大象传媒

Please read part 1 before this section. Note, Reg received good information on expected casualties but otherwise his information on RAF and RN activity was little better than that of other Malta residents. Force K, described below although withdrawn from May 1941 until late October 1941 was active at night and its achievements included the Duisburg convoy victory of November 1941. I'll let Reg continue in his own words.

In the harbour were Force K, the cruisers Aurora and Penelope plus destroyers Lively and Lance. Penelope is still known today as HMS Pepperpot. She had been hit so many times that her sides were a pin cushion of bomb splinters into which brave Maltese workmen would insert wooden plugs to keep her from sinking. Aurora was similar. They couldn't escape from Malta. At sea without the world famous Grand Harbour barrage, they wouldn't have had a chance. So we reached the lowest point in Malta's history.

We all became fatalistic. The usual story about a bombing raid if it's got your name on it then you've had it. It's true that the hospital wasn't an intended target. We had in fact got a number of German pilot prisoners of war both in the hospital and also in a little compound just by the hospital. . The Red Cross had to be informed of prisoners of war. We were sure that the Germans knew they were there and that they tried to avoid bombing the hospital which had a big red cross visible for miles in the square in front of it. The danger occured (and this happened several times) when bombers flying over the hospital were hit by Spinola or one of the other AA batteries at Narga or Nashua on the surrounding hills. If the bomber was on fire, sheer survival required the crew to jettison the bombs to get back to Sicily. I vividly remember one such bomber circling round over the hospital then coming down smoking and on fire. A Junkers 88 it was and one or 2 of the crew coming out by parachute. It was so low you could see the bombs on the bomb rack and I thought it was the end. The bombs were released, they whistled over the hospital and plunged into the sea near where we used to swim.. A second or so's difference in timing would have been fatal. It was difficult to concentrate on x-raying a patient or developing a film in the darkroom knowing that bombers and fighters were patrolling the island and the whole building could collapse at any time. In fact we were lucky. The hospital was damaged on one or 2 occasions but compared with what other people suffered was nothing.

More Food shortages
There were worrying reports on the food shortage. Certainly our rations were pretty terrible and all veterans will remember the hunger. The water we drank was heavily chlorinated. There was no butter, eggs cheese, milk in fact it is easier to say what there was. Corned beef, dry biscuits and Chinese pilchards or at least they had Chinese writing on the front. They may have come from Taiwan. That was all there was. Macaliph would curry, he would fritter, he would boil, he would fry bully beef. He would soften the biscuits and make some sort of mishmash of biscuits and corned beef with a few pilchards worked into the mixture and for those as hungry as we were it was very acceptable.

Morale and the Sergeants Mess
Moral amongst the personnel in the 45th was reasonably high considering the future did look hopeless but our mess had 2 factions, the technical staff, pharmacists, lab technicians, theatre staff, radiographers, and the regimental staff. The latter were medically less well trained and were there to deal with convoys of wounded coming in. They carried stretchers, dealt with tents and did other types of work, often very similar to what they would have done in the infantry. Regrettably, some of the regimental staff treated the Maltese badly and this caused a rift. The regimental staff who were mostly from London sat on one side of the mess and the medical staff, mostly from Leeds on the other and we were not a happy group.
Of course there was no drink and that didn't help. The nearest library was Valetta. Whilst we were allowed to go there it was seven miles by land, through heaps of rubble and almost continuous bombing raids. It was just not practical. I'm not exaggerating, this was really a very low ebb.
The other thing from a morale point of view was the irregular mail., It was a terribly difficult journey for an unescorted transport plane to make and a lot were shot down. An lot of sea mail was also lost in ships sunk trying to get to Malta. The only reliable contact was by the 2 minelaying cruisers Welshman and Manxman, one of whom I knew very well of course and submarines. There was a submarine flotilla which managed to survive in Malta and they would bring vital supplies, aviation fuel, some ammunition and some mail. When I did receive letters it was sometimes 3 at a time but I did appreciate this contact with home.

New Spitfires 20th April 1942
Then suddenly an amazing thing happened. Spitfires appeared in the sky in considerable numbers.
We learnt afterwards what had happened. The American carrier Wasp, had sailed from Gibraltar, halfway to Malta but had remained out of range of enemy aircraft from Pantellorea, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. We didn't know anything of this beforehand of course. She carried spitfires which had had their cannon removed and extra fuel tanks fitted. Meanwhile stone pens had been built and aircraftmen and many of the infantry battalions had been trained to remove the tanks and refit the cannon absolutely as soon as they arrived. I think the infantry removed the petrol tanks which would be virtually empty and very light, whilst the aircraftmen fitted the cannon. The idea was that they should be up in the air again within 20 minutes or they would be dead ducks on the ground.

Maltese stone can be cut with a saw into blocks and the block pens were intended to protect the Spitfires whilst they were on the ground Unfortunately even whilst they were landing, the Germans came over with fighters and bombers to try and shoot them down, hence the urgency in re-arming them. Then we had the amazing sight of a squadron of spitfires in the air attacking these Junkers 87 and Junkers 88s. Nobody watching gave a damn about the danger. The Spitfires were diving into the barrage of the Grand Harbour chasing the Junkers 87 and Junkers 88s, and engaged in swirling fights with Messerschmitts. It couldn't last. They were heavily outnumbered and inevitably when their fuel was exhausted, they had to land at Takali
Before they could actually get back into their pens, they were shot up. Some escaped but it was obvious that a continuous reinforcement of Spitfires was necessary in order to keep up the aerial defence of Malta. So the air battle went on. We were half starved but we felt that Malta was fighting back.

August 1942
The supply situation however got worse and worse and we were told that our rations would be cut yet again. We were really hungry. I had weighed almost 70kg and I was tall and thin but by the end of 1942 I was down to 50kg... I think we all were just skeletons. If you've been subjected to starvation over a long period, a key rule is never to talk about food. We all thought about it, but if anyone said " wouldn't it be nice if we had steak and chips" they were immediately jumped on.

I was chief radiographer and we had a fair number of German pilots in our officers ward who'd been shot down. One was fairly friendly and spoke good English. He'd had a fractured femur and a piece of shrapnel in his abdomen. I x-rayed his femur quite often as it was very badly broken. He told me he was a Czech. Czech! I said. "What are you doing in the German Air force?"

This man bitterly resented that Britain and France had refused to support Czechoslovakia in their resistance in 1938 and had joined the Luftwaffe as a professional pilot. He warned me no ship was ever going to come into the Grand harbour, we would have to surrender. The Germans would shortly invade Malta as they had done Crete. Our treatment, he said, would depend very strongly on how we treated prisoners. Whether he thought we would give him extra rations or not I don't know. As hard as it was for him to believe, he got exactly the same food as us!

Then something else happened which shook us.
The Geneva Convention states that non combatant troops such as Medical Corps are purely for the treatment of the wounded and they cannot be issued with arms. But for a short time, when invasion of Malta was imminent we were issued with rifles. Most of us thought this was appalling but we were taken to the rifle range and told to practice -purely for the defence of our patients in hospital! We did of course do as we were told. We fired our rifles and so on. The powers that be probably thought that a few score Medical Corps firing into the air against paratroops would have some effect. Certainly it would have had the effect of having us all shot if the invasion succeeded as we all thought it probably would do

Things were pretty bad in Malta but what we didn't know was how short of aircraft fuel the island was. About a week after my conversation with the Czech pilot, we were told to look out for a convoy coming into the Grand harbour . Amongst the ships of Operation Pedestal was the tanker Ohio which had been lashed to a destroyer. I took the Czech out to the window and pointed it out to him. He was incredulous. He couldn't believe, given all the forces against it that the convoy had been allowed to arrive.

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