Red Duster, White Ensign: The Story Of Malta And The Malta Convoys – Ian Cameron, 1960 ★★★

Steaming against the Odds

For want of a nail, the boot was lost. New life got breathed into a tired old adage in 1943 when the failure to secure a narrow island fortress just off the coast of Sicily wound up costing the Axis the entire Mediterranean and that biggest and most famous of boots, Italy.

How did British naval forces and the people of Malta, then a Crown colony, pull off this amazing upset? Ian Cameron lays out just how close matters came to falling Hitler’s way.

It almost was given up without a fight. According to Red Duster, White Ensign, analysis by the British high command determined Malta lost back in 1939, when the war had just begun and Italy was still neutral: Too small, too hard to supply, too close to the Italian mainland.

Just fifty miles from Sicily, Malta presented a vulnerable target for enemy ships and planes, but also an opportunity to harass supply routes to Axis forces in North Africa which Winston Churchill found too sweet to pass up. Image from https://www.venturists.net/what-to-eat-in-malta/malta-map/.

Cameron writes: It was fortunate that one man had enough strategic acumen and enough faith in human nature to disagree with the experts. Sir Winston Churchill, from the moment he took office, made it abundantly clear that he regarded Malta as the key to the Middle East; and in spite of bitter opposition from high ranking officers of both Army and Air Force…he never ceased to champion the island’s cause.

Was Churchill right? Cameron certainly thought so; his account of the siege of Malta is marked by a triumphalist tone that probably came off less shrill to British readers back when winning was fresh in their minds. You can’t argue with results, either when it comes to war or a rousing history. Cameron provides the latter well.

Red Duster, White Ensign focuses on two years, 1941 and 1942. In 1940 Italy joined World War II, overnight pushing Malta from backburner to knife’s edge. Tensions escalated in the following months as Axis leaders found Malta a large thorn in their supply routes to North Africa.

The red duster and white ensign referenced in the book's title are these, the flags flown by the civilian British Merchant Marine [top] and the military British Royal Navy [bottom].

For the next two years, while tabling a full-scale invasion, the Axis tried to squeeze and bomb Malta into submission. Very soon, Cameron notes, Malta became the most battered chunk of real estate in all Europe:

For all through the first three weeks of April [1941] the Luftwaffe pounded the near-defenseless island more or less at will. In those few weeks 5715 bombers dropped 6750 tons of bombs – the equivalent of the blitz on Coventry repeated every eighteen hours for thirty days.

Cameron’s book was first published in 1959; like many Americans of my age, I got hold of it years later as part of the paperback Bantam War Books series I collected as a boy.

Structurally this book is very much in line with other Bantam War Books, an action-packed narrative related in an episodic format. Most chapters highlight a running series of engagements between a British convoy and Axis attackers, offering a lot of color and vivid detail.

Cameron definitely plays up the legend. Early on, he explains how three British biplanes, dubbed “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Charity,” fought alone against Italian bombers early in 1941, giving Malta a hint of light in its first of many dark hours. According to Cameron, these planes “came to epitomize the island’s spirit of defiance; they became symbols of a cause which began to take on something of the sanctity of a crusade.”

Faith alone managed to survive the war. Today its intact fuselage is on display at Malta's National Museum in its capital city, Valletta. Image from https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hal_Far_Fighter_Flight. 

In reality, these outmoded Sea Gladiators were no match against waves of enemy planes and offered little resistance. But Cameron skirts such details while presenting a heroic if vague tale.

In other places, Cameron’s approach is more grounded in fact, laying out details as intricate as the exact tonnage each convoy to Malta was able to deliver and the various maneuvers taken by dueling battle fleets along the Mediterranean.

Individual vessels get much of his attention. The Breconshire, part of a March 1942 convoy that got horribly pummeled by bombers, was a converted merchantman which could do 15 knots and carry 5,000 tons of oil fuel and an equal load of general cargo. “She was rather like her captain. No airs, frills, or graces; but stouthearted, seaworthy, and tough,” Cameron writes.

The Breconshire wound up reaching Malta, only to be sunk trying to dock. While a snafu happened, there and elsewhere, Cameron presents Churchill and other British commanders both at sea and in Malta in the most favorable light. Setbacks like the Breconshire are dismissed as bad luck, poor weather forecasts, or the fault of unnamed third parties.

The sinking Breconshire just before it went down. After it did, a Maltese shipwright earned the British Empire Medal for diving to the bottom of the wreck to extract fuel oil stored in a tank deep inside her. Image from https://maltagc70.wordpress.com/tag/breconshire/.

This rosy view can come off strained:

So although Operation “Vigorous” was a failure – and a failure which came near to losing us Malta – at least its lessons were well learned and its mistakes were never repeated.

His non-judgmental approach is a reflection perhaps of the less revisionist way World War II books were written back then, when writers were more wary of second-guessing those who did the fighting. When Malta’s commander is relieved during the worst days of the siege, Cameron doesn’t quite explain what happened, only that we readers should not make too much of it:

No man ever did more for Malta than General [William] Dobbie, and his departure from the island at this critical moment in its history was a personal tragedy. But such changes are sometimes inevitable.

Valletta, Malta's capital, in 1942. According to Cameron, in one ten-day period early in 1941, over 220 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, and over 3,000 homes were destroyed. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(World_War_II).

Cameron’s writing style is fusty that way – you can smell the pipe tobacco riffling off his typewriter – but he knows how to tell a story. He was a successful fiction writer, penning popular adventure novels like The Lost Ones as well as Walkabout, which in 1971 would become a legendary film.

These novels pit man against nature; battle stories set on the high seas similarly channel the author’s inner Conrad:

This lift, already damaged by the second and third bombs, was now punched up into the shape of an arch. And through this arch a great draft of wind swept into the stricken hangar. The fires were fanned to a blazing inferno. Great torrents of smoke and fifty-foot tongues of flame poured out of the after-lift well. The heart of the Illustrious became one white-hot laminated furnace.

Cameron also offers lighter moments, like when a sailor on a crow’s nest is unhurt after an air raid but for the seat of his pants catching fire, or the prayers of the Maltese when enemy planes approached: “Oh, Lord, send over the Italians.”

The Italians were not terrible fighters, Cameron is careful to explain, just more easily discouraged in general than the Germans, who attacked with ruthless élan and weren’t as leery of the prospect of a serious fight. Still, Italian bombers delivered their share of misery, and Italian warships managed some major kills.

In 1953 a movie was made about the Malta siege, starring Alec Guinness as a fictional reconnaissance pilot assigned combat duty after he is stranded on the island. The film is inert, and Guinness stiff as a board, but you do get some unforgettable images of Malta destroyed but unbowed. It is free to view on YouTube. Image from https://itpworld.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/malta-story-uk-1953/.

A more strategic view of Malta – a sense of how things looked from month to month while the rest of the war tilted one way, than another – is shortchanged by Cameron’s fragmentary approach. Yet I felt in his account something of the dire circumstances British sailors and airmen must have faced in one of the more overlooked theaters of the war.

In the end, it would come down to the convoys, and just how many of their ships would dock at Malta’s main port, Grand Harbour. By mid-1942 not many were making it through at all. In June, two convoys were sent to Malta, comprising 17 merchant vessels. Just two ships and 25,000 tons of supply reached Grand Harbour.

Meanwhile, the Maltese starved and survived, living off dwindling rations and huddling in rocky tunnels whenever bombers came. How a people so culturally and geographically connected to Italy chose to stand with the Allies and take the punishment they did is one of the many real miracles that make this story so remarkable. Cameron tells it well:

And the island did more than survive. As the months passed her strength – albeit with painful slowness – increased until eventually her submarines and the warships of her famous Force K were harassing Axis shipping throughout the central Mediterranean, while her aircraft were not only taking a heavy toll of Rommel’s supplies but were striking at the Italian mainland as far north as Naples.

The same island that contemplated surrender in 1942 would observe Italian warships surrendering just offshore the following year.

A British Spitfire in flight. Those cannons on its wings were a critical difference maker at Malta, as they ripped through Axis aircraft armor which resisted the machine guns of Hurricane fighters used earlier in the island's defense. Image from http://charlesmccain.com/2018/03/photos-of-the-best-propeller-fighter-plane-the-raf-spitfire/.

I wish Cameron took more of an interest in the human dimension of the conflict. Plenty of sailors, soldiers, and airmen were alive to talk to him, not to mention Maltese civilians. His approach instead concentrates on captain’s reports and admiralty letters detailing fates of specific vessels.

Many of these stories are fascinating; most of all that of the Ohio, a Merchant Marine fuel tanker borrowed from the United States which in August 1942 managed to reach Malta after taking seven direct bomb hits and two planes crashing into its main deck. “Any one of these could quite easily have touched off the fuel in the Ohio’s tanks and turned her in a couple of minutes into a blazing funeral pyre,” Cameron writes. “This, Captain Mason and his crew knew.”

But they stayed aboard anyway, even without a working engine or an intact hull. The end result was the whole Battle of Malta in miniature, a success against the odds that, just one month later, would help to gas up the island’s Spitfires and thus turn the tide to the Allied side for keeps.

Cameron may be a bit of a yarnspinner here, but it’s a good yarn.