The recent death of one of the few surviving heroes of the defence of Malta in World War II passed virtually unnoticed in the island. Peter Rothwell deserved better.

Those were dire days: Malta, a last strategic hub in the Mediterranean, just could not afford to fail. Its survival was vital for the success of the Allies, its fall equally vital for the victory of the Nazi-Fascists in North Africa.

The fate of the Mediterranean depended on the beleaguered island, “the most bombed place on earth”. The Royal Air Force played a determining role in ensuring that the tyranny of deluded, psychotic dictators did not overcome Malta and prevail in Europe.

Rothwell had volunteered to join the Special Duties Flights of Wellington aircraft in Malta, reaching the island early in 1942, when the Axis forces were putting on all they had to vanquish the battered rock by air and by sea.

He had previously served in Iceland, and believed the Mediterranean would be a delightful paradise next to the numbing temperatures he had suffered in that sub-Arctic land.

That proved to be his first disillusion. Malta was going through one of its starkest winters ever.

The pilots thought the only way to fight the cold was to down gin with boiling water and to eat tiny pickled onions to simulate somehow the effects of warmth. Belying Tourist Board promotion, Rothwell voted Malta the coldest place on earth.

The pilots could well think that, as “within a fortnight their billets had been bombed out and they moved to the seaplane base in Kalafrana, four miles from Luqa.

Initially they had a small car to take them there and back but, by March 1942, with fuel so short, they had to abandon it and walk there and back instead, often in the dark after night-time operations”.

Worse was still to come. On April 7 bombing wrecked the Kalafrana seaplane base, though the pilots still made use of the mess, disregarding the insignificant detail that one wall had gone missing altogether and their common room henceforth greeted every whim of the elements.

“Their billets were now caves, where they were safe from bombs, but easy prey for sand bugs”. In fact, when Rothwell left Malta on June 22, 1942, his body sported numerous malicious boils, aided and abetted by heavy bouts of sandfly fever.

In Malta, Rothwell flew Wellington bombers which came in various marks and specifications, with maximum speeds varying from 235 to 299 mph. These Vickers aircraft, the staple warhorses of the RAF between 1939 and 1943, had versatile uses, from reconnaissance to long-range bombing, and sometimes also doubled as torpedo planes.

As the siege tightened, these stubborn planes “were increasingly battered, the airfield was a wreck, the pilots were expected to repair their aircraft by hand. Even air tests were dangerous exercises because of the large numbers of marauding enemy fighters”.

Rothwell’s last scheduled flight from Malta turned out to be an epic, suspenseful ordeal.

His Wellington needed a thorough overhaul, something quite fanciful in the besieged island – no spare parts or facilities for the RAF ground crews to undertake the extensive repairs themselves.

Air Force Command decided Rothwell would fly his plane to Cairo, taking with him a number of fighter pilots whose tour in Malta had expired, and some other passengers too. Rothwell, his body decorated with boils and his spirit undermined by malnutrition and sandfly temperature, took off, heading southeast to Egypt.

Ninety minutes after leaving, his starboard engine burst into flames. Rothwell immediately activated the fire extinguishers, but, following an initial success, the flames took over again – 200 miles out at sea. He ordered everyone to jettison their luggage, and turned back to Malta.

Piloting with one engine out of action and on fire would have been exhausting for a man in fine health, let alone for someone weak, feverish and malnourished.

The torque from the working engine pulled the plane violently to one side and only by applying constant hard rudder on the other could Rothwell keep flying. “It was an extraordinary demonstration of skill and resilience”.

Rothwell and his passengers, quite understandably, doubted they would reach Malta, with the aircraft implacably losing height and the engine on fire. Those probably remained the longest two-and-a-half hours in their lives, but they made it, the pilot’s last feat being his slalom between the bomb craters and the unexploded ordnance littering the Luqa runway.

This was not Rothwell’s only flying drama with a happy ending.

Before his Malta posting, in May 1941, taking off from Northern Ireland, he found himself navigating in impenetrable fog and running short on fuel, somewhere on the north coast of Scotland.

He searched anxiously for somewhere to land and decided to risk an emergency landfall on the grounds of a grand castle. Predictably his undercarriage gave way and his plane skidded to a halt just short of the castle walls – a shocked pilot, but with crew safe and sound.

Great was his surprise, if not his relief, to learn that he had chosen to land on the grounds of the home of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for the Air. A knock, and then an uninvited visit for tea with his topmost superior.

Rothwell was 21 when he volunteered for his Malta stint of duties. Despite his young age, he assumed the full responsibilities that “one of the worst postings in the world” demanded of him.

January 1942, when he arrived in Malta, coincided with the beginning of the heaviest aerial blitz by the German and Italian air forces that Malta was to suffer during the whole three-year siege. By that time Malta was “rained upon by bombs and short of just about everything”.

His superiors assigned the young lieutenant to Special Duties Flight – about the only air unit then still more or less operational in Malta, and he acquitted himself excellently.

On his second sortie, he helped lead the Fleet Air Arm squadrons to a convoy consisting of one merchant ship and one tanker heading for Rommel’s relief – both were sunk.

“Peter later commanded the flight which continued to serve valiantly from the island, even when almost all offensive air operations had ceased”.

Rothwell’s adversaries in the air were the German and Italian fighter pilots. What he thought of them is not recorded, but it would be fair to set straight a common misconception, born of ignorance and fostered by war propaganda – the cowardice and incompetence of Italian wartime pilots.

The truth was exactly the opposite: that British airmen feared and respected Italian pilots far more than they did German ones.

All serious military scholars who have tackled the issue dispassionately agree that Italian pilots generally showed astounding valour against all odds.

George Beurling, the legendary Canadian ace based on Malta, who was to become one of the greatest flying myths of the Second World War, did not mince his words about the Eyeties (Italians) and the Jerries (Germans) whom the Allied pilots had to fight:

“The Eyeties are comparatively easy to shoot down. Oh, they’re brave enough. In fact, I think the Eyeties have more courage than the Germans. They will stick it even if things are going against them, whereas the Jerries will run.”

On another occasion, Beurling worded his thoughts differently: “The Jerries are probably better overall pilots than the Italians, but they certainly let the Eyeties do their fighting for them when the going got tough”.

It was the Italians’ inferior equipment and weaponry that crippled their air force, not the valour of its pilots. “The Italians were let down badly in the matter of their equipment. Only about half of their bombs went off, and those that did went ‘pop’ instead of ‘bang’. Badly made, undersized bombs blunted their attacks and poor guns their defensive powers.

“Their armament was very bad altogether. I’d blame the armaments, not the individuals,” Beurling commented.

Wing Commander George Burges, resplendent in his Faith, Hope and Charity renown, expressed exactly the same judgment as Beurling:

“The average Italian pilot had more courage in the face of opposition than many of his Luftwaffe counterparts. I found the Germans were far more willing to break formation and leg it back home.

“Most German fighter pilots had far less stomach for individual combat, man to man, than the pilots of the Macchis and CR 42”.

Burges boasted of “many exciting personal combats with Italian fighter pilots, as did most of the pilots of the Fighter Flight”.

The Germans, Burges added, “preferred to stay in large packs at a great height, with occasional sorties to attack defenceless men, women and children on the inland roads of Malta, or to pick up a wounded straggler in a damaged Hurricane or Spitfire”.

And another source confirms this in full: “The RAF pilots had a higher regard for the Italian pilots who would ‘stay and mix it’ even if the odds were against them, unlike the gallant Luftwaffe who had a tendency to turn tail and run if they did not have all the cards stacked in their favour”.

In Malta, Rothwell took part in 38 sorties, all hazardous and nerve-wracking. On one occasion his command ordered his unit, the Special Duties Flight, to attack an Italian merchant vessel. “Flying through intense flak Peter and his crew bombed and sank the ship”.

Immediately after he joined the forces that attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto, a strategic assault which inflicted crippling damage to Italy’s sea presence from which it never really recovered.

“At the mercy of the firepower of the entire Italian battle fleet and harbour defences, this was another extremely hazardous task”.

The young flight lieutenant also distinguished himself on March 27, 29 and 31 during a series of attacks on Axis airfields, including a successful raid on Catania.

Some words about Peter Rothwell the man:

Eldest son of an army clergyman who fathered seven children and at the end of the war became a missionary in Africa, the young Peter did well in his studies, especially French.

In times of high fever and after a bad riding fall, his brain and his tongue switched to French, to the bewilderment of all those around him.

He had to abandon his studies when his father passed away aged 50.

“Peter was a humble man and never blew his own trumpet, but praised others and their part in the war”. He hardly ever obtained the recognition he deserved except, perhaps, in later life.

And even about that he said half-bitterly and half-depreciatingly, “The only reason I am getting recognition now is because all my more deserving friends have died”.

Perhaps his greatest exposure to public acclaim came when he was no longer in a position to relish it – a prominent obituary in the London Times.

Rothwell struck others as a tall, slim man with handsome, if charmingly spivvy features. He grew his iconic moustache (his RAF ‘tash’) to handlebar proportions and cultivated it lovingly to the end of his days.

In fact, the older he grew the wider his moustache stretched. It distinguished him among others in the yearly April pilgrimage to Malta.

“He was the focal point for many celebrations of their (the Malta veterans’) heroism”. Much to his pride, he was treated with respect and gratitude by the people and government of Malta.

Rothwell’s adjustment to civilian life when the war ended does not seem to have been as traumatic as it turned out to be for many other demobbed servicemen. He had the support of his “beautiful and loving wife” Eileen and the less obvious comforts of their six children.

He suffered the loss of his third-born Anthony when only four years old, and then of his wife, from pleurisy, when she was pregnant with their seventh son. This left him with five children, aged from two to 13, to bring up on his own.

A year later he married his second wife Margaret who already had three children from a previous marriage.

After the war, Rothwell kept himself busy in various commercial enterprises.

At first he renovated and resold properties in the southwest counties, then moved on to a successful boat-building business in Poole – a calling much after his heart as he loved the sea with a passion and always dreamt of wrapping up his occupations and sailing around the world.

He often opted to deliver the boats personally when commissioned from abroad. The world-renowned Earls Court show accepted his boats for exhibition.

He later turned his large house in Canford Cliffs into a residential home. His last major business revolved around flowers – a teleflorist agency in Plymouth and a plant nursery to go with it.

He eventually retired in Bournemouth where he dedicated much of his time to the George Cross Island Association, which kept 2,000 veterans of the siege of Malta in touch and actively promoted their yearly pilgrimage to Malta every April.

In part, this made up for the soft bitterness for the half-hearted recognition of the dedication and bravery he had always shown throughout 158 operational missions.

Rothwell passed peacefully away, aged 90, at the Cranley Paddock care home in Lyndhurst, on December 20, 2010, survived by his five children.

Malta, and the world, would have been a more dismal place were it not for the heroism of the likes of Peter Rothwell. May we never forget that.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to James Holland, Julia Gaw, Tim Lewin and Charles Debono of the National War Museum.