Malta at War, 1940–1943

Why Malta

Malta sits across the sea lane between Italy and Libya. When Italy entered the war in June 1940 the island became, at once, the only Allied base between Gibraltar and Alexandria and the only place from which Rommel’s convoys could be attacked. The Italians began bombing it on the second day of their war; the Luftwaffe arrived in force in 1941 and again in 1942.

The targets were the Grand Harbour, the dockyard and the airfields, and the towns around them took what was meant for those. Senglea, Cospicua and the seaward end of Valletta were largely destroyed. The population went underground, into shelters cut by hand into the rock under every town.

The worst of it

The spring of 1942 was the crisis. Raids came most days, sometimes several times a day; the island’s fighters were reduced to a handful; food, fuel and ammunition ran towards a date in late summer after which surrender would have followed. In April the King awarded the George Cross to the whole island. In August the convoy code-named Pedestal fought its way in from Gibraltar, losing nine of fourteen merchant ships, and the tanker Ohio was towed into the Grand Harbour with the fuel that kept the island in the war.

From the autumn of 1942 the balance shifted. Malta’s aircraft and submarines cut the Axis supply line to Africa, and in July 1943 the invasion of Sicily was commanded from the war rooms under Valletta.

What to see

The war is written on these walks in three registers. There are the places it was run from: the Lascaris War Rooms under the Upper Barrakka. There are the places it was survived in: the shelters under Casa Rocca Piccola, under the college at Rabat, under the land front at Birgu. And there are the places it destroyed and the memorials that took their place: the Opera House left as a ruin, the towns rebuilt around their churches, and the Siege Bell rung every day at noon.