Out today with The Malta Independent on Sunday
Published:
May 10, 2009 at 8:42am
Beautiful photography and lots of articles about contemporary plans for Valletta. And best of all, it’s free of charge – don’t miss it. Who said you can’t get something for nothing?
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Well, you can get lots of rubbish for nothing. Maybe your question should have been “Who said you can’t get something of quality for nothing?”
Ohh, that’s below the belt, that is.
Ghad nohorguha kandidat fuq il-Belt lil Daphne li kieku mhux Slimiza!
Is there an edition available online anywhere?
[Daphne – No, not yet.]
Daphne, congratulations, this is a truly excellent issue. I read it cover to cover. May I point out a historical inaccuracy? There is a rather glaring faux pas when Mr Mule Stagno refers to “someone might remember a paratrooper parachuting down” towards the end of the article. This is incorrect. If someone saw a paratrooper parachuting down, then one might get the idea that Malta was actually invaded by the Axis powers. It was not. Paratroopers were used in good effect by the Germans in Crete when they invaded it. They were never used in Malta, because Operation Hercules (the planned invasion of Malta) never happened. This is thanks to the intrepid defenders, be they British, Maltese, South African, American, Rhodesian, New Zealanders, Australian…..
[Daphne – He might have meant a pilot who pressed the eject button. One of my mother’s earliest memories is of a German pilot parachuting into Balluta Bay, after his plane was hit, the people of the area rushing at him to lynch him, and her father – a very large man – pulling them off him because he was just a terrified boy.]
For us amateur students of WWII, it is an interesting point deliberating why Malta was never invaded. The only reason is that the Axis thought us better able to defend ourselves than the Cretans. We were only 60 miles away from Sicily, so logistics were not a problem. They were a problem in Crete. In fact the Germans lost too many men. It was in effect a Pyrrhic victory.
It is also a moot point to mention that I might probably not be writing this and you may not be reading it if the Germans did take Malta. They considered us Untermenschen, and lumped us together with Arabs and Jews as subhuman. We were certainly not Aryan. So when a pompous prat decides to send someone else to a November Remembrance commemoration, or when someone calls for the removal of the George Cross awarded to the PEOPLE of Malta, I see red.
Your suggestion that, had we been invaded, we might probably have been exterminated, can’t really be taken seriously. Certainly the small and respected local Jewish community (and a few other oddballs) would have been carted off to the concentration camps. But not the rest of us. Malta would have been a prize for Mussolini (for whom we were his Italian brothers) and the fulfillment of his irredentist dreams. The last thing on his mind would have been to exterminate us.
He would have been gleefully welcomed by a certain section of the population. And this, to my mind, would have been the real tragedy had we been occupied. There would undoubtedly have been a body of collaborators, as there always is following occupation. The enmity these people would have spawned would have carried on down the generations. It would have given rise to yet another cause for an us-and-them rift amongst the population.
“Thanks God” we were not invaded.
John, we may not have been exterminated as a population, but we would have suffered terribly. Hitler called the shots, not Mussolini. They would have seen to it.
Most of us would have died in the slave labour camps the Germans would have set up. Remember we were “black” British citizens. The Germans used to shoot black Jamaican troops fighting with the British. On the other hand, they respected Indian POWs, probably because of the Nazi fascination with Hinduism.
[Daphne – Ho hum.]
No plane in WWII had an ejector seat. Getting out of the plane was a real problem, and many pilots died either snagged by their parachute and harness or else because they couldnt open their canopy. Baling out, as it was called, involved going up or down to a safe height and ideally turning the plane over so that one could drop out. This in reality was very difficult so pilots frequently had to clamber out of their planes the right way up and jump away.
It was a very difficult thing to do when your plane is mortally hit and burning, leaking oil and glycol everywhere and plummeting down out of control.
We owe these guys big, who lived, fought and died for it and bravely made it seem like a game.
All very interesting, but entirely beside the point. I remember that story about a terrified pilot landing in the Sliema/Balluta bay area almost as if I had been there myself. I’ve often wondered who he was and what eventually became of him. When Luciano Mule’ Stagno made that remark to me ‘paratrooper’ was just a detail. What his comment brought to mind was a story I’d often heard of a terrified young man being set upon by people whom he may never have wanted to bomb in the first place – a particular sort of the brutality of war that gets lost in the popular narrative of enemies and allies.
Mario Debono, Malta was not invaded because the Axis powers had lost a lot of men during the invasion of Crete. The invasion was carried out by the paratroopers division and thus Hitler lost faith in them. Another factor which hampered the invasion-tobe was that Herman Goering was opposed to it because a lot of the Luftwaffe stationed in Italy would have had to be transferred to Sicily.
Operation Hercules was going to be one of the biggest operations during WWII, involving over a thousand aircraft, several thousand Italian soldiers and a group of commandos who were to land before the actual invasion, to destroy key positions.
Another factor was the Royal Navy. Hitler believed the Italian navy to be no match for it. Obviously, when the Axis forces lost at Tobruk in Libya the operation was cancelled.
Dear Maria Galea, I have been short of comments at the risk of being pedantic. You are right of course, but we will never know the real reason, will we. Not invading Malta was the Germans’ greatest blunder.
A very interesting edition. I have just spent an enjoyable afternoon reading it from cover to cover. Keep up the good work Daphne.
Daphne, well done – really beautiful. May I ask, is it possible to get past editions?
[Daphne – I’m afraid not, as we’ve run out.]
Hi Daphne
Your last Sunday’s Flair is very informative. It was enjoyable to read so many interesting articles about Valletta. Keep up the good work! However, I differ on one point. Should there be a theatre or should we build a bridge. In my opintion we need to do both. I still think we need a national theatre for all local and foreign visual and performing arts. The old opera house is an ideal option being that it is right in the centre of Valletta and Valletta happens to be in a central for most of our towns. We do not have a proper art gallery and certain venues do not deserve to be held at the MFCC. I still think that we need to build bridges. The one that comes to mind, which in my opinion is more important than the one of the grand harbour is a bridge that unites this blessed island of ours and it that does not cost a cent but a lot of perseverance.