In Passage Perilous: Malta and the Convoy Battles of June 1942

1. The Vital Sea

1 The ViTal Sea We must look to the Mediterranean for Action. Winston Churchill to First Sea Lord, 12 July 1940 On 29 June 1940, as German armies gathered along the English Channel, the giant liners Aquitania, Mauretania, and Queen Mary departed the Clyde and Liverpool. These fast and valuable vessels carried eleven thousand troops bound for Egypt to bring British formations stationed there up to strength. They formed into convoy WS1 escorted by the heavy cruiser Cum­ berland and, for the first stage, four destroyers. The convoy arrived at Freetown , West Africa, on 8 July and Cape Town, South Africa, eight days later. From there WS1 crossed the Indian Ocean, picking up a second escort, the heavy cruiser Kent. Because the Admiralty considered the ships too valuable to expose them to Italian attack in the Red Sea, they docked at Trincomalee, Ceylon, on 29 July, and the men disembarked. The troops sailed up the Indian coast to Bombay. At Bombay they transferred to eight transports that formed a part of Convoy BN3: twenty merchant ships and eight escorts, including a light cruiser and two destroyers. BN3 departed Bombay on 10 August and arrived at Suez on 23 August. Great Britain’s Strategic Goals GreatBritaincommittedthesetroopstoajourneyofnearlytwomonths at a time when England faced a German invasion. The voyage was so long because Italy had declared war against Great Britain on 10 June 1940. This declaration severed the sea-route from Gibraltar to Suez. The official British history 1 2 In Passage Perilous of the war at sea summarized the impact. “The distance round the Cape from the Clyde to Suez . . . is 12,860 [statute] miles. For a convoy to reach the Middle East theater and return to Britain by this route necessitated a journey some 20,000 miles longer than the round voyage using the Mediterranean.” Not only were the time and the distance inflated but the convoys required escorts and special shipping such as liners and fast cargo vessels. “If one convoy of about twenty-five ships sailed each month, the new requirement meant that about 150 of our best merchant ships were kept permanently on this service.” Adding 8,700 nautical miles (thirty days at twelve knots) to each voyage to Suez was hardly the only problem: the one-way journey to India went from 6,200 to 10,600 miles, and the nearest Australian port became 1,500 miles farther away. Ships carrying troops and supplies to Suez generally had to detour to find cargos for the return trip, further reducing their efficiency and adding to the strain on shipping.1 Great Britain faced hard choices after France’s unexpected collapse. The first was whether to continue fighting or accept a German-dominated Europe. The new government led by Winston S. Churchill mustered popular support, overcame dissent from within its own ranks, and resolved to fight.2 This decision had global ramifications because, as in 1778 and 1803, the conflict pitted a world empire against a continental coalition. The British Empire’s power resided in a resource-rich network spread throughout Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Empire of India, and the colonies and mandates of Africa, South East Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. Possession of strategic points such as Suez, Gibraltar, Cape Town, Aden, and Singapore allowed Great Britain to control the world’s oceanic trade and choke an enemy nation’s maritime traffic. Merchant shipping unified Britain’s empire. Sea power kept the ships sailing or, in the case of enemies, confined them to port. The Broadway of the empire ’s pre-war sea-lanes was the Mediterranean—a vital shortcut to the lands east of Suez. Italy’s entry into the war, however, immediately transformed the Mediterranean from a thoroughfare into a dead end. Malta had been the Royal Navy’s main Mediterranean base since 1800; it lay astride Italy’s sea-route to Tripoli, Libya’s capital and major port. However, the neglect of Malta’s defenses in the decades leading up to war and the proximity of Italian air power—the potency of which the Royal Air Force greatly exaggerated “in the hope that, by so doing, a greater share of the service budget would be committed to the air force”—caused the fleet to abandon the island 4 In Passage Perilous by April 1939 for the much less suitable and logistically undeveloped Egyptian harbor of Alexandria.3 By...