It was Monday, 15 June, and the AOC had addressed the pilots in Rabat the previous evening. His face had been grim, and he had not minced his words. There was a great deal of news, and all of it was bad.
Rommel had broken through at Gazala, mopping up large numbers of Commonwealth and Free French troops, destroying their supporting armour wholesale, his Panzers racing on towards Egypt and overrunning the Desert Air Force’s forward airfields. Once again, the army was in full retreat, and the German success in North Africa meant that Malta’s position was now more exposed than ever.
In an attempt to alleviate the island’s desperate plight two convoys had been assembled: one at Alexandria and the other at Gibraltar. The latter, code-named ‘Harpoon’, had entered the Mediterranean during the night of 11 June; it consisted of six freighters strongly escorted by cruisers and destroyers and by the aircraft carriers Eagle and Argus. The other convoy, consisting of eleven freighters accompanied by seven cruisers and seventeen destroyers — almost the whole of the Mediterranean Fleet’s effective strength — had sailed from Haifa and Port Said two days later. It had no carriers, and consequently no air cover.
Starting at dawn on 13 June, the convoy from the east had come under savage air attack by Junkers 88 dive-bombers from Heraklion, in Crete, and before the day ended two freighters had been sunk and two more severely damaged.
That was bad enough, but there was worse to come. That same evening, Admiral Vian, commanding the naval escort, learned that units of the Italian Fleet — the battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, together with four cruisers and twelve destroyers — had left the naval base at Taranto and were steaming south-eastwards. Knowing that he had little hope of defending the convoy in the face of such superior strength, particularly since the British ships were under constant and heavy air attack and were running short of ammunition, Vian at last decided to proceed no further and ordered the convoy to turn back to Alexandria. In addition to the merchant losses, the abortive operation had cost him a cruiser and three destroyers.
Everything now depended on the convoy from the west. On the thirteenth it was attacked sporadically by bombers from Sardinia and one ship was lost, but the following day it was attacked almost without pause by high-level and dive-bombers, and torpedo aircraft escorted by fighters. A handful of Sea Hurricane and Fairey Fulmar fighters from the two old carriers put up a spirited defence and managed to shoot down six Italian aircraft, but the aircraft carriers were scheduled to turn back after dark.
Yeoman squinted into the rising sun, wondering when they would receive the order to take off. Malta’s three surviving Beaufighters had patrolled the convoy during the hours of darkness, as it slipped through the narrow channel between the coast of Tunis and the western tip of Sicily, but the really dangerous time began now, with the dawn, as the freighters — lightly escorted by a cruiser and five destroyers — entered ‘Bomb Alley’ on the final run to the beleaguered island.
Ten hours’ steaming lay ahead of the convoy: a ten-hour nightmare through the most bitterly contested waters in the world, with the full weight of the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica in southern Italy and Sicily devoted to its annihilation.
Sometime during the morning the convoy would reach a point seventy miles from Malta, when relays of Spitfires from Takali and Hal Far — every available aircraft — would endeavour to provide a continual air umbrella over the ships. Before that point was reached, however, there would be a critical forty-mile gap between first light and the maximum distance at which the Takali and Hal Far Spits could begin to provide cover.
That gap was to be filled by the Luqa Spitfires, fitted with long-range fuel tanks. Only Luqa had a long enough strip of runway to permit the heavily-laden fighters to take off. There were only twelve of them, and they would have to operate in sections of four: one section over the convoy, one on its way out and one on its way back.
Yeoman looked at his watch. Red Section, led by Roger Graham, had taken off twenty minutes earlier; any minute now it would be the turn of Yellow Section, led by himself. Gerry Powell was flying in the number two position, with Sergeant Wilcox and Pilot Officer Kearney, a burly Irishman, as Yellow Three and Yellow Four respectively.
Yeoman felt a shiver run along his spine and put it down to the aftermath of the Dog, an attack from which he had recently recovered. Gerry Powell had been right about the goat’s milk, after all. Yeoman still felt washed out and in no fit state to lead four fighters into action against, possibly, twenty or thirty times their number.
This morning, coincidentally, Sykes and Tozer were once again his fitter and rigger, and for this Yeoman was glad; he enjoyed the cheerful banter of the two airmen. At Luqa, in these hectic days, it was rare to get the same ground crew twice; you grabbed whatever fighter was serviceable, and in the five weeks he had been on the island Yeoman had done the rounds of just about all the blast pens around the perimeter.
In his mind, he went over the latest situation reports. While it was still dark, torpedo-carrying Beauforts had taken off to attack the Italian warships which, apparently, were still steaming in pursuit of the retreating Alexandria convoy; they had not yet returned. Those torpedo-bomber boys certainly earned their pay, he reflected, and recalled a conversation with one Beaufort pilot earlier that month. It wasn’t so bad, the man had told him. Nothing could get at you on the way out to the target, or on the way home again; it was only over the target that all hell broke loose during the two or three minutes it took you to make your run and drop your torpedo, and if you got through that you were all right. Yeoman imagined flying straight and level into a solid wall of flak, a few feet above the waves, and shuddered. Anyway, the Beaufort pilot’s luck had run out in the end. Only three days earlier, he had led a strike of four torpedo-bombers against an enemy convoy west of Pantellaria, and had flown into the side of an Italian freighter.
The Harpoon convoy was a long way behind schedule at the last report, with a hundred and forty miles still to run. By now, the enemy would be hurling everything at it.
Yeoman pushed himself away from the sandbags, startled by Tozer’s sudden excited shout. The airman was pointing across the cratered field towards G Shelter, where a Very flare was tracing its smoky trail through the morning haze.
Sykes, the fitter, was already in the cockpit, and by the time Yeoman got there he already had the engine running. The airman relinquished his place and helped Yeoman to strap himself in, dropping off the wing as the pilot taxied forward and giving a thumb-up for good luck.
The other three Spitfires were emerging from their pens, dragging clouds of dust as they followed Yeoman to the runway. Since he was in the lead, he could afford the luxury of taking off with the cockpit hood open, gaining a few precious seconds of cooling breeze.
The Spitfire rumbled forward, swaying as he lined up with the centre of the runway and opened the throttle. The tail came up reluctantly as he eased the stick forward and the speed built up agonizingly slowly as the valiant Merlin engine coped with the extra weight of the auxiliary fuel tank; he was almost despairing that the fighter would ever leave the ground when she bounced a couple of times and then wallowed into the air, the controls becoming more responsive as she gained flying speed steadily.
He pulled up the undercarriage and slammed the hood closed, turning quickly on to the heading that ought to bring them to the convoy, or what was left of it: 280 degrees magnetic. The other Spitfires slid into formation around him as he climbed, rocking their wings. Radio silence was to be maintained until they were over the convoy, or unless they ran into trouble en route; there was no point in advertising their movements to the enemy.
They flew on steadily for several minutes. Over on the left, a lump of rock emerged from the sea: the island of Linosa. Beyond it, there was nothing but a vast expanse of open sea.
It was as though the four Spitfires hung suspended in limitless space. There was no sense of movement; only the dials on the instrument panel betrayed the fact that they were c
leaving through the air at two hundred and fifty miles an hour. After a while, Yeoman frowned and glanced at the chronometer. They had been airborne for thirty minutes, and by now they should be over the convoy. Yet there was nothing below them or anywhere in their vicinity, as far as they could see.
Yeoman decided that it was time to break radio silence and call up the destroyer which had been designated as control ship for the Malta-based fighters. He called several times, but there was no reply. The sudden, horrifying thought struck him that perhaps the fighter umbrella had come too late, and that the convoy had already been wiped out.
The radio crackled suddenly into life and Gerry Powell’s voice sounded loudly in Yeoman’s earphones.
‘Yellow Two to Yellow One. There’s a lot of smoke over on the horizon, at three o’clock.’
Yeoman peered over to the right, towards the narrow band of haze that lay between the horizon and the sky. A wide column of smoke was rising from it, like the peak of a mountain protruding through a layer of cloud.
‘Okay,’ Yeoman said. ‘Let’s go.’ He swung his Spitfire round towards the north, followed by the others. If the smoke marked the position of the convoy, he thought, then it was a long way north of where it ought to be, dangerously close to the island of Pantellaria.
More smoke became visible as they flew on; great clouds of it, rolling across the sea. Suddenly, out of one of the clouds a ship emerged, her lines long and rakish, her upperworks gleaming white in the sun. Yeoman identified her as an Italian cruiser, and as he watched she loosed off a broadside towards some unseen target, her heavy-calibre guns belching sulphurous smoke across the sea. Another cruiser followed her, steaming in line astern, her outline trembling as she too fired a salvo.
The battle was not all one-sided. Near the rearmost of the cruisers, and just short of her, a line of waterspouts erupted and then collapsed slowly, leaving spreading circles of white foam on the surface of the sea. The warship began to turn away at speed, heeling over as she creamed through the waves.
Yeoman tensed involuntarily as anti-aircraft bursts peppered the sky some distance to the left. The leading cruiser had woken up to the fact that the four aircraft were enemies, and her superstructure twinkled with the flashes of her guns as she threw shells at them. The Spitfires swept through the drifting smoke of the bursts, which were creeping unpleasantly close; then the cruisers fell away astern and the fire died down.
The pilots could now see the source of the smoke which Powell had sighted initially. A large vessel lay listing and burning fiercely; because of the smoke and flames, which obscured her from stem to stern, it was impossible to tell whether she was a warship or a freighter. They circled her, alternately watching her end and keeping an eye on the sky.
In a sudden, horrific flash that was to remain imprinted on Yeoman’s mind for a long time to come, she exploded. A great column of smoke and water and debris hurtled skyward, a visible shock wave rippling out around it. The column hung poised, then fell in on itself and cascaded back down to the surface. White splashes all around marked the spot where wreckage hit the sea. Then there was nothing but a great patch of oil, floating on the swell.
They cruised over the area, searching constantly. Large tracts of the sea were blanketed with a fog compounded of drifting smoke and haze, and it was difficult to penetrate it. They glimpsed several ships, mostly destroyers, but Yeoman was unable to tell whether they were friend or foe; they appeared to be steaming round in circles. One of them, which seemed to be British, opened up on the Spitfires as they sped past her; Yeoman could hardly blame the gunners for being trigger-happy after what they must have been through.
This was crazy; it was impossible to identify anything in all the chaos down below. All they were doing was cruising around helplessly, using up precious fuel. Their search had already consumed the best part of an hour, and their fuel state would soon become marginal. Yeoman led the Spitfires in one more sweep of the area, then made up his mind.
‘All right, chaps, let’s pack it in.’ He made a rapid calculation. ‘Course for home 068 magnetic.’
They turned towards the south-east, leaving the battle-torn patch of water behind them. Blue Section would soon be arriving to take over; Yeoman hoped they would have better luck.
‘Yellow Four calling. Aircraft ten o’clock, low.’ Yeoman turned his head as Kearney’s Irish brogue sounded over the R/T. At first he failed to see them; Kearney must have excellent eyesight. Then, as his eyes focused, he picked out a flicker of movement low down against the sea, to the left of the Spitfire’s nose.
‘Roger, I have them.’ He made a conscious effort to allow his eyes to relax, the surest way of sharpening one’s vision slightly at long range. ‘They look like biplanes.’
‘They are biplanes!’ Powell’s voice broke in excitedly. ‘Fiat CR 42s! Boy, we’ve got ’em all to ourselves!’
He was right. There were six of them, crawling slowly over the brilliant surface of the sea in arrowhead formation, following a south-westerly course.
‘Hold it,’ Yeoman warned. ‘Wait till I give the word.’ He made a careful scrutiny of the sky, above and behind and to either side; it was empty. The Fiats were abeam of them now, about three thousand feet low down.
Yeoman pressed the R/T button. ‘Let’s go,’ he said laconically. ‘Pick your own targets, but watch them — they’re nippy.’
The Spitfires fanned out and went into a diving turn, curving down to get on the Fiats’ tails. The Italian fighters maintained their impeccable formation and seemed to float towards the hurtling Spitfires like bumble-bees flying backwards. There was no mistaking the outlines of the stubby little radial-engined biplanes, with their upper wings much longer than the lower set, their fixed, spatted undercarriages and their open cockpits. Each of them carried an egg-shaped object slung under its fuselage between the undercarriage legs, but whether it was a bomb or an extra fuel tank it was impossible to tell at this distance.
The range narrowed steadily. The Spitfires, their reflector sights illuminated and their guns set to ‘fire’, were already only half a mile astern of the enemy fighters and closing fast.
Suddenly the enemy formation scattered in all directions, the leading pair of aircraft diving headlong towards the sea and those on either flank breaking wildly to left and right. Yeoman knew that the CR 42 was one of the few aircraft in the world that could out-turn a Spitfire, even though it was a good hundred miles an hour slower, and that if the Italian pilots had been a little quicker off the mark they could have used their manoeuvrability to good advantage, out-turning the Spits until the latter were forced to break off the action through lack of fuel.
Yeoman ignored the Fiats on the flank, catching a glimpse as they steep-turned past him in the opposite direction, shooting between them like a rocket and chasing the leading pair, who had now levelled out a few feet above the sea. He made a rapid R/T call to Powell:
‘Give the others a hand, Gerry. I’ll handle these two.’
Powell acknowledged briefly, twisting away from his position a couple of hundred yards astern of Yeoman. A Fiat skidded across his nose and he fired, cursing as he saw his tracers go wildly astray.
Yeoman, meanwhile, was rapidly overhauling the two low-flying Fiats. The two black egg-shaped objects dropped away under them and splashed into the sea and an instant later the fighters split up, turning hard to left and right, their wingtips almost touching the water. Yeoman went after the Fiat on the left, cutting across its turn and firing as it crept into his sight. He saw his cannon shells churn up the sea, converging on the Fiat in a swathe of foam, and tensed ready to make a correction when the enemy fighter took evasive action. Instead it flew straight on, directly into the stream of shells, and came apart like matchwood. Its port wings ripped away completely, taking away with them part of the tail, and the remainder of the aircraft flicked into a series of rapid rolls before smacking into the water.
Yeoman flashed over the tangled, sinking wreckage and pulled up
in a steep climbing turn to the right, looking for the other Fiat. He located it almost immediately, low over the water and heading flat out towards Sicily, and raced in pursuit. The enemy pilot saw him coming and entered a beautifully executed series of evasive manoeuvres, handling his fighter skilfully and edging closer to home all the time. Yeoman fired twice and missed, miscalculating the Fiat’s speed badly and overshooting. The Italian disappeared under the Spitfire’s port wing and Yeoman turned hard, looking down and behind. It was some moments before he sighted the Italian again; the enemy pilot had crossed under his turn, taking full advantage of the Spitfire’s blind spot, and was once again making a beeline for the Sicilian coast.
Yeoman fired a last long burst in the direction of the fleeing fighter and then gave up the chase. His fuel was now dangerously low, and if he carried on the pursuit it was doubtful whether he would be able to reach Malta safely. Besides, he had a grudging admiration for the way the Italian had handled his outclassed biplane; he deserved to get away.
Yeoman turned on to a south-easterly heading and looked around. One by one, the other three Spitfires of his section converged on him. The battle had been short and one-sided; Yeoman’s Fiat was the only one to succeed in getting away. Sergeant Wilcox, the Rhodesian, had shot down two, although not without some difficulty; he reported that one of the Italian fighters had managed to hit his Spitfire with an incredibly lucky deflection shot, but that everything seemed to be working all right. Powell and Kearney had got one apiece.
Together, the four Spitfires set course for home, nursing their precious reserves of fuel. They had the sky to themselves, and all seemed peaceful. Then, after ten minutes or so, Wilcox suddenly called up:
‘Yellow Three to Yellow One. My engine temperature’s rising badly. Will somebody give my Spit the onceover?’
There was a brief pause, and then Kearney said: ‘It looks like you’re losing glycol, Johnny. You’re pulling a white trail. Not much, but visible.’
Malta Victory Page 12