“Most Urgent,” the new Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations prefaced crisply, straightening his jacket. Most movements sent splinters of, if not needle-like pain, then troublesome discomfort deep into his lean, bruised and battered torso despite the painkillers that Alan Hannay had been doling out to him every two hours ever since they’d landed yesterday afternoon. “Most Urgent,” he repeated, marshalling his thoughts. “For the Attention of the First Sea Lord and the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It is now apparent that the initial low-level air attack by American fighter bomber aircraft bearing the markings of the Regia Aeronautica against units of the Fleet anchored in Sliema Creek, Marsamxett Harbour, and Kalkara, French and Dockyard Creeks; and against radar and communications targets across the Maltese Archipelago were conducted in support of a simultaneous high-level precision bombing assault aimed at destroying key military and civilian command and control facilities.”
The older man paused while the younger man’s pencil scratched frantically to catch up with him. As he waited he looked again through the shattered windows of what had been the office of the base’s Transport Officer. Awnings were stretched from the sandstone cloisters of the one surviving large building. Other awnings were drawn between Bedford lorries, and tents had been erected on the far side of the parade ground As he watched four stretcher bearers gently carried another litter towards the line of tents, a nurse walking alongside holding a transfusion bottle high above her head in the brightening December afternoon sunshine. There was still no reliable estimate of casualties yet but the dead alone would inevitably, run into several hundreds and the flood of the wounded and injured had overwhelmed the island’s hospitals. Rescue parties were still digging the dead and the maimed out of the ruins of hundreds of buildings. Several times that day he’d walked past lines of bodies draped with blankets and tarpaulins arranged by the roadside. Once again he silently promised himself that one day there would be a reckoning.
“But for the fact that the attack commenced in the middle of a major pre-arranged RAF ‘war game’ involving six Hawker Hunter interceptors based at Ta’Qali, two of the four V-Bombers based at Luqa, and a mixed force of Fleet Air Arm Sea Vixens and Scimitars attached to RAF Malta on an extended training deployment, the raid would have been virtually unopposed and incalculable damage might have resulted.” Christopher tried and failed to completely suppress a predatory half-smile.
The ‘war game’ that Air Commodore French had mounted ‘to keep the chaps on their toes’, was specifically designed to counter the mood of despondency and, although Christopher hated to admit it, guilt that his predecessor Vice-Admiral Hugh Staveley-Pope had inexcusably allowed to permeate his whole command. This knowledge caused him pain of a kind much more profound than his cracked ribs, the superficial burns to his arm and the lingering ache of the severe concussion he’d sustained in the attack on Balmoral Castle only a few days ago. Hugh Staveley-Pope had been his closest friend at Dartmouth Royal Naval College; they’d served together on the battleship Warspite in 1918 — when the great ship still bore proud scars of her pounding at Jutland two years before — and stood together on the lee rail at her stern beneath the barrels of her fifteen-inch guns to witness, awed and humbled, the entire German High Seas Fleet steam meekly into captivity at Scapa Flow. Memories of that day remained crystal clear, he could still see the rust-stained, dirty battle line of the Kaiser’s beaten navy slowly steaming past the guns of the Grand Fleet, from which it had fled that day in 1916 when Warspite had fallen under the guns of a dozen German dreadnoughts and somehow, survived. Grosser Kurfurst, Derfflinger, Seydlitz and the Markgraf and a procession of other massive battleships and battlecruisers slowly, ignominiously churned into history whenever he thought of those days. Now poor Hugh Staveley-Pope’s body was lying incinerated and crushed somewhere under the ruins of his Headquarters, HMS Phoenicia, several hundred yards away across Sliema Creek on Manoel Island. The letter that Her Majesty the Queen had written to Christopher’s old friend was still in his pocket, undelivered; the letter commending his predecessor for his service to his Queen and his country, and confirming his immediate removal from command in Malta.
“Sir?” Alan Hannay asked, less anxiously than he felt.
The older man realised he’d been wool-gathering.
That would never do!
Air Commodore French’s ‘war game’ had mimicked many of the characteristics of the actual attack on the Maltese Archipelago. Things so often went awry in war that even an old salt like Julian Christopher sometimes forgot that luck was a coin with two sides. Yesterday, by pure chance over half the operational modern jet interceptors currently based at Malta had been in the air — and more importantly, already at a ‘fighting’ altitude — several minutes before the first Douglas A-4 Skyhawks attacked the Battle class destroyer HMS Agincourt in Sliema Creek, and the old cruiser, HMS Sheffield, which had just completed oiling in Marsamxett below the Floriana bastion. Alerted to the presence of incoming ‘unknowns’ some minutes previously, the ‘war game’ had been abandoned, the two V-Bombers, a Valiant and a Vulcan had made themselves scarce in the southern skies towards Tunis, leaving the fighters — some thirteen aircraft — to deploy to meet the interlopers. Most of the fighters had had at least twenty minutes fuel onboard as they manoeuvred into position. The Hunters had climbed to meet the four ‘targets’ approaching at thirty-four thousand feet from the north-east; the Sea Vixens and Scimitars had raced to intercept the dozen aircraft coming in skimming the wave tops from the east. The RAF Hawker Hunters hadn’t been carrying air-to-air missiles but as it turned out that hadn’t mattered; their 30-millimetre ADEN cannons had been locked, fully loaded and primed for action. The Royal Fleet Air Arm De Havilland Sea Vixens and Supermarine Scimitars, equipped only with short-range Firestreak, and early variants of the American Sidewinder heat-seeking air-to-air missiles had only succeeded in shooting down five of the low-level attackers. However, their presence had by and large, broken up the attack within minutes. A short, savage dog-fighting melee had broken out in the skies over the Maltese Archipelago.
In Sliema Creek the Battle class destroyer HMS Agincourt had been hit twice and despite desperate attempts to ground her in shallower water she lay half-sunk at her moorings. HMS Sheffield, hit three times had eventually been towed into Lazaretto Creek, where, listing and fire blackened, the old warhorse which had taken part in the hunt for the Bismarck in 1941, remained for the moment, afloat. Elsewhere, the Skyhawks had liberally sprinkled five hundred pound iron bombs in and around the Grand Harbour, Dockyard Creek — where the modern anti-submarine frigate HMS Torquay had capsized in a flooded dry dock — and across Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Kalkara Creek, where one bomb had exploded within the grounds of the Royal Naval Hospital blowing in scores of windows and temporarily rendering two wards unusable.
“In the event, RAF and Fleet Air Arm fighters disrupted and after a few minutes drove off the low-level raid at a cost of one Scimitar lost. I am happy to report that the pilot of this aircraft successfully ejected and suffered only minor injuries. As many as five enemy aircraft were shot down.”
Less than a minute after the first bombs fell on warships in Sliema Creek and Marsamxett harbour two large, probably guided missiles had fallen on Valletta. The first had penetrated forty feet of rock and exploded in the Army War Room beneath the Grand Harbour Saluting Battery. The second weapon had penetrated the reinforced concrete cupola of Fort St Elmo — which housed the Central Staff of the British Military Administration of Malta — at the seaward tip of the Valletta peninsula. Moments later more huge ‘ground penetrating’ or ‘earthquake’ bombs began falling on other key installations. Two struck and virtually demolished the Royal Navy Headquarters at Fort St Angelo overlooking the Grand Harbour opposite Valletta. On Manoel Island HMS Phoenicia was effectively demolished by three large bombs, one of which was probably an example of the new ‘fuel air’ munitions he’d known to be in development before the October War. Within less than three minutes the raid had paralysed the British military and civilian administration of the Archipelago.