Malta – a Childhood Under Siege. By Linda Peek. Woodlands Publishing, Glenmore Park NSW, 2023. https://woodlandspublishing.au/malta-a-childhood-under-siege/
Reviewed by Desmond Woods OAM
The story of Malta’s endurance, sacrifice and survival under intense air bombardment from Italian and German attackers has been told before and shown in History Channel documentaries. Recently the military historian Max Hastings wrote a fine account of the whole battle culminating in the relief of the siege with Operation Pedestal. But this story has not been told as this new book tells it, as a child’s eyewitness testimony.
This is a story of how the author’s mother Margaret Staples and her siblings and parents lived, and very nearly died, while the island of Malta, threatened for a year with an Axis amphibious invasion, came ever closer to starvation and surrender in 1942.
The generation that knew of Malta’s successful resistance to Axis assault, and its strategic importance, is now elderly or gone. There has been no cinema release about Malta’s war experience since Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins starred in ‘The Malta Story’ made in black and white in 1953. That fine film, made by those who had served in the war in uniform, is ancient history now and would be unknown to all but a few elderly film enthusiasts.
This new book is a beautifully written, humorous and elegiac family memoir, set during the Malta siege. It would provide a perfect script for a new film or television series to engage modern audiences with this timeless story of stoicism under fire. It is a story of civilian and military courage that deserves to be told and screened. Its relevance to contemporary events is very evident.
In 2018 the author discovered notes her late mother Margaret had written telling the story of her youth as the middle child in a British army family first posted to Hong Kong and then in January 1939 to Malta. Among the notes Margaret had dedicated her unwritten book to her daughter Linda thanking her for helping her to write it. Clearly this was a book that had to be written to honour her mother’s wishes. But what the author has produced is much more than her much loved mother’s story. It recounts that period of six years in her mother’s voice, but it also provides a well-researched and contextualised account of the domestic and military lives of Malta’s British Garrison and the reader learns of the trials of the 300,000 people of Malta living under a lethal siege.
All Maltese lives were at risk daily for two years as the Axis powers tried to bomb and starve the island into submission. We hear in Margaret’s voice how the people survived an onslaught that was heavier and more prolonged than the Luftwaffe’s blitz on London. The RN’s submarines that operated from the island devastated the convoys of munitions heading for Rommel and the Afrika Corps and helped make the Desert Victory of the 8th army at Alamein possible. Malta mattered.
There are many vivid moments from history recorded, with a child’s clarity of recollection. On the evening of 11 January 1941 young Margaret and her family, and the rest of the population of Valletta, stood on the bastions of Grand Harbour watching as the RN’s burning carrier HMS Illustrious entered the port. The ship was listing 5 degrees, was glowing at the waterline from the fires within and was still under attack from dive bombing Stukas and Italian torpedo bombers determined to finish her off. The Maltese people cheered her into their harbour. This was the end of Operation Excess. Illustrious, the RN’s newest armoured flight deck carrier, with the old battleship HMS Valiant and cruisers and destroyers, had guarded a small convoy from Gibraltar which was carrying just enough fuel to keep the RAF flying in defence of Malta and the food to keep the population from starvation. The convoy carried vital fighter aircraft and spares and the ammunition needed for the island’s anti-aircraft batteries.
The carrier’s exhausted AA gunners fought off the last attacking aircraft with the help of the shoreside Royal Artillery batteries, often manned by Maltese soldiers, and her own aircraft that came back to her aid. Illustrious docked at dusk, her cargo was unloaded through the night with the help of ordinary civilians and she escaped before dawn to eventually be repaired in the United States and return to war.
What young Margaret could not have known was that 126 of her sailors had been killed and 91 wounded in getting to Malta that week. The fires that killed them took several hours to extinguish by the Malta dockyard fire fighters and ship’s company so that at dawn she could steam out of Grand Harbour where her survival in daylight was impossible.
The terror and tedium of life in candle lit bomb shelters, and the horror of a childhood visit by Margaret to the mortuary looking for the young housekeeper’s aunt, are vividly re told. Tragedy was constant. Five hundred Maltese children died of poliomyelitis during the siege and typhoid killed many adults and children. It was a time of mass grief and daily fear, when religious faith and determination not to submit to the horrors of an enemy invasion were all that stiffened civilian morale.
In the midst of all this danger Margaret’s elder brother was a sleepwalker and nearly died when he fell from a bedroom window while still asleep. The family’s much-loved cat was stolen for food and Margaret’s mother served up her pet rabbit for dinner. By July 1942 the siege was crushing the life out of the people and this relatively privileged British army family were getting thin and existing on soup from the ‘Victory Kitchens’, a meagre bread ration, what they could grow and dead fish that were recovered from the sea after being bombed.
Then, eighteen months after HMS Illustrious and Operation Excess, on 15 August 1942, the family were once again on the bastions to watch as the surviving merchant ships of Operation Pedestal limped into Valletta to finally break the siege. Among them was the principal target of the attacks of the previous five days the British manned, American owned, oil tanker the SS Ohio. With her back broken by a torpedo and on fire with her upper deck awash she was kept afloat held between two RN destroyers and towed by dockyard tugs until her precious cargo of 11,000 tons of gasoline could be pumped out of her into an empty tanker. The population again watched her painful progress to her berth and cheered her alongside. Operation Pedestal represented their salvation and their hope that Malta would survive the onslaught uninvaded and still free. What those Maltese cheering Ohio’s gallant crew would not have known was that the old British aircraft carrier HMS Eagle had been sunk by a U Boat while escorting the Pedestal convoy and 260 of her sailors and officers had died with her.
Margaret’s father was a major in the Royal Engineers and it was he who planned and supervised the extension of old tunnels into the famous Lascaris War Rooms where Montgomery and Eisenhower planned Operation Husky, the assault on Sicily in 1943. Her father was present when King George VI came secretly by fast cruiser HMS Aurora to thank the Maltese people in person for their endurance. He raised the morale of all the defenders and the people when he decorated the entire Island with the George Cross for heroism. The GC is still to be seen in the Maltese flag.
Margaret’s family were singers, musicians and entertainers and the five siblings put on shows and enjoyed the entertainments that came to them from cinema and from Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) concerts. The children never forgot that when the war was finally over they would return to a world at peace in which they could buy clothes that fitted them, eat good food again and make their mark in the world.
This book is a valuable social history of a unique time and place in modern wartime history as seen through the recollections of a mother who often told her stories to a loving daughter who remembered them. She has researched this stirring and touching story of gallantry, loss and recovery and provided the strategic context in which the family narrative unfolds.
We are fortunate indeed that Margaret’s story has been saved by her daughter. It has escaped oblivion and is now available in this book illustrated by the black and white photos taken by the family. It is recommended to all who care to learn of Malta’s recent storied past as seen through the eyes of an intelligent and resourceful child who grew to be a young woman while avoiding being bombed.
