Before some other pedant picks you up, it was the ‘SS’ Ihio, I think, alpafloor. It wasn’t a military ship, but a civilian merchant tanker. It was a sorry mess by the time it entered Valletta Harbour, its decks literally awash and its superstructure shot to hell. And pause for a minute to think about the sheer guts of the civilian crew who remained aboard to man a seriously damaged tanker full to the gunnels with high octane avgas. Don’t know that I’d have that kind of guts.
Re the fighters flying off the Wasp: mph versus knots was an issue. (The RAF stuck with all sorts of old world anomalies until they were dragged screaming into the 1940’s. One famous one was the use of the term ‘airscrew’ rather than ‘propeller’. They switched to ‘propeller’ only after The System sent three hundred pilots – (aircrew) – to an RAF station one day in reply to a urgent request for ‘airscrews’. A typist left one little letter out.)
Even more than the mph -v- knots issue, (and as a military pilot at the time, this was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it), the problem was that pilots on the first ferry flight to Malta were so scantily trained that they did not understand – or were not told – that they needed to fly on a lean fuel mixture for the transit flight. They had been trained to fly the Spitfire to fight in it, not to be ferry pilots, and not surprisingly, they flew combat missions with the mixture control in full rich.
The RAF simply didn’t have time to teach students at Fighter OCUs anything more than what they absolutely needed to know. Interesting – and sad – that most of the people involved in these historic and heroic events were dead within weeks. That’s the way it was in air combat at the time.
Off the subject of the WASP, but does anyone here on Pprune know the full story of the very young and inexperienced RAF Gladiator (or possibly Hurricane?) pilot who shot down SEVEN Italian aircraft with one burst of machine gun fire in the Greek campaign in 1941? It actually happened.
Spotting an Italian twin engined reconnaissance aircraft through the clouds, he dived on it, opening fire too early. ‘Walking’ his tracer onto the aircraft, he kept his finger on the trigger until he hit the aircraft, shooting it down. When he claimed the kill, Army observers on the ground credited him with seven kills. Unseen by the RAF pilot through the clouds, a flight of six Italian fighters escorting the recce aircraft were flying in echelon formation off to one side and behind it. Apparently his line of tracers had ‘walked’ exactly along the flight of Italian fighters and he unknowingly shot every one of them down.
He was killed on operations the very next day.