What was the 1943 "Palm Sunday Massacre"?

During the North African campaign, the Ju 52 was the main German transport for reinforcements and supplies. From Sicily, daily flights to Tunis rose from 20–50 in November 1942 to 150 landings a day in early April 1943, as the Axis situation grew desperate. Those air convoys of slow, heavily loaded, barely armed aircraft were an obvious target.

For two months the Allies prepared an offensive against enemy aviation, launching it on 5 April 1943 under the name Operation Flax. On that first day they destroyed 11 Ju 52s in the air near Cape Bon and many more in bombing raids on their Sicilian airfields, leaving only 29 serviceable. Two catastrophic weeks then began for the Axis, in which more than 140 aircraft were lost in air interceptions.

The offensive culminated on 18 April 1943, Palm Sunday. That day Allied fighters surprised a formation of German transports: 24 Ju 52s were shot down and another 35 managed to return to Sicily, where they crash-landed. The episode went down in history as the "Palm Sunday Massacre." It illustrates the Ju 52's great weakness in the war: with a top speed of only 265 km/h, half that of a Hurricane, it needed escort whenever it flew over a combat zone, and without it its ruggedness counted for little. It was not the first time the transports had suffered such losses: in the early days of the Netherlands campaign, in May 1940, the Luftwaffe lost 125 Ju 52s and another 47 were damaged, largely to Dutch anti-aircraft fire, and in Crete, in May 1941, it lost 170 aircraft and 4,500 men.