Not Without Loss

Last week, defiant of military logic, the Royal Navy made another try. Not since last June, when Axis raiders unmercifully pounded a fleet of slow-moving Allied cargo vessels in the western Mediterranean, have the United Nations tried to push another convoy through that hazardous sea. The Axis, entrenched along the shores where the sea funnels into the 100-mile-wide straits south of Sicily, boasted that it could not be done.

Into the Funnel. From the Strait of Gibraltar "twenty steamers, escorted by three battleships (two of them of the Nelson class*), four aircraft carriers (the Eagle, Furious, one of the Illustrious class and one of the U.S. carrier York town class), numerous cruisers, several dozen destroyers and some smaller units" moved slowly into the Mediterranean Sea. This was the Italian report. If it was true, it was one of the greatest Allied naval concentrations in those waters since the war began. The destination: Malta.

Some 1,000 miles from Gibraltar, near the Tyrrhenian Sea, Axis ships bustled out--a force of cruisers which suddenly turned tail, trying to draw off some of the convoy's protective strength. The British dispatched a submarine in pursuit, held their course steadily for the funnel.

Then came the onslaught: submarine packs, torpedo boats, dive-bombers, torpedo-carrying planes. Details of the action were not revealed, but hour after hour, for several days, in the air, on the surface, undersea, the melee raged.

Italian sources reported British ships limping into Gibraltar. A Vichyfrance seaplane liner, bound for Algiers, was attacked in the air by planes, possibly British, to whom anything in the air on that confused occasion must have looked like an enemy. Spitfires based on Malta rushed out to the Royal Navy's aid.

Out of the Sea. The Axis lost no time in claiming great success. Sunk, they said, were 15 cargo vessels totaling 180,000 tons, three cruisers, two destroyers. Sunk was the Eagle, set on fire was the U.S. carrier Wasp. Damaged ships, said the Axis, also included the 22,450-ton Furious. Destroyed: 42 Allied planes.

The Axis claims were extravagant. Berlin later admitted that the report about the Wasp was incorrect. But the British admitted the loss of the new 9,400-ton heavy cruiser Manchester. They also admitted the torpedoing of the Eagle.

From Reuter's Correspondent Norman Thorpe came an eyewitness account of her destruction. Thorpe was aboard. "Violent explosions" sent him rushing to the quarterdeck. As the Eagle heeled over, "six-inch shells, each weighing 100 lb., tore loose from their brackets and bumped down the clifflike deck." Seamen flung themselves overboard to escape the runaway shells. Thorpe himself slid down a rope into the thick, oil-coated sea, let go, realized with horror that he had not blown enough air into his lifebelt. He thrashed his way to a cork float.

"I pulled myself up and looked at the Eagle, 200 yards away. She was lying on her side. Down the great red expanse of her underside, men were sliding into the sea. Suddenly I felt a shock at the base of my spine. I knew it was a depth charge from a destroyer hunting the U-boat." Clinging to the float with other survivors, Thorpe watched the stricken Eagle go. "A rumbling as the sea poured relentlessly into the vessel . . . a flurry of white foam. It subsided and she was gone." A destroyer's crew plucked Thorpe out of the waves.

Many survivors, said the tight-lipped Admiralty, were picked up. Others from the Manchester were believed to have reached the Tunisian coast. On total losses the British were mum, although they claimed destruction of two Axis U-boats. At week's end they issued a stoical report:

"These operations have resulted in supplies and reinforcements reaching Malta, despite very heavy enemy concentrations designed to prevent their passage. . . . It is not to be expected that extensive and dangerous operations of this type . . . can be completed without loss."

* There are only two: the Nelson and the Rodney.

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