MALTA CONVOYS

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, stimulating source book.
Review: With the fall of Crete, Malta appeared indefensible, yet to lose it would have dealt a winning hand to Axis forces in North Africa and made the capture of Gibraltar inevitable. In fact, the German High Command - the OKW - wanted to take Malta in preference to Crete, but was overruled by Hitler. While Crete fell to airborne assault, it proved of little enduring value to the Axis cause.

Malta, snuggled so close to the Italian mainland, seemed doomed. However, while many in Britain wrote it off, the islanders were gripped with a determination to resist. And the Navy grasped that in Malta it had an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

Woodman details the deadly chess game of submarines, shipping and aircraft, mines and weather, soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians, as both sides sought to protect or sever one another's supply lines.

Possession of Malta was crucial to the warfare raging in North Africa. Whoever controlled the island could dominate the Mediterranean, and hence the oil of the Middle East, and the entry to the Suez Canal. Failing to seize it ahead of Crete was one of Hitler's major errors of the war. That Britain maintained a garrison there was almost an accident - a fortunate happenstance which probably dictated the outcome of the North African conflict and eventually exposed the Axis Powers to a third Front in Italy.

Densely packed with information, this is an excellent source book for anyone interested in the North African campaign or naval/convoy warfare in WW2. Malta's role has always been understated: this book goes some way to restoring it to strategic importance, and does so without ignoring the human dimension of its determined population and defenders.

Rating:
Summary: Good on convoys, bad on details
Review: Woodman who is an ex-merchant seaman does very well on the story of the convoys as they plied there way to and from Malta during World War II. In this he is good and the book has real value. This includes interviews with some of the surviving sailors of these convoys.

However he essentially uses no German or Italian source material and has a great number of errors of detail. Nor does he use recent academic books in English filled with new information. For example, he has the wrong Italian general capturing Addis Ababa in the war with Ethiopia, he confuses hellcat with wildcat fighters (used on British carriers), he talks about lightly armored Italian heavy cruisers when four of their seven were one of the most heavily armored heavy cruisers in 1939 (the Zara class), and he is in error on Axis losses and Axis commanders and confuses bomb sizes. The list goes on. Written so long after the war he should have gotten the details better.