Operation Pedestal was not the end of Malta’s travails, but it was the beginning of the end. For those on the island, this was hard to grasp at the time. The convoy had brought them from the brink of starvation, but afterwards, the enemy seemed to close in more closely than before.
While Gort had taken a gamble with the bread ration, increasing this after the arrival of the Santa Marija convoy, the action soon seemed premature. True, Welshman continued to make her ‘club runs’, joined now by her sister ship Manxman, but grain hardly ever seemed to figure in the supplies carried. Most foodstuffs would last until December, but Gort knew that grain would run out well before then.
Yet, all was not well with the enemy. The loss of so many ships during Operation Pedestal couldn’t disguise the fact that five had got through, and that this had been a victory for the Allies and a defeat for the Axis. Kesselring described his men being in a state of nerves which he described as ‘Malta Fever’.
The day of the convoy’s arrival, 13 August, also marked another change with the arrival of General Montgomery and Field Marshal Lord Alexander in Egypt, to relieve Lord Auchinleck and Corbett. Brooke had been unimpressed with Corbett and believed that Montgomery would not work well under Auchinleck. These changes were essential to get the Eighth Army ready for the offensive for which Churchill was pressing.
Malta had once again become an offensive base. Rommel’s men were falling prey to many of the diseases caused by malnutrition.
That autumn Kesselring once again ordered Fliegerkorps II, now only the remnants of what had been a powerful force, into the air battle over Malta, appreciating that it could only be a matter of time before Rommel came under attack, and knowing that the ‘Desert Fox’ was short of fuel and water. The air raids started again on the night of Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 October. This time, the new AOC, Air Vice Marshal Sir Keith Park, tried different tactics, sending Spitfires out to intercept the raiders before they reached Maltese air space. It worked the first time, with a third of the bombers turning back without flying over Malta, but the Germans were made of sterner stuff, and the raids increased in their intensity, with the airfields once again the main targets. The Luftwaffe began attacking from all directions, hoping to confuse the defenders. Even so, on the first day of the new air assault, the Luftwaffe lost fifteen aircraft, with thirty more so badly damaged as to have been unlikely to have made it home. The second day saw twenty-four shot down, and forty-one seriously damaged. The RAF lost three Spitfires. The RAF continued to attempt to disrupt the bomber formations while they were still over the sea, and continued to enjoy considerable success, while air/sea rescue launches patrolled the waters offshore so that any pilot able to bale out was likely to be quickly rescued.
On 13 October, the 1,000th enemy plane to be shot down over Malta was reached. This milestone has been credited to an American pilot flying a Spitfire, Squadron Leader J. J. Lynch from California, but officially the Air Ministry credited this crucial kill to a Canadian, Pilot Officer George Frederick ‘Screwball’ Beurling, only twenty-one years old, and already the holder of both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Flying Medal, the latter indicating that he had started his career as an NCO pilot.
There was another discrepancy. Kesselring maintained in his diaries that heavy losses forced him to terminate this last fling air campaign after just three days, but British and Maltese sources maintain that it continued until 19 October. On this last day, fighters were sent to intercept an enemy formation as dusk approached, but it seemed that this was a decoy of fighter-bombers while a larger bomber formation was hoping to sneak in from the west while the Spitfires were heavily engaged and attack under cover of darkness, but another squadron of Spitfires was scrambled to meet the new threat. Most of the bombers dropped their bombs in the sea and fled back to their bases, while yet a third formation of bombers came in from the east, and were met by the Spitfires racing across the island. Then a formation of bombers came in from the north, and met a squadron of night fighters. Out of the four Luftwaffe formations, just a tenth of the aircraft managed to cross the coast; the AA gunners were waiting.
In North Africa, the great Battle of El Alamein had started on 23 October. At last the British Army had the tanks it needed, while many of those fielded by the Germans and the Italians were obsolescent. A thousand gun bombardment took place during the night of 23 – 24 October, and although the initial attacks by British infantry and armour were unsuccessful, by 5 November, Rommel’s forces were in retreat. At first, Montgomery feared that Rommel was setting a trap for him, but when the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, occurred on 8 November, Montgomery was able to chase Rommel’s forces into Tunisia.
At last, the territory to the south of Malta was free of Axis forces. The aerial assault on Malta had been conducted from Sicily, but German and Italian occupation of North Africa had been a major factor in the aerial attacks against the convoys.
The Stoneage convoy mentioned earlier was, of course, further confirmation if any was needed that Malta’s agony was drawing to a close when it arrived on 26 November, with four ships in the Grand Harbour.
Sadly, the fast minelayer Welshman that had done so much to relieve the distress of Malta, was sunk off Tobruk on 1 February 1943, with just half her ship’s company rescued.
On 26 May 1943, for the first time in almost three years, a convoy arrived in Gibraltar from Alexandria without losing a single ship. Italy had surrendered. The Mediterranean was no longer ‘Mare Nostrum’, ‘Our Sea’, to the Italians. The effort to make it so had cost Germany and Italy almost a million dead and wounded, as well as 8,000 aircraft, 1,500 of them shot down over Malta, 6,000 guns, 2,500 tanks and 70,000 motor vehicles, in addition to 2,400,000 tons of shipping. By contrast, the Allies had lost just two per cent of the ships sent into the Mediterranean, with 70,000 men dead and wounded.
This state of affairs was obviously of great benefit to Malta, but it had far wider implications. The passage from the UK to the Middle East was reduced from 13,000 miles to just 3,000 miles, saving an average of forty-five days per convoy passed through, the equivalent of providing the Allies with more than a million tons of shipping.
The Stoneage convoy arrived when there was just thirteen days’ of siege ration food left on Malta. They were followed by other ships, but it was not until Christmas that the food situation began to ease. Four ships alone could not change the picture overnight, especially when the cupboard was almost bare.
‘We stopped being hungry in March,’ recalled Mabel Strickland, editor of The Times of Malta, meaning March 1944. Even so, there were few luxuries at first, with no jam or even oatmeal.’76