unique sank another merchantman, the Fenicia. Later in the month, these submarines were at sea again, with Utmost finding a convoy of five ships on 28 March, and torpedoing and sinking the Heraklia while the Ruhr had to be towed into port. The return voyage for the depleted convoy was no less eventful, when Upright torpedoed and severely damaged the Galilea, reported as being a straggler.
April saw Upholder join the flotilla, and for almost a year she, and her commander, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Wanklyn, played havoc with the Axis convoys. From April 1941 to March 1942, this one submarine accounted for three large troop-carrying liners each of more than 18,000 tons, seven other merchant ships, a destroyer and two German U-boats, as well as damaging a further cruiser and three merchant ships. The first two troop-carrying liners had been in a convoy of three approached by Wanklyn steering on the surface, who then skilfully fired a spread of four torpedoes at the ships. Two of the troopships managed to zigzag into the path of the torpedoes, with one sinking immediately, leaving the other to be finished off by Wanklyn when he returned the following morning. Ursula missed the third troopship, which managed to reach Tripoli safely. For his time in the Mediterranean, Wanklyn was awarded both the Victoria Cross, the highest British service decoration, and the DSO. It was a sad day when Upholder was lost off Tripoli with all of her crew in April 1942.
For a period of about a year, the Malta-based submariners exacted a high price from the enemy, but opportunities could be missed. Probably more than any other type of warship, submarines need to practise ‘deconfliction’, largely because of the difficulty of recognizing other submarines. ‘Deconfliction’ is the deliberate separation of friendly forces. In British submarine practice, this meant placing submarines to operate independently within designated patrol zones known as billets, and any other submarine found in that area was to be regarded as hostile. Yet, off Malta there were often so many British submarines that it was necessary to impose an embargo on night attacks on other submarines because of the difficulty in accurate recognition.
During the early hours of one morning in 1942, HMS Upright was on the surface when her lookouts spotted another larger submarine on a reciprocal course, and it was not until they passed that they realized that the other submarine was a large U-boat. A missed opportunity! Of course, there were many U-boats off Malta at the time, and no one will ever know if the Germans were working to the same rules, or whether their lookouts failed to spot the smaller British submarine!
The idea of using submarines to carry supplies was not new – it dated from the First World War when the Germans had established a company to operate merchant submarines to bring much needed strategic materials from the United States and bypass the increasingly effective British blockade of German ports. The siege of Malta presented an opportunity for British submarines to show what they could do, carrying supplies on what became known as ‘Magic Carpet’ runs. At first the Axis grip on Malta was relatively light, and losses on the early convoys were few and far between, but by 1941, the situation was increasingly difficult, and it became the practice for every submarine heading to Malta from both Gibraltar and Alexandria to attempt to carry at least some items of stores in addition to their usual torpedoes or mines. The ‘Magic Carpet’ submarines, however, were the larger submarines, and included the minelaying submarines Rorqual and Cachalot, the fleet submarine Clyde and the larger boats of the O, P and R classes. The tragedy was that had not an unfortunate accident deprived the Royal Navy of its sole aircraft carrying submarine, M2, some years before the war, that boat’s hangar would have made an ideal cargo hold. In fact, the Royal Navy could have used the French submarine Surcouf, a large 2,800 ton boat also with a hangar, but never did so even though she was with the Free French rather than Vichy forces. Some have surmised that doubts over the reliability of her crew might have been behind this failure, but it is more likely to have been a failure of the imagination, since the crew could have been taken off and a British one installed – but in any event, Surcouf was lost in the Caribbean.
The Porpoise-class minelayers and Clyde were especially effective as supply ships, with plenty of room between their casing and the pressure hull for stores while sometimes one of the batteries would be removed to provide extra space as happened on Clyde on at least one occasion, and the mine stowage tunnel was a good cargo space. Rorqual on one occasion carried twenty-four personnel, 147 bags of mail, two tons of medical stores, sixty-two tons of aviation spirit and forty-five tons of kerosene. Inevitably, there was much unofficial cargo, a favourite being gin for the wardrooms and messes in Malta, and even Lord Gort, Dobbie’s successor as governor, was not above having a small consignment of gramophone records brought out to him in this way. Cargo was sometimes carried externally in containers welded to the casing.
The operation was not without its problems and the size of cargo that could be carried, while impressive in itself, could never compare with that of an average merchant ship, at this period around 7,500 tons. This was a measure of the desperation of Malta’s plight! For the submariners, there were problems with buoyancy. On one occasion Cachalot had so much sea water absorbed by wooden packing cases stowed in her casing that her first lieutenant had to pump out 1,000 gallons of water from her internal tanks to compensate. Fuel was another hazard. In July 1941, Talisman carried 5,500 gallons in cans stowed beneath her casing, and on other occasions fuel could be carried in external fuel tanks. When carrying petrol in cans, submarines were not allowed to dive below sixty-five feet, while aviation fuel in the external tanks meant that fumes venting in the usual way constituted a fire hazard, so smoking was banned on the bridge and pyrotechnic recognition signals were also banned. Another problem was that the Mediterranean favoured smaller rather than larger submarines, with its clear waters and the lack of great depths, although, of course, these submarines were always too close to the surface anyway.
One disadvantage of the convoy system is that ships come in bunches, like London buses, rather than one or two at a time when port facilities can cope easily. The submarines were free of this inconvenience, the case of feast and famine, and made supply runs once every twelve days or so.
In addition to flying her ‘Jolly Roger’ at the end of a successful patrol, HMS Porpoise added a second flag flown beneath the Jolly Roger’s tally of ships sunk – this was marked PCS for ‘Porpoise Carrier Service’, with a white bar for each successful supply run, and there were at least four for this one boat alone.
The ‘Magic Carpet’ submarines did not confine themselves to their supply runs. After unloading in Malta, they would take mines from the underground stores and proceeded north to lay them off the main Italian ports, such as Palermo, before returning to Egypt. On a number of occasions, these submarines also found and torpedoed Axis shipping, with one torpedoing and sinking an Italian submarine and then torpedoing an Italian merchantman, which stubbornly refused to sink until the submarine surfaced and sank her with gunfire.
Meagre though the capacity of the submarines might have been compared with that of cargo ships and tankers, the steady trickle of supplies did at least stave off defeat. Their work was augmented by a tenuous air link with Gibraltar, operated by the newly-formed British Overseas Airways Corporation, formed in 1940 on the merger of Imperial Airways with its lively competitor, British Airways, which operated ex-RAF Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley bombers, modified to carry supplies.
Meanwhile, the destroyers had not been idle. Typical of the early successes achieved by the destroyers was the night action of 15 – 16 April 1941. On 15 April, one of 431 Flight’s Martin Baltimores discovered a convoy of five Italian merchantmen escorted by three destroyers, and on closer investigation, it was clear that the ships were carrying troops, tanks and other vehicles, intended for Rommel. A short but pertinent message was immediately sent to Malta, where the destroyers Janus, Jervis, Mohawk and Nubian, were waiting. It took them just three hours to intercept the convoy, and on a brief but furious night engagement, all of the Italian ships were sunk, although one of the destroyers, Tarigo, managed to torpedo the Mohawk, sinking her before herself being sent to the bottom by the remaining British ships.
Then, just a few days later, on 21 April, the Mediterranean Fleet ventured west for a major attack on the Italian-held port of Tripoli. This operation was integrated with another, intended to ensure that oil and aviation fuel was fought through to Malta. This started on 18 April, with a convoy from Alexandria, and as usual in the Mediterranean, a sizeable and powerful escort was provided. Leaving ‘Alex’ at 07.00, the escort was headed by Cunningham’s flagship, Warspite, accompanied by the Mediterranean Fleet’s other two battleships, Barham and Valiant, and the new carrier Formidable, as well as two cruisers, Phoebe and Cairo, with a large destroyer screen. The difficulties facing Malta and the dangers for shipping approaching the central Mediterranean are amply illustrated by the fact that all of this was to provide cover for just one ship, the armed tanker Breconshire. It was also part of the plan for the escort to bring back four merchantmen from Malta. The Breconshire was left to continue her course into Malta safely shortly after nightfall on 20 April. That night, Tripoli was bombed by Malta-based RAF Wellingtons and Fleet Air Arm Swordfish. Oddly, Formidable’s own aircraft were limited on this occasion to flare dropping and spotting for the guns of the Fleet, rather than adding to the efforts of the Malta squadrons. Tripoli was mainly occupied by merchant ships and their escorts, usually nothing bigger than a destroyer. To ensure accurate shore bombardment, usually a great difficulty when attacking from the sea in the dark, Cunningham had the submarine Truant positioned accurately four miles off the harbour, showing a light to seaward as a navigation mark.
Joined by the cruiser Gloucester as they steamed south through the night, the Mediterranean Fleet sailed past the surfaced submarine Truant during the early morning of 21 April, just before daylight, in what was literally the darkest hour before dawn, at least for the Italian defenders, when from 05.00 to 05.45, in Cunningham’s own words, they ‘pumped 15-inch and 6-inch shell into the harbour and amongst the shipping. The Gloucester’s sixteen gun salvoes must have been particularly effective. ’ In any such bombardment, those on the ships could see little of the damage being done, especially in this case as the air raids, which had only just ceased, had created clouds of dust and smoke from the fires started, but Formidable’s aircraft reported that five or six ships had been sunk, and it looked as if Valiant’s guns had set off an oil fire in storage tanks ashore.
This was another instance of the Italians not being prepared, despite, or perhaps because of, the air raids. Two consecutive attacks on one night seemed to have been beyond their comprehension. A full twenty minutes passed before the shore batteries came into action, and even then, their shells flew over the attacking warships, which suffered no hits at all. Inexplicably, the Luftwaffe also failed to put in an appearance, leaving Cunningham to surmise that possibly the radio station at Tripoli had been put out of action. Before the operation, with the agonies of Illustrious in January still fresh his mind, he had been expecting anything from the loss of a major ship in an enemy minefield to the destruction of several ships or heavy damage to all of them from a heavy Luftwaffe attack.
This was the Mediterranean Fleet operating at its best, for while Tripoli was under attack, Vice Admiral Pridham-Whippell took the Mediterranean Fleet’s cruisers, with a destroyer escort, to attack coastal targets between Tripoli and Benghazi. After daybreak, as the Fleet started its return to Alexandria, three Junkers Ju88s attempted to attack, but Fulmars from Formidable shot down two of them and chased off the third.
During the first six months of war, from June to November 1940, the Italians had lost just four ships en route to North Africa, with a total tonnage of 11,104 tons. From December 1940, to the following March, they lost thirty ships with a total tonnage of 109,089 tons. Nevertheless, the two divisions of Rommel’s new Afrika Korps managed to reach North Africa with few losses. Effective control of the seas at this time would have done much to shorten the war and ease Malta’s plight, but effective control of the seas now, as in no previous conflict, meant effective control of the air!
The work of the destroyers was reinforced by two light cruisers, HMS Penelope and Aurora, that were based at Malta from October 1941, and with the destroyers Lance and Lively formed Force K under Captain W. G. Agnew. At this time, Malta was also home to the cruiser Ajax, heroine of the Battle of the River Plate, although out of action. Less happily, after the evacuation from Crete, Cunningham no longer had a single battleship or, more important, an aircraft carrier. Had the Italians sent their battleships and heavy cruisers to sea, not to mention their substantial fleet of submarines that on Italy’s entry into the war had far exceeded those of Germany in September 1939, the situation for Malta would have been hopeless.
The light cruiser Penelope was to be so badly damaged by shrapnel during her service in the Mediterranean and the stay at Malta, that she was nicknamed ‘HMS Pepperpot’. The thin plating of a cruiser’s hull was easily repaired, but repeated damage meant that she spent much of her time with her hull literally bristling with the small wooden plugs used by damage control parties to rectify small holes from shrapnel or machine-gun attack.
Force K was not long in proving its worth. Persuaded by the Regia Aeronautica that the two cruisers were so badly damaged as to be out of action, on 9 November the Italians sent a convoy of seven ships to North Africa with an escort of two cruisers and ten destroyers. Far from being confined to port, Force K turned up and in the engagement that followed, all seven merchant ships were sunk, as well as a destroyer, with another so badly damaged that she sunk later. On 20 November, another convoy was spotted with four ships escorted by two cruisers and eight destroyers. The two cruisers were badly damaged by torpedoes and the entire convoy beat a hasty retreat into Taranto. Two other ships were spotted steaming from Piraeus to join the convoy, and these were promptly sunk by Penelope and Lively. All this contributed to the loss of 54,900 tons of Italian shipping in November.
While spring and early summer 1942 saw a dramatic reduction in the Royal Navy’s presence in Malta as the air attacks took their toll, the safe arrival of the convoy, Operation Pedestal, in August saw increased submarine activity. That was when the submarine Saracen arrived. Her First Lieutenant was Lieutenant, later Commander Edward Young,52 who had started his career in submarines as a ‘third hand’ aboard HMS Sealion off Norway, attacking German coastal convoys.
From Gibraltar we were sent in convoy to Malta, which by this time was very much under siege. In order to get aviation petrol to Malta, two of our fuel tanks were cleared of diesel, and filled with aviation petrol. When we got to Malta, we not only had the petrol, but also other stores, including food. It was a relief to get all of this stuff out of the boat.
We then joined the flotilla of S-boats and . . . U-class boats.
We attacked a convoy, intending to sink a merchantman, but the destroyers were too close so that we sank the destroyer instead, a German destroyer.
I don’t think that we had very much trouble. There were a lot of planes going over all of the time, and we had constantly to go deep to avoid being seen. In the Mediterranean we did see an Italian submarine who appeared to be keeping no look out at all. We attacked him with three torpedoes and sank him. There were no survivors at all.
We didn’t have much time for going into the town, everyone was very hungry, even we were hungry, although we were not as badly off as the Maltese . . . We weren’t sent to get supplies for Malta, we simply brought some from Gibraltar as we were going there anyway.
We had a night encounter with an Italian submarine that flashed a long and unintelligible signal.
By October, 1942, the situation continued to be difficult, and there was even the renewed German air offensive in October, a last twitch of a wounded animal. Malta-based units remained on the offensive, with the submarines Unbending, Unbroken, United, Utmost and Safari attacking a convoy of five merchant ships, including a tanker, escorted by seven destroyers south of the Italian island of Pantelleria, coordinating the attack with aircraft from Malta.