Secret signing in Malta of final Italian armistice during World War II. The British battleship Nelson, moored to No. 8 buoy in Grand Harbour. It was moored in the same place when the final Italian armistice document was signed on board the ship on September 29, 1943.
This Sunderland flying boat, which was strafed by a Bf109, causing damage to the starboard wing and tail section.
In World War II, the island of Malta, which is located almost exactly in the center of the Mediterranean (like a cork centered in the hourglass between the eastern and western Mediterranean), took on enormous significance as the only British naval base in the 2,000-mile stretch of sea between Gibraltar and Alexandria. The island barred the north-south route across the Sicilian Narrows that connected Mussolini to his African empire. Early on the morning of June 11, 1940, the Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica, carried out the first of 3,340 Axis air raids on the island over the next three years, when it became the most bombed place on earth. Initially the island was defended by three obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes known to the Maltese people as Faith, Hope, and Charity. On August 1, 1940, 12 modern Hurricane fighters landed at Malta from the small carrier Argus to reinforce the island’s air defense. Potentially, Malta posed a serious threat to the Axis, but in the first six months of the war the few submarines based there rarely sighted an enemy ship, and scarcely knew where to look for one. As a result, in the second half of 1940 the Italian Navy escorted almost 300,000 tons of supplies to their Libyan ports with a loss of only 2 percent of the ships sent.
As Churchill had dreaded, Mussolini’s military debacle in Libya led Hitler to intervene in the Mediterranean. On December 10, 1940, Fliegerkorps X, a balanced force of 350 aircraft trained in anti-shipping attack, arrived in southern Italy, its primary task to gain air control over the central Mediterranean and to attack British shipping. Its power was dramatically shown on January 10 the following year when the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious was badly damaged while escorting a convoy through the Sicilian channel. Illustrious was subjected to further heavy attack while undergoing emergency repairs in Valletta Harbor before it escaped to Alexandria. This attack heralded the first German blitz on Malta. The island managed to hold out until, in April 1941, Fliegerkorps X was diverted from southern Italy to prepare for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Toward the end of June, codebreakers at Bletchley Park (northwest of London) broke the new Italian cipher machine referred to as C38m. This gave details of all planned convoys from Italy to Libya. A second advantage was the development of airborne radar (ASV), which could locate surface ships at night. In the last seven months of 1941, Malta’s air and naval forces waged an increasingly powerful campaign to restrict the flow of supplies to Rommel’s forces in North Africa.
But for the welcome news that the United States was now an ally in the war, the winter of 1941 was a cruel month at sea for the British. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the Malay coast. In the Mediterranean, German U-boats transferred from the Atlantic sank the carrier Ark Royal and the battleship Barham. Four British cruisers hit Italian deep-water mines off Tripoli, sinking two of the ships instantly. The most spectacular Italian naval operation came when Italian two-man human torpedo teams sank, in the naval harbor at Alexandria, the last two remaining British battleships in the Mediterranean, Queen Elizabeth and Valiant.
A weakened British Mediterranean Fleet was grim news for Malta, but even more serious was Hitler’s transfer of an entire air corps from the Eastern Front to Italy and North Africa to regain control over the sea route to Tripoli. German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring boasted that he would “pound [Malta] to dust.” The 400 German and 200 Italian aircraft in Sicily were only 10 minutes’ flying time away from Malta, whose position became desperate. Convoys could not get through, nor could the Royal Navy operate from Valletta. Food supplies dwindled, while dysentery, tuberculosis, and polio were rampant. The Axis siege of Malta was one of the longest and grimmest in the struggle to control the Mediterranean.
In March 1942, the first 15 British Spitfires were flown to Malta from the aircraft carrier Eagle and on April 1, Churchill asked Roosevelt to loan the large American carrier Wasp. Two days later the president agreed and on April 20 Wasp flew off 47 Spitfires. Churchill made a second request and on May 10 Wasp and Eagle flew more planes on to the island. The Axis could no longer take air superiority for granted. An elated Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt: “Many thanks for all your timely help. Who said that a wasp couldn’t sting twice?” The climax of Malta’s war for survival came between August 11 and 13, 1942, when Churchill organized a 14-ship convoy around the fast oil tanker Ohio, loaned by the United States. Once through the Straits of Gibraltar, the convoy ran a four-day gauntlet of Axis naval and air attack. No fewer than 784 Axis aircraft attempted to stop the convoy. The famous Operation Pedestal convoy had started with 14 merchant ships, of which nine were sunk along with the aircraft carrier Eagle and several warships damaged or sunk. The remaining merchant ships, bringing the largest cargo since the previous year, arrived at Valletta to be greeted by the Maltese people with tears of joy. The Ohio crawled into port the next day, lashed between two destroyers to keep her from sinking. The courage shown by the Maltese people and the garrison was an inspiration to the Allied cause in a time of crisis. Saved from a calamity on the scale of Singapore and Tobruk, Malta was restored as a serious threat to Axis supply lines to North Africa. Nevertheless, the naval effort to sustain Malta, involving as it did the loss of many British ships sunk or damaged, has not gone unquestioned. The costly battle for Malta has been called the “Verdun of Maritime War.”
