Malta Spits Back

In stone-deaf Lady Strickland's Maltese garden a land mine blew the tail feathers off her prize peacock, blew Lady Strickland off her feet. She remarked, as she got up: "At last I've heard something." Last week all the Maltese heard something they had been waiting long to hear: thunders of noise that meant an even chance of pasting the enemy back after almost two years of being pasted. Malta had gotten important reinforcements.

When Italy's sneak-punch into the war brought minuscule Malta under its huge, puffed-up shadow, there was not a single plane on the island. Only 60 miles from Sicily, Malta was promptly written off by the British as impossible, to defend. But while Italy still controlled Sicily, Malta's war was a seesaw affair of brief, bravura raids and dolce jar niente. Not till the Luftwaffe took over did the real pasting come, and Malta become history's most heavily bombed island.

Last month, tall, lean British Air Marshal Sir Arthur William Tedder, a vital, soft-spoken Scot, visited Malta and saw with his own shrewd eyes what was happening. He promised to send reinforcements and keep on sending them. On Saturday, when the alert sounded, swarms of Spitfires rose to meet the Luftwaffe attack, tore through the screen of Messerschmitts that was protecting Junkers bombers, sent one after another on flaming nose dives into the sea.

Incredulous, the Nazis tried again on Sunday, met the same withering attack. Three times that day the Luftwaffe came back for more, made it the best British day in Malta's history. R.A.F. score for the two days was 29 planes destroyed, 27 probably destroyed, 37 damaged. R.A.F.

losses totaled three planes. . How the air reinforcements arrived in Malta is a snug R.A.F. secret. No secret is the fact that, meeting the Luftwaffe on equal terms, the R.A.F.

in Malta can shoot rings around it. Whether Malta's local air superiority was to be merely temporary and defensive, or, like the R.A.F. superiority over Occupied France, it hinted preparations for a second front, only Allied grand strategist-could say.

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