by Jan Morris
The peoples of the overseas Empire were not, pace Churchill, so unanimous in their fidelity as they had been in the Great War. They were rather better informed now, they had other standards to judge by, and they had learnt to question the meaning of the war and the purpose of the imperial connection. Treason to the Crown, so rare in the First War, was not uncommon in the second. The Mufti of Jerusalem, for instance, the leader of the Palestine Arabs, went to Germany and formed a Muslim Army of Liberation. Aung San, one of the most prominent Burmese nationalists, went to Japan and formed a Burma Defence Army. Subhas Chandra Bose, quondam president of the Indian National Congress, went first to Germany, where he formed an Indian Legion, then to Japan, where he formed an Indian National Army. One in six of Indian prisoners of war joined his forces (which included a Gandhi Brigade and were known to the British as ‘Jiffs’—Japanese Indian forces): Bose declared himself head of an Indian Government-in-exile, and became in the end a national hero.1
On the other hand the loyalty was often touching. Most of the hundreds of thousands of colonial volunteers joined the colours simply out of loyalty, to an idea, a heritage or perhaps a set of values: and this truly Victorian sense of duty was encapsulated best of all in Malta, a small group of islands in the middle of the Mediterranean which assumed not only a high strategic importance in the war, but a symbolic meaning too. As the main base of the Mediterranean Fleet Malta was made untenable when Italy entered the war, but it remained invaluable as a submarine base, from which to harass the enemy supply routes to North Africa, and it became almost indispensable as a propaganda station. Through the long years of setback, when islands fell and British armies retreated everywhere, Malta remained defiant in defence, furious in attack. If it had not been for Malta’s submarines and aircraft, Egypt might well have fallen, and like the defence of Mafeking in the Boer War, the defence of Malta was seen as an earnest of greater things, and of victories to come.
The British made the most of it, immortalizing it in film and propaganda pamphlet, in stirring speech and kingly gesture, but still it was a genuine triumph. The five islands of Malta, with a total area of 125 square miles, lay some 60 miles south of Sicily, 180 miles north of Cape Bon on the North African coast, in so commanding a situation that Rommel himself saw them as the key to Mediterranean victory—in December, 1941, three-quarters of his supplies were sunk by ships and aircraft from Malta, and one Italian convoy, comprising seven merchant ships and ten destroyers, was completely annihilated. It was inevitable that the Germans and Italians should try first to neutralize, then to capture the islands: and between June 1940, when Italy entered the war, and November 1942, when the British won the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, Malta was under siege. Some 16,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the islands: during fifteen days of April, 1942, there were 115 air raids.
There was never another imperial siege like this. Though the ships which supplied Malta, and the fighter aircraft which defended it, were all manned by Britons, the beleaguered population was notably un-British in everything but citizenship. Catholic, Latinate, speaking a language incomprehensible anywhere else, addled by political, religious and cultural rivalries, the Maltese were notoriously among the more difficult subjects of the Crown. Though since 1921 the colony had been ostensibly self-governing ‘in all matters of purely local concern’, the constitution had been suspended in 1936 because of this continual rumpus, and when the war came the Maltese had no responsible government at all. The British, as we have already seen, viewed the majority of the Maltese as less than absolutely pukkah, and generally looked upon the islands not as anybody’s homeland exactly, but as a dockyard, a barracks and a sailors’ tavern.
Yet the Maltese were to be the acknowledged heroes of the battle for Malta, and the prize examples of colonial loyalty. Though Mussolini had long laid claim to the islands, and though Valletta the capital was less than half an hour’s flying time from Italian air bases, the Maltese never wavered in their faithfulness to the British Empire—or perhaps to the Royal Navy, whose ships had for a century provided a background for every facet of Maltese behaviour. The British got very sentimental about Malta as the war proceeded, and this was one wartime saga that was never discredited. Battered, half-starved, exhausted by noise and sleeplessness, living for the most part in subterranean galleries and dug-outs, the Maltese retained their morale from the very first trial black-out (a word which Malta gave to the language) to the last fitful air raid from the retreating enemy. Baden-Powell would have been proud of them.
Actually it was a drama less in the British than in the Spanish style, very far from the tight-lipped heroics of Lucknow or Ladysmith. It was a siege in the romantic mode. Aesthetically it was thrilling. The splendid architecture of the islands looked more splendid still, manned for war. The searchlights played ritually around the great cathedral of St Paul at Mdina; the tracer bullets flew in coloured streams from the ramparts of the Knights; convoys laboured into the anchorage of Grand Harbour; black submarines slid shark-like from their pens beneath Fort Manoel. At night warships at sea reported Malta like an explosion on the horizon. By day Valletta was often shrouded in a pall of golden dust from the rubble of its bombed buildings.
Then the nature of the battle was stylish. Three elderly biplanes, at the start of it, represented Malta’s entire air defence—Faith, Hope and Charity, whose indefatigable lumbering sorties against colossal odds were astutely publicized throughout the world and immortalized in Maltese legend. Later fighter reinforcements were flown in from carriers offshore, and this too was a spectacle full of excitement—once reinforcements arrived actually in the middle of an air raid, so that within minutes of their arrival on the island they were refuelled and in the air again in action against the Luftwaffe. Once there was a suicidal Italian torpedo-boat attack upon Grand Harbour itself, when seventeen motor-boats, hurling themselves against the nets, chains and buoys of the harbour defence, were caught in the searchlights and blasted one by one out of the water by the rampart guns, while the Maltese lining the battlements cheered in the darkness.
There was the spectacle too, salutary to the British, of a Mediterranean people behaving night after night with a truly imperial stoicism, spiced perhaps with a trace of Cockney bravado picked up from so many generations of contact with the Navy. The Knights of St John had burrowed labyrinths of chambers and galleries in the soft limestone of Valletta, and there the Maltese slept each night, while the city was pounded into ruin above them. For a small fee they had the right to dig extra chambers for themselves, and sometimes they moved all their possessions down there too, put their own street number above the entrance, and made their home in some alcove of an ancient catacomb, or in the deep Fosse which, 300 years before, the Knights had dug on the landward side of Valletta. Priests moved about them at night; great ladies of Malta, in the English manner, brought them food and comfort; cameramen from the Ministry of Information frequently photographed them, and once or twice official war artists set up their easels in the half-light.
The Governor of the island, General Sir William Dobbie, was an epic figure himself. A Cromwellian figure, Churchill called him, and in fact he was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, an evangelical directly in the tradition of the God-fearing stalwarts of pre-Mutiny India. Dobbie believed implicitly in God’s pro-British inclinations, and matched his faith with his bearing, so that despite his fervently protestant views he appealed to the fervently religious Maltese, and even had a pub named after him—the ‘Everyone’s Friend’. ‘I call on all officers and other ranks humbly to seek God’s help,’ said Dobbie’s first Order of the Day, ‘and then in reliance in Him to do their duty unflinchingly.’ Almost every morning he repeated the message in a broadcast to the islanders: he had fought in the Boer War and the Great War, both victories in the end, and in his sixties regarded his call to the command of Malta as a summons directly from the Almighty.
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Most thrilling of all were the days when, like wildfire around the battere
d streets, there ran a rumour that a supply convoy was approaching the islands. At the worst moments of the siege Malta very nearly starved, and very nearly ran out of food and ammunition too—in August 1942 only two weeks’ supply of petrol remained, and the populace was rationed to half a bucket of water a week. The Malta convoys, by which the Royal Navy tried to bring provisions direct from Britain, were among the most hazardous operations of the whole war, so ferocious were the air and submarine attacks upon them during their passage through the western Mediterranean. Each convoy was a major naval operation. Sometimes the greatest of the Royal Navy’s warships, battleships, battlecruisers, carriers, escorted the merchant ships, and hundreds of aircraft were deployed. Even so, of the 30 merchant ships which set out for Malta in the first seven months of 1942, 10 were sunk at sea, 10 were so badly damaged that they turned back, 3 were sunk in Malta harbour after their arrival, and only 7 survived to unload all their cargoes on the quay.
Single ships sometimes ran in and out of Malta—submarines, destroyers, or the 40-knot three-funnelled minelayers, Welshman, Manxman and Ariadne, which maintained a desperate shuttle service from Gibraltar. The arrival of a convoy, though, was a dramatic occasion, and the Maltese crowded to their ramparts, as they had thronged in happier times to watch the resplendent Fleet return from exercises, to see the rusted, battered and sometimes sinking blockade-runners limp in from the battle. The most momentous of them was Convoy S 26, Operation Pedestal, which sailed to Malta from the Clyde in August 1942. No convoy had reached the islands since June, and even the indomitable Dobbie had reported that the battle was nearly lost. Surrender plans had already been drawn up; some women and children had been secretly flown out in bombers to Cairo. Pedestal was accordingly the most powerful convoy of them all. The battleships Nelson and Rodney were accompanied by 3 carriers, 7 cruisers and 32 destroyers, and this great fleet was escorting no more than 14 fast merchantmen. Among them was the tanker Ohio, an American ship with a British crew, carrying 11,000 tons of kerosine and diesel oil, without which air operations from Malta would almost immediately collapse.
The voyage of this convoy through the Mediterranean was one of the great naval exploits of the war. The freighters and their escort left Gibraltar on August 11, and from dawn the following day, all the way to Malta, they were under continual attack by aircraft, submarines and torpedo boats. The losses were terrible. First the carrier Eagle was sunk, then the carrier Indomitable crippled. Two cruisers and 8 merchant ships were lost, 2 more cruisers, 3 merchants ships badly damaged. The Ohio, the one tanker in the convoy, was attacked more frequently and more heavily than any other ship, and on the 13th, 100 miles from Malta, her engines were put out of action. Twice her crew abandoned her, only to reboard her later. Sometimes she seemed to be enveloped in a sheet of fire. Once she was taken in tow by a destroyer, but she was holed so badly that she could not be pulled, and in the end, within sight of Malta, she was lashed to a destroyer and a minesweeper, one each side, and so carried rather than towed into the safety of Grand Harbour.
Only five merchant ships got through, but they saved Malta. As they sailed one by one into harbour, huge cheering crowds waved them in, crossing themselves in thanksgiving, while the bands played ‘Rule Britannia’ as in the old days, and the warships, all spick-and-span suspended, sailed to their familiar moorings beneath the walls. Such was the allegorical lifting of Malta’s siege—the arrival, through three days of screaming dive-bombers and torpedo explosions, of a handful of damaged merchantmen and their exhausted escorts. There is a completeness to the Malta story that was rare in the imperial history, and its combination of unbreakable defence and snarling offensive spirit powerfully appealed to the British. ‘The loss of Malta’, Churchill had said, ‘would be a disaster of the first magnitude to the British Empire’, and when the worst was over the Empire recognized Malta uniquely. Just as Spanish cities, in the high days of Spanish chivalry, had been awarded corporate honorifics—the Very Noble, Very Loyal, Very Heroic and Invincible City of Seville, for instance—so now King George VI awarded his Colony of Malta the newly instituted decoration called the George Cross, ‘for heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history’.
The King went to Malta in person to bestow it, sailing into Grand Harbour in 1943 on the bridge of the cruiser Aurora, and the medal, after being displayed like an ikon in every village of the archipelago, was laid up like a battle honour in the Governor’s Palace.1
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No such inspiriting epic sustained the imperial legend in the Far East. There it seemed less likely that the Empire would last Churchhill’s Thousand Years. India was in a state of spasmodic turmoil, Congress supporters boycotting the war effort in a campaign called ‘Quit India’. There were horrible riots, and mass arrests, and to complete the suggestion of impending catastrophe, the worst famine for nearly a century. Hong Kong fell to the Japanese after a battle that lasted seventeen days, Malaya did not survive much longer, and in 1942 there occurred the most humiliating single disaster in British imperial history, the fall of Singapore, an event which presaged unmistakably the end of Empire itself.
The island colony of Singapore, 225 miles square, was a British creation from scratch. Stamford Raffles had founded it, 120 years before, and it was specifically the alchemy of Empire which had made it, by the 1930s, the fourth port of the world. Flat, steamy, thickly humid, the island lay at the southern tip of the British Malay peninsula, linked to it by a causeway across the narrow Johore Strait. It was traditionally one of the main pivots of imperial power. The base the British had built there between the wars, their greatest military work of those decades, was intended to assure the security of the whole Empire east of Suez. It cost £60 million, it covered 21 square miles, and its complex of docks, warehouses and barracks lay massively along the Strait, well away from the open sea.
The base was specifically designed to service and support battleships, the chief weapons with which the British hoped to maintain their presence in the east. The plan was that a battle fleet would be sent there as soon as war in the Far East impended. The Australians and New Zealanders looked to Singapore as the main guarantor of their security, and it had been frequently represented to the world as impregnable. Some 700 miles of British territory lay to the north of it, while the sea-approaches to the island were commanded by batteries of 15-inch, 9.6-inch and 6-inch guns, hidden away in scrubby offshore islets, or sunk deep among the mangroves. There was an air base too, and a garrison of some 7,000 men, and though in normal times there were few warships at Singapore, and still fewer aircraft, it was assumed that in time of trouble powerful forces could get there in no time at all to impose the will of Empire on the east.
It was a handsome city, with its white cathedral above the green Padang, its stately offices of law and government, the spruce bungalows of its British rulers and the spiced haphazard quarters which housed the Chinese, the Malays, the Javanese, the Arabs, the Indians and all the other thousands who had flocked from half Asia to this profitable emporium. Nothing very terrible had ever happened in Singapore. Nobody had ever bombarded the place, still less invaded it. There was no political dissent, the colony being governed absolutely by the Governor and his Council: the large British commercial colony lived in Singapore complacently, enjoying the rewards of Empire without too many of its discomforts.
Its members believed explicitly, from experience, in the power of prestige, in maintaining above all the respect of their Asian subjects. Like the masses adopting some pastime when it is slightly passé among the fashionable, the Singapore British behaved rather as Anglo-Indians did fifty years before. ‘Face’ was all-important to them, and the maintenance of an invulnerable image. If the brown and yellow peoples thought them invincible, they reasoned, invincible they would remain: and so assiduously did they propagate this self-image that they had long come to believe in it themselves. It was inconceivable to them that British troops might actually be beaten by Asians, just as it was almost impossible to im
agine an Englishman ordered about by Asians, or obliged to live Asian-style. It was not done, so it would not happen.
In this as in much else they were pitiably out of touch with developments at home. There, by 1940, the strategists had virtually dismissed the Far Eastern Empire, so overwhelming were the dangers nearer home. Smuts assured the Prime Minister that diplomacy was the only weapon available to the Empire in the east, and in fact the Americans had already been warned that the defence of the region was beyond British capability. As for Singapore itself, a defence conference had secretly reported that far from being impregnable, if Malaya were ever lost the island would be untenable—almost all its defences were on the seaward side, and there was almost nothing to stop an enemy crossing the Johore Strait from the north. The contingency plans for the colony, presented so reassuringly to the Australians and New Zealanders, had been shattered. The fighter aircraft which were to fly in relays to the east were at home defending Britain. The battleships supposed to rush to the base were engaged in the Mediterranean, left fatally vulnerable by the fall of France—in the summer of 1941 the Far Eastern Fleet consisted of three old cruisers and five destroyers.1 There was not a single tank in the Malay Peninsula, and not a single modern fighter east of Egypt.
The Australians and New Zealanders, always afraid of Japanese intentions, pressed repeatedly for the reinforcement of Singapore, but British priorities were elsewhere. Churchill hoped in any case that the Japanese could be deterred from attacking the Empire by old-school imperial means—by a ‘show of force’. In October 1941, when Tokyo’s posture seemed particularly threatening, he ordered to Singapore two capital ships, the battleship Prince of Wales, the battlecruiser Repulse, the Prince of Wales’s pleasure-ship twenty years before. They sailed there without air cover, their escorting carrier having been delayed by an accident in Jamaica, to intimidate by their presence a Japanese battle-fleet eight times the size and with a formidable air arm. ‘Thus’, said Churchill at a Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, ‘we stretch out the long arm of brotherhood and motherhood to the Australian and New Zealand peoples….’2
