On Meeting a War Hero
As a child of 1960s Malta, with strong family roots in the Three Cities and the Grand Harbour, part of whose coast they line, I was brought up listening to first hand accounts by relatives and acquaintances of incessant air raids, nights spent in bomb-proof shelters, dive-bombing sorties on naval vessels being repaired at the Dockyard and the bravery of supply convoys which ran the gauntlet between Gibraltar and Malta or even Alexandria and Malta to deliver much needed ammunition, fuel and food supplies to extend a lifeline to Malta as it stood alone and besieged by the Axis territories in surrounding Italy, the Balkans, Tunisia and Libya.
Foremost amongst these convoys was the immortal and unforgettable Santa Maria Convoy, officially codenamed Operation Pedestal which went down in history as the biggest ever convoy of the Second World War comprising fourteen merchant ships escorted by a huge group of Royal Navy warships including two battleships, four aircraft carriers, seven light cruisers, thirty two destroyers and seven submarines. Each merchantman carried a similar mix of supplies so that even if only a few made it through, Malta would be replenished with the whole spectrum of necessities relevant to feed its population and arm its defenders.
The fastest of the merchantmen was the Texaco oil tanker the SS Ohio which, as the fastest oil tanker available at the time, generated a sailing speed of 16 knots equivalent to 30 kilometres per hour. The American Government conceded the loan of this tanker to Britain upon Churchill’s own personal request.
The bravery of the convoy and its protagonists as it sailed through hostile seas and constant German and Italian air and sea attacks during the second week of August 1942 is legendary and in the end, by 15th August, the Catholic feast of the Assumption of Mary, and following the loss of one aircraft carrier, two light cruisers, one destroyer and nine merchant ships, with up to 550 men killed, a total of five merchantmen limped one at a time into Malta’s Grand Harbour to the joy of the thousands of jubilant Maltese shouting and waving flags on the Harbour’s battlements.
While each surviving warship and merchantman had its own story to tell, the epic of the Ohio, so badly bombed that it had to be brought into harbour slung between the two destroyers Ledbury and Penn who had to manoeuvre it slowly as it was almost down to its deck and in imminent danger of breaking its back due to a jammed rudder, stands out as the most memorable. Ohio reached Grand Harbour against all odds and no sooner was her precious cargo pumped off her that her keel settled on the Harbour bottom.
Thus was the story of the Ohio and the Konvoj ta’ Santa Marija told and retold to me within the stupendous backdrop of Grand Harbour itself, so that it became woven into my very fabric and stoked back into my vivid memory each time the historic convoy’s anniversary was commemorated every August 15th.
Fast forward to August 2002, the sixtieth anniversary of Operation Pedestal, when I was one of the hosts at a reception in Valletta in honour of the surviving crewmen of the convoy from sixty years previously. Crewmen who had been invited specifically to Malta to be honoured for their contribution in saving Malta from capitulation in those dark days in 1942.
Of the crew members present, there were only two survivors who had actually served on the SS Ohio, one of whom was Allan Shaw who I had the pleasure to meet, exchange a few words with and pose for a quick photo beside the original Ship’s bell from the Ohio which had been borrowed from Texaco for the occasion.
The Sunday Times of Malta of 13 August 2017 published an article in which it announced that following Allan Shaw’s passing in 2015, his twin children have revisited Malta to scatter some of his ashes in the Grand Harbour on this 75th anniversary of the famous convoy. The full story can be read on https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20170813/local/ohios-final-survivor-returned-to-grand-harbour.655447?utm_source=tom&utm_campaign=top5&utm_medium=widget
As I read the story, I went back to the stories of my childhood and my brief encounter with Allan Shaw in 2002. I remembered meeting a rather short, humble, unassuming gentleman. Such is the stuff that real heroes are made of. And when it came to having our photo taken, I actually had to politely clarify that he was the actual subject of the photo and that I was a but a mere observer from the post-war generation who wanted to immortalise my brief encounter with him, the real hero.
Postscript:
So Grand Harbour’s hallowed waters now also carry within them the combined ashes of SS Ohio’s Allan Shaw and HMS Ledbury’s Commanding Officer Roger Hill, another unassuming war hero linked to Malta through Operation Pedestal. But that will be the subject of another story when the time for it comes……..
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