Malta Victory

by Robert Jackson

  The sky, a vault of rich blue stretching endlessly above them, was empty for once. It had been a confused, bewildering day, with several air raids, and Yeoman had spent most of it in G Shelter, together with the other reinforcement pilots. Any hope they had entertained of getting into action quickly had been rudely dashed; the veteran pilots of the squadron on Luqa had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new Spitfires for a long time, and they had no intention of letting the newcomers fly them. Yeoman knew that this was a matter of wisdom, rather than of selfishness; he had already learned that Malta was a far different battleground from any he and his fellow pilots had experienced so far, with different — almost alien — rules and tactics, and unless the newcomers were initiated gradually they wouldn’t last five minutes.

  The proof of that was starkly evident in the day’s losses. Yeoman reckoned that one-third, perhaps more, of the Spitfires which had flown in from the two carriers had already been put out of action, either in the air or on the ground.

  Another couple of days at this pace, and Malta’s air defences would be back to square one.

  The bus churned its way up a steep hill. Craning his neck to see over the heads of the pilots seated on his right, Yeoman picked out a flat expanse of ground, a hillside broken by the dark, yawning mouths of caves, and some sandbagged emplacements. He glimpsed the tail of a Spitfire and knew that they were passing Takali. Although the airfield had been bombed three times that day there was no sign of damage, nor indeed of any movement whatsoever.

  The bus churned its way up the hill, twisting round bends, and suddenly the shadows of high walls fell across it. The driver threaded his way deftly through narrow streets, some of them showing signs of severe bomb damage, and through occasional openings Yeoman caught tantalizing glimpses of ancient, curved archways and baroque churches. He leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of Roger Graham, who was sitting in front of him, and asked where they were.

  ‘Rabat,’ the squadron leader replied. ‘It’s the old capital of Malta. It used to be called Melita — that’s where the island gets its name from — and, according to legend, Saint Paul stayed here after he was shipwrecked.’

  The road narrowed even further and the bus passed slowly through an archway, a gate into some inner sanctum enclosed by vast stone walls.

  ‘We’re in M’dina now,’ Graham continued. ‘These walls were built by the Arabs to fortify Melita when they occupied the place after the Romans had gone, and the bit left outside they called rabat; the name means simply “suburb”. When the Spaniards occupied the island they changed its name to Città Notabile. Then the Knights came along and made Malta their HQ, so to speak; they built Valletta, which is really one big fortress, and moved the capital there. After that M’dina took second place, but to many Maltese it’s still the capital; they call it the Città Vecchia, or Old City.’

  Yeoman was about to question Graham further when the bus halted outside a palace, its walls golden in the rays of the sinking sun to a point just above a massive iron-bound double door, where the shadows of neighbouring buildings cast dark, angular lines across them.

  ‘Right,’ Graham shouted, ‘everybody out. This is it.’

  They piled out of the bus and into the palace, their shoes kicking up small clouds of the grey dust that lay like a mantle over everything as they went. Just before he reached the massive door, Yeoman noticed another khaki-painted bus parked up a side street, and guessed that it had brought more pilots over from Takali. All the new arrivals were to be briefed here at the same time.

  As they went inside Yeoman shivered slightly. The gloom of the big hall was dank and forbidding, in sharp contrast to the sunlight outside. Once, he thought, the whole place must have been filled with light and laughter; now its walls held only the musty odour of dead dynasties. The pilots crossed the hall quickly, their footsteps echoing, and climbed a wide marble staircase. At its head was a long corridor, and at the end of the corridor a wooden door stood open, giving access to a large room. A hubbub of voices, punctuated by an occasional laugh, drifted from it.

  The room was crowded with pilots, perched astride chairs and benches, on trestle tables and window ledges. A few nodded and smiled at the Luqa contingent as they trooped in, pushing their way into the throng in search of vacant places. Yeoman looked around him, trying to pick out any familiar faces, but failed to locate any. He sat down on a bench between Roger Graham and Gerry Powell and waited to see what was going to happen.

  The wait was a brief one. After only a couple of minutes, a voice from the doorway cut through the buzz of chatter like a knife.

  ‘Gentlemen!’

  Chairs and benches clattered as they stood up, staring fixedly ahead of them. A man came into Yeoman’s field of vision, striding purposefully down the centre of the room towards the heavy table at its far end. He went round it, laid his cap carefully on the table top, and stood with his hands behind his back, surveying the men assembled in front of him. A thick-set, medium-built man, he seemed to radiate strength. Although his grey hair betrayed the fact that he was more than twice the age of most of the pilots in the room, his eyes were sharp and piercing, his manner full of vigour. He wore full khaki-drill uniform, immaculately pressed. The cap on the trestle table beside him bore a double row of gold oak leaves around its peak.

  This was the man who, in May 1942, bore the burden of what was probably the most difficult command in the Royal Air Force: the Air Officer Commanding Malta, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh P. Lloyd.

  ‘Sit down, gentlemen.’

  The chairs scraped and clattered again and a ripple of coughs ran round the room before silence returned. The Air Vice-Marshal spoke.

  ‘Welcome to Malta, gentlemen. I’m sorry the Luftwaffe decided to welcome you first.’ The remark brought a murmur of laughter.

  ‘I am not going to make a lengthy speech,’ the AVM continued, ‘but I do want to impress one or two points upon you. Firstly, I fought the Germans in the last war, and now I am fighting them again in this. Why? Because they are bullies. They want to bully Malta into submission, but they won’t succeed, because we are going to stop them.’

  The AVM smiled briefly. ‘In this determination I am totally at one with the new Governor-General of Malta. Some of you may have heard of him. He is Field-Marshal Lord Gort.’

  Yeoman’s ears pricked up and he listened to the AVM’S words with renewed interest. In a flash, his memory reeled off details of the man who had arrived on Malta in the hour of her desperate need. John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, sixth Viscount Gort; the man who had become almost a legend during his service with the Grenadier Guards in the Great War. Wounded four times, mentioned in dispatches nine times for galantry, he had won the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order three times over, and finally the Victoria Cross.

  In May 1940, when Yeoman had flown Hurricanes in France, Gort had been commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and later had been unjustly blamed for authorizing the BEF’S retreat to Dunkirk. Yeoman knew otherwise; if Gort’s men had not begun their fighting retreat across Flanders when they did, with Allied armies collapsing all around, they would have been encircled by the Germans and the ‘deliverance of Dunkirk’ would never have happened. As far as Yeoman was concerned, the choice of this man as Malta’s Governor-General was inspired. If anyone could sustain the island’s morale through the onslaught, and God only knew how long it would last, then that someone was the unassuming bulldog figure of ‘Tiger’ Gort.

  ‘We are aware,’ the Air Vice-Marshal went on, ‘that the Germans and Italians are planning to invade Malta. We do not know when. But we do know this: that they will never invade until they have established complete air superiority.’

  He paused, then, pointing a finger to lend emphasis to his words, told them briskly:

  ‘You are here to deny them that superiority. You, together with the anti-aircraft defences, are Malta’s shield. The Maltese people are taking everything the enemy throws at them, and wi
ll continue to endure as long as they see you in the air, day after day, fighting to preserve their homes and ideals.’

  The AVM paused again, letting his words sink in, and then continued:

  ‘For the present, Malta is on the defensive. But never forget that the island’s true strategic role is an offensive one. From here, our bombers and torpedo aircraft can strike hard at the enemy’s supply lines in the Mediterranean, but they cannot do so without your protection. Your task, therefore, is to secure the skies over Malta to a degree that will render an enemy invasion out of the question, and to enable our bomber and torpedo squadrons to return and get on with the business of hammering the enemy.’

  Not a man stirred. They were all gripped by the plain, unvarnished facts presented to them by the AVM. Yeoman was reminded irrationally of a father, telling his sons the facts of life. The AVM’S eyes roved round the room, seeking out the face of each man and holding it briefly, as though the message in his words was addressed to him personally and to no other.

  ‘There is, however, a more immediate task. You men who arrived this morning have brought only a temporary respite. Let us be under no illusion; Malta is starved of every conceivable commodity, from food to fuel. People will not function without one, Spitfires and Hurricanes without the other. More convoys must reach the island if we are to survive, and once here they must be permitted to unload without interference from the enemy. There must be no repetition of the events of previous weeks, when several ships, having braved everything to bring their vital cargoes to Malta, were sunk in Grand Harbour before they could unload.’

  The AVM folded his arms and stared at them.

  ‘Fighters would have prevented that disaster,’ he went on, ‘but we had too few. It must not, will not, happen again. You, gentlemen, are Malta’s salvation. The next convoy to reach Malta will deliver its supplies, and will do so because of your efforts.

  ‘Let me conclude by saying this. Here and now, you may hate every moment of your time on Malta. But looking back, in years to come, you will realize that you have been part of a first-rate team, and be proud of that fact. Good luck to you all.’

  The pilots rose again as the AVM left the room. There was no time to dwell on his words, because his place was taken immediately by a tall, swarthy officer whose face seemed to show the signs of a recent illness. He introduced himself to the men.

  ‘My name is Hazell, and I am Wing Commander (Flying) at Takali. I have been asked to give you a few pointers to the way we live and operate out here. You will, of course, be briefed more fully within your own units tomorrow.’ He cleared his throat and looked around, as though in search of a glass of water. Finding none, he coughed again and continued:

  ‘First of all, I know that some of you have gained a considerable degree of experience elsewhere. Now, I’m not going to ask you to forget all you have learned; that would be foolish. I want you to remember, however, that we follow a completely different set of rules out here, and some of you may find them bewildering. For a start we are always heavily outnumbered, and therefore we have to improvise all the time. No sortie ever follows the same pattern as the next — nothing like the big fighter sweeps some of you will have taken part in.

  ‘We are here to shoot down bombers. Remember that always. The fighters we leave alone whenever possible; we don’t tangle with them unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, and then only at the last moment. Things tend to happen very quickly, too, and there is often no time for the niceties of R/T procedure such as you have been used to. We use first names a lot. Things such as “Yellow Two, break starboard” are all very well, but by the time you’ve got it out Yellow Two will probably be going down in flames. Something like “Break, Fred” serves just as well, and you save a vital second.

  ‘Similarly, enemy fighters are always “snappers”, no matter what they are. Don’t waste time trying to identify something as a One-oh-Nine, or a Macchi or a Reggiane; if it looks unfriendly it’s a snapper, and you make sure everybody knows it’s there.’

  The wing commander paused in mid-stride, waved a hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, sorry, chaps — smoke if you want to.’ He produced a cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lit it. A look of bliss spread over his face. ‘Ah, Camels,’ he said, ‘Thank God for a decent smoke. We’ve had nothing but bloody Drapis, that’s the local brand, for weeks now. They make ’em out of goat shit.’

  He inhaled deeply, then went on with his briefing.

  ‘Talking about fighters,’ he said, ‘you’ve probably heard a lot of bloody nonsense about the Italians. Forget it. Our experience here has shown that the Eyeties will stay and fight like hell while the Germans are high-tailing it for home. Anybody met the Italians before?’

  Yeoman stuck up his hand self-consciously. ‘Just once,’ he said, ‘over Libya. It was a Fiat G.50, and it gave me a few nasty moments.’ Once again, he was uncomfortably aware that his thirteen victories made him an old boy among the new boys, in a manner of speaking.

  ‘Well,’ said Hazell, ‘the ones we meet over here are Macchi 200s and 202s, and Reggiane 2000s. They are all highly manoeuvrable, the latter perhaps more than the other two, so watch out for them. As far as the Huns are concerned, they are all pretty much textbook fighters, hanging around upstairs and making fast firing passes before climbing back up again. You really have to keep your eyes peeled, because they can be on top of you before you know what’s happening, especially if there’s haze about.

  ‘In one respect,’ Hazell went on, ‘we are very fortunate indeed. We have a first-rate fighter controller, Group Captain Douglas. He was a sector controller in the Battle of Britain, and came here straight from handling the big fighter sweeps over France. He really is a bloody good type, so do what he tells you. He was to have been here in person to have a word with you, but he’s tied up at a conference in Valletta.

  ‘We always operate in pairs here; it’s very rarely that we are able to put up more than four fighters in one place. With all the opposition we have to contend with it’s very easy to become separated, and if that happens in the middle of a scrap make a beeline for the nearest airfield and no messing about. If you’re chased by fighters, head for Takali and do tight turns inside the defensive ring of Bofors guns.’

  Yeoman glanced round. Some of the pilots were scribbling notes on bits of paper or the back of cigarette packets as Hazell talked. He went on for a few more minutes, describing tactics and answering the occasional question that was fired at him. Finally, he glanced at his watch, placed both hands on the table and leaned forward, staring intently at the pilots.

  ‘There’s one last thing,’ he said. ‘This is not a game of cricket. We are fighting a dirty, nasty war out here, and those bastards over there are pulling no punches. There have been instances of our chaps being machine-gunned after they baled out. Now I’m not suggesting you do the same, but if you do, nobody is going to take much notice. Personally, I shoot the bastards. Just think about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Yeoman to Roger Graham a few minutes later, as they boarded the bus once more. ‘I’ve never heard anyone put it as bluntly as that before. Still, I don’t think I would be prepared to shoot a defenceless pilot, especially one who is likely to be taken prisoner anyway.’

  Graham looked at him. ‘Larry Hazell has his reasons,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve known him a long time. He was a Spit pilot with the Biggin Hill wing in the Battle of Britain, then his wife and three kids were killed during the night raids on Liverpool, and after that he transferred to night-fighters. He shot ten Huns down, then the action slowed down a bit so he came out here. The last I heard, he had twenty-two kills to his credit. He’s a little bit round the bend, the way he goes after those bombers. He just ignores return fire completely, and gets stuck in. It’s a miracle he’s still in one piece.’

  The bus followed the narrow road north-eastwards from M’dina, winding its way through the streets of Mosta, the ancient city that was dominated by the second largest domed c
athedral in Europe. It was growing darker now, and the buildings on either side were little more than looming shadows, all the more fascinating because of their obscurity. Yeoman sat and smoked his pipe, conscious of the dark shapes of his fellow pilots around him, swaying to the movement of the vehicle. He was tired now, and grimy with the dust of Malta. Idly he wondered if it was going to be possible to have a bath; he doubted it, if the water situation was as bad as he had been led to believe.

  Billets for the Luqa pilots had been found in the hilltop town of Naxxar, a mile or so beyond Mosta. They were quartered in what seemed to be yet another old palace; it was by no means as large as the one in M’dina, but was spacious enough. By the light of flickering candles they groped their way up a stone staircase and out on to a broad landing. There were rooms on either side, most of them filled with sleeping bodies sprawled on mattresses, but Graham led the way along a series of corridors to another landing, where smaller cubicles stood vacant. Three pilots were allocated to each room, Yeoman sharing his with Gerry Powell and another flight lieutenant, Arthur Rowland. The whole building stank of stale cooking, human sweat and drains. Maltese orderlies brought round pannikins of bully stew and mugs of tea, and after eating their first real meal that day the pilots turned in and tried to get some sleep.

  It proved impossible, for the newcomers at least. The raiders came that night, and Malta trembled to the constant crash of explosions and the bark of anti-aircraft guns. Flashes of light burst eerily across the interior of the room. Fine dust trickled down from the ceiling, tickling throats and nostrils.

  By midnight Yeoman could stand it no longer. He got up, pulled on his trousers and groped his way out on to the balcony, tripping over Rowland en route and ignoring the latter’s ‘Lie down, for God’s sake, you silly sod!’