History records the heroes of Malta who were fighter pilots; the fighter pilots thought that the ground crews who serviced their planes and the ‘pongos’ who filled craters day and night, with no relief from tension, no proper food and no sound rest, were the real heroes in the air battle of Malta.
When possible Malta-based bombers attacked Axis airfields, but losses were quickly replaced and the assault did not weaken. On 7 February there were sixteen alerts in twenty-four hours. One wag suggested that the BBC news report of raids against Malta would give a more accurate and concise account of what was going on by saying simply, ‘Last month Malta had six all-clears, one of which lasted for twenty-five minutes.’ Between the beginning of the year and 24 July the Maltese had known only one period of twenty-four hours in which there was no raid.
As the bombs fell day and night (14,000 tons of them) the Maltese people hid out in the ‘catacombs’, tunnels hollowed out in the rock. Above, flak rained down over Cottonera as the bombers came over the box barrage in wave after wave, doing their best to smash Grand Harbour and the air-fields at Luqa, Hal Far and Ta Qali. The civilians who remained near Grand Harbour lived in the galleries carved out of the rock by the Knights of Malta to accommodate their galley slaves or in the old railway tunnel, which by late 1941 had been equipped with tiers of bunks, electric light, radio, piped water and ablution blocks. Each tunnel had been given a street name and divided into numbered cubicles where postmen delivered the mail. People fell in love and married, babies were born and baptised inside the rock.
Some lucky people with houses on the perimeter of the bombarded areas dug themselves shelters below them, and equipped them with bedding and a few necessities. Here they could sleep all night in privacy, avoiding the terrifying scramble with sleeping children through the unlit cratered streets when the alarm sounded. Unfortunately, too many of these homemade shelters were too shallow to be safe, and more became sealed tombs when houses collapsed on top of them.
For the unlucky there were just the small neighbourhood shelters, low tunnels where the only air supply was from the doorway. During the raids the doorways were often jammed and the air supply became so fetid that the people’s candles guttered and went out. The space allotment was two feet per person. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the dark, women holding moistened handkerchiefs over their babies’ noses and mouths, as the limestone dust loosened by the bombing showered down on them, praying, praying hardest that their shelter would not become their tomb by collapsing on them or filling up with sewage or water from shattered pipes. The bomb-blasts sucked the air out of their lungs; many found they could not swallow. For some people the ordeal of the shelter was more terrifying than the prospect of death or maiming under the open sky. The British for their part maintained a foolish preference for ‘coolly finishing their drinks’ and defying the raids.
The Maltese noticed that no preparations were made to ready the underground shelters until after months of bombardment, that there was no money available for shelter improvement, for enlarging them or drilling ventilation shafts or providing facilities for disposal of sewage. They saw that there was no political will to improve their existence or to minimise the risks they ran. There was no pretence of keeping them informed, or consulting them. In 1941, conscription had been introduced to bring the Maltese regiments up to the same numerical strength as the British, 15,000 men; for some reason the Malts were paid less than the Tommies. The Maltese watched and learned and made their plans to unload the British once and for all when the agony was over. Through the fog of propaganda about Maltese loyalty the authorities sensed that the Maltese though stoical, cheerful and co-operative were disabused. Terse telegrams advised Whitehall that the Maltese were politically unsound. The only effect was an increase in bullshit parades, in pomp and panoply and martial music. When the remnants of the shattered convoys dragged themselves, or were dragged, into Grand Harbour, the watchers on the heights raised their massed voices and sang ‘Roll out the Barrel’, corny but it made them feel defiant and unbowed.
By 1942, thanks to Rommel, the British were totally committed to the defence of Malta but, despite their best attempts to relieve the garrison and beef up its fighting force, the situation continued desperate. The February convoy never got near Malta. Of the four ships of the March convoy only two made it to harbour. The Maltese dockers struggled to unload them in between raids in which both were badly holed and settled in the shallow water. A third ship was unloaded at a makeshift mooring on the southeast side of the island, despite the unremitting attempts of the Luftwaffe to sink it. The crews working day and night to refit damaged vessels could only watch helplessly as they were blasted at their berths in Grand Harbour, without even the protection of a smoke screen. When the all-clear sounded they would start patching up again.
Resistance had its usual reward; the old residential area of Floriana was flattened; the Inns of the Knights of Malta were destroyed, their Military Hospital was badly damaged. The opera house was burned out. The basilica of St Publius was reduced to rubble. In April, 10,000 Maltese buildings were destroyed or damaged; the shortage of housing was acute, even before preparations for Operation ‘Torch’ brought increased numbers of service personnel.
The British response was to devise a new tax on property owners with which to finance reconstruction, as well as continuing to collect estate taxes for destroyed property. People who inherited bombed property from owners who died in the bombardment were still expected to pay inheritance taxes. Compensation for personal injury was made at an insultingly low level. The British answer to accusations of niggardliness was simply that there was a war on. The Maltese could beef if they wanted to, the British were not listening.
A colonial officer might have been expected to sympathise with the Maltese, for he too was a nonentity in Churchill’s army. RAF aircrews were one-third colonials, and later in the war the proportion of colonials to British increased to almost half, but the Air Ministry kept no separate record of the colonial contribution. It was galling enough that the colonials kept their own pay-books and were to be given better rations than the British where possible. As far as the record was concerned they would all be called British.
The April raids came from all directions, three a day each lasting about an hour, making a total of the time spent actually under bombardment twelve days, ten hours and twenty minutes. The most Malta could marshall in defence were six fighter aircraft for each raid, four to engage the enemy, and two for airfield defence, to be sent up at the last moment to save petrol. Sometimes—only the AOC knew quite when—they had no ammunition, and had to fake it. Newly captured prisoners of war turned cocky, saying they weren’t afraid to fly over Malta any more, and would soon be rescued. The battle, they thought, was all but over. On the eleven days in April when there were no fighter planes operational, Malta’s only defence was the antiaircraft battery, which claimed 102 enemy aircraft destroyed in that dreadful month. The gunners were badly exposed as the enemy concentrated on the fringes of the airfields where the aircraft were held in their pens. Casualties were heavy. All services followed a policy of publishing only the enemy’s losses. The Maltese disbelieved what they read in the Times of Malta, and what they heard from the local radio relay. They had no other source of information besides rumour.
Churchill was acutely aware that Malta could not be allowed to fall. He was also aware that both military and civilians were near collapse. On 15 April the people of Malta, who had lived through nearly two years of hardship, short of food, often without light or heat, and even without water when bombs hit the mains, were awarded the George Cross. Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to give him the use of the aircraft-carrier Wasp to bring Spitfire replacements; three days later, they were all unserviceable, ‘spitchered’ on the ground. The disappointment was bitter; Malta began to prepare for invasion. The lull in the air offensive at the end of April and the beginning of May was taken to be the calm before the storm.
In fact the Ax
is was in no hurry to occupy the island itself which would have been costly to take. Considering Malta neutralised they turned their attention to supporting Rommel’s desert advance. If they had launched their invasion attempt then, the course of their war might have been very different. Appalled by the suffering of the Maltese, Governor Dobbie told Roger Strickland, head of the elected majority in the Council of Government, ‘Strickland, I cannot ask them to suffer any more than they have.’ The word reached London. Churchill sent Casey for a confidential first-hand report on the situation; Casey endorsed the recommended replacement of Dobbie by Viscount Gort, who arrived on 8 May. He was said to be more vigorous and enterprising; he was certainly afflicted with less ruth. The next day, sixty-four Spitfires were successfully delivered; this time they did not wait to be spitchered on the ground, but were immediately refuelled and armed and aloft ready to attack the raiders sent to disrupt the delivery. There were nine raids that day, some lasting more than an hour. For the whole day the air-crews stayed in the pens, flying the Spitfires in turns, while army and ground crews refuelled them from cans by hand, and re-loaded ammunition. At dawn the next day HMS Welshman docked with a cargo of ammunition, spare air-crews and spare engines. The battle of Malta was on again.
On 14 July, 1942, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Lloyd welcomed his replacement, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, who had flown in from AHQ Egypt in a Sunderland which landed during an air-raid. According to Park, as they travelled in the car from Kalafrana to Sliema, Lloyd puffed out his chest and said, ‘Now you will see how Malta can take it! Aren’t we brave?’ to which Park answered, ‘I think you are dumb. Why don’t you stop the bombing and get on with the war instead of sitting back and taking it.’ In fact the turn-around was due as much to the fact that Malta now had sufficient planes to mount the offensive as it was to Park’s ‘Fighter Intervention Plan,’ by which wave after wave of fighter planes was sent to attack raiders as soon as they took off from the airfields in southern Italy. Given the continuing shortage of everything, of fuel, planes, men and munitions, every raid had to produce a pay-off; good intelligence was an essential factor in the strategy. Park and Gort knew what Ultra could do. Ultra could both give them accurate information about enemy movements and supply phony information to the enemy about their own.
When on 25 July, 1941 (for example) ‘it was learned’ from Ultra that ‘a surface force was approaching’ the Vice-Admiral Malta chose Lieutenant Commander Carnes to decypher the Ultra information warning of the raid, telling him that ‘this was in fact information from an enemy spy in Naples’. The Malta Special Liaison Unit was evidently not then in place. As a result of the Ultra information, the Vice-Admiral ‘ordered all coastal gunners, including the Royal Malta Artillery, to stand-by, sleeping at their guns, ready at a moment’s notice to repulse any possible raid on the Grand Harbour’. As Ultra had not been able to give further details, the whole coast was watched, and the troops guarding possible landing beaches were put on alert. So the human torpedoes of the Decima Flottiglia MAS found the Malta batteries ready and waiting for them. The operational instructions captured with the boats made no mention of what to do when encountering resistance, so completely had the planners of the raid relied upon surprise.
If the Germans were surprised at the number of times raids were intercepted and bombers sunk and fighters strafed from above or out of the eye of the sun, they did not guess what lay behind the uncanny accuracy of the attacks. They did not suspect how few planes Malta had to send after them, or how short of fuel and ammunition the island was. Official explanations stressed the expertness and daring of Malta’s aerial intelligence gatherers and the excellence of their photographic reconnaissance. The truth behind the extraordinary losses that Malta’s tiny Spitfire force inflicted on an enemy vastly superior in numbers and firepower was not however ‘Malta’s eyes’ but Malta’s ears. To say this is by no means to detract from the well-deserved glory of the PR squadrons, who flew accurate and dangerous missions and brought back the goods. In order to protect Ultra, all Ultra information had to be verified from another source before it could be acted upon. The most obvious way of doing this was to fly an aerial reconnaissance sortie within sight of the target before attacking it. At last Ultra was being properly used.
The Maltese housewife had no idea that superior intelligence was coming to her aid. She found clean water for her family to drink, somehow washed and mended their clothes, ran the gauntlet of the black market and the rationing, queued for everything, husbanded the meagre fuel ration, and the firewood that she and her children could scavenge from the bombed buildings, and remained cheerful and patient even when scabies and fleas and bedbugs and sandflies made their lives a misery. By the autumn of 1942 when her children began to die, the possibility that she would mutiny should have occurred to the island’s leaders. One in three of the babies born in Malta in 1942 died before its first birthday. The death rate had leapt from 5,385 in 1939, to 8,603 in 1942. Pneumonia and other respiratory diseases acquired in the catacombs decimated a population that had been undernourished for months. In the autumn of 1942, as Reg Greer waited at Personnel Transit Centre No. 22, diphtheria swept through the shelters; 21 cases were recorded in the RAF itself. In July typhoid, caused by the seepage of sewage into the Ta Qali reservoir, which had been cracked by bombing, spread through from the Victory kitchens where food was prepared on a communal basis; the epidemic which raged until December afflicted 1,566 people of whom 202 died. Again. RAF personnel were afflicted in 23 cases. The most horrible epidemic, of polio-encephalitis, reached in to the heart of the officer corps of the RAF, crippling 28 men.
The most terrifying aspect of sickness in Malta was that the medical equipment that was in place before the war had worn out and not been replaced. Medical supplies were brought in by submarine but they were not adequate to cope with epidemic conditions. There was no penicillin until the end of 1942. A typhoid vaccination campaign was successful, but otherwise prognoses for the sick, even those suffering from relatively commonplace afflictions, were not good. One in eight of all the patients admitted to a Maltese hospital, civil or military, for any cause whatever in 1942 died. To the shortage of medicines and equipment was added the impossibility of maintaining hygiene given the chronic shortage of fuel and clean water. In 1942 the Maltese death rate jumped from 20 per thousand to 32 per thousand. If the extra 12 per thousand are thought of as war casualties, the number of Maltese war dead leaps from 1,500 to 4,500. Some authorities put the number of casualties much higher, in the region of 15,000, claiming that the Maltese did not always report deaths because they needed to draw the extra rations, especially given the niggardliness of the ration for larger families. One thing is certain, at the outbreak of the war the British did not know how many people lived on the islands of Malta and Gozo. Estimates of the population vary from 220,000 to 300,000.
The number of casualties civilian and military was played down all through the siege of Malta, nevertheless it was in actuality remarkably small given the scale of devastation. More people died as a result of disease and accident than as a direct result of enemy action. The only possible explanation for the fact that people were not killed during the rush to the shelters through the narrow entrance ways and down the uneven stairs in the dark is that the Maltese were aware of the feeble and young and the problems of women struggling with babies and toddlers and did not panic and trample the more slow-moving. It was a point of honour to walk to the shelter, not to run. It was in England, not in Malta, that, during a raid in March 1943, 178 people died of suffocation because a woman carrying a baby tripped and fell on her way into a shelter.
The Maltese themselves had another explanation for the low number of casualties. When on 9 April, 1942, a 500-kilo bomb fell through the roof of the crowded church in Mosta where three hundred people were waiting for the evening service of benediction, bounced off one wall, hit another, flipped down the sanctuary steps and slid the length of the floor before coming to rest by the west door, th
e people knew whom to thank for the fact that no one was hurt even by falling masonry. On the steps of the church lay another of the enormous bombs, it too unexploded. Two such coincidences equal a miracle. The Madonna herself, patroness of the church, had protected her devotees.
Reg Greer despised such mawkish superstition. He saw the priests moving among the people, consoling them, praying with them, calming them, and noticed only that they were sleek and well-fed compared to their hollow-eyed parishioners. He compared the wretched houses the faithful lived in with the sumptuous churches stuffed with tasteless gilding, and hated the priests whom he saw as the oppressors of the people, milking them of money they should have been using to feed, clothe, house and educate their children properly. Reg Greer was frightened of the people’s Malteseness, their poverty and their piety, their lack of respect for the values of clubland.
While enemy losses mounted, anxious telegrams to Whitehall warned that the Maltese were ‘now feeling the cumulative effect of shortage of food and domestic fuel’. Bread had been rationed from 6 May, at three-eighths of a ratal (ten and a half ounces) per head per day for all except men between the ages of sixteen and sixty who on working days could have half a ratal. The tenth submarine flotilla had been stood down for a much-needed rest and refit. Both the June convoys were attacked; one of them turned back to Egypt; of the other only two ships made it through from Gibraltar to Malta. Flour, fuel, ammunition were all in short supply. The situation was desperate, ‘exhaustion date’, as it was called in the secret telegrams sent to the Air Ministry, only weeks away.