MALTA: BLITZED BUT NOT BEATEN

Philip Vella’s comprehensive account of the Second World War siege of Malta was published in 1985; my copy was the third edition, 1989. In the 1970s a group of Maltese enthusiasts formed The National War Museum Association and over the years they have collected and collated documents, photographs, first-hand reports, interviews and eye-witness testimonies about the Battle for Malta. This large-format book is a result of those endeavours.

Besides relating in detail from the outset of hostilities, it also contains almost a hundred pages of appendices recording convoys, daily rations, buildings destroyed or damaged, honours and awards. There are also dozens of illustrations, maps and black-and-white photographs. It is a treasure-trove for any writer or student of history.

In the summer of 1939, when it seemed that war was imminent, the Admiralty pressed to strengthen the island against air attack by installing 122 heavy AA guns, 60 light AA guns and 24 searchlights. Inertia hampered this process. On June 10, 1940 Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. Malta was in the firing line and by this time the islands only had 34 heavy anti-aircraft guns and 8 Bofors; the number of searchlights was up to strength, however.

‘... Malta’s loss would have denied the Allies of a staging post to the Middle East, jeopardised the fate of the British Army fighting in North Africa, and turned the Mediterranean into an Axis lake’ (p163).

The air-raid sirens sounded to warn of the first raid on June 11, 1940. ‘... ten Savoia Marchetti 79s crossed the 60 mile channel on their way to their target Hal Far airfield’ (p6). Other targets were the dockyard and forts. There were seven bombing sorties that first day, with no planes lost on either side.

That year, Malta suffered 211 air raids. Succeeding years increased in number, 963 and 2,031 for 1941 and 1942 respectively. The devastation was horrendous (as many photographs attest); ‘the Royal Opera House was demolished along with several other buildings in Valletta on April 7, 1942’ (p111); the ruins of the opera house are still there, concrete yet mute testimony to the siege. Two days after that, a bomb penetrated the dome of Mosta Church but instead of exploding merely bounced among the congregation. In the first weeks of 1942 ‘the number of unexploded bombs from heavy daylight raids by German aircraft rose from 6 to 143 per week’ (p128).

Civilians sought refuge in ‘the old railway tunnels in Valletta and Floriana, as well as in the Hypogeum, a prehistoric underground burial place, and also the Catacombs at Rabat’ (p15).

The Royal Malta Artillery recruited ‘a motley crowd of clerks and farmers, shop assistants and masons, intellectuals and illiterates’ (p34). In fact, as early as September 1938, ‘3,000 volunteers enrolled in the Women’s Auxiliary Reserve set up by Lady Bonham-Carter, the wife of the then Governor of Malta’ (p73). The native RMA and the Royal Artillery raised a curtain of flame that was fearful to behold... Captured German pilots admitted that they had been unnerved by it. It probably saved the Island from devastation, saved many a British warship... Remarkable was the stoicism of the civilians’ (p173).

Supplies came by seagoing convoy, the first in September 1940 from Alexandria. Subsequent convoys sailed from Gibraltar as well. Freight was also transported by RN submarines, among them HM Submarines Porpoise, Rorqual, Cachalot, Osiris and Otus [While in SM drafting in the 1970s I sent men to submarines that bore these names, but newer boats of the Porpoise and Oberon class, launched 1958 to the 1960s]. Submarines based in Malta attacked German convoys destined for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, sending to the bottom of the sea some 400,000 tons of supplies. In April 1942 HM Submarine Upholder was lost on her twenty-fifth patrol.

Shortages meant that improvisation was the order of the day; ‘men found fig and vine leaves a substitute, albeit a distasteful one, for tobacco... women made coats from blankets and dresses from curtains’ (p77). By September 1941 the only unrationed items were bread, pasta, cheese, rice and tea. At this stage of the war, the Enigma codes had been cracked and warnings of imminent attacks on convoys could be countered. ‘Cigarette-smokers took a deep breath when, on October 30, 1942, after many months of enforced abstinence, an issue of 30 cigarettes a week was introduced on a ration basis, to be increased to 50 with effect from January 15, 1943’ (p172).

‘Radar... is regarded as one of the main contributors to Malta’s defeat of the enemy. Radio Direction Finding was first brought to Malta in Marsh 1939 when the Air ministry Experimental Station was set up at Dingli Cliffs, one of the highest spots on the Island’ (p83).

Allied aircraft were transported by convoy but many were lost during the air-raids on Ta’ Qali, Hal Far and Luqa airfields. ‘In answer to the 200-240 daily Axis sorties, Malta could seldom muster more than six fighters at one time’ (p101).

In September, 1942, even while conflict still raged, the King presented the George Cross to the Island Fortress and its people, acknowledging the ‘gallant service’ the Maltese people had already rendered in the fight for freedom (p120). On June 20, 1943 the King visited the Island, ‘sailing through a hostile sea, with enemy air bases a mere 60 miles away’ (p184). He was given a rapturous reception by civilians and the armed forces; he toured much of the Island all day, witnessing the destruction and speaking to the Maltese. Prime Minister Churchill visited the Island on November 17 for two days and President Roosevelt arrived on December 8 and presented the people with a citation concerning their ‘valorous service above and beyond the call of duty’ (p197).

With the retreat of the Germans from Italy in 1944, few air-raids occurred and none resulted in any further damage or deaths. The last alert sounded on August 28.

‘... looking back across the years, serving at Malta in spite of the hardships, hunger and the constant presence of danger and death, is curiously one of these parts of one’s life, which if given the chance, one would do all over again’ – Leo Nomis, an American pilot flying from Ta’Qali (p154).

Make a date - 1, 14 and 31 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 14 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

1, 14 and 31 October

October is supposed to be the scary month, a time of hobgoblins, ghosts and of course Halloween. They don’t get much scarier than those Nazi leaders who in 1946 were sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials (1). A couple of years earlier (14) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, suspected of plotting Hitler’s assassination, was given the choice of a public treason trial and certain death by firing squad or suicide with honour. This much-revered soldier chose the latter.

A ruler who met a grisly end was Benito Mussolini; little did he know about his fate when in 1922 he became the youngest premier in the history of Italy (31). Familiar to all of us living in Spain, Francisco Franco, although a controversial leader, actually died in his bed: in 1936 he was named the head of the Nationalist government of Spain (1).

Benito Mussolini

 

Less fortunate was King Harold Godwinson, who in 1066 got one in the eye at the battle of Senlac Hill (14), seven miles from Hastings.

With one eye on history, Khruschev made several cataclysmic revelations about his predecessors in his 1956 speech, resulting in the body of Joseph Stalin being removed (31) from Lenin’s Tomb in 1961 because Stalin was suddenly a non-person.

A mere three years later, Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev (14), probably as a result of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which began with a U2 flyover taking photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed in Cuba (14).

Indeed, October seems to be a month marked by achievements in transport.

To begin with, in 1811, the first steamboat set sail down the Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans (1) and the following year work on London's Regent’s Canal began (14).

In 1908 Ford introduced the Model T car (1) and a mere thirty-nine years later Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane faster than the speed of sound (14), heralding in the concept of the space-age. NASA was created (1) in 1958.

Chuck Yeager and the X-1

 

Eleven years later to the day, a passenger aircraft - the Concorde - broke the sound barrier for the very first time (1). Maybe it did become uneconomical, but what a beautiful plane!

Other technological things happened on our selected days in October too. The first electric lamp factory was opened (1) by Thomas Edison in 1880 and the first rectangular television tubes were manufactured on the same day sixty-nine years later.

Although refrigeration was in use at the turn of the century, it wasn't commonplace, but that was due to change when Acme Refrigeration (1) was incorporated in 1959.

Quite a bit of land changed hands this month, too. Alexander the Great increased his empire (1) by defeating Darius III of Persia (now Iran) in the battle of Arbela in 331BC and Spain ceded Louisiana to France via the Treaty of San Ildefonso on the same day in 1800.

Still on the same day, with the help of T E Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Damascus for the Allies in 1918, while thirty-one years later Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.

T.E. Lawrence

 

Eleven years after that (1), the British Empire was being given away - notably Nigeria and Cyprus gained their independence.

 
That favourite place for philatelists, the Gilbert Islands, lost the Ellice Islands when they took the name Tuvalu (1) in 1975. Independence occurred in 1978. Tuvalu means “group of eight” – there are eight inhabited islands in the group. In 2000 Tuvalu leased its internet domain name “.tv” for fifty million dollars (until 2012).

Four years later to the day – 1979 - America too gave back land, returning sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama. The canal was purchased by the US while Theodore Roosevelt was their charismatic president. In 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt was shot by a saloon-keeper (14) but even with the flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his scheduled speech.

Of course teddy bears were named after Roosevelt.

Another kind of bear cropped up in 1926 when A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (14) was first published.

 
An earlier landmark in the publishing of a continuing character was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published (31) in 1892.

A similar publishing phenomenon is Ian Fleming’s James Bond; Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose exploits were the inspiration for the famous spy, died (14) in 2003 while coincidentally on the same day in 1927 the movie Bond Roger Moore was born.

Further to the magic of movies, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was born in 1961, perhaps appropriately on Halloween. Thirty-two years to the day later, Federico Fellini, the Italian director died. Magician Harry Houdini died the same day in 1926 after his appendix was ruptured. Houdini and Conan Doyle were acquainted; the former debunked spiritualists, while Conan Doyle believed in them.

 

The magic of Broadway was heightened by the great composer Leonard Bernstein, who died (14) in 1990 while two famous British singer/actors were born on the same day (1) - Julie Andrews in 1935 and Stanley Holloway in 1890.

So there’s probably something to celebrate among that little lot! You could even sing Celebrations! Cliff Richard was born (14) in 1940 but they don't know in which attic he keeps the painting. (Oscar Wilde was born in October too [1854] but two days later than Cliff).