World War: Test Assault?

In World War I, the island of Malta was used as a vast hospital for wounded Allies. But this forbidding rock offers thin hospitality in this war. Angry are its forts, its schools of mines crowding ten miles out to sea, its anti-aircraft guns, its airdromes with hangars sheltered by bombproof rock quarries, its harbor-mouths teethed with 10-, 14-, 16-inch guns, its dockyard, its seaplane and sub marine bases.

Last week both ends of the Axis openly acknowledged interest in this porcupine of a place. Berlin correspondents cabled that German military circles boasted Malta could be made “ready for storming” by Stukas alone. The Rome radio said: “British navigation in the Mediterranean may become a practical impossibility. . . . The first definite change for the worse will come when the base of Malta is completely dismantled and the port and airports are made absolutely unfit for service. To achieve this, air activity over Malta will be intensified to such a pitch that no breathing space would be allowed between raids.”

Axis interest in Malta suddenly intensified when the aircraft carrier Illustrious limped into the island’s tight but deep harbor, Valetta, after the Battle of the Sicilian channel three weeks ago (TIME, Jan. 27). Day after day German dive bombers returned. At first they just attacked the crippled Illustrious. Then they began going after port installations and defenses in general. The British, hunting down the Stuka hive at Catania, Sicily, raided it many times to try to smoke the attackers out.

Late in the week, Berlin announced that dive bombers had come upon a British convoy west of Crete, and in the ensuing attack had scored “severe bomb hits of heavy and medium caliber” on the stern of one battleship, forward and starboard on another battleship, and also on a heavy cruiser.

The Maltese assaults were more important, because in the final analysis, the battle of plane v. ship is really a battle of plane v. base. If the main naval establishments of supply and repair are made untenable, navigation indeed becomes a “practical impossibility.” Malta is not a primary base. Only 60 miles from Sicily, its chief purpose now is to supply and fuel craft that can slide in and out overnight.

If a full-out assault is made on Malta, it may be not only practice for an attack on Britain but a test of whether the Axis will ever be able to make successful assaults from the air on Gibraltar, Alexandria, Suda Bay, Tobruch, other big and little naval bases; whether, in short, the Axis can make the Mediterranean its sea by making the air above an Axis sky.