Operation Pedestal by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-03-22T18:24:51+00:00

9

Scuttling Charges

As Nelson ploughed west that night, George Blundell read signals about the tribulations of Force X and wrote in his diary: ‘shortly after we left them they got beaten up badly – it’s a pity we couldn’t have stayed on a little longer’. Burrough’s captains might have said: quite so, though it is unlikely that the continued presence of the fleet would have averted the calamities. Just before midnight on 12 August, the three minesweeping destroyers leading the convoy passed Cap Bon lighthouse, its powerful beam catching the blacked-out silhouettes of the foremost ships – others were trailing up to thirty miles behind.

Sailors aboard Ashanti, accustomed to destroyer informality, found it hard to get used to the awe-inspiring presence of the admiral and his staff on her overcrowded bridge. A sailor said: ‘Gor blimey, you’ve never seen so much brass in your life.’ Ashanti’s first lieutenant, deciding that war correspondent Anthony Kimmins was the least essential presence around Burrough, removed him to crew an Oerlikon gun, which the writer seemed to find diverting.

By 0100 on 13 August the leading ships were two hundred and twenty miles from Malta on their designated southern, then easterly, dogleg course, designed to skirt the Axis minefields south of Pantelleria. In the darkness the admiral could exercise effective command only of the warships close at hand. He had no grip upon those merchantmen that had become invisible, scattered across hundreds of square miles of sea. Burrough acknowledged later: ‘It is almost impossible to give proper protection to a scattered convoy with such a small escorting force.’ Horatio Nelson, 140 years earlier in waters not very distant, fumed at lack of frigates as the curse of his campaign against the French. Now, lack of destroyers, their latter-day counterparts, menaced the very existence of Pedestal. It was almost certainly a mistake, though a readily understandable one, to have sacrificed three escorts to accompany the crippled Nigeria to Gibraltar when Force X faced a new menace.

Deployed in clusters close to the Tunisian coast and a few miles offshore, nineteen Axis fast torpedo-boats waited in ambush. Tedder’s Middle East Air Force, conscious of the threat the boats represented, bombed their North African harbours on successive nights, 5 and 6 August, but without success. The light craft, constructed of wood or aluminium, were too fragile to achieve much in rough weather or on an open ocean, and their high-performance engines were notoriously prone to breakdown. To have a realistic chance of success, they needed to close to almost point-blank range, less than a thousand yards, before unleashing their twin torpedoes – a Doppelschuss, in German parlance. The calm prevailing in the early hours of 13 August off Cap Bon nonetheless offered ideal conditions for them to achieve their worst.

Like submariners, boat crews saw themselves as an elite, liberated from the rigid discipline of big warships, revelling in the thrill of racing into action aboard the fastest fighting craft afloat. The boats drifted on the glassy sea with power switched

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