Mediterranean and North Africa · Britain vs Italy and Germany
Operation Pedestal
10 August 1942 – 15 August 1942
Fourteen merchant ships with the heaviest escort of the war sailed from Gibraltar to relieve Malta. Nine merchantmen, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer were lost, but five ships including the tanker Ohio got through and kept the island in the war.
Explore Operation Pedestal on the interactive map · Wikipedia
Day by day
— Into the Mediterranean
Fourteen fast merchant ships, one of them the American-built tanker Ohio under a British crew, pass Gibraltar in the dark with two battleships, three fleet carriers, seven cruisers and 32 destroyers. Malta has six weeks of food and no fuel at all; if the convoy fails the island surrenders. Everything from the Balearics to Crete knows they are coming.
— Eagle
At 13:15, north of Algiers, U-73 works through the destroyer screen and puts four torpedoes into the carrier Eagle from 500 metres. She goes down in eight minutes with 131 of her company and sixteen of her aircraft; 927 men are picked up. The first air attacks come at dusk and are beaten off.
— The Skerki Bank
Raids come in all day from Sardinia and Sicily: Deucalion is crippled in the morning and Indomitable's flight deck is wrecked at 18:45. The battleships and carriers cannot follow the convoy into the narrows, and turn back at the Skerki Bank at 19:00. Twenty minutes later the submarine Axum fires four torpedoes and hits three ships in one salvo, the cruisers Nigeria and Cairo and the tanker Ohio; Cairo goes down, and with her the fighter-direction sets.
— The narrows
Italian and German motor torpedo boats work the convoy along the Tunisian shore from midnight to dawn and sink four merchantmen and the cruiser Manchester, the largest warship ever lost to such craft. At 08:00 Waimarama takes four bombs and blows up with a column of flame the whole convoy steers through. Three ships reach Grand Harbour that evening to a crowded Valletta; Ohio, hit again and again, is stopped and burning fifty miles short.
— Ohio
Ohio has a broken back, no engines and a Ju 87 lying in the wreckage of her boat deck. The destroyers Penn and Bramham lash themselves either side of her and Ledbury steers from astern, and at four knots they bring her the last hundred kilometres under air attack. She enters Grand Harbour on the morning of the 15th, the feast of Santa Marija, with her decks awash, and is pumped out before she settles on the bottom. Her 11,500 tons of oil keep Malta and its aircraft in the war.
