by James Philip
His mindset was wrong.
If Malta was being attacked to force the abandonment of Operation Grantham; the real question was why did Cyprus matter so much to the enemy?
The sudden stark clarity of his thoughts gave him no satisfaction.
His was the generation of leaders who had sleep-walked towards Armageddon in October 1962. It was apparent that he had learned nothing from the tragedy of recent history. He had been obsessed with the idea he was confronting zealots and maniacs, berserkers; when in fact all along he had been opposed by patient men to whom revenge was a dish savoured ice cold, cold like the wintery steppes of the Mother Country. Those same men had nearly succeeded in fomenting war between America and the United Kingdom, men to whom the sacrifice of thousands, or millions was grist to the mill if it facilitated the onward march of their perverted Marxist-Leninist ambitions.
The next salvo of four six hundred and sixty-six pound 11-inch high explosive shells fired from the antique battlecruiser Yavuz screamed down in a two hundred yard long line diagonally across Ta’Qali airfield.
Julian Christopher rested his hands on the parapet high on the sheer walls of the Citadel and tried very hard to think of a good reason why he should not throw himself over the precipice.
“Sir!”
The Commander-in-Chief heard the voice from afar.
Committing suicide was not the act of an honourable man; not at the height of a crisis. He would revisit the option later, if he was still alive later.
“Yes, what is it?” He inquired with a crisp businesslike authority that belied the black despair gripping his soul. A man only showed his true mettle in his darkest hour.
“HMS Yarmouth is reporting sixty plus bandits approaching the archipelago from the north-west, sir.”
“Do we have voice communications with Yarmouth?”
“Sporadically, sir. There’s pretty fierce jamming...”
Julian Christopher determined that he had brooded long enough for one day. He swept off the ramparts like a leopard with his eyes fixed on his next meal. It did not matter how the Soviets had done it, he would leave that discussion to the historians who would pore over his blunders in the years to come. What was important was that very soon now hundreds, possibly thousands of Soviet paratroopers were going to be spilling from the bellies of the incoming ‘bandits’.
Chapter 42
12:13 Hours
Friday 3rd April 1964
Kalkara, Malta
Nobody on the Maltese Archipelago with memories of the siege of the islands in the Second World War hesitated when they heard the shriek of the battlecruiser’s opening broadside rend the heavens.
Marija Christopher and her sister-in-law Rosa Calleja had been in the small kitchen of the married quarters above Kalkara Creek when they recognised the dreadful harbinger. They had been gossiping, giggling. One moment Rosa had been gently teasing her sister about how much she very, very obviously loved married life, the next moment they were huddling together under the table. Their minds worked quickly with a pragmatism that would have been familiar to a survivor of the London Blitz, but utterly inexplicable to somebody with no experience or family memory of having been under sustained bombardment.
Firstly, hearing the sound of falling bombs or of shellfire – initially it does not matter who is shooting or dropping the bombs – one finds the nearest cover.
Secondly, once under cover – any cover will do – one asks how close the bombs or shells are falling? And: Do I have time to get to a proper bomb shelter?
Thirdly, one gets to the nearest shelter.
Marija and Rosa clung to each other under the kitchen table.
“They must be attacking the docks or Luqa?” Rosa speculated. It did not matter who ‘they’ were; less still why it was happening.
“Yes, over that way,” Marija agreed.
The young women were afraid but calm, their thoughts turning hurriedly as they worked through the possibilities and decided what to do next.
“The nearest shelter is just around the corner but it was locked up years ago,” Rosa explained. Her local knowledge of these things was ten times better than her sister’s. Marija had been brought up in Sliema; Rosa had lived in Kalkara for over two years.
“Aren’t their caves on the ridge where the old anti-aircraft guns used to be?” Marija suggested, wondering if her memory was playing tricks on her.
“Yes.” Rosa hesitated. “We’d have to go past the sheds where...”
The first big explosions were followed by a gap of at least two minutes.
And then the insane runaway express train screeching rushed overhead again and there was an avalanche of distant detonations. Down on the floor the women felt the earth flinch with the impacts. Crockery rattled faintly in the cupboards.
“We go to the old caves!” Marija declared.
Since Marija could not run, and Rosa was still hobbling with the aid of a stick; the young women found themselves moving slowly while men, women and children scurried around them. More shells were roaring overhead but mercifully none landed in the village. Nobody was panicking, people walked fast, heads down, but nobody actually ran. Marija and Rosa kept moving up hill. They were a little breathless as they reached the level ground behind the married quarters where the three old Nissen Huts had stood before Lieutenant Jim Siddall’s death. Without a word they paused to take one last look around before they disappeared into the deep caves in the limestone ridge that rose in front of them. They stood under the lip of the cave roof and looked back down the slope towards the waters of Kalkara Bay and the Grand Harbour breakwaters.
They gasped and then they stared, raptly fascinated and terrified.
Great waterspouts erupted in Kalkara Bay below them, the closest among the small fishing boats moored inshore, the farthest almost beside the lighthouse at the end of the southern Grand Harbour breakwater.
But that was not seized their instant attention.
In the midst of the maelstrom of collapsing columns of frothing white water the long grey deadly silhouette of HMS Talavera was racing for the safety of the open sea. Her funnel was smoking grey-black and she was steaming faster than either woman had ever seen any ship in the enclosed waters of the Grand Harbour.
The destroyer – nearly four hundred feet long – disappeared in a forest of watery explosions, each of which sent spumes of water as high as her slowly rotating four-ton Type 965 double bedstead radar aerials.
The women sucked in their breaths in horror; and breathed again as the destroyer charged out of the maelstrom apparently untouched.
The two sisters were not the only onlookers.
Practically everybody around them had halted and was staring down into the harbour.
Flags were running up HMS Talavera’s main mast halyards and at her stern, a big White Ensign had been broken out. The flags streamed in the quickening wind of her passing, as faster and faster she charged ahead throwing up an ever rising bow wave.
There was a lump in Marija’s throat and a heavy weight on her chest.
Somewhere out to sea there were big ships, at least two, maybe more, and HMS Talavera was alone. One brave little destroyer dashing towards its fate could not possibly be a match for what awaited her out at sea. Nevertheless, it never crossed her mind that Peter Julian Christopher, her husband of less than a month and the man whom she had loved half her life, would not hesitate to throw himself and his ship at his enemies.
How else could he protect all that he held dear, and everything and everybody in the World that he loved?
As another air-rending salvo rocketed over her head on the way to RAF Luqa, Marija watched HMS Talavera heel into a racing turn that took her perilously close to the northern breakwater as another forest of giant shell splashes tore up the grey, shot churned waters of the outer Grand Harbour.
HMS Talavera crashed into the seas beyond the breakwater, already half-lost in the gathering haze of the spring day.
Marija wondered sile
ntly if she would ever see the man she loved alive again in this World.
Rosa tugged at her arm.
“Sister!” She cried urgently. “We cannot stay here!”
Shells were screaming down into Dockyard Creek, Senglea, French Creek and beyond. There was dust rising in the air, and for the first time the acrid taint of gun cotton wrinkled her nose. Marija had grown up with that bitter stench in her face and the gritty taste of pulverized limestone and sandstone in her mouth. Nothing lingered like the corruption of fire.
Marija could not make herself move.
Across the other side of the Grand Harbour a battery of three 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns in emplacements below the ruins of Fort St Elmo belched fire. For a moment she did not understand why their barrels were only inclined a few degrees above the horizontal.
The guns were not firing at enemy aircraft. Those small guns were all the defenders had to shoot back at the big ships out at sea.
HMS Talavera was shrouded in the mist, moving like a wraith, her indistinct port silhouette lengthening as she swung around to the north.
The north...
Towards the sound of the guns...
“We cannot stay here!” Rosa pleaded.
The women turned and stumbled deeper in to cave.
The British had used the caves above Kalkara to store shells for the Second World War anti-aircraft batteries which had once been emplaced all along the ridge. Twenty years ago the caves had been both bomb shelters and homes to local civilians and the gunners alike. The entrance to the biggest cave had been shut off with a grill several years ago but somebody had cut off the padlock and local children used the murky, dank subterranean warren of caverns and tunnels as their playground. Those who had experienced the bombing of the Second World War always knew where the nearest ‘safe’ shelter was to be found.
Two decades ago only the fact that the Maltese Archipelago was riddled with deep granite and limestone caves had saved the Maltese population from a decimation of biblical proportions.
As a girl Marija had been taught and compelled to relive the nightmare. Such was the inheritance of her generation of Maltese children, to have lived through the storm and to be required – as if by law - to know its dimensions, lest future generations dared to forget their past.
Then as now the greater part of the three hundred thousand people who inhabited the islands of the Maltese Archipelago lived on the southern half of the main island, Malta itself, mainly in the ‘cities’ and towns clustered around the Grand Harbour, and the airfield at Luqa. The 1945 war had left two-thirds of all the buildings on the archipelago destroyed or so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable. Of the major populated areas Sliema-Gzira had suffered least, with some 40 percent of its houses surviving either lightly damaged, or undamaged. Either side of RAF Luqa 70 percent of the houses were gone; in Kalkara 70 percent, in Birgu where Marija had been crushed in a collapsed basement, 65 percent, in Senglea and Cospicua abutting French Creek 80 percent, while in Floriana on the landward side of Valletta hardly one stone was left standing above another, and in Valletta itself, notwithstanding its great bastion walls and ramparts, three-quarters of the city was wrecked. However, what Maltese teachers taught their children in schools was about more than the cost in bricks and stones, or the wanton desecration of their proud island heritage; because a people was infinitely greater than the sum of the houses it lived in and the historical monuments that adorned its communities. The miracle of the second great siege – the first had been in 1565 - was that so few Maltese had actually died. Malta had been the most heavily bombed place on Earth in 1941 and 1942 but only 1540 civilians had died; 703 men, 433 women and 404 children.
Malta had survived that trial by fire.
Marija and Rosa held hands in the gloomy, crowded cave. They heard and felt the shells crashing down to earth and the barking of the distant anti-aircraft guns like small dogs yapping in a thunder storm. They listened to the distant whoosh of missiles launching and roar of RAF and American jets. In between the crack of guns and the fall of shot, the air was eerily quiet.
Everybody in the cave had recognised Marija.
The Heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu was among them so everything would be well.
“We should pray,” Marija said.
The murmur of approbation filled the cavern.
Marija bowed her head.
Chapter 43
12:21 Hours
Friday 3rd April 1964
One mile west of the King George V Breakwater, Malta
Joe Calleja’s ears were still ringing and blood was trickling into his eyes from somewhere on his scalp. A big shell had exploded in the water alongside the bridge and he had been blown across the deck. His flight had only been halted when he crashed into the destroyer’s quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount, or more accurately, the rear end of the torpedo stuck half in and half out of tube Number Four. From the way his chest hurt he guessed he had cracked a rib.
However, he did not waste time worrying about that.
The deck around him was littered with the bodies of the men who had been attempting to load and secure that final torpedo into the mount on the open deck behind the destroyer’s single stack.
The young officer who had been supervising the operation was white-faced on the deck, twitching in a spreading pool of his own blood. Joe pulled off his jacket and jammed it into the fist-sized hole in the man’s right leg, knowing that if somebody did not put a tourniquet on the man’s upper thigh he was going to bleed to death sooner rather than later.
There was a pat on his right shoulder.
Initially, he could not hear what the man standing over him was saying.
A Royal Marine crouched beside him, shouted in his face: “Good man! You’ll have to lift his leg for a second so I can tie him off!”
HMS Talavera was heeling into a violent turn to port and had Joe not been already leaning against the side of the quadruple torpedo launcher mount he would have fallen over. There were more explosions, and the air was filled with the angry whistling of small, razor-sharp objects parting lines and pinging off metalwork like a swarm of enraged killer bees. The ship juddered momentarily as her main battery fired a broadside.
“Now! Now! Now!” The Marine bellowed.
In a daze Joe raised the wounded man’s leg, desperately attempting to maintain pressure on his gory wound.
“Down! Down!” The Marine screamed above the bedlam all around them on the main deck. He had looped what looked like a length of insulated two-core electrical wiring around the young officer’s thigh and was tightening the improvised tourniquet using a small monkey wrench, turning it smoothly, oblivious to the chaos.
Joe was lifted unceremoniously to his feet; another Royal Marine tossed away his bloody jacket and pressed a thick white dressing over the wounded officer’s blood-soaked thigh. A strong hand took the dockyard electrician’s elbow as he started to retch uncontrollably. It had all happened too quickly. He could have sprinted for cover beneath Corradino heights, instead, some contrary impulse had made him step onboard the destroyer. It was like a dream; the shells throwing up massive columns of water that fell back onto the ship drenching everything and everybody, bowling men over literally like skittles. He had blacked out after he hit the torpedo tube mount, albeit momentarily. He had seen the officer bleeding on the deck, reacted, ignored the shells bracketing the ship as she dug her stern into the waters of the Grand Harbour and dashed for the open sea.
The main battery fired again.
“Don’t I know you?” Demanded the grinning, red-headed and bearded man in a blood-spattered Petty Officer’s uniform who was peering into Joe’s face. The bearded man was holding Joe upright with thick, teak-like arms that vaguely reminded the young Maltese dockyard electrician of something he remembered from Popeye the Sailor cartoons...
Joe’s head cleared, his ears unclogged.
“Joseph Calleja,” he blurted guiltily.
“Jesus!” The other man exclaime
d, his grin freezing on his lips. “The Skipper’s frigging brother-in-law! This just gets worse!”
Actually, even as he said it, Petty Officer Jack Griffin knew full well that he was guilty of a gross exaggeration. There was very little scope remaining for the current situation to get ‘worse’. Beneath his feet there were men struggling to light off Talavera’s second boiler and out to sea – a lot closer than was remotely healthy – were several big ships with very big guns trying very hard to kill him.
“Damn it!” Said the youthful figure who materialised out of the spray at the troubled Petty Officer’s side.
“The civilian is the Captain’s brother-in-law, sir,” Jack Griffin reported to Lieutenant-Commander Miles Weiss, HMS Talavera’s newly promoted Executive Officer.
The newcomer frowned at Griffin.
He quirked a welcoming grin at Joe Calleja.
“I know that!” He grunted. “More to the point,” he frowned again, watching two Royal Marines and a medical orderly gently carrying the stricken officer whom Joe had been tending below. “Now that the Torpedo Officer is incapacitated is there anybody onboard who knows how to fire these bloody things?” He demanded, gesturing with disgust at the quadruple torpedo tube mount. “And we have to do something about this bloody fish sticking out of Tube Number Four!”
“Er,” Jack Griffin began uncertainly. “I, er...”
Joe Calleja coughed.
“I trained on these mounts as an apprentice, Mr Weiss,” he claimed diffidently. A little more confidently he added: “Once the torpedo is in the tube it is simply a matter of pointing the tubes over the side, starting the motors, that’s done on the circuit board over there,” he pointed at the side of the tubes where the mount’s operator sat. “By connecting up the impellor charge ignition, and,” he shrugged, “there’s a small bang, compressed air is injected into the tube and the torpedo goes out of the other end.”
Miles Weiss did not think it could possibly be that straightforward. However, given that the torpedo officer was badly wounded and most of the other men in his ‘Torpedo Division’ were dead, on their way to the sick bay or wandering around in a state of near catatonic shock, he was going to have to take Joe Calleja’s word for it.
