Free At All Costs by Sam Moses Page A

They dropped 127 bombs on Sicily’s Catania airfield, destroying eleven MC.200s, nine Ju 87s, six He 111s, two Ju 52 cargo planes, one Ju 88, and one SM.79. Seven of the Wellingtons made it back. And three nights after that, nine Wellingtons repeated the attack, without loss; their crews estimated that they had put thirty-five dive-bombers—Stukas and Ju 88s—out of action.
     
    The Luftwaffe had used up all its bombs, but a convoy to Sicily brought more. On the cloudless winter afternoon of January 16, with the sun shimmering off the still water of Grand Harbour, the sky fell in on Malta.
    Forty-four Stukas escorted by ten MC.200s and ten CR.42s, and seventeen Ju 88s escorted by twenty Bf 110s, arrived over Grand Harbour, intending to finish off the
Illustrious.
The RAF sent up all the fighters it could: three Fulmars and four Hurricanes.
    The fighters shot down five bombers and claimed another five probables, but the antiaircraft guns scored zero, because they couldn’t aim low enough to hit the Stukas when they were vulnerable, flying level at 100 feet after their dives and racing out of the harbor at more than 200 mph. The gunners on the bastions were actually looking down at the Stukas. One antiaircraft gun missed a low-flying plane and blew off part of the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor.
    Malta’s “box barrage” of antiaircraft fire appeared for the first time during this attack. The ack-ack guns raised rectangular walls of flak like beaded curtains in a sixties restaurant. The box barrage was intended to foil the attackers, not really shoot them down, and it succeeded too well in misdirecting the aim of the bombers. The Three Cities along the docks, Vittoriosa, Cospicua, and Senglea, were heavily hit.
    “Our instructions were clear, to sink the carrier
Illustrious
only,” said Johann Reiser, one of the 101 Luftwaffe pilots. “It is true we hit all round the harbor, houses, buildings, roads, and killed many civilians…but the murderous anti-aircraft fire all around, north, south, east and west, made it impossible for us to aim properly. It was like hell.”
    The day also featured the debut of a new Axis weapon, as a guided missile zoomed heavily through the box barrage. It was Fritz PC 1400, an experimental secret rocket that German scientists had been working on for two years. The huge bullet-nosed bomb had four stubby wings and a tail and was guided toward
Illustrious
by radio. It failed to explode or kill anyone when it landed on a nunnery in Vittoriosa. Another Malta miracle.
    Most of the seventy-two people killed that day were crushed by rubble, with more dying trapped under blocks of limestone in the days that followed. The devastation looked so clean afterward. Where once there had been a building, afterward there were just big white chunks of stone. Thousands of them covered the Three Cities.
    Five thousand people took shelter in the old railway tunnel in Valletta that night, and it remained packed with teeming humanity for months. Tunnels that had been dug by the Knights under the city were inhabited for the Second Great Siege. There were rows upon rows of triple-high bunk beds, each wooden rack big enough for three children. Some of the boards were scorched black from futile attempts to burn out the bedbugs, fleas, and lice. Hungry rats slinked in the shadows, terrifying the children.
    The brave souls who left the shelters the next day were rewarded with some good meals. The sun rose on hundreds of dead fish floating in the harbor, which were quickly scooped up and sold out of carts, cooked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over fires made from shattered furniture. The fish tasted like gunpowder, but the redolence created by their grilling helped deodorize the air, which was growing putrid with the stench of dead horses.
    But the German bombers had failed: they had missed
Illustrious.
After nearly two weeks of round-the-clock welding of the worst holes, she sneaked away from Malta under the