Word: maltas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Thursday some Italian cruisers were located at sea by our air reconnaissance, but we did not of course know precisely what game they were up to. It might have been an attack on Malta, an attack on our convoys, an attack on Crete, or one of several other possibilities...
...About Malta: "It has held out amazingly but we will have to abandon it for strategic reasons...
Against this ground lull, air action grew to new vigor on both sides. The British pounded Italian bases in Rhodes seven nights in a row, firing hangars and crumpling grounded planes. The Germans attacked British motorized transport in Libya, hit at Malta over & over, dropped huge parachute bombs onto Bengasi. The R. A. F. came back with an attack on the Nazi Stuka bases in Sicily. For five hours they shuttled past overhead, wheeling and diving on gasoline stores and bomb dumps. German reconnaissance pilots returned from a flight over Suez with photographs showing two vessels sunk in the channel...
...British could take Tripoli, they would be within 300 miles of Sicily and the new Stuka bases there. At Tripoli they would have another naval operating base, besides Malta, near the Sicilian channel. To throw Italy entirely and finally out of Africa was a goal not to be sneered at. Perhaps British proximity might prove to be a beneficial persuasion on General Maxime Weygand. The Vichy censors decided it was about time to let French newspapers pay a little attention to the Italian situation in Africa. The paper Montague of Clermont-Ferrand went so far as to say: "The word...
...invasion of Britain. It hinted, in fact, at a southerly diversion before invasion. Roads to the south of Berlin were jammed with military matériel, moving south. German air tactics appeared in Greece and Libya (see p. 22). German airplanes based on Sicily continued active attacks on Malta and Crete. The British, now familiar with the Hitler reconnaissance pattern, could only suspect that a southern campaign would be a sure indication of an imminent attempt at invasion...