Free At All Costs by Sam Moses

torn apart by a firework display which spat flame into the night to a height of nearly 5000 feet.”
    But the slow Stringbags flew under the barrage, skimming as low as five feet over the water. They dropped torpedoes that blew huge holes in three of the battleships, sinking them in the shallow water; the other three battleships ran from the harbor before morning. The sensational success of the Battle of Taranto was attributed to Malta’s Photo Reconnaissance Unit, flying the camera-equipped bombers.
    Early on the afternoon of December 20, Admiral Cunningham steamed again into Grand Harbour, bearing Christmas gifts: eight cargo ships full of food and supplies from Alexandria. “Our reception was touchingly overwhelming,” he said. “I went all over the dockyard next morning with the Vice-Admiral, and was mobbed by crowds of excited workmen singing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia.’ I had difficulty in preventing myself from being carried around.”
    Meanwhile, thousands of Luftwaffe personnel were traveling through Italy on trains, showered with candy and fruit at each stop. Comando Supremo had invited the Luftwaffe to Sicily to obliterate Malta.
    Warplanes arrived by the dozens in daily flights, and soon there were more than a hundred German bombers on Sicily—Junkers 88s and 87s and Heinkel 111s—with hundreds more on the way, along with squadrons of Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters.
    The aircraft carrier
Illustrious
had enabled the Allies to rule the Mediterranean for four months. Off the Sicilian shore, Germany’s best pilots practiced on a floating mock-up of the
Illustrious,
with its 620-by-95-foot flight deck.
    At high noon on January 10, 1941, the Luftwaffe made its Mediterranean debut, diving from 12,000 feet. Thirty Stuka dive-bombers screamed down on the
Illustrious
as she steamed toward Malta in a convoy. Another thirteen Stukas targeted the battleships
Warspite
and
Valiant,
on each side of
Illustrious.
The Luftwaffe had caught the Royal Navy unprepared for the attack, with only four Fulmar fighters in the air at the time, covering the convoy.
    The Stukas dived in synchronized waves of three, from different heights and bearings, dividing and confusing the antiaircraft fire. At angles of 60 to 90 degrees—absolutely vertical—they fell to 800 feet and dropped 500-kilogram armor-piercing bombs with delayed fuses, to penetrate the carrier’s flight deck and blow it up from the inside.
    The
Warspite
was hit by one bomb that didn’t explode. “One of the staff officers who watched it hurtling over the bridge from astern told me it looked about the size of the wardroom sofa,” said Cunningham, commanding the convoy from
Warspite.
    Cunningham knew that the Luftwaffe had moved into Sicily, but he had taken the
Illustrious
into the highly exposed Sicilian Narrows anyhow. Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, commanding the RAF from Cairo, had told him that British fighters could easily handle the Ju 87 Stuka. But four Fulmars against forty-three Stukas in coordinated dives wasn’t what either man had in mind. The convoy’s fighters also had to deal with ten Messerschmitts and eighteen Heinkel He 111 torpedo bombers.
    The
Illustrious
was hit seven times in six minutes, with one of the bombs falling into the open bay of the hangar, where some 50,000 gallons of aviation fuel were stored. As the burning behemoth listed toward Malta for the next nine hours, Captain Denis Boyd steered with the engines and the three screws, because the rudder was smashed.
Illustrious
entered the harbor just after nightfall, with hot spots glowing orange in the dark. One hundred twenty-six men were dead, with many more injured.
    The convoy’s sole freighter intended for Malta made it into the harbor, carrying forty-two more antiaircraft guns along with the necessary soldiers, 4,000 tons of ammunition buried under 3,000 tons of seed potatoes, and twelve crated Hurricanes.
    Two nights later, ten Wellington bombers got some revenge.