Operation Pedestal: The Fleet That Battled to Malta, 1942, by Max Hastings

By Timothy Sandefur

New York: Harper, 2021

428 pp. $35, hardcover

Among the horrific battles of World War II, Operation Pedestal—the 1942 effort to resupply Britain’s besieged colony on the Mediterranean island of Malta—seems relatively minor. It was nothing like the Battles of Stalingrad, which lasted six months and killed two million people; or Okinawa, which involved hundreds of ships, thousands of planes, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors. Nor was it a pivotal victory for the Allies; on the contrary, it is better seen as a failure by German and Italian forces to push their own overriding advantage. Yet the British and American convoy that braved onslaughts from air and sea to bring food, fuel, and ammunition to twenty thousand people trapped on a tiny island was, as Max Hastings explains in this breathtakingly dramatic account, “one of the fiercest sea battles of the war,” and one that encapsulated the courage and cowardice, genius and foolhardiness, that made up mankind’s bloodiest conflict (31).

Pedestal was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s idea. By the summer of 1942, his government had lost all of its Mediterranean outposts except Malta, which was both a tactical handicap to the Allies (because it meant the Axis powers faced fewer obstacles in southern Europe and Northern Africa) and a blow to British morale. Churchill’s forces had been driven to surrender in Singapore in February, and Libya in June, and even more humiliating was the failure, also in June, of an Allied convoy called PQ17. That episode involved a flotilla carrying supplies to the Soviets, which fell into disarray when the British Admiralty, thinking the fleet was about to be attacked by a German battleship, panicked and ordered the ships to scatter. That battleship turned out not to be in the area, and by breaking up, the Allied vessels became prey to Axis submarines and planes, which destroyed twenty-four of the thirty-five cargo ships. . . .

It was a humiliating shock to Britain’s credibility, and that worried the prime minister. “Among Winston Churchill’s foremost qualities,” writes Hastings, “was his understanding of the importance of sustaining an appearance of momentum in the war effort” (xix). Not only would soldiers and civilians be more likely to give their best efforts if they thought their side was making progress, but if the British military gained a reputation for ineptitude, that would likely deter the Americans and Soviets from consulting them or relying on them as the war moved forward.

Such considerations weighed on Churchill’s mind as he contemplated Malta’s fate. That 122-square-mile outpost beneath the toe of the Italian “boot” included valuable airfield and submarine facilities, from which the Allies could disrupt Axis supply lines and naval routes. “We are determined that Malta shall not be allowed to fall,” Churchill decreed in May 1942. “Its possession would give the enemy a clear and sure bridge to Africa with all the consequences flowing from that” (23). But the colony was entirely surrounded by Germans and Italians, who imposed a blockade to starve the Maltese into submission. After potatoes, fruit, and pasta ran out in the spring, men were rationed six ounces of bread per day; women, four. Meanwhile, the enemy bombarded them constantly. “The Italians bombed them by day and the Germans by night, devastating great swathes of the island and destroying 15,500 houses. . . . On the three airfields, anti-blast pens for the [Royal Air Force]’s planes were built from petrol tins filled with the rubble of Maltese homes” (8). Nearly three thousand planes bombed the island in February alone.

It became clear that Malta would not survive beyond September. “The price of fighting under the banner of Western liberal democracy was that the war must be conducted on civilized terms,” Hastings notes. “The civilian population could not be permitted to starve to death or resort to cannibalism, as Stalin a few months earlier had mandated as the fate of hundreds of thousands of the citizens of besieged Leningrad” (21). In early June, Churchill ordered two simultaneous convoys, called Operation Harpoon and Operation Vigorous, to try reaching Malta from the west and east, respectively. They failed; only two of Harpoon’s six supply ships arrived, none of Vigorous’s eleven—and the effort cost more than three hundred lives. Thus when the decision was made on June 15 to try once more, this time in August, the Royal Navy knew it was their last chance.

To do the job, the Admiralty put together the largest fleet it had yet assembled, creating Operation Pedestal. Whereas most convoys consisted of between thirty and sixty cargo haulers escorted by fewer than ten destroyers, Pedestal included eighty-seven British and American ships, including four of the six aircraft carriers Britain possessed and fourteen merchant vessels, built and manned by private owners. Between August 9 and August 15, their crews sailed the nerve-racking eleven hundred miles from Gibraltar to Malta under constant assault by submarines and dive-bombers.

Hastings details the violence and valor of that week with all the elegance for which he is famous. As the author of a dozen books on World War II, as well as volumes on World War I and the Korean, Vietnam, and Falklands wars, Hastings has earned a reputation as a master of concise and dramatic prose, whose trademark is a seamless blend of scholarly analysis and vivid details drawn from interviews from those who experienced the conflict firsthand. The result is a history at once objective and sympathetic, written with a profound respect for the men—many of them civilians—who faced such immense peril. Consider his description of one of the most horrific moments of the journey, when the merchant vessel Waimarama,the convoy’s largest ship, was struck by Italian and German planes on August 13, 1942:

The first aircraft, facing a storm of flak, bombed wide. The second, however, hit the hapless cargo-liner four times. . . . A stupendous explosion followed, as Waimarama’s eleven thousand tons of munitions and fuel blew up with a force that destroyed the next attacking aircraft, killed eighty-three men on the ship and sent debris soaring hundreds of feet into the air and across the sea—fragments caused casualties and superficial damage on Rochester Castle, half a mile away. . . . [Another ship, Melbourne Star,] was just four hundred yards astern when the explosion came. A great shower of debris, some of it flaming and including shards of steel plating five feet long, rained down, hammering and clattering on decking and superstructure. The base of a ventilator smashed into a machine-gun position, wrecking the weapon and shocking its gunner. Next day n David MacFarlane discovered an unexploded six-inch shell, blown from the lost ship, embedded in a bulkhead above his own cabin. . . . As Melbourne Star bore down on the stretch of fiery sea, from his post high on the monkey island the Master ordered hard aport, but the ship could not change course swiftly enough to escape. MacFarlane then embraced his only other expedient—to make the vessel’s ordeal by fire as brief as possible. He called to Second Officer Bill Richards in the wheelhouse for full speed. . . . Wooden lifeboats, hanging out from both sides of the ship, were scorched and charred; much of Melbourne Star’s paint was blistered away. . . .  Then yet another German aircraft descended. (282–85)

Nobody knows for sure how many men were killed during that horrific week, although the best estimate is about 550 on the Allied side and about 100 Axis sailors and airmen. Some of the participants panicked and fled, including Arthur Venables, whose role as convoy commodore gave him responsibility for keeping order among the merchant ships. When communications problems led to confusion about the chain of command, Venables ordered his own ship and three others to turn tail for Gibraltar. The others refused, and Venables’s own ship was soon ordered to get back in line. After Pedestal ended, however, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, as were other survivors, who made no mention of his failure of nerve. Pedestal’s participants also concealed the effort by another vessel’s crew to mutiny and take their crippled ship to what they thought was the relative safety of French territory in Africa. Only the captain’s patience and authority persuaded them to continue their mission. When they made it, their officers, too, were presented with medals. “After Pedestal,” Hastings concludes, “the truth was again demonstrated of the old saw that ‘the only man who knows what a decoration is really worth is he who receives it’” (354).

Yet many others rose to the occasion and earned their honors. When Waimarama was destroyed, Charlie Walker, a twenty-seven-year-old cook on a neighboring ship, leaped into the sea to drag wounded men out of the way of burning oil. Bob Bowdrey, a fifty-six-year-old crewman on the Waimarama,shielded teenager Freddie Treves from the explosion and threw him overboard to safety, where Treves, a good swimmer, was able to rescue others (astoundingly, many sailors were not trained to swim). Bowdrey himself died in the flames.

Perhaps the most heroic efforts were those of the crew of the Ohio, a fuel ship so severely damaged by air attacks that it had to be towed through the last three days of the journey. The slowly sinking Ohio carried 11,500 tons of liquid fuel, which would have caused a greater explosion than Waimarama had an Axis bomber scored a direct hit. Ohio’s crew had abandoned her when bombs immobilized her, but, determined to get her cargo to port, they volunteered to return and help with the complicated towing operation. “I thought this was the bravest act I had ever known,” said one captain (322). Only hours later, yet another cluster of German planes bombed the Ohio and its valiant sailors. But they managed to survive and drag the ship the rest of the way to Malta, where they were greeted by cheering crowds. “It was immensely to the credit of those who had already suffered such traumas that they returned to the fray,” writes Hastings, “embracing yet again the risk—some would say, the overwhelming likelihood—that the ship which they now crewed would explode into an inferno around them” (323).

Historians still argue over whether Pedestal can be called a success. In fact, Germany proclaimed it a Nazi victory, with newspaper headlines announcing “Huge Convoy Destroyed in the Mediterranean” (343). This was not inaccurate: thirteen of the Allied ships were sunk, including 65 percent of the supply vessels. The fact that Ohio and others made it was due more to the Italian navy’s decision not to send its battleships, which would have proved decisive, than to the might of the Royal Navy. And although the supply mission enabled Malta to hold out till November, it was only subsequent land battles in Africa that ensured the colony’s long-term survival.

Yet Hastings shows that resupplying the isolated outpost ensured that Malta-based planes could disrupt the Axis supply network in Africa; the convoy itself forced the Italians and Germans to spend scarce resources that might have hurt the Allied cause more if they had been deployed in Africa instead. But there was more at stake, too. “No battle can be justly assessed by a mere profit-and-loss account of casualties, of tanks, aircraft, ships destroyed,” Hastings notes. “The British display of will, g the surviving vessels of Pedestal through to Malta despite repeated onslaughts and punitive losses, gave victory to the allied cause” (349).

That display of will took the form of countless decisions by hundreds of airmen and sailors—mostly young, many only teenagers, many of them civilians—who, under terrifying circumstances, “redeemed from the brink of disaster one of the most hazardous naval operations of the Second World War” (353). In expertly recounting their courage and the horrors they faced, Max Hastings has helped ensure the well-deserved immortality of this band of heroes.