May and June 1940 were blazing, July thundery. Fortress Gibraltar sweltered, waiting for war’s Donner und Blitzen to split the sky. The Battle of France was lost, and with the German air force now bombing ships in the English Channel and strafing south coast towns, the Battle of Britain was just beginning.
‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation,’ Winston Churchill declared on 18 June. ‘Upon it depends our own British life … and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.’ On 14 July, Churchill added: ‘We await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week … We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock, or … a prolonged vigil.’
The Battle of Britain was also the battle of the British Empire. The Dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa – the Indian Raj and Burma, as well as the Colonial Empire of fiftyodd crown colonies, dependencies, mandates, overseas territories and protectorates, which included the faraway Gilbert and Ellice Islands as well as Guyana, the Gold Coast and Gibraltar, had all rallied to the mother country in September 1939 and joined in declaring war on Germany. Only Ireland/Éire, a self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations, chose neutrality. The distinctive Rock of Gibraltar, three miles long and 1400 feet high, hanging off southern Spain by a sandy isthmus, was a tiny but significant part of the empire, waiting to do its duty. As the last Allied toehold remaining on the continent of Europe, everyone knew that the Rock would be a target for attack, but no one could say how, when or where it would come. Insect-buzzing aircraft had passed in daylight reconnaissance, and early one morning some bombs had been dropped harmlessly in the sea. But the sound of droning aeroplanes in the middle of a summer night was unusual, ominous. The air-raid sirens sounded. Was this it, then? Was the match about to kick off at the western end of the Mediterranean?
In the early hours of Thursday 18 July 1940 a full moon silvered the Sphinx-like profile of the Rock. All except the uniformed men on duty were indoors or at home during the curfew from 11.30 p.m. to 5.30 a.m. As the siren wailed, young John Porral, in his cotton summer pyjamas, went downstairs with his sister to the ground-floor sitting room of their house on Main Street. The aeroplane engines crescendoed above and the upward searchlight beams criss-crossed nervously, searching for a target so the anti-aircraft ‘ack-ack’ guns could pump explosive shells up into the sky. The gunners were not wholly proficient at this, having only practised in daylight with limited ammunition on drogues, known as ‘sleeves’, towed behind old-fashioned biplanes. The novelist Thackeray once called Fortress Gibraltar ‘this great blunderbuss’, but it was now somewhat rusty, and the Rock clogged with supernumeraries.
Two months earlier, the military authorities had ordered the decks cleared of all ‘useless mouths’ – the dismal phrase for civilians who were too young (under sixteen), too old (over sixty) or too female to be combatants. The great exodus had begun well, with the first shipload of women and children leaving Gibraltar on 21 May 1940. The nearest and safest place for non-combatants was thought to be the French Empire in North Africa, and so thirteen thousand Gibraltarians had been compulsorily evacuated by ship to Casablanca in Morocco. Then the evacuation plan was forced into reverse, so Gibraltar was again packed to the gunwales with returned civilians.
These ‘chattels of the military, slaves of the fortress’ were a small part of larger wartime movements of people. ‘Evacuation’, as the British Cabinet Secretary drily remarked, ‘is becoming our greatest national industry.’ The German Blitzkrieg made millions of Europeans refugees, and over half a million Allied soldiers had to be rescued by the Royal Navy as Britain’s main ally, France, surrendered.
The Fortress braced for its first bombing in this new Great War. But whose bombers were heading for the Rock? Which air force was about to drop its ordnance? At that moment of history, in the middle of July 1940, there were multiple possibilities, because Gibraltar was confronting not one but four potential enemies.
*
First among them was Nazi Germany. The attacking aeroplanes might be from the German air force, whose northern cohorts were now probing British airspace. Adolf Hitler’s armed forces had already conquered Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands. France had capitulated to Nazi Blitzkrieg on 22 June, and the Wehrmacht had parked their Panzers at the Pyrenees, with some officers crossing the Spanish frontier to celebrate in the hotels of San Sebastián. The German military was familiar with Spain: nineteen thousand volunteers from das Heer, die Luftwaffe and die Kriegsmarine had served there with the Condor Legion between 1936 and 1939, helping Franco’s Nationalist rebels to win the Spanish Civil War.
The peninsula of Gibraltar lay five hundred miles south of the nearest German airfield in occupied France. Perhaps this night raid was the first step of a coming German attempt to rub out the British enclave and close off the mouth of the Mediterranean. The Germans had been intriguing in Morocco for four decades and their espionage in the area was proficient. If controlling the Strait of Gibraltar was the next step in the Führer’s strategic push westward across Europe, tonight’s exploratory raid might be followed by a full artillery ‘stonking’, Stuka dive-bombing and parachutists dropping from the sky, as had worked so well in the German invasion of the Low Countries.
*
The second possible enemy was Fascist Italy, which had joined the war only five weeks before. Eighty thousand Italian regulars and Fascist militiamen had served on Franco’s Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Benito Mussolini wanted a new Roman Empire in the Mediterranean – ‘Mare Nostrum’, ‘our sea’ – and the Italian navy was developing new kinds of submarine to attack the British fleets that controlled its surface and its exits. Mussolini had declaimed: ‘The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez’, and on 9 June 1940 he wrote to Franco, ‘In the new reorganisation of the Mediterranean which will result from the war, Gibraltar will be returned to Spain.’ When he declared war the next day, the Fascist leader said: ‘We want to break the territorial and military chains which are strangling us in our sea.’ Italian aircraft immediately started bombing British Malta, carrying out more than fifty air raids in June 1940. Perhaps a raid on Gibraltar in the west presaged the Italian fleet breaking out into the Atlantic to help the Germans throttle British sea lanes.
*
Gibraltar’s third possible enemy was its next-door neighbour: Falangist Spain. Spain was brutalised and impoverished by the three-year civil war that had left a million dead and tens of thousands jailed or exiled. The date of the bombing attack, 18 July 1940, could be significant. It was the fourth anniversary of General Franco’s military uprising. Perhaps Franco was abandoning his country’s peculiar status of ‘non-belligerence’ to join forces with the ‘Axis’ of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the same totalitarian powers which had helped his military coup d’état against the elected Spanish Republic. He had declared the Rock a legacy of the fifteenth-century Queen Isabel la Católica, which it was Spain’s ‘duty and mission’ to recapture. When Britain’s new ambassador had arrived on 1 June, Falangists shouting ‘¡Gibraltar español!’ had mobbed the British Embassy in Madrid.
Franco’s military had indeed been working on a secret plan to take back el Peñon de Gibraltar, mapping the entire peninsula through photographs in order to direct artillery fire on all its installations and defences. From 1939, up to fifteen thousand Republican prisoners of war, organised in ‘Disciplinary Battalions’, had begun slave labour, widening roads and building gun sites in the Spanish hinterland north of the Rock, el Campo de Gibraltar. The Spanish said publicly that the ‘southern border fortifications’ conducted by General Pedro Jevenois were purely defensive, but admitted privately that ‘the planned use of artillery has the clearly offensive aim of destroying the English garrison’. The British press and parliament had been worried for some time about ‘Guns over Gibraltar’, the heavy artillery gun barrels pointed straight at the peninsula.
*
Gibraltar’s fourth potential attacker was Vichy France. The military defeat of the French Third Republic in June 1940 had been a tremendous shock to the British as the bulwark on which Allied defence relied fell apart like wet cardboard. France’s huge army, navy and air force, with more than enough guns and tanks and ships and planes to match the Germans, had disintegrated. The western part of France was now occupied by German troops, and the new right-wing government of l’État français, established in the spa town of Vichy, was collaborating with the Nazis.
On 3 July 1940, British Royal Navy ships from Gibraltar had been ordered by Winston Churchill to bombard the French fleet in Algeria to stop its battleships falling into German hands. This desperate action killed nearly 1300 French sailors and started a blood feud between the former allies. Admiral François Darlan, the head of the French navy, who already resented the Royal Navy for killing his great-grandfather at Trafalgar in 1805, was enraged, and on Bastille Day, Sunday 14 July, persuaded his new president, Marshal Philippe Pétain, to strike back. Smiting the treacherous English would be a pleasure as well as a duty.
Following the killing of the French sailors at Mers-el-Kébir, life had been made intolerable for the Gibraltarian evacuees so recently arrived in Vichy France-controlled Morocco. The British refugees were expelled from French territory in the filthy holds of cargo boats that had just brought back to the Maghreb thousands of not very clean French soldiers who favoured Vichy rather than Charles de Gaulle’s Free French.
This was why, from 10 July 1940, up to twenty-two thousand Gibraltarian civilians, women, children, aged and infirm, chattering away in Yanito, their Rock Spanish idiolect, were back home again in Gibraltar’s narrow streets, crammed hugger-mugger wherever they could fit in spaces not yet requisitioned by the military. Their menfolk – insultingly dubbed ‘Rock Scorpions’ by the soldiers – had had to make a mass demonstration, threatening the governor with paralysing strikes, before he allowed their families off the beshitten boats bringing them back from Morocco.
*
At two o’clock in the morning of 18 July 1940, bombs started dropping from a pair of aircraft whose identities were unclear. No one was quite sure whether they were German Heinkel He 111s or Italian Piaggio P.2s or French Glenn Martin 167s, although the targets of the air raid were most likely the high-ranking British admirals based at Gibraltar. Since the late eighteenth century, Royal Navy flag officers had occupied a large house with extensive grounds off Europa Road on the western slope of the Rock overlooking the dockyard, the bay and the strait. This shuttered house, the Mount, was guarded by Royal Navy personnel and was well known to all visiting dignitaries and naval attachés. The pilots were probably aiming to kill or wound Admiral Sir Dudley North, Flag Officer Commanding North Atlantic Squadron, and his colleague Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, the Commander-in-Chief of Force ‘H’.
Bombing was imprecise in 1940. A ‘surgical strike’ was as likely as a successful operation with a lump hammer. The only military fatality of the first air raid on Gibraltar was Gunner Percy Leonard, a twenty-year-old serving high on the Rock with 4 Battery, Royal Artillery, who now lies buried in the North Front cemetery. Although a stick of bombs did run up Gibraltar’s western slope, the Royal Navy’s villa was unscathed. One bomb missed the northern gateway and guardhouse of the Mount by a few yards. It shot through the downstairs wall of 13 Europa Road, which was the home of the Loreto Convent School, founded by Irish nuns from the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The projectile exploded by the school laundry. The body of seventy-one-year-old Sister Lorcan O’Connor, a blameless, smiling nun who had spent fifty years of her life teaching in Gibraltar and was now awaiting re-evacuation to England with her schoolgirls, became lodged in the rafters: a fireman called Sheehan had to bring down the remains. Two more wounded nuns, Sister Milagrosa McGovern and Sister Thomas More Devaney, were taken to hospital. Nearby, rescuers found more ‘collateral damage’ among the innocent: the corpses of the school’s caretaker-cum-gardener, Luis Dallia, and his wife, Maria.
Who did this? On balance of probability they were Vichy planes on a vengeance mission for the sinking of the French ships. The Germans had too far to fly, the Italians were occupied elsewhere and the Spanish would not have dared. But whoever struck that first blow, in July 1940 the Rock of Gibraltar was threatened on four sides by imperial powers, and not too well protected by the fifth, Great Britain.
The paradox of bombing is that it often stiffens resolve rather than breaking morale. John Porral, sitting it out in the downstairs shelter of his home in Main Street, was now even more determined to join the Gibraltar Defence Force. Although he would not turn seventeen until mid-September, he and his friend Hector Sheppard-Capurro soon went together to Fortress Headquarters in Line Wall Road to sign up and get into uniform. Their fathers had served together in Sam Browne’s Cavalry in the First World War, and were now honorary aides-de-camp (ADCs) to the governor. When the aeroplanes came back in full force in late September 1940, the boys would be serving the pair of three-inch twenty-hundredweight ack-ack guns that the Gibraltar Defence Force had hauled and manhandled high up to the top of Signal Hill. The two young Gibraltarians would do their bit defending the Rock.