Malta’s Ordeal By Fire
By the fall of 1940, the British had come through the Battle of Britain, and with their home islands secure from invasion, they were able to pay closer attention to what was going on elsewhere. In September, Mussolini had sent his armies from Libya to invade neighboring Egypt, but it turned into a fiasco. The Italians crossed the border, only to halt after a 50 mile advance and dig in. They were routed that December by a British force only a fifth their size, which killed, wounded, and captured about 150,000 Italians.
The rampaging British threatened to overrun all of Italian Libya, before other commitments forced them to halt their advance and cannibalize its units in order to send reinforcements elsewhere. British arms met further successes against the Italians that December, when a surprise air raid from Royal Navy aircraft carriers devastated the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto. The survivors were forced to flee their base in southern Italy, from where they had threatened British Mediterranean sea lanes, and scurry for safety elsewhere.
The Italian threat, although contained, had refocused British attentions on Malta and its potential as a base from which to disrupt Axis efforts in the Mediterranean. In the meantime, the Italian debacle had compelled Hitler to come to his ally’s aid, and early in 1941, a German corps under the command of Erwin Rommel was sent to North Africa. Rommel, whose forces were often forced to operate on a shoestring because of a precarious link to resupply and reinforcements from Europe, recognized Malta’s importance. In May of 1941, he bluntly warned that: “Without Malta, the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa“.
The Germans joined the Italian air campaign against Malta in late 1940, when the Luftwaffe sent to Sicily bomber squadrons of Ju 87s, Ju 88s, and Heinkel He 111s, along with Me 109 and 110 fighter units. By then, Malta’s obsolescent Gloster Gladiators, flown by amateurs, had been reinforced and replaced by newer fighter aircraft such as Hurricanes, flown by RAF and Fleet Air Arm pilots. They had their hands full against the Germans, whose Me 109s were superior to the British Hurricanes, and were flown by better pilots to boot. One of the German crack fighter wings, 7/JG-26, claimed 42 aerial victories in its first four months of operations, without losing a single airplane over Malta.
In the face of such lopsided losses, morale plummeted in British squadrons in Malta. During that period, Axis supplies to North Africa were largely unimpeded, with roughly 95% of the tonnage shipped from Europe arriving safely in Libyan ports. The British got an unexpected reprieve in mid 1941, when the Germans redeployed most of their airplanes from Sicily to Eastern Europe, in preparation for the invasion of Russia, and to North Africa, where Rommel was rampaging against the British.