How Churchill’s success hinged on a small Mediterranean island

If you can tell the difference between Jack Hawkins and John Mills, and between a Stuka and a Sten gun, perhaps after long, wet afternoons watching black-and-white war films, this is the book for you. Max Hastings is a wily operator who knows exactly what his readers want and with Operation Pedestal he has produced it for them again. The latest book off the apparently unstoppable Hastings conveyor belt tells the dramatic story of one of the most ambitious and dangerous naval operations of the war, and tells it well.

Malta, an island slightly smaller than Birmingham, sits at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, 60 miles south of Sicily. A base for the Royal Navy since Napoleonic times, during the second world war it was well positioned for interdicting German and Italian supply lines feeding Rommel’s forces fighting the British and Commonwealth Eighth Army in North Africa.

By the summer of 1942, however, the island had been bombed almost flat. Unable for the moment to do much more than defend itself, it was all it could do to hold out. But hold out it must. To lose Malta, said Churchill, would be ‘a disaster of first magnitude to the British Empire, and probably fatal in the long run to the defence of the Nile Valley’. Neither Churchill personally, nor Britain, could afford another shameful surrender such as had recently taken place at Tobruk and Singapore.

Starving people, however, cannot hold out indefinitely Several convoys had fallen victim to Axis aircraft, submarines and fast attack boats. Provisions were running dangerously low. Civilians pointedly rubbed their stomachs as the governor cycled by. Food, fuel and ammunition simply had to get through or the island would be forced to raise the white flag.