Malta’s Siege Tunnels: What WWII Taught Me About Survival and Resilience
- Grow Some Labia
- Oct 18
- 7 min read
You never know what you're made of until the air raids sound. All. Day. Long.
Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, and Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’ head of the German Imperial army, didn’t agree on much, except one thing: If the Axis powers couldn’t subdue the tiny tri-island country of Malta, the Axis was, to put it more bluntly than either of them did, fucked.
“Without Malta, the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa,” Rommel warned.
“Malta is the master key of the Mediterranean: the battlefield on which the fate of the Mediterranean war will be decided,” said Churchill.
I recently visited my aunt in Malta, whom I hadn’t seen in over thirty-five years. She kept encouraging me to visit Mellieha, a town on the northern end of ‘Big Island’, the largest and most central of the Maltese triad, the other two islands being Comino and Gozo.
My last full day, I visited the World War II bomb shelter just around the corner.
Aunt Nancy was born a year before the war ended, and two years before the Axis’s five year Siege of Malta ended. She doesn’t remember the war or the air raids, but her toys as a small child included broken glass and rubble. Malta, as I heard at least eleventy-hundred times from everyone while I was there, was the most bombed country in Europe. This tiny little island that some people have never heard of—I had to enlighten my Indian Uber driver who drove me to the Toronto airport—was one of the most strategically important points of World War II. My aunt, who lives just a few blocks from her old ‘hood, pointed out some caves, natural and man-made, a short walk from her apartment where she and her friends played.
The Axis objective was to subdue Malta by starving the populace and destroying their morale with relentless bombing attacks. Because Malta and Italy have intermingled family ties, Italian pilots ‘missed’ a lot. The Germans, however possessed no such sentimental decorum. A newspaper headline in the shelter mentioned ‘15 attacks in 24 hours’; this must have been sheer hell on those below and the Axis actually came very close to achieving their objective.
What they didn’t count on was how resilient the Maltese had become. Given how tiny these chunks of land in the middle of the Mediterranean are, it’s hard to imagine what the big conquest jones has historically been, but pretty much everyone has taken a whack at them over the centuries. When you speak of the ‘Siege of Malta’ you have to specify which one.
The French, the British, the Ottoman Turks and the Barbary corsairs invaded, blockaded or raided for hundreds of years; so did the Kingdom of Sicily in 1429; the Normans invaded in 1091; and the Arab-Byzantines besieged them in 870. This isn’t even a comprehensive list!
In some respects the bomb shelter reminded me of both the current Russian-Ukraine and Israeli-Gazan wars. Like Mussolini’s military, reports are that many Russians are unhappy with going to war with a country with which they have many blood ties; the Russian Air Force knows they may be attacking their families.
The history of the scrappy little country with very powerful friends recalls Israel. And, while watching a short video on the course of the war on Malta, the scenes of destroyed buildings and endless piles of rubble from relentless attacks reminded me of the scenes we see today in Gaza.
Mellieha’s tunnels—about 2.1 meters high, seemed terribly claustrophobic. At five-foot-three, I felt how close the ceiling was to my head (the Maltese themselves are roughly my height) and for my non-guided tour were lit by dim electric lamps, which were only available to the wartime Maltese when it was working. Otherwise, the shelters were lit by Italian-imported candles until they ran out, and after that by olive oil lamps which were plentiful as Malta has plenty of olive tree plantations.
I imagined how horribly depressing it must have been to live like rats undergound. Not everyone was fortunate enough, even, to live like that; at the beginning of the war, when the air raid sirens sounded, there were only a few shelters that could only hold so many.
Malta is largely made up of porous limestone, and mining and digging is as natural as breathing. My aunt’s 19th century church sits atop limestone but the square and the museum are carved out of it. Across the street is the beautiful Our Lady of the Grotto shrine, in a carved cave. It’s quite lovely.
Miners continuously carved tunnels and cubicles all throughout Malta, often without shoes or the protective gear we have today.
Early in the war, they created them for their families but as the war progressed the Maltese government decreed they must do it for the public, and later, families could dig their own private rooms.
Babies were born here; the injured were attended to and operated on in surgical units; others died.
Food supplies got through but it certainly wasn’t easy or always successful. Malta was in no position to defend itself, and the best it could do is survive.
They even managed to preserve some of their most precious artworks and valuables in a space little bigger than a Burger King restroom.
And of course, they prayed to the Lady who always watched over Malta.
In the end, 17,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the country from over 3,300 air raid warnings; 1,500 Maltese citizens died and over 2,000 were injured, which seems remarkable to me as the population was, in 1940, around 250,000-275,000. I would have guessed much higher casualties. Likely many of them came at the beginning of the war. By its end Malta had more than enough underground space for all its remaining citizens and their refugees.
What would you do?
How would I live underground like this? I ask myself, even though, despite the growing hostilities around the world and Canada’s increasingly unstable neighbor to the south, I don’t, at this time, harbor great fears about invasion.
But, I can’t rule it out.
I wonder how capable any of us are of defending our respective motherlands. Only our refugees have real-world experience with home-made wars.
Not to downplay the very real existential threats many of us face now, but it truly puts the price of eggs in perspective when one considers huddling in a tunnel with unwashed neighbors not knowing when you’ll eat again and worrying about your mother who’s developed a concerning nagging cough. Oh, have to go to the bathroom? Push past the elderly and the crying children and use that chamber pot in the alcove over there.
The smell. The disease. The infections. The people you know could have been saved if they’d been treated in a proper hospital.
The terror of wondering what you did to make the Germans hate you so much. How your Italian neighbors could do this to you.
What must it have been like sleeping wherever you could, reminiscing about your old bed now broken in a pile of rubble you used to call home.
Wondering what might happen if a land invasion occurred. If the armies found the people huddled in the tunnels, the mothers clutching their pretty daughters and young sons, knowing they might not be able to protect them from becoming some horrid commandant’s mistress or being forced to serve in the Wehrmacht.
We have no idea how spoiled we actually are until we’re faced with danger we couldn’t even imagine before.
I imagine that if Toronto was bombed or invaded, our Ukrainian refugees could teach us survival tips and best practices. Other subject matter experts are those who escaped the Communists in North Vietnam; or the slaughter of the Tutsis; or the hellholes of Third World Asia and Africa. Today, these Toronto refugees are terrified by the screaming of fighter jets over the city every year for the annual air show, but at least they can be grateful it’s now only once a year.
One wonders how would fare the ‘victims’ of elite overproduction Rob Henderson recently wrote about, furious to have been deprived of the good jobs and higher pay they feel entitled to. They need to take a day off when they hear an idea they can’t handle and can’t define what they think when challenged, and these able-bodied kids are our best defense. What would they do when faced with a drone attack?
I don’t know I would handle it with any more aplomb, but I would head for my bathtub.
Today’s effete elites—all of us, who’ve never experienced a war on our own soil—would have no choice but to take up arms and fight back. Suddenly, a guy who thinks women should marry, submit to a man, and pop out babies, or a woman who claims all men are sexual predators become insanely irrelevant.
Europeans in World War II had already lived through another world war preceding this one; perhaps they were used to it all. I think of my aging self crouched in a hole in the ground, my arthritic knees aching to stretch, and wonder just how much fortitude I’d have waiting for the ‘maybe’ of an invading army. What could I do? At 62, I can’t kick anyone’s ass, but I might be able to improve the morale of sobbing teenagers completely unprepared for what’s unquestionably a horrifically challenging future. I’ve been around long enough to see some shit, even if only on the news, so I know how resilient human beings are. So what if we weren’t tempered by a recent world war like the 1940s Europeans? It’s gotta start somewhere, right? I can write. I can fact-check. I can counter mis/disinformation and remind people what they’re really made of.
That’s what I like to think I’d do.
I hope I never have to find out.
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