Tough Sponge

The sea that the Italians have sometimes called "ours" was anybody's lake last week. But 60 miles south of Sicily, 225 miles north of Tripoli, the spongy little island of Malta was definitely Britain's. Malta is the most heavily and frequently bombed stronghold of World War II--and therefore in the history of the world--and from the impatient Axis last week it got its heaviest raids of the war.

Not only does Malta straddle the Axis supply route to Libya; it also threatens the left flank of any Axis drive along the African coast toward Egypt. Submarines glide in & out of the harbor at Valletta. The dockyard repairs surface ships up to cruiser size. Bombers and fighters come out of hiding in hangars dug deep in the limestone and take off from rocky fields in the hills. The British believe that Malta's concentration of anti-aircraft guns is the heaviest in the world, not even excepting Moscow's.

The island might be strangled by blockade, if the Axis could stop the convoys, but the convoys are still getting through. Recently the Germans sent the Luftwaffe's Field Marshal Albert Kesselring--who blueprinted the razings of Coventry and Warsaw--to Sicily, already bristling with German airpower. Kesselring had a blueprint ready for Malta, too; he cocked his fist and let fly across the short gap of blue water.

Wave after wave of Stukas and Junkers-88s came over, hour after hour, day after day. They had fighter protection, but they were careless of losses. Malta's fighters, Hurricanes and Spitfires, tore into the attackers. The anti-aircraft batteries opened up full blast. The guns of navy ships in the harbor joined in. "The thunderous noise," said a London report, "was indescribable."

Stukas, Junkers-88s and Messerschmitts flumped into the sea like dead ducks, but the defenders were too busy and too outnumbered to follow cripples. In four days they counted 22 German planes certainly destroyed, estimated that some 50 in all had never got back to Sicily. Berlin claimed hits on docks and harbor equipment, fuel dumps, one cruiser. London admitted casualties and "some damage."

After 1,600-odd air attacks, the 269,000 people of Malta are hardened to raids, and so are their goats and donkeys. Between attacks, movies and markets are crowded; when convoys are in, as one was last week, boys in the street sell chocolate and jelly. When the bombers come, the people take to the caves and catacombs used by the Knights of St. John long ago; these shelters have been enlarged so that every civilian in Malta can go underground. The soft limestone and coral rock is easy to excavate, but when exposed to air it hardens like concrete. Geologically, Malta is a sponge. Militarily, it is a rock.

For nearly three centuries Malta was ruled by the Knights of St. John, called the Knights of Malta after they were chased from Rhodes by the Turks and were handed Malta by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1530. Originally Phoenicians, the Maltese have seen Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, Italians and French come & go; they have not seen the British, who got Malta after Napoleon's hash was settled, go yet. Up to World War II, Malta's greatest siege was that of 1565, when Grand Master of the Knights Jean de La Valette, for whom the island's capital city is named, beat off the Turks under Dragut.

Malta's present ruler is pious, beefy, frumpy Lieut. General Sir William George Shedden Dobbie, 63, whose troops call him "Old Dob Dob" and who does not drink, smoke or swear. He regards this war as another crusade against infidels, and he hates the Nazi nihilists for making him fight on Sundays. Any other day of the week he is glad to oblige. In 1918 he observed that, if anyone ever asked him what he did in World War I, he could say that he stopped it, for it was he, as a member of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's staff, who wrote and signed the order for the Armistice. If Malta stands this time, no one will have to ask "Old Dob Dob" what he did in World War II.

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