Should the Axis have tried harder to take Malta?

There is a reason the Italian landing ships were called cisterne acqua (water tankers) , the small island I spent my summers was still supplied with drinkable water by Adige and her successors in the seventies (after that a civilian contractor did it).

 

You´ve posted some fine Links, lwd. Im aware that the Wehrmacht hasn´t had the resources at there but only for the reason that they´ve been needed elsewhere. In generally they had the resources to do the job. The only reason they can´t do it was that they needed all the things at a more eastern location. For the fortifications, there weren´t any fortifications mounted in a regular defending line which couldn´t have been destroyed and there wasn´t a reason to destroy any single bunker. You can spare them out and detroy them later or wait til the crew surrenders.

 

Flame throwers and demolition charges are the ideal weapons to take on forts/gun emplacements. The First Parachute Division were lavishly equipped by the standards of the day. Folgore had the talent and the motivation. By the time of Gazala, Malta was indeed very ragged. Herrubble strewn streets were occupied by people that had a definate siege mentality, what with the constant strain.

Based on what I've dug up, my mney would be on the Axis to wipe the floor with their airborne component alone. Two ivisions of highly trained and motivated troops v 4 brigades of ragged riflemen. Don't tell me that Axis air superiority was in question. Prior to them leaving, Malta was the most bombed place on earth....Stuka, Dorniers, Heinkels, day in day out, never letting up. 2.5 raids a day for many weeks, and all this with air superiority in question?

Don't think so....

Read Liddel Hart. Student makes no bones about an opportunity missed, and the blame falls fairly and squarly at Rommel's feet for losing his head at the sniff of a pyramid.

 

A Mediterrranean Stalingrad?? I think despite "rumors" of civilians opposed to British domination, Maltese *HATE* to think they can be taken over by invasion, and it was the British that were keeping them supplied, not the Italians. Might we consider that the British-supported Maltese would resist fiercely in their largely built-up island and so delay capture with house-to-house fighting reminiscent of Stalingrad? And British submarines and carriers were pretty deadly in the Med, and with ULTRA foreknowledge the Italian fleet might come up against some decent resistance. I cannot be convinced at all that a successsful Axis invasion of Malta would even be a 50/50 proposition, and it had too many risks, IMHO.

I do take issue with the "perfection" of Axis anti-shipping air forces. Other than "light" forces, no heavy cruiser, battleship, or carrier was sunk by Axis air power during the entire war. Of course carriers Illustrious, Formidable, and Indomitable were pounded, but NOTHING was sunk. U-boats got the Eagle and Barham, not air forces. I think the naval battles off Dunkirk and Crete well demonstrate the tenacity and pluck of British naval forces in spite of "perfected" air strikes. Might have the British retained the services of the USS Wasp if enough were known ahead of time (just musing)?? She alone would have TWICE the airpower of any British carrier.

 

But for a mistake by the commander on Crete, the Germans would not have won the battle. The commander abandoned an airfield which allowed the Germans to reinforce their troops. The main question for airborne is how quickly can they be reinforced, since they cannot sustained combat for long and city fighting of the type in Malta would quickly wear out airborne troops.

 

You´re right on that point Steve, but this should be no problem for a well planned Operation. And this must have been a very well planned Operation with enough operational reserves and a bit of insolence. And for me the main target for the Airbornes had to be the capture of the enemies HQ. If that had worked, i´m sure the rest of troops would have react very confused and could have splitted up in smaller targets.

 

Italian simpathizers "rumours" are based on some pretty hard evidence, read David Niven's "the moon is a baloon", he was stationed at Malta as part of the pre-war British garrison and descibes anti British incidents in detail. There were also Maltese "British hating" volunteers serving with Italian forces. Certainly not a majority after two tears of RA bombings (a 1940 invasion would be different) but still a very different setup from Crete. Note that Italian troops would have no language barrier, that matters.

A number of BBs were pounded from the air as well, HMS Nelson and HMS Warspite amongst them. As for "heavy" cruisers none were stationed in the Med after the loss of HMS York until USS Wichita got there after Torch, hard to sink them if theyr'e not there, even before them the Admiralty apparently didn't send many HMS Berwick was a Capo Teulada where she took a couple of 8" shell from RN Pola but I can't recall any others. BTW York is sometimes credited to the LW instead of the barchini (AFAIK she was beached but could still fire her guns after the first attack) so you have your "heavy" cruiser if you really want it.

 

This might have worked fine earlier at Eben Emael but by 1941, the British had excellent Ultra information. Freyberg in Crete was forewarned of the German operation. Unfortunately whilst he was a hell of a warrior and motivator, he was not the brightest of sparks and misread the warning making the assumption that the Germans would attempt a sea-landing before sending in the paras. Consequently he placed the majority of his troops to guard again sea landings and he failed to protect the airfields sufficiently.

But even so the German Paras failed (sorry Ulrich). If it had not been for glider troops arriving by luck the wrong side of a dried out river bed at Maleme, the Operation itself would have failed. With a bit of thought, Freyberg could have disposed his troops to thwart the Invasion.

German Forces were superb in short aggressive, logistic light, Continental Wars and had been since Frederick the Great. They were poor at logistic heavy, long distance, attentional wars (eg WW1, Barbarossa and North Africa and had no history or experience of air/sea invasions of a contested coast.

If they had really wanted to take Malta, given the huge numerical superiority, the Axis could definitely have done it but the cost would be enormous in elite\expensively trained troops. Hitler was right again - it just was not worth taking.

 

Not that sure about the cost, a "first Tobruk" like result is just as likely as "Singapore" or "Second Tobruk" once the enemy makes a breach resistance in isolated fortresses often collapses.

 

Maybe a Montecassino.

The place is hot and rocky in July and the defence improved by a lot of damaged infrastructure. The defenders maybe malnourished but the troops were for the most part regulars (except the AA batteries) with plenty of ammo. They had a few tanks, machine gunners and sufficient AA with the whole of the small island covered.

The italian and German paras are going to take a lot of initial punishment. With only 2 or three days ammo, no heavy weapons and lack of water, they are going to need fast resupply even where they do manage a lodgment. Most observers seem to believe that the best way of providing this is by seaborne landings probably in the North of the Island as airfields and main harbors are well covered.

The Italians probably had enough to make a day one landing but if this fails then there is no spare and even continual resupply is problematic. Time is not on their side because the British Fleet forewarned by Ultra will undoubtedly arrive at some time from Alex.

It all adds up to a very risky venture. And as the Luftwaffe can't be in two places at once, Rommel has to cancel his attack on Alamein.

Surely Hitler and Rommel took the right decision, if Rommel succeeds at El Alamein\Alexandria then Malta has little value to the British and can be left to perish.

 

No need for a sorry, scipio! You added some good points. So can we agree that the capture of Malta would have been possible but very hard and only to make with a excellent planning enough resources and enough troops. Seeing it from the point the war is gone in history, it would have been impossible but seen that the Axis high command had seen it as neccessary and would have had the resources ( they had it but wasted it at the Eastern front) it could have been done. The losses i would estimate to a 35 to 45% rate indeed high but i think worth it. The british fleet would have come from Alexandria, yes but they are easier to destroy when they delivering themself than making the way to Alexandria. I´m sure that it had worked but only under the right circumstances.

 

This is always the problem with these sort of threads. Yes you can take Malta but you can forget about El Alamein. Yes you can take North Africa but forget about Russia etc etc.

Personally I think that in the context of the overall situation in Early 1942 Hitler took the best option open to him.

Don't discount the British navy so easily - They ran out of ammunition at Crete and took amazing risks to effect evacuation than defending themselves. The RNavy was morally, doctrinally and physically much superior to the Italian. At some point in the Malta attack, the Germans would be depending on the the Italian Navy and am sure that this would have caused Hitler a pause for thought.

 

If you don´t like it that someone will have his thougths, why you will discuss a thing that hasn´t happened? If we fix it all at the given history facts, no discussion will ever be needed.

 

I read somewhere recently that for most if not all the North African campaing both sides were able to find enough water in most places. Sometimes brackish and not enough for regular bathing but enough. They still had to move it of course but it didn't have to come from great distances most of the time. On the otherhand most of that doesn't apply to Malta. The reason they were called water tankers was to disguise their real purpose I thought. In any case they have to remain near the beaches for some time to off load the water. That puts them at considerable risk.

 

The Axis can indeed have air superiority pretty much anytime they plan to have it. But they can't keep it for 24/7. The RAF was still intercepting Axis raids weren't they?

Note that one corrilary of being the most heavly bombed place on earth is you probably have the most experianced AA gunners on the planet as well. Not a good situation for big, slow moving, low flying planes full of paratroopers.

In this talk of multiple divisions of paratroopers has any one looked at just how many could be lifted at one time? I think one of the links I gave stated about 200 Italian transport planes would be available. Not sure about German planes. A JU-52 could take what 10 paratroopers and their weapons container or 12 without or 18 regular troops? If apply a similar ration to the Italian passenger capacity they will be able to transport somewhere between ~3,000 and ~3,500 paratroopers at a time. It's going to take quite a few sorties per plane to get all the paratroopers on the ground and that's without factoring in losses which based on Crete and Holland are going to be heavy.

 

Actually the SM 82 has a better load carrying capacity, the Italian plane can carry twice the numbers or freight of a Ju 52, it also has ventral doors for ease of cargo drop. Looking at the numbers of planes in the Tunisian air bridge they probably could drop the 5 available para regiments in two/three waves.
Ther are probably more paras available for Malta than there were for Crete, the German division is now down to 3 regiments from the original four but there are sone non divisional units and the two regiments from Folgore. AFAIK the British force is smaller than the Crete one and much harder to support by the RN, what is lacking to the axis compared to Crete is a German airlanding force, 22LL is at Sebastopol and the mountain troops are all committed elsewhere but there are two Italian divisions somehow trained in the role.
The cisterne acqua were dual use, offloading a fully loaded one using her pumps normally takes a few hours (my memories are the ship stayed moored for couple of days in the sixties as there was no central reservoirs and only one set of hooses so she had to stop pumping every time it filled a house cistern, in the seventies off loading time dropped to less than one day as they had built a large reservoir.
I expect Maltese houses to have a similar design to Sicilian and Italian small islands ones, the flat roofs are designed to collect rainwater to an underground cistern, so each captured house is good for 3 to 10t of water storage and in early summer will probably have 1 or 2 tonns still in the cistern, as it's impossible to drain it fast, the water is pulled up by hand pumps, and the locals will object forcefully to any attempt at "scorched earth" tactics by the British IMO water is unlikely to be a problem early on and if the fight lasts overa couple of days the cisterne can take up the slack having completed their assault role, they are horribly vulnerable but can be well protected. Loading an MZ with barrrels of drinkable water ia a possible lternative, the MZ can simply roll them ashore in one or two hours and 100t of drinkable water is a lot.

 

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. The Ju 52 could carry 18 passengers or 10 jump ready paratroopers. So I applied that ration (18:10) to get the paratroop carrying capacity of the Italian planes which I took off one of the links I posted earlier. It also listed the number of planes available and in most cases I took the max number but rounded down a bit. Note that I didn't apply any reliability factors to reduce the number of planes available either.

But the force in Crete was mostly evacuees from the mainland where they had left most of their equipment. They were also for the most part new to the island and their organization was rather chaotic as well I beleive. The soldiers on Malta on the other hand had all their equipement, were very familiar with the terrain, were well organized, and had detailed defence plans.

The British also have plans to block the runways to prevent such air landings and in any case the runways are subject to artillery fire from the British if such an attempt is made. There's still the question of available transport.

The problem is what do you offload it into?

The big problem will be getting off the beaches. While there the Axis forces will be concentrated in a local with very little water other than what they carry and the terrain is incredibly favorable to the defence.

1 ton is roughly 1,000 liters if you limit the troops to 2 liters a day 100t is 50,000 man/days but of course there will be considerable wasteage and 2 liters is a fairly conservative estimate.

 

View attachment 16669

OK Ulrich - on with the fun.

The Map above shows the density of AA guns. After months of Luftwaffe bombardment, the British had 112 AA (mostly 3.7inch and a few 4.5inch) plus 120 Bofors (not shown) in summer 1942.

Coastal guns were eight 9.2inch outer defence and thirty 6 inch inner defence.

Four Matilda mark II and two Vickers VIc tanks.

Almost all the British Battalions were Professionals and some had been in Malta from the beginning. Others such as 1st Cheshire (machine gunners) had been shipped to Malta after fighting in NA. Just can't see them collapsing quickly and in any case any Plan has to assume worse as well as best case.

The Luftwaffe had tried the standard dive bomber tactics but these were abandoned in April due to vulnerability of the aircraft and poor results. High level bombing was more successful but even here they had to alter tactics from a massive attack in one direction to approaching it from several points.

All this against a very small Island - no more than 15 by 10 miles. The more you look at this the harder the nut seems to be.

 

Given this consider what happens when a large formation of slow flying transports enters the islands AA envelope. Especially since they won't be flying very hight. Not only is the first wave likely to suffer severe casualties but the ability to transport succeeding waves is likely to be severely diminished.

 

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]Type
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Flown off​

[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

Arrived​

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[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"][/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"][/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]Hurricane (all Marks)
[/TD]
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353​

[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

334​

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]Spitfire (all Marks)
[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

384​

[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

367​

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[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]Swordfish
[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

8​

[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

7​

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]Albacore
[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

17​

[/TD]
[TD="width: 189, bgcolor: transparent"]

11

​

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All the while the British were managing to replenish fighters - admittedly they were being shot down almost as quicly as they arrived. My rough guess is about 25% arrived in the critical first 6months of 1942 and these were Spitfires in April onwards. The turning point was the delivery of 62 by the US carrier Warspite and RN carrier Eagle in April - all 62 successfully landed and nine airraids by German and Italian planes successfully intercepted.
A week later the Minesweeper Welshman brought 340 tonnes of supplies from Gibraltar.