Malta under the bombs

War chronologies record under 10 February 1941 that a critical period had begun for Malta: until the end of March the island was to be heavily bombed every day. This was not a single event on that day but a whole phase of the siege. After the attack on the aircraft carrier Illustrious and two weeks of raids on the Grand Harbour, which the Maltese called the “Illustrious Blitz”, General Hans Geisler’s German X Fliegerkorps set itself a new objective: not a single ship but the island itself as a base. Throughout February and March the Germans bombed the airfields and the harbour almost every night; by day the recently arrived Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters roamed over Malta, and aircraft dropped mines in the bays and harbour approaches. The handful of worn-out Hurricanes dwindled, British bombers and flying boats had to be withdrawn to Egypt, and the Italian convoys to Libya, then carrying the first German troops, passed Malta almost without loss.

That formulation needs some qualification. Malta experienced “daily heavy raids” in the strict sense in the second half of January and again in the spring. At the beginning of February the Germans changed their tactics: instead of large daylight bomber raids they came mainly at night, while by day for a time it was chiefly fighters that appeared over the island. The greatest weight of bombs fell on Malta only in April, and the hardest months of the siege came in the spring of 1942. February and March 1941 were nonetheless genuinely critical for the island’s defence – not because the bombs were heaviest, but because Malta very nearly lost its ability to defend itself in the air and to strike at the enemy.

X Fliegerkorps’s new tasks

X Fliegerkorps had arrived in Sicily at the turn of 1940 and 1941 to rescue its Italian ally after the defeats in North Africa. Hitler’s Directive No. 22 of 11 January 1941 gave it as its main task attacking the British fleet and shipping between the western and eastern Mediterranean. At the beginning of February its orders were extended: the corps was to “neutralise” Malta, cover the transports sailing from Italy to Tripoli and attack the British in Cyrenaica. All three tasks were bound up with one another. In February convoys carrying the German 5th Light Division, the nucleus of the Afrika Korps, set out from Naples, and Malta lay right across their path. British submarines, torpedo bombers and bombers from the island could sink these transports – unless the island could be paralysed.

The corps’s strength grew rapidly. According to the British official history, based on German documents, in mid-February it had 243 aircraft, and at the end of March, at its peak, 443 (excluding transport aircraft). An ever larger share of them, however, had to support Erwin Rommel in Libya and cover convoys, while losses and wear on the aircraft mounted. The corps’s bases lay in Sicily – at Catania, Comiso, Trapani, Palermo and Gela – a quarter of an hour’s flight or so from Malta. Alongside the Germans, Italians of the Regia Aeronautica still flew over the island, often on the same raids.

Nights over the airfields

From the beginning of February night raids became a daily fact of life on Malta. According to the British official history, anything from a few to forty-odd Junkers Ju 88 and Heinkel He 111 bombers came over the island at a time. They did not arrive in close formation but singly, one after another, dropping their bombs from high or low altitude on various parts of the island. This method did little damage, but it allowed no sleep either to the inhabitants or to the anti-aircraft gun crews, who waited all night for the next aircraft. On moonlit nights the Germans bombed the airfields at Luqa and Hal Far again and again. From February aircraft also dropped mines in the Grand Harbour, in Marsamxett Harbour and on their approaches. For Malta’s small flotilla of minesweepers, sweeping became endless work.

The airfields were the heart of the island’s defence and of its offensive power. At Luqa, the largest, were based the twin-engined Vickers Wellington bombers of No. 148 Squadron RAF, which since the autumn of 1940 had been bombing Naples, Tripoli and the Sicilian airfields, as well as the Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft of No. 69 Squadron, the eyes of the whole British fleet in the central Mediterranean. Hal Far in the south of the island served the Hurricanes and the navy’s Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, and Ta’ Qali near Mdina, a former civil airfield renamed an RAF station in November 1940, served the fighters. In Kalafrana Bay lay the Short Sunderland flying boats of No. 228 Squadron, which patrolled as far as the Ionian Sea. All these aircraft stood on open hardstandings or in makeshift pens of drystone walls and sandbags, which the mechanics and airmen built and rebuilt after every raid largely by themselves.

On the night of 10–11 February – the date under which the chronologies place this entry – eight Whitley bombers from England took off from Malta and dropped 38 paratroopers of No. 11 SAS Battalion in southern Italy. Their task was to blow up the Tragino aqueduct near Calitri, part of the great water-supply system serving Apulia and its ports. This was Operation Colossus, the first British airborne operation of the war. The aqueduct was only partly damaged and all those who took part were captured, but the very fact that the operation could be mounted from Malta showed what the island meant to the British. To make room for the Whitleys during the preparations, five Wellingtons even had to be sent off to Egypt.

Messerschmitts over the island

The real turning point came with the fighters. On 9 February the 7th Staffel of the 26th Fighter Wing “Schlageter” (7./JG 26), equipped with new Messerschmitt Bf 109 E-7s and transferred from Belgium via Rome, arrived at the airfield at Gela in southern Sicily. It was commanded by Oberleutnant Joachim Müncheberg, a twenty-two-year-old veteran of the French campaign and the Battle of Britain, who already had twenty-three victories and the Knight’s Cross to his name. His pilots had fought over the English Channel throughout the summer and autumn of 1940. According to the British official history, German single-engined fighters appeared over Malta for the first time on 12 February. That day, south of Siġġiewi, Müncheberg shot down a Hurricane of No. 261 Squadron RAF.

No. 261 Squadron was then the only fighter squadron on the island. It had been formed in August 1940 by merging the Gladiator flight with the first Hurricanes, flown to Malta off an aircraft carrier during Operation Hurry. Its aircraft were mostly old Hurricane Mk Is, patched dozens of times and kept going with parts from wrecked machines, and without new engines and propellers their performance kept falling. Against the Bf 109 E they were slower at high altitude and climbed less well. The Germans could therefore choose when and from what height to strike, and then break away in a steep dive. Many British pilots on Malta, moreover, had no experience of fighting German fighters, and their warning and control by radar and the operations room were far weaker on the island than in England.

The consequences came quickly. One of the squadron’s best pilots, James MacLachlan, who in January had shot down several Stukas over the Grand Harbour and on 11 February received a bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), noted in his diary that the Messerschmitts “left us standing” and described the sagging morale among his comrades. On 16 February Müncheberg shot down MacLachlan himself. The wounded pilot baled out, but his left arm had to be amputated. He returned to combat in the autumn of 1941 with an artificial arm. Over the following weeks the Messerschmitts shot down Hurricane after Hurricane while suffering almost no losses. According to tallies cited in the literature, in four months in Sicily Müncheberg’s Staffel claimed forty-two victories, twenty of them credited to its commander, while losing very few aircraft itself. The Bf 109s also strafed anything that moved on the airfields.

No. 261 Squadron’s blackest day

At the end of February the bombers returned to daylight raids. Ju 87s and Ju 88s with a strong fighter escort again dived on the airfields, while the Bf 109s waited higher up for the Hurricanes that tried to intercept them. According to the British official history, in one of these raids six Wellingtons were destroyed on the ground and four damaged. The Sunderlands moored in Kalafrana Bay were also repeatedly strafed and bombed.

The heaviest was the raid on Luqa of 26 February. According to some accounts, nearly a hundred German and Italian aircraft came over the island, and eight Hurricanes took off to meet them. Three pilots of No. 261 Squadron were killed in the fighting: the ace Frederick Taylor, with seven victories, and P. Kearsey and C. E. Langdon. Taylor’s body was never found; the sea washed up only his life jacket, with a hole from a cannon shell. He was probably shot down by Müncheberg, who later recalled that the British pilot, though badly hit, was still trying to attack a German bomber. Luqa airfield was severely damaged that day.

Despite the losses, the defence did not give up. The Governor and Commander-in-Chief on Malta, Lieutenant General William Dobbie, had already asked London on 5 February for an additional battalion, because, although he could not assess the threat of a landing, he considered that a single reserve battalion was not enough for all its tasks – including supporting the police should the population’s morale break. Churchill insisted on sending two. They were brought from Egypt on 21 February by the cruisers Orion, Ajax and Gloucester, covered by the main body of the Mediterranean Fleet (Operation MC 8). The fears were not groundless: on 15 February Hitler ordered a study to be prepared for the capture of Malta, involving X Fliegerkorps, a parachute division and a seaborne landing division. Ready a month later, it was set aside when German attention shifted to Greece and Crete.

March: an island without teeth

On 5 and 7 March the Germans carried out particularly heavy raids on the airfields, above all on Hal Far. Afterwards the Air Officer Commanding on Malta, Air Vice-Marshal Forster Maynard, reported that he could not protect the Sunderlands and Wellingtons and with a heavy heart proposed withdrawing them. The RAF commander in the Middle East, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Longmore, agreed. In the course of March both squadrons flew off to Egypt. A few Marylands remained on Malta, left to watch the Sicilian airfields, the ports of Italy and Africa and the sea between them on their own. Surface warships could not be based on the island either, and Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s fleet was busy in those weeks ferrying the British corps to Greece. Malta’s offensive weapons at this time consisted, in effect, only of the small U-class submarines based on Manoel Island and a handful of Swordfish.

On 7 March Dobbie sent a personal telegram to the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal. He wrote that the attacks were growing ever heavier and that without more fighters of the best class Malta would lose its value as a naval and air base. He feared the effects of the unremitting strain both on the pilots and on the civilian population. Portal replied that he understood the gravity of the situation – Longmore had from the outset been under orders to treat the defence of Malta as his first duty – but that the possibilities were limited by transport, and Middle East Command had more and more commitments, not least in Greece. Longmore sent six Hurricanes each from Egypt to Malta on 2 and 14 March. According to some accounts, five Hurricanes and five pilots were lost in combat in those same weeks, so that the number of serviceable aircraft on the island rose very little.

The second of these deliveries was to cover the first supply convoy since the beginning of January. Four ships – three from Haifa and one from Alexandria – carrying coal, cement and food, slipped through unobserved thanks to a roundabout route and low cloud, and on 23 March entered the Grand Harbour. There, however, the bombs caught up with them: Perthshire was hit in the forward hold and City of Lincoln took a small bomb on the bridge. Even so, almost the whole cargo was unloaded. In March food rationing was introduced on the island. The authorities had delayed it because they wanted the inhabitants to see for themselves how heavily they depended on the infrequent convoys; already before that, however, wholesale allocations of sugar, fats, tinned meat, milk, coffee and matches had been restricted.

Life in the rock

For the quarter of a million inhabitants of the island, February and March 1941 meant life to the rhythm of the sirens. Alerts interrupted work by day and sleep by night, and yet the dockyard went on repairing ships, labourers patched runways and farmers worked tiny fields enclosed by drystone walls. After the “Illustrious Blitz” most of the inhabitants of the Three Cities next to the dockyard and a large part of the population of Valletta moved to relatives and to makeshift lodgings in the countryside. According to British estimates, by May 1941 nearly 60,000 people had left the towns around the harbour.

The island itself proved their salvation. Malta is made of soft limestone, which is easily cut and quickly hardens in the air; the same stone was used to build flat-roofed houses that resisted fire. Many families cut their own shelters in the rock beneath their houses or in the sides of valleys and spent their nights in them in conditions that the British official history calls “neither comfortable nor healthy”. People took refuge in the early Christian catacombs of Rabat and in the tunnel of the Malta Railway, disused since 1931, under Floriana and Valletta. The authorities, who before the war had protected mainly military installations, employed about two thousand miners and stonemasons to dig public shelters. The work went slowly, however, because the pay was poor, and when the miners threatened to strike they were threatened in turn with conscription.

Thanks to the rock and the shelters, casualties were lower than might have been feared. According to the British official history, in four and a half months of German raids, from mid-January to the end of May 1941, 184 civilians were killed and 191 seriously injured – nearly twice as many as in seven months of Italian raids (98 killed). The damage was far greater: according to the same estimates, more than two thousand houses were reduced to rubble in the first months of the German attacks. The deeply religious Maltese found support in the Church and in Governor Dobbie, a fervent evangelical Protestant whose deep faith and calm won him immense respect on the island.

Place in the war

February and March 1941 were the period in which the Axis came closest that year to the goal it had set X Fliegerkorps. Malta did not fall, but it ceased to be a hindrance. According to tallies cited in the literature, from January to April 1941 the Italians and Germans shipped more than 320,000 tons of supplies to Libya, of which less than 19,000 tons were sunk, and of nearly 74,000 troops 97 per cent reached Africa. By the end of March fifteen convoys had carried the German 5th Light Division to Tripoli, and on 31 March Rommel struck at the weakened British in Cyrenaica. Without the paralysis of Malta this first German success in Africa would have been much harder. British submarines from the island scored occasional successes in those months – on 25 February Upright sank the Italian cruiser Armando Diaz – but they could not make up for the lost bombers and reconnaissance aircraft.

The crisis passed in the spring, although at first the raids grew heavier still. On 3 April Admiral James Somerville’s Force H flew in from the carrier Ark Royal the first twelve Hurricanes of the newer Mk II version, and in April, May and June a total of 224 fighters took off from carriers for Malta, of which 109 stayed on the island. April brought the greatest tonnage of bombs, but X Fliegerkorps was by then exhausted: at the end of the month Geisler reported that he could not sustain such a rate of losses, and his units were leaving for Africa and the Balkans, where the Germans had attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. On 4 June the last German combat unit left Sicily. According to the British official history, from January to June 1941 the Luftwaffe lost 60 aircraft over Malta and the Regia Aeronautica 16, while the British lost 42 fighters. The study for the capture of the island was shelved when the same airborne forces were sent against Crete, and their heavy losses there put Hitler off similar undertakings.

In the summer of 1941 Malta once again became a base for attacks on Axis convoys, and in the autumn it inflicted very heavy losses on them. That was precisely what brought the Germans back. In December 1941 the Luftwaffe returned over the island under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, in incomparably greater strength than X Fliegerkorps, and in the spring of 1942 Malta endured the heaviest bombing in its history, for which in April 1942 King George VI awarded the whole island the George Cross. February and March 1941, however, had already revealed the pattern that was to govern the whole war in the central Mediterranean: whenever Malta was paralysed, supplies for the Axis forces in Africa flowed unhindered; whenever the island regained its strength, Rommel began to go hungry for fuel and ammunition.