A few minutes later, they weren’t.
The Stukas came in waves, a cascade of dropping planes, plunging almost vertically through the barrage, shrugging aside the few puffs of pale smoke writhing in the sky. Gone were the days when the Grand Harbour barrage had looked like a giant chestnut tree in full flower, and admiration for the gallantry of the enemy pilots had been at its height. This ack-ack was small beer by comparison, little more than a thin splatter.
He spotted a bare section of four Spitfires following the Stukas in, looking to get among them, waiting for them to come out of their dives. This was the moment when the Stuka was at its most vulnerable, when its bombs had been released and the German pilot flicked the gizmo that pulled the aircraft up on its tail and for a few brief seconds both he and the rear gunner blacked out from the rapid climb. Easy meat for a Spitfire pilot who knew how to time his attack.
So it proved. Max saw two rising Stukas shredded by cannon fire, spinning away and dropping into the harbor. Their ammo exhausted, the Spitfires headed for home, running the gauntlet of 109s waiting for them over Hamrun. Meanwhile, the Stukas kept coming, sharp-angled birds of prey swooping from out of the blue.
Down on the bastion wall, the Bofors crew had yet to fire their gun. The long barrel swept the sky, searching for targets that warranted the precious ammunition. It found one as the raid was petering out: a lone Stuka whose dive didn’t seem to be directed at the dockyards. It wasn’t. The aircraft was bearing straight down on the gun pit.
“Traverse left … Down two … Lateral zero.”
Max was close enough to hear the bombardier’s shouts even above the scream of the diving Stuka.
“On!” yelled the layers almost simultaneously.
“Engage.”
“Fire!”
The stream of shells ascended toward the plane, bursting in its path, but not hitting it. A moment later, the pilot unloaded his twin bombs.
Max watched, mesmerized, as the two dark objects fell earthward, his brain processing their trajectory and struggling to make the calculation. Bang on target? Or a touch too short?
The gunners appeared oblivious to the menace, their minds on other matters. The Bofors’s barrel swung round to pick up the Stuka as it came out of its dive.
“Engage. …”
Max didn’t hear the command to fire. It was drowned out by a mighty explosion that shook the balcony beneath his feet and sent him reaching for the rail to steady himself.
The bombs had fallen short, slamming into the sheer bastion wall below the gun pit.
Max raised his eyes toward the Stuka, guided by the red phosphorescence of the tracers, and saw the tail section part company with the main body of the aircraft, cleaved clean away as if by a knife. He glimpsed the pilot and the rear gunner, strangely inert in the high Perspex hood, unconscious still because of the g-forces. The Stuka spiraled away over the rooftops. He hoped for their sakes that they wouldn’t regain consciousness before the end, but it was a good few seconds before a distant
The “Raiders Passed” siren sounded as Max was running a razor over his chin. He dressed quickly and headed downstairs, out into the unearthly silence that always followed a raid. The stench of cordite sat heavily in the chill morning air, and the flocks of pigeons were once more settling warily onto the rooftops, having spent the past half hour whirling around in agitated flight. A crowd of admirers was gathered around the Bofors gun pit. The Maltese boys had abandoned their nearby flag station and were reenacting the final moments of the doomed Stuka. The gunners were smoking and laughing and looking justifiably pleased with themselves. It had been a fine piece of shooting, each of them playing their part, a true team effort.
“Congratulations,” said Max.
“Thank you, sir,” replied the bombardier, the oldest of the bunch, a skinny fellow with jug ears and tombstone teeth.
“I saw it all from up there.” Max nodded toward his balcony.
“Wish I had too, sir,” said one of the layers, to a round of laughter.
“There’s only one thing troubling me.” Max threw in a brief pause for effect. “I was watching closely, and the way I saw it, you fired off four clips at four rounds apiece.”
One round more than their daily allowance of fifteen. They quickly figured Max was joking, and the bombardier spun round to the No. 4, the man who worked the pedal that fired the gun. “Oi, Bennett, you plonker. You hear that?” Bennett was the best footballer of the bunch, a sturdy little left-footer who could send an opponent the wrong way with the merest dip of a shoulder. “You’re in for it when the battery commander gets wind.”
“Go easy on him, sir.”
“Yeah. Bennett can’t count for nowt.”
“Don’t know the difference between fifteen and sixteen.”
“Just like his sister, sir. She told me she was sixteen.”
More laughter, and more cigarettes, and a promise from Max that they’d get a special mention in the Information Office’s
