Malta Victory

by Robert Jackson

  ‘God,’ muttered Yeoman, appalled by what he saw. ‘What an awful bloody mess.’

  It was like a scene from the Apocalypse, a vista of utter devastation. The dockside was a nightmare jungle of shattered warehouses, with the jibs of cranes protruding here and there at crazy angles, while the harbour itself was choked with sunken and capsized ships, their masts, funnels and rusting hulls breaking the smooth surface of the water.

  The sight was not new to Yeoman; he had seen something similar in the Libyan port of Tobruk a year earlier. But this was infinitely worse, a graveyard of ships that left him with a leaden feeling of horror.

  He moved his gaze quickly away from the tangle of wreckage, looking across the inlet to where the town of Senglea nestled on its clifftop. Its walls were a gentle yellow-white in the sun against the deep blue of the sky, a relief to the eye after the carnage over which it presided. It seemed to be intact, an oasis of peace amid the murderous aftermath of the raids, but Yeoman knew that this was no more than an illusion; Senglea was a broken shell of a town, its buildings torn and crumbled with the same ferocity that had levelled Floriana.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Powell, ‘let’s go. I could do with a drink myself, now.’

  They walked on in silence for a few minutes, then Yeoman said thoughtfully: ‘It makes you wonder, seeing a mess like that. Whether we’re doing our job, I mean. Whether we’re shooting enough of the bastards down.’

  ‘Oh, we’re shooting them down all right,’ replied Powell, ‘but don’t forget that we’re looking at the results of nearly two years of raids. And we’re on a shoestring all the time. If we could put up sixty or seventy Spits and Hurricanes each time, instead of nine or ten, it would be a different story.’

  He paused, then looked directly at Yeoman. ‘Do you really think we can stop them, George, if they tried to invade?’

  Yeoman shrugged. ‘I only wish I could answer that question,’ he said, ‘but I just don’t know. We could have stopped ’em in Crete, if we’d had enough fighters; that I do know. It all depends on whether we can keep the reinforcements and supplies coming in, and that depends on the Navy. They’ll do their job, if it’s humanly possible. After that, it’s up to us. If we can only establish air superiority — I don’t mean in numerical terms, but if we can shoot enough of the sods down every time they come over to make them think twice — then they won’t come. The Jerries don’t like water, and Crete must have frightened the daylights out of them. They really took a hammering in the early stages, from what I saw. No, you can be certain of one thing; the dice will have to be very heavily loaded in their favour before they’ll risk invading.’

  ‘Well, I only hope you’re right,’ Powell grunted. ‘I just wish we had some idea of how long it’s going to go on, that’s all. At the moment, it’s a toss-up who gets us first, the Jerries or the Dog.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yeoman, ‘I’ve been lucky there, all right. No sign of the Dog at all so far, touch wood, apart from the odd twinge. Poor old Roger Graham’s latest bout was really nasty; I thought I was going to have to take over the squadron for another few days, at one point.’

  ‘Instead of which,’ Powell grinned, ‘here you are, nicely off the hook and hound for a couple of days’ debauchery. If we can find any among this lot,’ he added as an afterthought, looking round at the sea of destruction.

  ‘I’m not really bothered about that,’ Yeoman answered. ‘I’d rather see what’s left of the sights, meet a few of the people.’

  ‘God, George, what an awful bloody liar you are!’ Powell gave a guffaw of laughter. ‘I’m keen to meet a few of the people, too, but there are a couple of conditions — they’ve got to be female, and they’ve got to be horizontal at the time.’

  They skirted the debris of a collapsed house and found themselves on the main street of Floriana again, where it curved round to join the avenue. Ahead of them the street split in two and they took the left fork, heading for the great gateway that led on to Kings way, the main artery of Valletta. The right-hand fork curved up a slope towards St. Michael’s Square; on the far side of the square was the long tunnel that led on to the RAF’S main operations room, from which Group Captain Douglas and his hard-worked team of controllers directed Malta’s fighter defences. The back door of the ops room opened on to Strait Street, the deep alley that sliced to the harbour through sheer rock. To the countless British service men who had discovered a few minutes’ dubious delight in the arms of the prostitutes who infested it, Strait Street was more popularly known as The Gut.

  The two pilots passed under the ancient archway and stopped, looking down the road. Kings way dropped away sharply for a few hundred yards, then climbed steeply again. Its whole length was littered with rubble.

  They began to move forward down the slope. After a few paces, Yeoman stopped and grabbed Powell’s arm.

  ‘Just a sec,’ he said, a note of urgency in his voice. ‘Have you noticed anything?’

  ‘No, what is it? I don’t see anything.’

  ‘That’s just it. There aren’t any people about. There should be droves of them at this time of day. It’s almost as if —’

  The wail of a siren, its note rising and falling, cut through his words. A few moments later they heard the roar of aero-engines, reverberating from the walls around them.

  Yeoman started to run, propelling Powell towards a mound of rubble that stood beside a low wall, all that remained of some bombed-out building.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ he shouted breathlessly, as they sprinted across the street, their shoes kicking up spurts of dust. ‘The Maltese seem to have a sixth sense about when there’s a raid coming in. They must have all legged it for the shelters minutes ago.’

  They threw themselves into the narrow gap between the rubble and the stone wall, crouching in the dust, their ears battered by the note of the sirens and the swelling throb of engines. Somewhere behind the ruined buildings, anti-aircraft guns opened up.

  Yeoman tilted his head to one side, trying in vain to establish the direction of the incoming aircraft. The noise of their motors bounced around the street, echoing from wall to wall. The bark of the anti-aircraft guns intensified until it became a continuous roll of sound.

  An engine howled stridently, accompanied by the rending screech of a Stuka’s underwing sirens. Every nerve in Yeoman’s body screamed at him to lie prone and cover his head with his hands, following Powell’s example, but he went on searching for the source of the noise. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a gull-winged shape, flashing past a gap in the buildings on the far side of the street as the Stuka pulled out of its dive, very low. An instant later, the earth heaved under him as the aircraft’s bomb exploded, somewhere out of sight. Stones clattered from the ruined buildings, bouncing across the street.

  The sky was filled with the shriek of engines, the whistle and thump of bombs. He ducked as a great cloud of dust and smoke erupted halfway down the street, a couple of hundred yards away. This time the concussion was fearsome, stunning him. Blast waves rippled across the ground, plucking at his protective pile of stones. Beside him, Powell let out a sudden cry and tried to get up; Yeoman pushed him flat again, holding him down with an outstretched arm.

  ‘The shelter!’ Powell cried, choking on dust. ‘Got to get to the shelter!’

  ‘We’d never make it,’ Yeoman yelled in his ear. ‘Too far! Past where that last bomb went off!’

  Their world dissolved in a wave of noise that lasted for a few seconds or an eternity. The walls of Valletta captured the hellish din of diving Stukas and amplified it, magnifying it tenfold. The sun vanished behind boiling clouds of smoke. Dust drifted along the street, settling and covering everything, clogging eyes and nostrils.

  The silence that followed was oppressive, the kind of silence that follows a mortal hurt before the victim realizes, and screams. The age-old walls of the city still trembled, as though Valletta was weeping inwardly, sobbing with the injury and injustice of it, as though to say: I have wea
thered centuries of storms, storms made by the men I have seen come and go across the sea. This is the worst of all, for my very heart is being destroyed. No more, I beg, no more!

  The two pilots got up, spitting out grit and dusting themselves down as best they could. Slowly, without speaking, they made their way down Kings way, skirting the still-smoking bomb crater.

  The all-clear had not yet sounded, but already people were beginning to emerge from their holes in the ground and go about their business as though nothing had happened. The bomb that had fallen on Kingsway did not seem to have inflicted any casualties, but in the distance Yeoman could hear the rumble of falling masonry, and it did not take much imagination to visualize the rescue teams working frantically to release people entombed under fresh mounds of rubble.

  A few yards past the bomb crater they came to the entrance of an air-raid shelter. The faint murmur of voices drifted from the dark interior. The sound had a rhythmic quality to it and Yeoman, his curiosity aroused, went into the entrance. Powell, his thirst still uppermost in his mind, rolled his eyes heavenwards in despair and then followed him.

  A long tunnel curved down through the rock, lit by the occasional electric bulb, its walls glistening with damp. The stench that floated up it was nauseating; a compound of sweat, burnt fat, human excrement and a dozen other subtler and less definable odours. Yeoman gagged and almost turned back, but his curiosity overcame him and he forced himself to go on. Gerry Powell’s stomach, already severely upset, dictated otherwise: muttering ‘See you in a minute’, he beat a hasty retreat back up the tunnel.

  The murmur grew in volume. The tunnel curved sharply, and Yeoman suddenly found himself standing on a kind of raised dais. Steps led down from it to the floor of a large cavern. The rhythmic chanting was loud and echoing now, rolling from wall to wall, cutting through the foul air.

  It was a few seconds before Yeoman’s eyes grew accustomed to the shadowy gloom, and the tableau that gradually pieced itself together was, to him at least, extraordinary.

  There must have been at least two hundred people — men, women and children — in the cavern, all kneeling in prayer, facing a solitary priest who held a crucifix high above his head. They were saying their rosary, their words loud and confident.

  Yeoman shivered, and suddenly felt very humble. This, then, must be what men called Faith: the spiritual shield which these people, in their simplicity, believed would protect them from the enemy bombs. This was why Malta and her people had endured through all their centuries of turmoil, and doubtless why they would endure for centuries to come.

  He recalled the story of the thousand-pound bomb that had penetrated the dome of the cathedral in Mosta, when over a thousand people were praying inside. It had bounced up the aisle, missing them all, and come to rest against the far wall without exploding. If that wasn’t divine intervention, then what was?

  Come on, George, he told himself, pulling himself together, it was more likely the result of some German armourer not doing his job properly. Nevertheless, he went back up the tunnel very slowly and quietly, so as not to disturb the strange congregation. Despite himself he felt horribly guilty, as though he had made an inexcusable intrusion into someone’s deepest privacy.

  Powell was waiting for him at the entrance, showing every sign of impatience.

  ‘Thought you’d gone to sleep down there,’ he said. ‘What’s going on, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, just a lot of people praying,’ Yeoman told him.

  ‘Well, I hope they put in a request for a few more Spits while they’re at it. Meantime, I’m praying for two things. First a drink, then a floozie. There’s a bar just down the road; it must be in business, because I’ve seen folks going in and out. C’mon, let’s give it a try.’

  Belatedly, the all-clear sounded as they entered the bar. It was small and gloomy, but the proprietor — a small, rotund man in a spotless white shirt and dark trousers — looked up from his task of wiping a layer of dust from the tables as they came in and grinned at them in a friendly fashion. They grinned back, but stopped grinning abruptly when he told them that there was only one drink in the house, and that was goat’s milk.

  He urged them to try it and they accepted reluctantly — to find themselves pleasantly surprised. The milk was cool, with a strange, subtle flavour which they discovered was almond. It slaked their thirst beautifully, and they ordered another before leaving. The proprietor refused to accept any payment, insisting only that they return sometime to meet the rest of his family. Feeling faintly embarrassed, they thanked him and went out into the sunlight.

  ‘We’ll get the Dog now for sure,’ Powell commented morosely as they walked on. ‘They feed the grass with shit, then feed the grass to the goats. We’ve just been drinking liquid shit. The goat was just the middleman, that’s all.’

  Yeoman burst out laughing. ‘You’re a cheerful old bastard, and no mistake,’ he said. ‘I haven’t tasted anything nicer for a long time. Anyway, I didn’t notice —’

  He broke off suddenly as something tugged insistently at his sleeve. He looked down. A small and very dirty walnut-coloured boy was grinning up at him.

  ‘Pennies, Johnny,’ a small voice piped.

  Yeoman smiled. He reached into his trouser pocket and drew out a handful of coins.

  The next instant there were children everywhere, bursting out of doorways, leaping from behind piles of rubble. They surrounded the pilots, laughing and chattering, jumping up and down in their excitement.

  ‘Pennies, Johnny, pennies, Johnny,’ they chanted in unison.

  Yeoman raised his arms, sent the coins scattering across the street in a glittering arc. The children fell on them like a pack of starving dogs.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to his companion, ‘let’s get out of here!’

  They ran off down the street. Yeoman risked a glance behind; the children had gathered up the money and were in hot pursuit, yelping wildly.

  The pilots veered off Kings way into a narrow, rutted street. They spotted an open doorway and dived in, flattening their bodies into the shadows. Moments later the frenzied mob of children went howling past, their bare feet pattering.

  Powell wiped his brow. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘give me the bombs, any time.’

  Yeoman made no reply. There was a hand on his thigh, squeezing gently. He swung round, startled.

  A woman was staring up at him, grinning toothlessly. The front of her tattered blouse was open and her half-exposed breasts flopped in an untidy heap over her waistline. She couldn’t have been more than thirty years old.

  ‘Hello, Johnny,’ she lisped. ‘You got some money for me?’

  ‘Christ!’ gasped Yeoman.

  They fled.

  Chapter Six

  Captain Joachim Richter yawned, lifted the flap of his flying helmet, and massaged a large and painful carbuncle on his right cheek. He made the ritual scan of the instrument panel and brought the throttle back ever so slightly, adjusting the engine revs.

  He looked around him, at the Messerschmitt 109s strung out across the sky. There were twenty-eight of them, including his own, the full complement of the 1st and 2nd Squadrons of Fighter Wing 66.

  Richter was weary. It had been a long flight from Nikolayev, in the Ukraine; over eleven hundred miles, with nothing but the heavy silence of the engine’s roar and the dancing of the needles on the instrument panel for company. The other Messerschmitts seemed as remote as the moon, even though there was only a couple of hundred metres between each aircraft. In a single-seat fighter, when radio silence was imposed, you were completely isolated from your fellow men.

  They had stopped three times to refuel and stretch their legs: first at Bucharest, then at Skopje in Yugoslavia, and finally at Crotone, on the south-west tip of the Gulf of Taranto. From there they had flown across the ‘toe’ of Italy, crossing the coast on a south-westerly heading high above the Straits of Messina. Now, at last, they were approaching their destination, the Sicilian airfield of Catania, lying in t
he shadow of Mount Etna.

  Yes, it had been a long flight; but, by God, every mile had been worth it. Every mile that put more distance between them and Russia, that accursed wilderness that swallowed men up contemptuously, without trace.

  Eleven months they had been there, right from the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Eleven stinking months, roasting in the summer, soaked through and mudcaked in the autumn, freezing to death in the winter.

  The winter! Although it was warm in the cockpit Richter shivered. He never wanted to experience anything like that again. Even huddled round the stove in the peasant’s hut that served as the officers’ mess, they had never managed to keep warm — and they had been the lucky ones. The real sufferers had been the front-line soldiers of the Wehrmacht, holding their positions out there on the steppes. There had been hardly any winter clothing; someone’s head should certainly roll for that. He had seen the frozen bodies of soldiers who had died at their posts around the airfield perimeter, still standing stiffly in their foxholes, glazed, ice-rimmed eyes staring out over the wastelands, rifles clenched in frostbitten hands.

  It had been different in the beginning, just like a field-day, almost.

  They had practically wiped out the Soviet Air Force in those early weeks of the campaign, shooting down the tubby little 1-16 Rata fighters, the SB-2 bombers, the Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft in their dozens. He himself had destroyed nine Russian aircraft in a single day, five of them on one sortie. They had been twin-engined SB-2S — ‘Katyushas’, the Russians called them. They had just sat there, in perfect formation, making no attempt at evasive action, while he shot them down in flames one after the other. Only one enemy gunner had returned his fire.

  The winter had brought an end to the Luftwaffe’s orgy of destruction. Determined though the men had been to maintain the air offensive, it was impossible to fly in the teeth of a raging blizzard, or in sub-zero temperatures where even engine oil froze solid. The army had reached the gates of Moscow, had pushed on through the Ukraine towards the vital oilfields of the Caucasus, but the onset of winter had put an effective brake on further progress and had brought the Reds the respite they so desperately needed.