“Three nights ago the peace of these islands was shattered by a cowardly and unprovoked attack that has left over a thousand British and Maltese dead and missing, and over one thousand five hundred people seriously injured. You will have heard many stories and a great deal of uninformed gossip about the events of last Friday night. I would like to put the record straight.”
Julian Christopher spoke in a clear, unfaltering voice without notes for nearly twenty minutes. His enunciation was patient, speaking to an underlying outrage that the majority of his audience would almost certainly share and empathise with regardless of their political leanings.
First he described the peaceful scene on the Gzira — Sliema waterfront, the night shift at the Senglea docks swarming all over HMS Torquay as she was positioned, exactly above the grounding blocks hidden beneath her hull in the dark water of Number One dock; and the roar of the motors winding up to start pumping. There were families enjoying a stroll along the Msida sea wall opposite Manoel Island, the officers at Fort Phoenicia were filing into the Mess for dinner; and out in Marsamxett Harbour the old cruiser HMS Sheffield was manoeuvring alongside the oiling jetty. In Sliema Creek a lone destroyer, HMS Agincourt rocked gently at her moorings, her guns trained fore and aft, her GWS 21 Sea Cat quadruple missile launcher locked down beneath a tarpaulin and with half her crew out on the town on a typical Friday evening run ashore…
The first wave of marauders had approached at over four hundred miles an hour hugging the tops of the waves, soaring high over the rocky coast and falling like plummeting hawks upon the unsuspecting ships moored in the harbours and creeks. There had been no warning, no air raid sirens had wailed like banshees across the Archipelago. A bomb had wrecked HMS Agincourt’s bow and started a fire that would have ignited her forward magazine had her crew not let her sink where she lay in Sliema Creek. A bomb had sliced through the armour of HMS Sheffield’s aft triple six-inch turret and exploded against the breech of one of the big guns. Another bomb had landed in the water some distance away and ‘skipped’ across the surface to detonate against the lightly armoured trunk of her forward port twin three-inch secondary armament mount. Another bomb had exploded in the water directly alongside her bridge, smashing a ten feet wide rent in her side beneath her armour belt. It was a miracle the old cruiser had been eventually towed into shallow water. Across the other side of Valletta, HMS Torquay had been defenceless as she lay in Number One dock. Perhaps, four or five bombs fell around her, mostly in French Creek before the fateful impact of the bomb in the dock opened her side like a great tin can opener and she capsized within seconds. In attacking the warships bombs fell with apparent randomness into closely packed streets, tearing trails of ruin through whole districts. Three bombs killed scores of people on the Strand in Gzira and Sliema. More civilians, including many workers at the main hospital on the Archipelago died when a string of small bombs bracketed houses along Msida Creek. A bus at the roundabout at the end of Pieta Creek had received a direct hit.
The aircraft in the first wave of the attack were piloted by Italians and wore the livery of the reincarnated Regia Aeronautica, the air force of the new Fascist Republic of Italy and Sicily. All the aircraft in this attack were of American manufacture but, so far as could be ascertained from the testimony of the three captured Italian airmen, they were flown by native Italian pilots.
Had it not been for the ‘valiant endeavours of the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm,’ the first wave would undoubtedly have caused even greater damage and caused significantly greater loss of life.
However, while the Regia Aeronautica Skyhawks were being hunted by Royal Navy Sea Vixen and Scimitars big bombs suddenly started to fall from seven miles high in the darkening Mediterranean skies.
The second — high-level — attack had commenced some three minutes after the attack by the low-level first wave had turned into a dog-fighting melee that rapidly spread across the skies of the whole Maltese Archipelago. At the conclusion of this low-level battle five of the attackers and one of the Fleet Air Arm fighters had been shot down.
“The pilot of the Scimitar that was lost survived with only minor injuries,” Julian Christopher told his audience with grim satisfaction.
As the last of the surviving Regia Aeronautica A-4 Skyhawks fled into the darkening north-eastern skies a rain of M118 general purpose — classified by the United States Air Force as ‘demolition’ munitions — arrowed down with unerring precision on Royal Navy and Army headquarters, and major public buildings and bomb shelters used by the civilian authorities across Valletta, Birgu, Kalkara, Cospicua and Floriana from the bomb bays the four Boeing B-52 Stratofortresses of the 2nd Bomb Wing of the 100th Bomb Group of the United States Air Force that were subsequently engaged by RAF Hawker Hunter fighters between six and seven miles high above the Maltese Archipelago. HMS Phoenicia, the Headquarters of the British Military Administration was struck by several large ‘demolition’ munitions and at least one very large ‘fuel-air’ device which exploded in the middle of the old fort with the force of a small nuclear detonation.
“I can confirm that my good friend Vice Admiral Hugh Staveley-Pope was among the dead on Manoel Island. Had the Manoel Island detention camp still been in operation the death toll on the island would have been many times higher.”
Even as he spoke RAF and Fleet Air Arm technicians were splicing together gun camera footage from the ‘air actions over Malta’; and within days this footage would be shown in local cinemas.
Eventually, Julian Christopher concluded the litany of death and destruction.
“I personally, have lost many good friends in this atrocity. In the cities and villages of the Maltese Archipelago everybody will know somebody; a father, a mother, a brother or a sister, a son or daughter, a friend, or a colleague at work, or somebody one was at school with many years ago, who has been taken from us in this terrible, cowardly assault on the very soul of these precious islands.”
The hairs on the nape of Lieutenant Alan Hannay’s neck were standing on end by this juncture. There was a cold, deadly intent in his new Admiral that he had never encountered in any other man in the Navy. It was as if he’d had his eyes opened to a truth he’d not known to exist. Nelson, he decided, must have had this self-same power to galvanise his captains, to instil in his people the belief that defeat simply wasn’t a thing within the bounds of possibility. And that, one day, there would be retribution. This he understood long before the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations signed off with the promise that: “It is my pledge to the people of Malta that if I have anything to do with it,” there was a perfectly judged pause for effect, “there will be a reckoning for this crime against humanity.”
Chapter 21
Marija Calleja shivered and drew her shawl close. She ached from head to toe after a third successive long and exhausting day mostly spent on her feet. Margo Seiffert had taken one look at her twenty minutes ago, handed her two aspirins, and taken her off the hastily organised ‘ward’ — three big tents linked by awnings to the barracks block the Army had made available — and brought her into the cluttered ‘hospital office’. The office had a telephone which had to be ‘manned’ at all times, a desk piled with medical reports, and around the walls, wooden orange crates filled with supplies. The British, as every Maltese knew, had a prodigious talent for improvisation; for sorting things out as they went along. Most of the time this wasn’t good news but in a crisis it was a positive boon, with everybody pitching in without complaint and officials who’d normally have endlessly obfuscated to avoid a thorny problem, suddenly eager to be of service. Hence, the Pembroke Barracks Emergency Field Hospital had been magically conjured into existence out of practically thin air inside a day of the bombing. However, as Marija sat at the desk slowly creating little heaps of ordered paperwork and ‘watching’ the telephone, the miracle of the new field hospital didn’t take her mind off her numerous physical vexations, or the nagging, insidious worm of doubt — distant terror, really — that had dogged her ever step these last two days.