At 09:30 on 15 August 1942, a tanker that had been torpedoed, bombed and hit by a crashing dive bomber crept into Grand Harbour, Valletta. She had a broken back, her decks were almost awash, and two destroyers were lashed to her sides to hold her up. Crowds lined the bastions. A band played Rule Britannia, then the harbour fell quiet as she passed.

The tanker was the Ohio, and she was the reason Operation Pedestal had been fought at all. Malta, the British island fortress in the middle of the Mediterranean, was days from running out of aviation fuel and weeks from surrender. To get one convoy through, the Royal Navy sent three aircraft carriers into range of hundreds of German and Italian aircraft based on Sardinia and Sicily.

Only five of the fourteen merchant ships made it. One carrier was sunk and another put out of action. Yet the fuel in Ohio's tanks kept Malta's Spitfires flying and its strike aircraft hunting Axis supply ships, and that made Pedestal one of the most consequential air-sea battles of the war in the Mediterranean.

Malta on the brink

By the summer of 1942 Malta had been under air siege for two years. It was the one Allied base that could strike at the supply route between Italy and Rommel's army in North Africa, which is precisely why the Axis was trying to bomb and starve it into submission. In June, two convoys sent from either end of the Mediterranean had largely failed. Only two merchant ships got through.

Food was rationed down to a few ounces of sugar, fats and bread a fortnight. More importantly for the air war, the island's fuel stocks were dwindling. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, who commanded the RAF on Malta, warned that only a few weeks of aviation fuel remained. Without it, the fighters defending the island and the bombers attacking Axis convoys would be grounded.

Historigraph's concise documentary on Operation Pedestal, one of the most watched films about the convoy that saved Malta.

The Admiralty's answer was the largest escort yet given to a Malta convoy. Fourteen merchant ships sailed from the Clyde on the night of 2/3 August, covered by the battleships Nelson and Rodney, seven cruisers, more than 30 destroyers and three fleet carriers. The prize at the centre was Ohio, an American tanker owned by the Texas Company and lent to Britain, carrying more than 11,000 tons of kerosene and diesel fuel under Captain Dudley Mason.

Three carriers and their fighters

The carriers carried roughly 70 fighters between them. HMS Victorious embarked Fulmars of 809 and 884 Naval Air Squadrons and a handful of Sea Hurricanes. HMS Indomitable had ten Grumman Martlets of 806 Squadron, 24 Sea Hurricanes of 800 and 880 Squadrons and a strike force of Albacores. HMS Eagle, the oldest of the three, carried 16 Sea Hurricanes of 801 and 813 Squadrons. The Sea Hurricane was a navalised Hawker Hurricane with fixed wings, which made it awkward to handle on a crowded deck.

A fourth carrier sailed with them on a different job. HMS Furious was running Operation Bellows, a ferry mission to fly Supermarine Spitfires to Malta. Her sloping flight deck was so awkward for the Spitfire that the fighters needed constant-speed propellers fitted at short notice before they could take off safely.

On the other side, the Regia Aeronautica and the Luftwaffe had several hundred aircraft in Sardinia and Sicily: Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 and SM.84 torpedo bombers, Junkers Ju 88 bombers, Ju 87 Stukas, and fighter escorts including the Macchi C.202 et le Messerschmitt Bf 109. Their orders were to go for the carriers first.

11 August: Furious launches, Eagle goes down

The convoy slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar in fog on the night of 9/10 August, but Axis agents and reconnaissance aircraft had it under watch within hours. On 11 August, between 12:30 and 15:15, Furious flew off 38 Spitfires for the long flight to Malta. According to the most widely cited count, 37 of them arrived. Furious then turned back for Gibraltar.

At about 13:15, in the middle of that launch, the German submarine U-73 under Kapitänleutnant Helmut Rosenbaum slipped inside the screen and fired four torpedoes into Eagle. The old carrier rolled over and sank in a matter of minutes, about 70 nautical miles south of Mallorca. Destroyers and the tug Jaunty rescued 929 men; 131 died, according to the most commonly cited figure, although some accounts give more.

Only the four Sea Hurricanes that were airborne survived, landing on the other carriers. The rest went down with the ship, roughly a fifth of the convoy's fighter cover gone before the main air battle had even begun. That evening, at dusk, Ju 88 bombers and He 111 torpedo bombers made the first air attack. The convoy's guns shot down two Ju 88s, then fired on some of their own fighters as they tried to land.

12 August: the largest air attacks

The 12th was the day the Axis air forces threw everything at the convoy. A morning raid by Ju 88s was broken up by the carrier fighters. Around midday came the biggest attack of the battle from Sardinia: waves of Italian bombers and SM.79 and SM.84 torpedo aircraft escorted by Reggiane Re.2001 and C.202 fighters, with Ju 88s from Sicily joining in between the Italian waves. Victorious was hit by a bomb that killed six men, and the merchant ship Deucalion was damaged and later sunk.

The Fleet Air Arm pilots were flying obsolescent fighters against modern opposition, landing on to rearm and taking off again through their own ships' anti-aircraft fire. Captain H. C. Bovell of Victorious was blunt in his report a few days later about what they were given to fight with, and equally clear about who deserved the credit.

The same report was scathing about the aircraft themselves. Bovell wrote that the Fulmar was "completely outclassed in every respect" and that the early Hurricanes were almost as badly off, with fixed wings and poor endurance. Only the ten Martlets, he noted, were modern fighters.

In the early evening the Stukas found their target. Shortly after 18:30, Ju 87s diving out of the sun hit Indomitable twice on the flight deck and near-missed her three more times. Around 50 men were killed and the carrier, burning, could no longer operate aircraft. Her fighters had to land on Victorious, where machines that could not be struck down were pushed over the side.

At the same time, SM.79 torpedo bombers hit the destroyer Foresight, which had to be scuttled the next day. With only one working carrier left and the Skerki Channel ahead, Vice-Admiral Neville Syfret turned the heavy ships back towards Gibraltar as planned, a little earlier than intended. From here on, the convoy's close escort of cruisers and destroyers was on its own until it came within range of Malta's fighters.

Night of the torpedoes and the run to Malta

The night of 12/13 August was the worst of the operation. Italian submarines torpedoed the cruisers Nigeria and Cairo, and Ohio, which caught fire but kept going. Then the convoy, strung out off Cap Bon, ran into German and Italian motor torpedo boats. They sank the cruiser Manchester and four merchant ships in a few hours of darkness, and more merchantmen were lost to air attack.

At dawn on 13 August the remnants came within reach of Malta. The RAF had flown in reinforcements, and Malta-based Bristol Beaufighters had already raided Axis airfields on Sardinia and strafed aircraft on Pantelleria. Now the island's Spitfires took over the air cover. Ju 88s and Stukas still got through: the Waimarama, carrying aviation fuel on deck, blew up, and a Stuka shot down by Ohio's gunners crashed onto the tanker.

The Operations Room's animated, map-based account of the air attacks on the Pedestal convoy, part two of a four-part series.

That afternoon three ships, Melbourne Star, Port Chalmers and Rochester Castle, entered Grand Harbour. Brisbane Star, damaged in the bows, followed on 14 August. Ohio was further behind and in desperate shape. Bombs had broken her keel and wrecked her engine room. She had no steering and was abandoned and reboarded more than once.

Ohio comes home

For two days the destroyers Penn, Ledbury and Bramham and the minesweeper Rye nursed the tanker towards Malta, with Spitfires overhead and bombers still attacking. Tow lines snapped repeatedly. In the end the destroyers were lashed to either side to hold her up, with the minesweeper Rye helping to steady her and, at the end, Malta's tugs helping her through the swept channel.

She entered Grand Harbour at about 09:30 on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, which Maltese call Santa Marija. Her fuel was pumped into other vessels as water was pumped in to keep her stable, and she settled onto the harbour bottom as the last of it came out. Captain Mason received the George Cross. The London Gazette citation recorded that he had brought the ship in by hand-steering, without a compass, under persistent attack.

A costly strategic victory

Pedestal cost the Royal Navy a carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer, along with nine merchant ships, and more than 500 sailors, merchant seamen and airmen were killed. Indomitable, Nigeria and Kenya spent months under repair. Both sides overclaimed in the air: post-war research credits British guns and fighters with around 40 Axis aircraft, far fewer than the 74 they claimed, while the Fleet Air Arm lost 13 aircraft in action plus those that went down with Eagle.

Italian historians still count the battle, which they call the Battle of Mid-August, as an Axis tactical success, and with good reason. But about 29,000 long tons of general cargo and Ohio's fuel reached Malta, enough to keep the island going for weeks longer than its stocks would otherwise have lasted. Even Admiral Eberhard Weichold, the German naval attaché in Rome, concluded that letting the convoy through had been a strategic failure for the Axis.

The battle was big news in Britain, and British Pathé released a newsreel on the Malta convoy that year.

British Pathé's 1942 newsreel on the Malta convoy battle.

With fuel in its tanks, Malta went back on the offensive. Bristol Beauforts, Beaufighters and submarines from the island hit Axis tankers and freighters bound for North Africa through the autumn, just as Montgomery prepared for El Alamein. The pilots who flew Sea Hurricanes and Fulmars off Eagle, Indomitable and Victorious were outnumbered and outclassed on paper. They won where it mattered, by getting a broken tanker to an island that needed it.

Sources: The London Gazette (8 September 1942), Report from Commanding Officer HMS Victorious (ADM 199/1242, via armouredcarriers.com), Wikipedia, Regia Marina Italiana (regiamarina.net), American Merchant Marine at War (usmm.org), Imperial War Museums photo archive