CHAPTER 7 •••
GLADIATORS
O
ne hundred and forty years of freedom from aggression had ended for Malta on June 11, 1940, as more than forty Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 trimotor bombers, escorted by about two dozen Macchi MC.200 fighters, appeared over the glistening Mediterranean at 6:49
A.M.,
coming from three airfields on Sicily. The bombing was somewhat surreal, as excited boys climbed onto rooftops to watch while old women cowered under their beds and prayed. Hot splinters of shrapnel rained down on the streets, whizzing softly as they fell, and the boys ran to retrieve them as if they were arrowheads, not knowing that they would have 3,340 more opportunities in the next 1,185 days to collect shrapnel souvenirs.
The sea breeze carried the acrid aroma of cordite from guns and bombs. Soldiers from the Royal Malta Regiment fired rifles with wild optimism at planes flying two miles high. Windows in Valletta rattled to booms from the big guns on the old monitor HMS
Terror,
moored in Grand Harbour to bolster the shore defense. Dirt roads leading away from Valletta were jammed until midnight with stunned families scurrying into the country with their belongings stacked in horse-drawn carts and teetering wheelbarrows, diving for cover from the bombs that fell during a second attack in the evening.
Many of the 369 bombs that fell that day—250 kilos, 100 kilos, and some 20-kilo incendiaries—fell at random, on a hospital, a convent, a school, a hotel, a cinema, a Turkish cemetery. Thirty civilians were killed and 130 wounded, and 17 more died the next day from their injuries. Among those killed in the morning were Antonia Furrugia, twenty-five, her children Ninu and Joe, five and four, her niece Josephine, three, and the baby she carried in her womb. Charles, eighteen months old, was the only one of the children to survive.
The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, had announced his declaration of war on Britain the previous evening, shouting it from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome in a speech broadcast live by Italian state radio and heard all over Malta.
“We have only one watchword,” he said. “This word is already in the air and is burning in Italian hearts from the Alps to the Indian ocean: Conquer!
“People of Italy! To arms! Show your tenacity, your courage, your worth!”
“Il Duce” was fond of calling the Maltese his “blood brothers” and had promised that he would free the Maltese from their yoke of British colonialism and return them to what he said was their rightful ethnic fold. He promised that if he bombed the island, it would be with flowers. Win their hearts and minds. He presumed he would be hailed as a liberator by the people of Malta and that the conquest would take mere weeks. But like Napoleon, he failed to account for the Maltese people’s depth of fortitude, let alone their perception. Sixty percent of the Maltese might have been illiterate, but they weren’t dumb.
They spat “blood brothers” back in his face. The Maltese could tell the difference between shrapnel and flower petals. They could see it in their dead and wounded children, beginning the first day of the siege that would last more than three years.
Malta had been worried about an attack or invasion from Sicily for five years. Civil defense brigades patrolled the streets, and Boy Scouts stood twenty-four-hour watch over the sea at the edges of the island. Because Mussolini had used mustard gas to speed up his conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936, Maltese families learned how to suit up in gas masks and gloves, armed with buckets and brooms. There was even a special baby gas mask, designed to enclose the entire infant.
British ambivalence about the defensibility of Malta had slowed the plan for arming the island with antiaircraft guns. On the first day of the siege, there were less than half as many guns as there were supposed to be. Eleven months earlier, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had promised Malta 112 heavy and 60 light antiaircraft guns, but only 34 and 22 had been delivered, adding to the 24 old three-inch guns that had been installed during the Italian assault on Ethiopia. And none of the planes that had been earmarked for Malta was anywhere near the island.
“I think more fighters for Egypt and a fighter squadron for Malta are both urgent,” Admiral Cunningham had told the Admiralty. “Malta is of immense value to us, and everything possible should be done to minimize the damage that Italian bombers may do to it.”
Cunningham and Churchill believed that Malta should be held at all costs, but, said Cunningham, “The Army and Royal Air Force did not take the same view. Malta, they considered, could not be held and defended against continual air attack from Sicily, and possible invasion.”
Since Churchill wasn’t a dictator, he couldn’t make all things happen by mandate, and he wasn’t a magician, so he couldn’t create materials out of thin air. He also had a lot on his mind, namely, other fronts to worry about. And when Malta was attacked, he had been prime minister for only a month.
Governor William Dobbie had been assigned to Malta on April 28, 1940, just six weeks before the bombing began. His belief in God’s will was fatalistic and sometimes fanatic, although the devout Catholics of Malta might not have thought his faith was extreme. A Scottish Protestant, he led after-dinner prayer meetings and Bible readings, and was held in awe by the islanders for his striding through falling bombs as if he were protected by a divine shield. While others dived for shelter, Dobbie stood on walls to get a better view, secure that God was by his side.
“Through the goodness of God, I had learned to know something of His grace and power long before I reached Malta,” he said. He offered evidence at his prayer meetings of how the Bible spoke to Malta; he saw himself like King Jehosaphat being attacked by the Ammonites and Moabites:
Humanly speaking, the situation was desperate, and little hope appeared on his horizon. He, likewise, spoke to God, and implored His help. God’s answer was one we may still take to heart today: ‘Be not afraid, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.
These and many other instances recorded in the Bible were naturally a tremendous encouragement to me, and I believe, to many others in Malta. They so exactly fitted our case that we might have thought that they had been expressly written for us.
The antiaircraft fire on the first day of the siege was more abundant than accurate. No planes were shot down, but Italian pilots reported a “curtain of fire” around the island and said that some twenty British fighters had challenged them. But there were only three little Gloster Gladiator biplanes. For the first two weeks of war in the sky over Malta, the overachieving Gladiators were the island’s entire air force.
The RAF had sent a commanding air officer to Malta, without airplanes to command. The AOC, the New Zealander “Sammy” Maynard, had been a World War I flying ace and was a “quiet, able, thorough and determined man with none of the flashy trappings and film-star swagger of many high-ranking officers determined to blaze a meteoric career for themselves across the dark sky of war, according to
Faith, Hope and Charity
.”
Ten crated Gladiators had been accidentally left behind on Malta in April, when the aircraft carrier
Glorious
had hurriedly left for Norway, after Germany invaded that country. Maynard asked Admiral Cunningham if he could save four of them for his newly formed Malta Fighter Flight, and it was done. The Admiralty wanted the planes for other fronts, but Cunningham persuaded the dubious First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, that Malta was worth four obsolescent biplanes, at least. The Admiralty later sent instructions for the Gladiators to be crated back up and shipped to the Middle East. But, said their ace pilot George Burges, “The admiral more or less told them to take a running jump.”
AOC Maynard kept one of the four Gladiators on the ground in reserve, and there were only six pilots in Malta Fighter Flight anyhow, with three on duty at one time. The three planes that took to the air against impossible odds became known as Faith, Hope, and Charity. The miracle-working mechanics who kept the planes airborne called them Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
But they were worth it. Sometimes the SM.79 bombers—known as “flying buffalos” for the humps over their fuselages—turned and ran when they saw the Gladiators coming. The sight of one of the little biplanes chasing a flying buffalo lifted Maltese spirits. With a top speed of just 250 miles per hour at 14,000 feet, the Gladiators were slightly slower than the SM.79s but chased them anyhow. And they were more than 100 mph slower than a diving MC.200—called Saetta, or “lightning bolt”—but they could virtually pivot in the sky and thus outmaneuver the fast Italian fighters.
There wasn’t enough fuel for the Gladiators to patrol in the air, and because it took them nearly seven minutes to climb to 15,000 feet, the pilots sat in the cockpit on the ground waiting for the next raid, in order to save the two minutes it would take to run to their planes and strap in. Sometimes they sat for hours in triple-digit heat, until hemorrhoids became a problem for the pilots, who already suffered from the Malta Dog.
The pilots of Malta Fighter Flight were cheered wherever they went. They were the new Knights of Malta. All of them were volunteers from among the few flying RAF personnel on Malta in April. None of them had flown a Gladiator before.
Flight Lieutenant George Burges, who would score three kills and three probables to earn a Distinguished Flying Cross, had been AOC Maynard’s personal assistant, performing clerical chores; he had gone from being a pencil pusher to “Il Ferocio,” as the Maltese called him.
Peter Keeble drove his Fiat Topolino flat out from the Hal Far airfield to his apartment on the coast, where he went sailing with his pretty wife, Lorna. Timber Woods was the lone wolf, a superstitious Irishman who feared only the color green. Peter Hartley escaped the stress of combat on his farm with pigs and chickens. The baby of Malta Fighter Flight, Pete Alexander, was high-strung on the ground but indifferent to danger in the air, and was the first of a long line of Canadians who would fly fighters from Malta.
The commanding officer, Jock Martin, was stereotypical RAF, with a handlebar mustache growing over a pipe, a rowdy sense of humor, and a sidekick bull terrier (until the dog walked into a Gladiator prop). Long in the tooth and battle-scarred, he walked with a limp from a crash in a Fairey Gordon, a biplane bomber they called the “Beast” because it was so big and slow.
Amazingly—miraculously, the Maltese would say—all six pilots survived the impossible odds against Faith, Hope, and Charity; although Hartley was burned over most of his body when Charity’s eighty-gallon gas tank was hit by machine-gun fire from a Fiat CR.42 biplane in July. He dived headlong out of the plane with his khakis on fire, and was rescued from the water.
On July 16, Flight Lieutenant Keeble was killed flying a Hurricane. That morning he had received a letter informing him that his brother, also an RAF pilot, had been shot down and killed. His final words before climbing into his plane were “I want to get one of those bastards today.”
Peter Keeble—handsome, fearless, and hotheaded—was the first RAF pilot to die over Malta. The pilot of the CR.42 that hit him followed him in, crashing within a hundred yards of the Hurricane. Keebler had gotten the “bastard” who had shot him down.
CHAPTER 8 •••
FROM NELSON TO CUNNINGHAM
T
hirteen days after Italy attacked Malta, France capitulated to Germany, an act that turned over 1,300 miles of North African coastline, including Tunisia and Algeria, from the Allies to the Axis. Overnight, allies became enemies. One day the French and British sailors were drinking pals in Alexandria bars; the next day their commanders, Cunningham and Vice Admiral R. E. Godfroy, were facing a battle between the fleets at point-blank range in the harbor. Admiral Cunningham dramatically and creatively solved the standoff in the desperate eleventh hour, ignoring impatient and demanding cables from Churchill; much to the relief of both fleets, Godfroy finally agreed to disarm, discharge fuel, and disembark 70 percent of his men.
A Scot raised in Ireland, Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham was called “ABC” or “Cutts” by his men. He drove a car as if he thought he were Tazio Nuvolari, the Italian Ferrari driver who raced at the ragged edge; and he was known to occasionally flick a butter ball across the table with his spoon. He was generally irascible and sometimes short-tempered, and at age fourteen had been called “Meatface” for his “love of a scrap,” as he was reminded by a classmate in a congratulatory letter when he took command of the Mediterranean fleet, based in Alexandria.
Cunningham’s warships were outgunned and his submarines vastly outnumbered by those of the Italian Navy. But, he said, “We never gave a thought to the strength of the Italian fleet. We were perfectly confident that the fleet we had at Alexandria could deal with them if they chose to give battle.”
As Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister of foreign affairs, wrote in his diary on June 28, 1940, “The fighting spirit of His British Majesty’s fleet is quite alive, and still has the aggressive ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the seventeenth century.”
Like Nelson looking all over the Mediterranean for Napoleon in the summer of 1798, “Meatface” was itching for a scrap with the Italians. On July 7 he sailed from Alexandria with three battleships, five cruisers, seventeen destroyers, and the venerable aircraft carrier
Eagle,
headed to Malta to escort four ships carrying noncombatants (including his wife and two nieces) back to Alexandria. But on the first morning at sea he received a report from the submarine
Phoenix,
which had spotted six Italian warships about two hundred miles east of Malta, so he went after them. By the time he found them the next afternoon, off the southern coast of the toe of Italy, the Italian fleet had grown to two battleships, twelve cruisers, and too many destroyers to count. But that didn’t stop Cunningham from attacking. The encounter at Calabria was the first sea battle between British and Italian fleets in history.
Cunningham commanded the convoy from his flagship, the battleship
Warspite,
whose fifteen-inch guns scored a heavy hit on the battleship
Giulio Cesare—
“at the prodigious range of 13 miles”—and the Italian fleet retreated. “I suppose it was too much to expect the Italians to stake everything on a stand-up fight,” he said, with a touch of disappointment.
Admiral Inigo Campioni, the Italian commander, had called for air support, but his bombers didn’t arrive until after he had retreated, and then they attacked the Italian ships.
Churchill wasted no time in using the Battle of Calabria to push for more arms for Malta.
“A plan should be prepared to reinforce the air defenses of Malta in the strongest manner with AA guns of various types and with Air planes,” he wrote on July 12 to General Lord Hastings “Pug” Ismay, his chief of staff and secretary of the imperial defence. When a foot-dragging reply came back from the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Dudley Pound, Churchill replied with a testy message: “We must take the offensive against Italy, and endeavor once again to make Malta a Fleet base for special occasions.”
Admiral Pound, who was Cunningham’s superior in the chain of command, wasn’t convinced that Malta was worth saving. He asked Churchill to consider evacuating Malta and conceding the entire central and eastern Mediterranean, which would have meant abandoning whatever and whoever was left on the island to the Axis. Cunningham was told to start thinking about a withdrawal plan. “If it had come to pass it would have been a major disaster, nothing less,” said Cunningham.
The nagging issue of aircraft for Malta was ongoing. When eight Hawker Hurricanes landed at Luqa airfield to refuel on their way to Egypt, Malta’s commanding air officer, Sammy Maynard, snatched five of them, with their pilots—“impressed” was the word used to describe what might also be called “shanghaied.” The pilots were trained to simply ferry the Hurricanes, not fly them in combat, but this was war. None of them liked it. Some survived, and some didn’t.
Churchill knew the value of Hurricanes to Malta—their 324-mph top speed could match that of the fastest Italian fighters. Even with the Battle of Britain beginning at this time, he asked the Admiralty, “As we have a number of Hurricanes surplus at the moment, could not the Malta Gladiator pilots fly the Hurricanes themselves?”
Admiral Cunningham had been putting pressure on the First Sea Lord as well, and the Admiralty finally gave in. On August 2, 1940, a dozen Hurricanes were officially sent to Malta, flown off the ancient aircraft carrier
Argus
from 380 miles away. They buzzed Malta in two formations, with the roar of their 1,280-horsepower Rolls-Royce V-12 engines stopping hearts; but when people realized that the powerful planes were on their side, they danced in the streets. One Hurricane crashed when it hit a bomb crater on Hal Far airfield upon landing, and two more were destroyed on the ground in an air attack forty-eight hours later, but nine new arrivals were better than none.
The pilots thought they would be going back to England the next day, to fight the Luftwaffe over London in the Battle of Britain; but again, Sammy Maynard “impressed” them. They were angry about having to stay in that hot hellhole Malta, doomed to dust, hunger, and dysentery like the rest of the islanders. But they would get their chance with the Luftwaffe over Malta soon enough.