Malta in World War Two

Today I visited the Lascaris War Rooms which provided a interesting lesson in history. The war rooms were excavated by the British starting in 1940 and were strategically located and excavated off an old communications tunneo built by the Knights of St. John.


The Siege of Malta was a military campaign in the Mediterranean Theatre of the Second World War. From 1940-1942, the fight for the control of the strategically important island of Malta pitted the air forces and navies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.

The opening of a new front in North Africa in mid-1940 increased Malta's already considerable value. British air and sea forces based on the island could attack Axis ships transporting vital supplies and reinforcements from Europe. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in command of Axis forces in North Africa, recognised its importance quickly. In May 1941, he warned that "Without Malta the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa".^[1]

The Axis resolved to bomb, or starve Malta into submission by attacking its ports, towns, cities and Allied shipping supplying the island. Malta was one of the most intensively bombed areas during the war. The Luftwaffe (German Air Force) and the Italian Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) flew a total of 3,000 bombing raids over a period of two years in an effort to destroy RAF defences and the ports.^[10] Success would have made possible a combined German—Italian amphibious landing (Operation Herkules) supported by German airborne forces (Fallschirmjäger). It was never carried out. In the end,Allied convoys were able to supply and reinforce Malta, while the RAF defended its airspace, though at great cost in material and lives.

By November 1942, the Axis had lost the Second Battle of El Alamein and the Allies landed forces in Vichy French Morocco and Algeria under Operation Torch. The Axis diverted their forces to the Battle of Tunisia, and attacks on Malta were rapidly reduced. The siege effectively ended in November 1942.^[11]

In December 1942, air and sea forces operating from Malta went over to the offensive. By May 1943, they had sunk 230 Axis ships in 164 days, the highest Allied sinking rate of the war.^[12] The Allied victory played a major role in the eventual Allied success in North Africa.

Malta was a significant military and naval fortress, being the only Allied base between Gibraltar and Alexandria, Egypt. It became a linchpin in the British Empire overseas—a vital way station along Britain's lifeline, through Egypt and the Suez Canal to India and the Far East. It offered a haven for British shipping to and from those places, but also it gave the British an excellent staging platform of offensive thrusts against naval, land, air and shipping targets in the central Mediterranean. Owing to its exposed position, close to a potentially hostile Italy, the British had moved the headquarters of the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet from Valletta, Malta in the mid-1930s to Alexandria in October 1939.^[13]

The island itself has an area of just under 100 square miles (260 km²) and had a population of around 250,000, all but three or four per cent native Maltese. According to the 1937 census, most of the inhabitants lived within 4 miles (6.4 km) of the Grand Harbour, where the population density was more than six times that of the island as a whole. Amongst the most congested spots was Valletta, the capital and political, military and commercial centre. In this city, 23,000 people lived in an area of around 0.25 square miles (0.65 km²). Across the Grand Harbour, in the so-called Three Cities, where the dockyards were located and the Admiralty had its headquarters, 28,000 more were packed into 0.5 square miles (1.3 km²). It was these small areas that absorbed the heaviest, most sustained and concentrated of aerial bombing in history.^{[14] More}

It is amazing what they did manually to track all incoming aircraft. Today we could use computers and have all our data coming in to huge flat screens which would be simualtaneously up linked to fighter aircraft and missile batteries. Back then it was all manual. However, the same level of technology was is use by all parties which levelled the playing field.