(continued from KTB #113)

The Germans also doubted whether the Italian Fleet would be successful against the British Fleet. Hitler also stated that if Mussolini really meant business, why were the Italians not already bombarding Malta's Grand Harbour with their warships prior to a seaborne invasion. It should have been possible for the modern Caesar, Mussolini, as he laid claim to the Mediterranean in true Roman fashion as 'MARE NOSTRUM'. (HARRY's NOTE - means 'our ocean')

Hitler had tried to persuade Mussolini to withhold entry into the war at this moment, but the Italian leader was eager to lay his hands on the spoils of war and had determined to rush in as soon as it was clear that France was falling. Hitler little knew at that time how often over the years to come he would be called to the assistance of his ally in the south. Nor how much the weakness in that quarter would later distract him from other important theaters of the war.

While the British mocked and compared the Italian dictator's activities to a jackal's, the Germans cynically nicknamed their allies 'the Harvest Hands' for their entry upon the field at such a moment over the Mediterranean, which had hardly yet become a theater of war. The seeds of distrust between the Axis partners were already sown.

It was at five minutes to seven on that blue June morning, the 11th, when the first air raid siren of the thousands that were to follow, sounded over the island of Malta. The raid had long been expected for the island had been anticipating war ever since the Italian-Abyssinian crisis of 1935. As early as October 1935 the first mock air raid had been carried out on Malta's capital Valletta with dummy explosions, church bells winging as a warning, and public utilities turned off.

Even without the early radar that had been installed on Malta, the enemy raiders would soon have been spotted in that clear summer sky. Two small groups, ten planes in all of SAVOIA MARCHETTI Tri-Motor bombers with an escort of nine MACCHI fighters. Few enough for the first raid of the war. They were more like the gauntlet flung down to confirm the high words of Mussolini on the previous day. All 19 aircraft were from Sicily, only sixty miles to the north.

They came over at 20,000 feet in the conventional high-level bombing technique of the time, one that the Germans had already discounted having proved over Europe that it was low-level dive-bombing tactics that were accurate and at the same time, instilled the maximum amount of terror.

The flashes of sun on their silver fuselages and the mumbling rumble of their engines inspired an unknown fear among the watching population. Anticipation of pain, injury, loss - or death - is often worse than the reality which, when it occurs, must be somehow or other endured.

Then from far up, the high-whistling, thin screaming of the falling bombs began & the sound of anti-aircraft barrage - mute indeed to what it would become - reinforced by the guns of the old monitor TERROR and two China river gunboats, the APRIS and LADY BIRD moored in the harbour to aid the shore defenses, thundered on eardrums accustomed only to the sounds of island life. The war had begun.

On the first day of their war there were eight air raids on Malta. In the later raids, during the afternoon and early evening, 38 bombers escorted by 12 fighters invaded the sky that those beneath the bombs felt was Maltese. The last raid was the most unpleasant of all; but all of them were designed primarily to demoralize the population as well as cause damage to the dockyard installations and the air bases.

That there was no strong force of British fighters to rise to meet the raiders, or to be destroyed on the ground, was the result of a decision taken long ago by the Royal Air Force that Malta was indefensible in the event of war. Only four old Gloster GLADIATOR fighters - obsolescent if not obsolete - clattered up from Hal Far airstrip to the surprise of the islanders and to the alarm of the attackers, who had been incorrectly informed that no fighters were to be expected.

Gloster GLADIATOR

The last raid, at nightfall, was the heaviest and caused the most casualties. Almost all civilians, indeed through the day's raids, only a few soldiers were killed at their posts, and no guns were knocked out. The casualties were mostly among the families living around the dockyard, which was one of the most densely populated areas in the whole of Europe.

It was quickly established in those first raids that the solid limestone blocks with which most of the houses were built, combined with their flat roofs of stone, made them almost impervious to incendiary bombs and highly resistant even to high explosives. The island itself was little more than a Hugh block of limestone rising out of the sea, and it was this geological fact that was to contribute to its defensibility under later horrific bombardments, heavier and more intense than could ever be imagined. That the stone could be quarried easily meant that hundreds of tunnels would soon shelter its people resulting in a casualty rate almost unbelievably low when measured against the millions of tons of explosives rained down upon the island.

During the last engagement of the day, one of four Gloster GLADIATORS was destroyed. On the following day, June 12, one Italian reconnaissance aircraft flew over from Sicily to assess the damage caused by the first acts of war - it was shot down.

Mussolini may however, have remembered telling a British correspondent before the war, that his forces could destroy Malta in 48 hours. The Italian bombers had opened the siege of Malta and for two months, until reinforcements arrived from England, that valiant island fortress was defended in the air against wave after wave of attackers by three obsolescent Gloster GLADIATORS which came to be known to the islanders as 'FAITH' 'HOPE' and 'CHARITY.'

More Royal Navy

Submarines Sunk and the HMS Sealion
Mediterranean Campaign June 1940-July 1941
"T"- and "Porpoise"-Class Submarines
Malta
Italy Bombs Malta 1940
British Strategy Mediterranean 1940
British Parthian