Interesting description on the effect of Keith Park arriving on Malta in Stephen Bungay’s ‘Alaimein’
Lloyd had led Malta’s air defences with great courage and tenacity throughout the worst year in its history, but he was a bomber man. He had been a strange choice for the Malta job, for he was wont to express contempt for Fighter Command and had a deep dislike of the Royal Navy. His successor was the most experienced and successful fighter commander anywhere in the world. Throughout the summer of 1940, this tough, wiry New Zealander had been in charge of 11 Group, the largest Group in Fighter Command, which covered southeast England and London. He had frustrated Kesselring’s every move and thwarted the Luftwaffe with a brilliance which put him in a class of his own. After the war, Tedder, then Chief of the Air Staff, once observed that ‘if ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did’. He was about to demonstrate his quality for a second time. Fliegerkorps II’s attacks on Malta had peaked in April. The 8,788 sorties they flew in that month fell to 2,476 in May, and dropped again to 956 in June because of the needs of the desert itself. But in July, bombers from France and fighters from Russia arrived in Sicily. That month, with 150 aircraft, Fliegerkorps II flew 1,819 sorties against the island. They were given a beating.
Park spent the first few days after his arrival assessing the situation. He later wrote down what he discovered. Malta’s three airfields were being bombed three or four times a day, inflicting losses on aircraft and personnel. ‘The tactics in vogue,’ he wrote, ‘were to dispatch our fighters to the rear of Malta whilst they assembled and climbed in big formations, and then to come in and attack after the bombs had been dropped and the enemy was diving away in full retreat under cover of its fighter escort. These tactics were being employed by the Commander of the Fighters, who had been station commander at Duxford in No. 12 Group which originated the Big Wings led by Bader in 1940. I immediately sent this officer back to England, and changed the tactics to what I called a forward interception plan used in No. 11 Group. I sent the fighter squadrons forward, climbing to meet the enemy bombers head on, and to intercept well before they reached Malta, when the bombers were in tight formation, heavily laden and unable to take evading action.’ The officer concerned was Group Captain Woodhall, who had come to Malta in February 1942, having been the senior controller at Duxford during the Battle of Britain. There had been at the time a famous controversy between the commander of 12 Group, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, and the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Sholto Douglas on the one hand, and Park and the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, on the other. Leigh-Mallory and Sholto Douglas believed that it did not matter whether enemy aircraft were intercepted before or after they bombed as long as lots of them were shot down, and that the way to do that was to form wings of at least three squadrons and attack them in strength all at once. Park and Dowding believed that enemy bombers should be intercepted before they inflicted any damage on the ground, and that the way to do that was to send up fighters in squadrons or pairs of squadrons without forming them into wings. Park and Dowding won the Battle of Britain that way, but Leigh-Mallory and Sholto Douglas won the argument at the Air Ministry, and so took over their jobs, with Leigh-Mallory inheriting 11 Group from Park and Sholto Douglas inheriting Fighter Command from Dowding.
Park issued his ‘Fighter Interception Plan’ on 25 July. He generously suggested that past tactics had been forced on the defenders by lack of fighters, but that they now had sufficient numbers to stop daylight bombing. Squadrons were from now on to follow instructions from the controllers, who were to put one squadron up-sun to attack the German top cover, one to attack the close escorts and a third to deliver a head-on attack on the heavily laden bombers to break them up and force them to jettison their bomb-loads. He tightened up radio discipline and controlling and demanded take-off from ‘standby’ in two minutes. Park’s four-page document gave a full account of the purpose and method of the new policy, and was to be read by every fighter pilot in Malta so that everybody knew exactly what they and everyone else were to do and why.
The effect was immediate. On 10 August, Park issued a second set of instructions in which he reported the results of the new tactics. During the first half of July, 34 British aircraft had been destroyed or damaged on the ground. In the latter half of July, the comparable figure had been four. Whilst 380 tons of bombs had fallen on Malta during the first two weeks, after Park took over the figure dropped to 160 tons. During July, the Luftwaffe suffered a loss rate of 5.8 per cent, even higher than the 5.1 per cent loss rate suffered by the US Air Force in the disastrous Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid of August 1943, which almost persuaded them to abandon the daylight bombing of Germany. Unlike the Americans, the Luftwaffe was truly persuaded. Having flown 1,819 sorties against Malta in July, they reduced their activity to 862 sorties in August and reduced it further to a mere 391 in September. As in the closing stages of the Battle of Britain, they switched from bombing raids to fighter sweeps. Park had stopped the bombing, saved his aircraft and airfields, and defeated the Luftwaffe in the air.
Of course Park benefited from having the structure and forces in place but he seems to have been able to make far better use of them and it would have been interesting to see how what was availalble earlier would have fared had Park's tactics been used.