Summer meant harvest. Even troops were released to help farmers reap the harvest. Yet, much of the farmland had itself been disturbed by bombs. Normal planting and the crop cycle had been disrupted by the war. There was little manure and no artificial fertilizers. The fate of the ship bringing seed potatoes has already been described, and the replacements from Cyprus produced a lean crop. Most of the goats on Malta, Gozo and Comino had been killed, along with any poultry and the wild rabbits.
The poor diet was taking its toll. The worst affected women and young children, Maltese and British, were evacuated by air to Cairo aboard two bombers. This was a risky venture, but the planes got through and those doctors and nurses waiting for them in Egypt were appalled at their condition.
Malta was once again dependent on the large minelaying submarines for supplies, augmented by the fast minelaying cruiser HMS Welshman, capable of making a 40-knot dash, carrying fuel and other urgent supplies on what became known to the Royal Navy as the ‘Club Runs’. The air link with Gibraltar could carry only limited supplies, and of course the aircraft were dependent on the runways being clear. The big problem with air transport at this time was that the aircraft, converted bombers, had to bring with them the fuel for their return flight, limiting the weight of supplies that could be carried.
If the news wasn’t bad enough, on 21 June, Rommel’s Afrika Korps took Tobruk. The airfields in North Africa could be added to those of Sicily in menacing Malta. Rommel had at a stroke captured 1,400 tons of petrol, 2,000 serviceable military vehicles and 5,000 tons of provisions, as well as large quantities of ammunition. His supply problems might not have been solved forever, but they had at least been relieved. The day after, he was promoted to Field Marshal.
The victory may have been Rommel’s undoing. It seemed that nothing was impossible for him and his troops, and that the British were defeated. Instead of using the breathing space afforded by a great victory to consolidate his position, ideally by invading Malta, that thorn in his side, he decided to head for Egypt and the Suez Canal. Rommel forgot his claim a year earlier that Malta had to be occupied. He bypassed the Italian High Command, who were strictly speaking his superiors, and approached Berlin direct. Militarily weak, the Italians had to accept that Malta would have to wait, and that the objective was to be Egypt.
The summer and autumn of 1942 saw Malta surrounded by minefields that could not be swept as the Luftwaffe attacked the minesweepers. In North Africa, Rommel’s advance eastwards continued, so much so that Mussolini moved to North Africa and set up his headquarters at Derna in Cyrenaica. Il Duce was ready and waiting to make a triumphal entry to Cairo. He even procured a white stallion and had a sword, modelled on those carried by the crusaders, specially made.
It was at Derna in June that Kesselring tried to inject a note of realism into the ambitions of Mussolini and Rommel. The fighter pilot pointed out that the enemy’s position had vastly improved, while the Afrika Korps was being dragged further from its bases and overextending its supply lines. He also drew attention to the growing aerial superiority of the British. Kesselring advised that Rommel’s advance should stop at El Alamein.
Rommel had not been present at the meeting, so Kesselring and the rest of the combined German and Italian High Command visited him shortly afterwards at his forward field headquarters at Sidi Barrani. Strangely, Rommel admitted that his troops were short of both petrol and water, ‘but we cannot stop for that’. These were the two most vital commodities for desert warfare. Rommel’s enthusiasm infected those at the meeting, with the exception of Kesselring.
Rommel’s overstretched and under-supplied troops spent July struggling with the British Eighth Army. The results were inconclusive, but it was clear that an early victory was unlikely. Disappointed, Mussolini returned to Italy.
Gort continued his predecessor’s practice of broadcasting to the Maltese people. He had addressed them on 16 June to tell them about the failure of the two convoys.
‘If the enemy failed in his main purposed, he succeeded in part of it,’ the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Edward Jackson, explained in a radio broadcast on 20 June.
He has delayed the arrival of our much needed supplies, and as His Excellency the Governor has told you, a time of further privation, greater privation than we have known hitherto, lies ahead of us . . . We received about 15,000 tons of stores from the two ships which arrived. That is something and certainly a help, but it is a very small part of what we had hoped for . . .
I have said that in examining our position, we first calculated the time for which our bread could be made to last. That calculation gave us a certain date which I shall call the ‘Target Date’, the date to aim at. Our next task was to see how we could make our other vital necessities last to the Target Date.71
On 2 August, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and War Cabinet Member, General Sir Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, flew into Malta on his way to visit Egypt. He not only saw for himself the plight of the islanders, but also briefed Gort on the plans for a major offensive against the Axis in North Africa. This was undoubtedly a morale booster for Gort and Jackson, since Malta would cease to be a beleagured outpost, and would become a springboard for the assault on the enemy.
Brooke had served under Lord Gort during the Battle of France. His visit to Malta was by way of Gibraltar, where he had toured the defences. His War Diaries recall the trip.
For the next hop it was essential to reach Malta before dawn, otherwise there were chances of being shot down by Italian fighters . . . I was especially anxious to visit Gort in Malta as I knew he was in a depressed state, feeling that he had been shoved away in a corner out of the real war, and in danger of his whole garrison being scuppered without much chance of giving an account of themselves. His depression had been increased by the fact that he insisted on living on the reduced standard of rations prevailing on the island, in spite of the fact that he was doing twice as much physical and mental work as any other member of the garrison. Owing to the shortage of petrol he was using a bicycle in that sweltering heat, and frequently had to carry his bicycle over demolished houses.
I wanted to tell him about the plans for a new command in the Middle East with an advance westwards combined with American-British landings in West Africa moving eastwards, destined to meet eventually. I wanted him to feel that if all this came off he would find himself in an outpost of an advance instead of the backwater he considered himself in. I felt certain that to be able to look forward to something definite would do much to dispel his gloom.72
Brooke’s flight from Gibraltar took six-and-a-half hours. Learning from experience on earlier flights, he had borrowed some ear plugs to protect against the noise of the aircraft engines, and was able to snatch some sleep. He woke to find that the aircraft was bumping badly, and his first reaction was to assume that they had flown into turbulence, but instead the aircraft was landing on Malta in the dark. He was taken to Gort’s house where he slept. Meetings with the senior service officers on Malta followed.
‘ . . . After lunch we went to the docks and to Valletta,’ he wrote.
The destruction is inconceivable and reminds one of Ypres, Arras, Lens at their worst during last war. We travelled about in Admiral’s barge and examined wrecks of last convoy. Finally examined new dock workshops that have been mined into the rock. Had tea with Admiral in charge of the docks. 5 air raid alarms during the day, but no serious bombing. Finally at 10.45 before we were to start a German plane came over, but did not remain.73
Brooke then continued on to Cairo, a seven-and-a-half hour flight. His visit to Malta had been worthwhile.
The conditions prevailing in Malta at that time were distinctly depressing, to put it mildly! Shortage of rations, shortage of petrol, a hungry population that rubbed their tummies looking at Gort as he went by, destruction and ruin of docks, loss of convoys just as they approached the island, and the continual possibility of an attack on the island without much hope of help or reinforcements.74
Interesting to note what Brooke did not say in his War Dairies. This was a man who did not suffer fools gladly, in fact he did not suffer them at all! His criticisms of those he met were often damning. He gave praise to few, although one of these was later to be Cunningham when he took over from Pound as First Sea Lord. Gort seems to have escaped the withering criticism, and no doubt Brooke played a part in obtaining for him an appointment later as Governor of Palestine, no doubt meant as a compliment, but for Gort it was probably a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’.
Malta’s situation was indeed serious. Top secret plans for surrender had already been prepared, but to maintain morale, these were known to few. The target date really did mean a surrender date.
As the target date drew near, in August, 1942, a final all-out effort was made to fight supplies through to the beleagured population of Malta. This was the convoy known to the British as ‘Operation Pedestal’, but to the devout Maltese, it was to be the ‘Santa Marija Convoy’, as it was due to arrive on 13 August, just two days before the feast day of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. The lessons of the recent past were not lost, and this convoy had naval air power in abundance, and what is more, higher performance aircraft in the shape of the Sea Hurricane and the Martlet.
The Sea Hurricane was the naval variant of the Hawker Hurricane and the first attempt to give the Fleet Air Arm the high performance aircraft it needed. That the Hurricane prototype had made its first flight in 1935 shows the lack of urgency that had been given to making good the deficiencies of the fleet! The Sea Hurricane first entered service with the Fleet Air Arm in July 1941, and the aircraft were all basic conversions from RAF standard machines fitted with arrestor hooks, without folding wings so that not every carrier could operate these aircraft because of the limitations on wingspan imposed by some carrier lifts. The lack of folding wings also severely limited the number of aircraft that could be accommodated. The Hurricane had two advantages over the faster Spitfire, of which the Seafire variant had folding wings. It had a tighter turning radius, always an important feature for a fighter, and it was easier to repair, again important with the limited number of aircraft that can be carried aboard ship.
Better still in many respects was the Grumman Martlet, as the Fleet Air Arm liked to call its Wildcats early in the war. Here at last was a purpose-designed high performance naval fighter, designed for the rough life of carrier operations. First flown in 1937, it entered FAA service in September 1940. Designed for the United States Navy, the Martlet had folding wings. Its retractable undercarriage was mounted under the fuselage, giving a narrow track, so that in rough seas the aircraft appeared to ‘dance’ from one undercarriage leg to the other!
Despite the substantial escort and the new aircraft, this was a large convoy of fourteen merchant vessels since heavy losses were expected, for Malta’s smallscale port facilities could not cope with anything like fourteen merchantmen at one time. The escort, designated Force Z, was commanded not by the more usual commodore, but by Vice Admiral Syfret with the two powerful battleships Nelson and Rodney, sister ships nick-named ‘Rodnol’ because of their supposed similarity in appearance to tankers, with a superstructure well aft and all nine 16-inch guns in three turrets all forward. The large ships could not be risked in the confined waters of the Sicilian Channel, so the convoy would actually be taken into Malta by Force X, under Rear Admiral Burrough. There were no less than four aircraft carriers. The veteran Furious, the world’s first aircraft carrier when she joined the Royal Navy in 1918, carried Supermarine Spitfire fighters to reinforce Malta’s air defences. The other carriers were part of the convoy escort and included the elderly carrier Eagle, and the new Victorious, a true sister of Illustrious, and even newer, Indomitable, a modified variant of Illustrious. Finally, there were no less than seven cruisers, Force Z’s Sirius, Charybdis and Phoebe, as well as Nigeria, which was to be Burrough’s flagship, Manchester, Kenya and Cairo, and thirty-two destroyers, of which eight would be protecting the carrier Furious and her valuable cargo of fighters, as well as towing vessels. A supply force would accompany the convoy, known as Force R and consisting of two tankers and three corvettes, with a tug. Additional protection came with the creation of a submarine patrol line south of the Italian island of Pantellaria with six boats, while another two were placed off the north coast of Sicily at Cape St Vito and Cape Milazzio.
Aboard Victorious were sixteen Fairey Fulmar fighters as well as five Sea Hurricanes and, for anti-submarine and reconnaissance work, twelve Fairey Albacore biplanes, supposedly an improvement on the venerable Swordfish but in fact disliked because of its poor reliability. Indomitable had nine Grumman Martlet and twenty-two Sea Hurricane fighters. Eagle had twenty Sea Hurricanes. Although working as an aircraft transport, Furious carried four spare Albacores for Victorious.
The strains of war were already beginning to show, and an early indication of the poor strategic position of the Axis powers can be gathered from the fact that the Italian Navy was confined to port by fuel shortages. The Germans were keeping all of the fuel to themselves, and in the Mediterranean they had E-boats and U-boats as well as the Luftwaffe.
On 10 August, the convoy left Gibraltar with its escort, with its presence immediately reported by a Spanish airliner flying to North Africa, and the following day the Axis attack started. An attack by Junkers Ju88s at 10.00 was warded off by the carriers’ fighters, while the RAF from Malta and the USAAF from the UK bombed three airfields in Sardinia, destroying twenty-two enemy aircraft. At 12.29, Furious launched thirty-eight Spitfire Vs towards Malta, and of these just one aircraft failed to get through. The carrier Eagle was hit by four torpedoes from U-73 at 13.15 on 11 August. The old carrier, a converted battleship that should have been retired had not war intervened, immediately started to list to port. Within four minutes she had gone. Despite sinking so rapidly, just 160 of her ship’s company of 953 died, but many survivors had to spend hours in the water before a destroyer could risk stopping to pick them up. The old ship would be missed by those in Malta because she had flown off 183 fighters to Malta on several ventures into the Western Mediterranean.
Later, at 20.45, thirty-six Luftwaffe aircraft from Sardinia attacked. After a peaceful night, twenty Luftwaffe aircraft attacked at 09.15, followed at noon by a combined force of seventy Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica aircraft. That afternoon, at about 16.00, a destroyer found and sank a U-boat. Three hours later, another combined strike hit the convoy, this time of a hundred aircraft, sinking a merchantman and so badly damaging Indomitable that those of her aircraft in the air had to be recovered onto the crowded decks and hangars of Victorious. The Sea Hurricane could cope easily with the Ju87 Stuka, but was a poor match for the faster Ju88.
‘The speed and the height of the Ju88s made the fleet fighters’ task a hopeless one,’ wrote Syfret. ‘It will be a happy day when the fleet is equipped with modern fighter aircraft.’
The day hadn’t finished: at around 20.00, twenty Luftwaffe aircraft attacked, sinking the cruiser Cairo and two merchant vessels, as well as damaging the cruiser Nigeria and three other ships, including the fast oil tanker Ohio, American-owned but on this occasion British-crewed. One merchantman, the Deucalion, was so badly damaged that she had to make for the coast of Libya. As darkness fell, E-boats attacked, sinking five ships and so damaging the cruiser Manchester that she had to be sunk later.
The Italians now attempted to use their new weapon, the Motobomba FF, a motorized bomb dropped by parachute, which started its engine once it had contact with water, and then drove in a circle with a radius of around fifteen kilometres in an attempt to hit a ship. Fortunately, it had little effect.
At 08.00 the next day, 12 August, twelve Luftwaffe aircraft from Sicily struck at the convoy, sinking another ship and battering the Ohio still further. At 11.25, fifteen Regia Aeronautica aircraft attacked. By now, the battered Ohio with her highly flammable cargo was ablaze and her master gave the order to abandon ship. The ship remained stubbornly afloat, so before they could be picked up, they reboarded her.
Meanwhile that day, the destroyer Foresight was so badly damaged that she had to be sunk by another destroyer, Tartar. Later, Force Z turned back to Gibraltar, leaving the convoy with the last, and most dangerous, thirty-six hours of its passage to Malta. Later, amidst heavy air attacks, the Empire Hope was set on fire before being sunk by an Italian submarine, while the Glenorchy was sunk by a torpedo from E-31. Badly damaged by a torpedo, the Brisbane Star was given makeshift repairs by her crew, and then headed south in search of shelter. Clan Ferguson, carrying ammunition, was hit by an air-dropped torpedo, and set on fire, before being sunk by another Italian submarine. Three more merchant ships were sunk that night in the E-boat attack that had also sunk the cruiser Manchester.
On 13 August, the main body of the convoy, just four merchant ships, finally reached Grand Harbour, but the Ohio had to be taken alongside a warship and helped into Grand Harbour two days late, on 15 August. She was lucky, for another straggler, the Dorset, was sunk by dive-bombers.
In Malta, the heavy aerial activity off the coast and the presence of patrolling Spitfires over the approaches to the Grand Harbour confirmed what the Malta rumour mill had been predicting; a convoy was close. Those waiting on the walls of the bastions strained their eyes, looking far out to sea. Then a ship was spotted, and the crowds broke into loud cheers. As she drew closer, they could see that she was a battered merchantman, the Melbourne Star. Then another ship appeared, the Rochester Castle, followed a little later by the Port Chalmers. The ships received a tumultuous welcome from the crowds lining the walls, and another warm welcome awaited the Ohio when she arrived two days later, with those present marvelling at how this blackened wreck could have remained afloat.
The cost had been considerable. Nine merchantmen were sunk or forced to withdraw, as well as an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer. There was serious damage to the Ohio, two aircraft carriers and two cruisers. Yet, the five merchant ships that reached Grand Harbour were spared any further attacks, at a time when they would have been most vulnerable, despite the efforts of the defenders, waiting to unload at Malta’s very limited port facilities. The Ohio gave up her cargo of oil, with her oil tanks being emptied and their contents replaced by sea water so that she wouldn’t break her back, and then afterwards, she slipped beneath the waters of Grand Harbour. She was refloated, but the damage was so great that she eventually broke her back whilst at her moorings. She was made watertight and the two halves were used as floating stores. It was impossible to repair the ship and after the war ended, the two halves of the Ohio were towed out to sea to provide target practice for a destroyer’s gunners. The aft portion sunk quickly, but the buoyant forward section lasted a while longer before reluctantly slipping beneath the waves.
Her master, Captain Dudley Mason had been taken to hospital after arriving in Malta, but he recovered and was later awarded the George Cross.
The convoy had come just in the nick of time. Malta had had just thirteen days of supplies left when the first ships entered Grand Harbour.
A month later, on Sunday 13 September, 1942, Lord Gort finally found the time and the opportunity to make the presentation of the George Cross to the people of Malta, on whose behalf the award was received by the Chief Justice, Sir George Borg, in a ceremony in Valletta. The ceremony was also attended by the Archbishop of Malta, Dom Maurus Caruana, and the Bishop of Gozo, Monsignor Michael Gonzi, later to be Caruana’s successor as Archibishop of Malta, and whose anti-British sentiments had proved to be an unjustified slander. There were others there too, for amongst the crowds, representatives of all walks of Maltese life were present, representing Maltese women, dockyard workers, farmers, the military, telephone exchange workers, the rescue services and so on. Before presenting the medal, Gort read out the citation, written in George VI’s own hand.
Afterwards, Gonzi asked for a repeat ceremony in Gozo, knowing that few of his flock would have been able to travel to Valletta. Gort agreed instantly, and promptly offered to do it the following Sunday.
The air raids in October 1942, reflected Malta’s strength rather than that of the Axis, with fourteen bombers escorted by no less than ninety-eight fighters.
It was to be some months before the war in the Mediterranean reached the turning point, the defeat of the Italian and German armies at the Battle of El Alamein which started on 23 October with a thousand gun barrage and ended on 5 November with Rommel retreating into Tunisia. The start of the offensive caught the Germans ill-prepared, with Rommel absent, convalescing in Austria, and their difficulties were not lessened when, on the very day that Montgomery’s offensive started, the Malta-based submarine Umbra found the supply ship Amsterdam, 8,670 tons, carrying tanks and motor vehicles for the Afrika Korps and sank it with her torpedoes. Victory at El Alamein marked a further step forward, removing German pressure on the Suez Canal, which had been threatened at one point with Rommel’s forces just eighty miles from Alexandria.
When would the next convoy arrive? An answer was not long in coming the Axis forces in North Africa were not simply being rolled back in what might be yet another swing of the pendulum, they were on the road to defeat. The beginning of November showed the way the war was going, as within days, on 8 November, victory at last appeared possible with the successful Allied landings in North Africa. Vichy French resistance did not last long – it could not since their fuel and armaments position was precarious. The Afrika Korps risked being squeezed.
Fears that Malta might be forgotten in the excitement of the new advances were unnecessary, as the small country once again assumed a vital strategic role as the RAF in Malta saw its strength rise to 200 front line aircraft, half of them bombers. A new airfield was constructed in great haste near Qrendi, known as Safi, and opened with great ceremony on 10 November by Lord Gort, while Air Vice Marshal Keith Park landed the first aircraft on it. From that day, until 23 November, Malta-based aircraft kept up an unending series of attacks on airfields in Sicily, and on that day, with just thirteen days of supplies left, a convoy of four merchantmen sailed into Grand Harbour, the Stoneage Convoy, the first to reach the island unmolested since June 1940. The siege was lifting.
That day was also memorable for Park, who was awarded the KBE.
Nevertheless, all was not well as the New Year dawned. The food situation was much improved, but the many ailments that had arisen due to malnutrition and the absence of soap and other washing and cleaning materials, were still there. Scabies was still rife, and the usual remedy, sulphur, didn’t seem to have much impact. Then in January, a new dread appeared, acute poliomyelitis, striking hardest at children so that it was popularly known as infantile paralysis, often killing, and for those spared, it usually maimed for life. Places of popular entertainment that had remained open during the worst of the blitz were now closed to prevent the dreaded infection spreading unchecked.
Nevertheless, there was more good news from North Africa, with the fall of Tripoli on 23 January.
The final air raids on Malta came on 26 February 1943, with the Regia Aeronautica sending one bomber that approached the coast just before daybreak, but did not cross it, followed in the evening by a few fighters attempting a quick hit and run raid. All in all, the Maltese had seen 1,597 killed in the air raids, another 1,818 seriously injured, and less serious injuries to another 1,889. Yet, the figures for the dead and wounded do not give the true picture of wartime casualties in Malta. The poor diet took its own toll over and above the official casualties, with the most seriously affected being the very young, the very old, and the infirm. To take the worst year, 1942, infant mortality was 345.15 per thousand, meaning that more than one baby in three, 2,336 babies, under the age of one year died. At the other end of the scale, elderly people died at 31.97 per thousand. Together these cruel statistics meant that the population fell for the first time on record by 1,835. This, after all, was in a devout Roman Catholic country with a high birth rate.
The worst damaged place in Malta was Senglea, which had all but ceased to exist. This dockyard town suffered eighty per cent of its buildings destroyed, and the other twenty per cent damaged so badly as to be uninhabitable, with the streets impassable because of the rubble.
No less than 547 British aircraft had been lost in the air battles over and around Malta, with another 160 lost on the ground, but the Germans and Italians had between them lost 1,252 aircraft over Malta, with another 1,051 probables.
The British started to increase their air power in Malta, but other units were rotated out of Malta to join the Eighth Army in North Africa. Rations had been increased following the arrival of the August 1942 convoy, Operation Pedestal, but the Devonshires for one found the going tough, as after some leave in Egypt, they started training as a commando battalion, ready for the assault on Sicily.
‘I think that we ate more than the stomach could reasonably accept in those days,’ Norman Travett remembers of his arrival in Egypt.75
Now the Maltese had to rebuild their country, and also welcome the many visitors who wanted to see for themselves how they had fared. Their old friend Admiral Andrew Cunningham was among the first, as was Admiral Harwood, and then Air Marshal Lord Trenchard, the father of the RAF, and from further afield, Archbishop Spellman of New York. Then, on 20 June came King George VI, Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Malta Artillery. On a warm sunny day, so much like that June day three years earlier when war had broken out, the cruiser Aurora steamed slowly into Grand Harbour with His Majesty on the bridge wearing the tropical No.1 uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. At a signal from the bell of Fort St Angelo, a general salute was fired not by the guns of the Royal Malta Artillery, but by the church bells of Valletta, Cospicua, Senglea and Vittoriosa, determined to show that they were still standing. Loud cheers followed from those on the bastions and on the harbour front, and from those in the many brightly coloured dghajsas.
After inspecting a guard of honour provided by the Royal Malta Artillery, the King proceeded to the Governor’s Palace where he presented a Field Marshal’s Baton to Lord Gort, while Gort in turn presented Monsignor Gonzi to the King, explaining his role in saving Malta from starvation.
A new understanding of Gonzi meant that British objections to his becoming Archbishop of Malta in succession to Caruana were lifted, and not only did he become Archbishop on the death of Caruana, he was also awarded the honorary rank of a major general in the British Army.
The King then embarked on the expected round of inspections of the various service units on Malta, and, just as he had done so often in London, he also saw the effects of the blitz and met those who had suffered so much. He saw the tunnels, many of them with names such as Petticoat Lane or Lambeth Walk, he saw the shrines and chapels underground, and he saw just why Malta had so deserved the George Cross.
Now Malta went beyond simply taking the offensive to the enemy, and became a base for the first invasion of enemy-occupied Europe. The RAF’s combat strength in Malta trebled to 600 aircraft, the ships entering Grand Harbour brought not just fuel and provisions for the Maltese and for British units based on the island, but also the tanks and artillery needed for an invasion, and for this there were the landing craft, so much more efficient and effective than the barges that the Germans and Italians would have used for an invasion of Malta.
Now, it was not Malta that would be invaded, but a much larger island. The invasion was not long in coming, in July 1943, after which Malta was no longer in the front line. This time, however, in contrast to the situation after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Malta was not to become a backwater. Not only did British ships, and especially the aircraft carriers, bound for the British Pacific Fleet use Malta to work up as they passed through the Mediterranean on their way to take the war to Japan, but the post-war world brought a massive realignment in strategy with the onset of the Cold War. For most of those years, until the end of the British presence in the late 1970s, Malta was on the frontline of the Cold War with a NATO headquarters just outside Valletta at Floriana.
On 9 July 1943, the invasion convoys for Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily gathered to the east and to the west of the island. The Eastern British Task Force had 795 vessels with 715 landing craft under the command of Vice Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, while to the West lay the Western Naval Task Force under the US Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, with 580 vessels and 1,124 landing craft, as well as three convoys with the 45th, 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, the 2nd Armoured Division and the 1st Canadian Division. The degree to which the Allies had aerial and naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, can be gathered by the fact that, out of all these ships, just four ships and two LSTs, landing ships tank, were lost to submarine attack. A far worse opponent was the weather, with a storm developing during 10 July, but nevertheless, it was decided to press ahead in the belief that the Italians would not expect an attack in such conditions. The date was exactly a year after the date set by the Germans for the invasion of Malta.
General Kurt Student, who would have led the invasion of Malta, wanted to counter-attack with his two paratroop divisions, but this was refused. Eventually, his 1st Parachute Division was dropped in Sicily to defend a bridge leading into the Plain of Catania – one of the first British units they faced was the 231 Brigade from Malta, one of the units that had expected to repel an Axis invasion!
On 3 September that year, Allied forces crossed from Sicily into mainland Italy, and Air Vice Marshal Sir Keith Park formally marked the end of Malta’s place in the front line by presenting Faith, the sole survivor of the three Gloster Gladiators, to the people of Malta, choosing once again the Palace Square in Valletta where a year earlier the George Cross had been presented, and once again the recipient on behalf of the Maltese people was Sir George Borg, the Chief Justice.
There was more to come. On 8 September, people flocked to Senglea for the popular feast of Our Lady of Victories, which had signified the defeat of the Turks in 1565 and which was, by coincidence, the titular feast of Senglea. The atmosphere was charged with optimism, and the usual procession with the statue of the Lady of Victories passed the usual church, now in ruins, and headed for the church of St Philip, taking the place of the parish church. The crowds followed the statue into the church, with many having to stay outside. The joyful babble of the crowd faded away into a respectful silence, when suddenly there was a disturbance, and the parish priest in his vestments was seen running to the pulpit. All eyes turned to him, and he seemed to find it impossible to speak at first, but he struggled and then out came the message and there was never a more welcome pronouncement from that pulpit: ‘My brethren, rejoice,’ he shouted. ‘I have just had the news, Italy has surrendered.’
There was a stunned silence for the briefest of moments, then the people inside the church exploded in a roar of shouting that spread like wildfire through the crowds outside, then the bells started to ring, first in Senglea and then throughout Malta, giving the ultimate all clear!
Two days later, the crowds who so quickly assembled on the bastions to see ships enter port, saw twenty-eight warships approach the Grand Harbour, but this was no convoy, but the van of the Italian Navy, anchored outside. During the week that followed, the number of ships increased to sixty-five. Cunningham signalled the Admiralty:
Pleased to inform their Lordships that the Italian battle fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta.
Cunningham would not be with the Mediterranean Fleet for much longer. The following year he would become General Eisenhower’s naval deputy, but in October 1943, still higher demands were placed on him, as he became First Sea Lord, taking over from the ailing Dudley Pound. By that time, Allied naval supremacy in the Mediterranean had been re-established.