The George Cross for Malta

On 15 April 1942 King George VI wrote a short letter at Buckingham Palace to the Governor of Malta, Lieutenant General William Dobbie: “To honour her brave people I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history.” Dobbie replied: “By God’s help Malta will not weaken but will endure until victory is won.”

The award came in the worst week of the siege. The island was being bombed several times a day, its harbour had emptied after the departure of the last surface warships, and its stocks of food, fuel and ammunition were dwindling. For the first time so high a British award for gallantry had been given not to a person or a unit but to an entire island – its roughly 270,000 inhabitants and the garrison defending it.

A decoration born in the Blitz

The George Cross was a young decoration. George VI announced its institution on 23 September 1940, in the third week of the German raids on London, when news arrived daily of the courage of firemen, rescue workers, bomb-disposal men and ordinary citizens, and the existing civilian awards did not fit. The royal warrant was dated 24 September 1940; alongside the cross the lower-ranking George Medal was created. The cross was awarded for “acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger”, to civilians and to servicemen, but for deeds for which military gallantry awards are not given. In precedence it stood beside the Victoria Cross, the highest British award for gallantry in the face of the enemy.

Awarding the cross to a whole island was exceptional. For several decades Malta remained the only collective holder of the decoration. Only in 1999 was the George Cross awarded to the Northern Irish police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and in 2021 to the National Health Service.

April 1942 on Malta

From 20 March Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s II Air Corps (II. Fliegerkorps) waged the heaviest air offensive of the entire siege against the island. After the disaster of the March convoy, whose ships were sunk off Malta or burned in harbour, the bombs fell above all on Grand Harbour, Valletta and the small towns around the docks, and also on the airfields, where they destroyed the first Spitfires on the ground. According to Maltese figures, in April 1942 alone there were 282 raids on the island and more than 6,500 tons of bombs were dropped. The often-repeated claim that more bombs fell on Malta than on London during the Blitz needs explaining: about 18,000 tons fell on London over the whole Blitz, but in April 1942 more than a third of that amount fell within a single month on an island smaller than a fifth of the area of Greater London. The density of bombing was thus incomparably greater.

On 7 April bombs destroyed the Royal Opera House in Valletta. On 9 April a bomb pierced the dome of the Rotunda of Mosta, where several hundred worshippers were praying, and failed to explode. According to Maltese figures about three hundred civilians were killed in April alone. The inhabitants of the harbour towns moved to the villages or spent whole days in shelters cut into the soft limestone and in old railway tunnels.

Hunger was becoming more dangerous than the bombs. Only a small part of the March convoy’s cargo had reached the island, and the next convoy could not be sent until June. Food, kerosene and soap were rationed, and fuel was reserved for the military. From January 1942 the authorities opened communal kitchens, soon known as Victory Kitchens, which served modest hot meals – the first was set up at Lija, and in the following months the network was extended across the whole island. Anti-aircraft ammunition was also short, and according to the defenders’ accounts on some days the guns could fire only a few rounds.

To whom the cross was awarded

The words of the letter were carefully chosen. The King did not decorate the garrison or the governor, but the “Island Fortress of Malta” and its “brave people”. The Maltese were not merely victims of the raids in this war. Soldiers of the Royal Malta Artillery manned a large proportion of the anti-aircraft and coastal batteries, and volunteers of the King’s Own Malta Regiment guarded the beaches and airfields. Workers at the naval dockyard repaired ships in docks that were the bombers’ main target, and after the raids Maltese and British soldiers filled in the craters on the runways so that the fighters could take off again. The police, air-raid precautions volunteers and the clergy dug out people buried in the rubble and organised life in the shelters.

At the same time the island was a British colony in which part of the elite had sympathised with Italy before the war, and in February 1942 the authorities deported to Uganda without trial several dozen interned Maltese suspected of sympathising with the enemy. The award to the entire population was therefore also a political gesture: it emphasised that the Maltese and the British stood on the same side.

A governor at the end of his strength

William Dobbie, a Royal Engineers general and a devout member of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren, had governed the island since the spring of 1940. In the first months of the war his calm, religious bearing had heartened the defenders, but by the spring of 1942 he was exhausted and ill, and mutual recriminations over delays in unloading ships were growing within the island’s administration. In London, meanwhile, the view was already taking hold that the island needed a new master. Still in April, Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to replace Dobbie with the Governor of Gibraltar, General Lord Gort. Gort flew into Malta on 7 May 1942, bringing the cross with him.

The formal presentation was postponed, because the island could not afford to gather a crowd under the bombs. It took place only on 13 September 1942, after the August convoy Operation Pedestal had got through, in the ruined Palace Square in Valletta, in front of the Grandmaster’s Palace. Gort handed the cross in a glass-fronted case to the Chief Justice, Sir George Borg, who received it on behalf of the people of Malta.

Place in the war

The George Cross had moral and political significance. For the Maltese it was proof that their sufferings were seen in London; for the British, an obligation. The British naval historian Eric Grove observed that after such a gesture Malta could not be allowed to fall as Singapore had fallen two months earlier, and that the fighting in North Africa in 1942 was waged as much to hold Malta as Malta was held to support the army in Africa. The British government also commissioned a propaganda film, Malta G.C., with footage of the bombed island.

The hardest months still lay ahead. In May new Spitfires wrested air superiority from the Luftwaffe, but the hunger lasted until August, when the remnants of the Pedestal convoy reached Grand Harbour, and the siege was ended only by the Stoneage convoy in November 1942. On 28 December 1943 an image of the cross was placed on a blue canton in the corner of the flag of Malta. When the island became independent on 21 September 1964, the blue field was removed, and the cross, edged in red, remains on the national flag to this day. The cross itself and the King’s letter are kept by the National War Museum at Fort St Elmo in Valletta, and Malta is still sometimes called “the George Cross Island”.