Malta
Heroes Remember
Malta
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I don't know how the people survived. They took an awful
beating and Malta was given the George Cross.
The George Cross, the people of Malta and the Island
of Malta was given the George Cross, and the George Cross
is the civilian equivalent to the Victoria Cross. The place was
bombed something awful by the Italians, some German.
Mostly Italian at that time. You'd look out,
we were in what was a hotel at one time,
and you'd look out and there was, nowadays
you would say it was a parking lot.
It was a big cement slab. There used to be a building there.
There was one street in Malta that we used to
walk down the street and I looked up one day and the rubble
was oh, ten, twelve feet high. So I asked one of the Maltese,
I said, "Why don't you clean that up?"
They had cleaned up an awful lot of streets, eh.
They said if they did the buildings would all fall
down around it so they left it there, they left it there.
At that time, I went there in April of ‘43 and left in December,
there were no restaurants because any food coming
coming in had to come in by convoy.
They did little farming, but for ballast, ships normally
use stone but when they were going to Malta
was just like a little stone quarry really. There was a hundred
foot drop on each end of the main runway and
that was stone quarry. It was only fifty miles from Sicily
and it was the entrance to the Suez Canal so
they got that and this is what they were trying to do.
But, and at that time it belonged to the British.
It was like Palestine and Malta they were British protectors.
Part of the empire. And the, this was one of the reasons
why they were trying to beat it into submission.
England had a naval base there as well.
And of course to run the airdromes, they had built some,
the main airdrome was Luka, the one I was at, but they
had an awful lot of stuff in there, different types of aircraft,
an awful lot. But the problem was the convoys coming in
they took an awful beating, an awful beating.
I don't know how they existed really to tell you the truth.
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