Malaya was wreathed in heavy smoke, and the cruiser Berwick had interposed itself, and now had the misfortune of becoming the new target. The twelve guns roared and scored a hit. The next salvo would log two more, and the cruiser, already damaged by a 500 pound bomb, was suddenly penetrated to magazine level and exploded. It would sink in the next ten minutes.
In other action the three remaining French cruisers had pounded the Calcutta to a smoking wreck, but Coventry and Orion had scored enough hits to discourage their closer approach to the scene. The French cruisers broke off, but the heart of their battle fleet, Normandie and Dunkerque, remained undamaged, and undaunted.
Dunkerque had been in on the action against Calcutta, scoring at least one good hit there before turning the battle over to the cruisers and looking for bigger prey. Now the battlecruiser joined the action against Malaya, adding another eight 12.9 inch guns to the heat of that engagement.
It was then that Admiral Laborde saw the streaking tail of yet another missile pierce the heavy pall of drifting battle smoke, and lance into the heart of the light cruiser Jeane de Vienne. The resulting explosion told him the ship had taken heavy damage. The missile had popped up and come down on the 38mm deck armor, plunging deep into the ship and nearly exiting through the bottom hull.
Damn these naval rockets! Look what they’ve done to the German battleships. He was receiving reports from every ship in the fleet, keeping a mental tally of his losses. Of his ten destroyers, Mistral, Orage and Vauban had been sunk, with damage to Tempte, Tornade, Lynx and Panthere that had forced them to retire. He had clearly lost the heavy cruiser Colbert, and the same might now be said for Jeane de Vienne. The hits to Strausbourg were serious, and the ship was struggling to control bad flooding as it shrunk from the fight. Both German battleships had turned away, though their aft turrets were still firing.
He had two good ships in hand, his flagship hit but undaunted, and Dunkerque was practically the only ship in the engagement that had come through without so much as a paint scratch. Queen Elizabeth was clearly a lost cause for the British, and he could stay here and pound the Malaya senseless if he chose to do so, but how many more of those rockets might find his ship? The fires he could still see burning on the Hindenburg were enough to convince him that this engagement had run its course.
The Franco-German fleet had been hit with fifteen supersonic missiles and eight more of the lighter Sea Skuas. They had also faced the gunnery of the British fleet, which had scored many hits in the battle to cause further mayhem. It had been a terrible hour, and one of the most costly naval engagements in history when the final tally was registered on both sides. Considering the losses that had been sustained by the Italians, the Axis fleet had taken a severe mauling.
It was then that the sole surviving spotter plane sent in a report that another squadron of enemy ships was approaching, seven ships in front at high speed, another six ships, and aircraft carriers among them that appeared to be launching planes. That was enough to convince La Borde that he had tarried here too long. He gave the order to break off, just after 18:00, and the heavy smoke soon obscured all view of the enemy as the Normandie began its turn. Now he looked to the skies, sending orders that the fleet should regroup on a new heading and prepare to defend against enemy air attack. In all this time, he thought, where was the air cover he had been promised by the Germans?
The Luftwaffe would come, but far too late to make any difference in the action. His column reformed, beat off one half hearted attack by British Swordfish torpedo bombers, and then the skies began to darken with the growl of the German planes. It was a formation of thirty Bf-110 twin engine heavy fighters, more than enough to discourage any further air action off those carriers. As it was soon determined that these planes were no direct threat to the fleet, both Kirov and Argos Fire preserved their SAMs, and the action slowly dissipated.
When he learned the enemy fleet had diverted from its easterly course and turned south, Tovey had turned about with Invincible and all his cruisers, leaving Warspite to escort the carriers with a few more destroyers. Argos Fire saw them coming on radar, the ships appearing on her screens just after that missile strike by Kazan. The formation had come upon the scene too late to take any decisive action, but its sudden appearance had been the last factor compelling La Borde to break off.
