The fight for Malta
A. J. Mullay is gripped by Max Hastings’s detailed exposé of a dramatic WorldWar II battle
Operation Pedestal: The Fleet That Battled to Malta 1942
Max Hastings HarperCollins, 2021 464 pages Hardcover, £25.00 ISBN: 9780008364946
Sir Max Hastings is a renowned historian, having first established his reputation with Bomber Command (1979) and burnished it by his personal involvement as a journalist at the Falklands War. He is best known for his histories of the triumphs and failures of Britain’s army and air force campaigns, so Operation Pedestal is something of a departure for him. He describes the work as ‘my first full-length narrative about the war at sea’ (xxi), and it is notable as a stand-alone (as any pedestal should be) volume, not published to coincide with any anniversary, but as a tribute to the memory of those who took part in a gruelling and bloody military undertaking often viewed as something of a failure.
When thirteen merchant ships left Gourock in early August 1942, sailing ‘in full darkness past Ardrossan and the lovely Isle of Arran’ (p.68), not all the crews were aware of their destination, or of the urgency in reaching it. They would soon grasp the importance of their convoy, joining up with an unprecedented escort of five aircraft carriers, two battleships, five cruisers and numerous destroyers – the largest British fleet of the war up until then. Prime Minister Churchill believed that the loss of Malta to the enemy, or even its surrender because of starvation, would be a catastrophe, facilitating Axis convoys to North Africa and emphasising enemy air superiority in the mid-Mediterranean. With the prime minister planning a visit to Moscow, it was also a potential personal affront when having to deal with scornful Soviets.
Facing the Pedestal ships, whether the crews knew or not, were Italian cruisers and torpedo boats, German E-boats, submarines (including U-boats) from both these combatants, dive bombers, high-level bombers, torpedo aircraft and fighters of both the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica – all this, to say nothing of minefields. That any ships at all managed to fight their way through to Grand Harbour was little short of a miracle, and Sir Max is quite right to feature this as one of the most remarkable battles of World War II. As the reader might expect, this is a detailed account, and a highly readable one.
This reviewer has one minor quibble. The author claims that the award of decorations to two merchant captains after Pedestal was ‘the first time that Merchant Navy personnel became eligible for armed-forces decorations’ (p.335), but a Christian Salvesen skipper and gunlayer were decorated in World War I when their Leith ship successfully fought off a U-boat, and there were other examples, including maritime staff employed by, of all things, the Great Eastern Railway. Despite this reservation, this reviewer found the book un-put-downable.