The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson

Author:Rick Atkinson [Atkinson, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, War, History
ISBN: 9780805062908
Amazon: 0805062904
Goodreads: 16044941
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

Part Four

10. ARGONAUTS

Citizens of the World

MORNING sun and a tranquil breeze carried hints of an early Mediterranean spring across Grand Harbour, where strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” could be heard from a Royal Navy band practicing aboard H.M.S. Sirius on Friday, February 2. Not since Eisenhower’s arrival with his headquarters in July 1943, just before the invasion of Sicily, had the little island of Malta seethed with such excitement. Hundreds of Allied officers now swarmed through the capital, Valletta, where an Anglo-American strategy conference code-named CRICKET had convened to consider the weightiest matters of war and peace.

Sixteen thousand tons of Axis bombs had pulverized Malta from 1940 to 1943, clogging every street with drifted rubble and giving Valletta the gaunt, haunted mien of the Maltese themselves. Difficulties in finding enough intact buildings to house the CRICKET legations had exasperated conference planners, who warned that “a certain amount of inconvenience must be expected.” (They also cautioned that “spreading of rumors and gossip in Malta is a national pastime, so please discuss nothing in public.”) The Americans alone occupied sixteen barracks, palazzi, and improvised hostels, including the local YWCA and the Lascaris Bastion, a dank warren excavated eons ago by the Knights of St. John, a monastic order founded during the First Crusade. The honey-hued sandstone long favored by Maltese builders was so porous that even buildings unbruised by enemy bombs were said by one airman to resemble “ventilated cold-storage vaults.” Allied officers took their meals in winter garb, and an admiral described trying to sleep while wrapped in a dressing gown, raincoat, overcoat, and several blankets. To provide more billets, nine U.S. Navy ships had berthed in Grand Harbour, lauded by a visitor as “perhaps the most astonishing natural anchorage in the world.” An LST from Naples served as a floating garage for staff cars.

To compensate for any discomfort, every officer was permitted seventy pounds of luggage, and CRICKET’s British hosts assigned each a batman to fetch the daily newspaper. “The shine he put on my shoes lasted for weeks,” an American delegate marveled. An efficient valet service pressed uniforms overnight, and bars opened punctually at six P.M. A twenty-piece orchestra played until midnight in Admiralty House, once home to the Captain of the Galleys; marble scrolls on the wide staircase listed the name of every British sea dog to command the Mediterranean fleet for the past century and a half, Lord Nelson among them. A local librarian gave walking tours to explain Malta’s exotic history, beginning with the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians: how shipwrecked Saint Paul converted the Maltese to Christianity with proselytizing fervor and perhaps a miracle or two; how the knights in the sixteenth century paid the Holy Roman emperor Charles V an annual rent of one falcon, due on All Souls’ Day, a curiosity used by Dashiell Hammett in his novel The Maltese Falcon; how Turkish brigands captured Fort St. Elmo in 1565, nailing defenders to wooden crosses that were floated across Grand Harbour; how the Maltese

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