Halberd’s Heroes: The 1941 Convoy That Fed Malta’s Fighting Spirit

**The Night the Harbour Roared: How Operation Halberd Fed Malta’s Fighting Spirit**

It was just past 21:00 on 27 September 1941 when the blackout curtains of Valletta’s bombed-out cafés fluttered from the inside—people couldn’t resist peeking at the thunder echoing across Grand Harbour. Searchlights sliced the sky, not for enemy aircraft this time, but to guide in a miracle: nine battered merchant ships escorted by the steel sinews of the Royal Navy. From the bastions to the rubble of Ħamrun, Maltese families whispered the code-name that had crackled over Rediffusion sets for days: “Halberd.” Within hours, the island’s population of 280,000—hungry, exhausted but unbroken—would taste fresh bread again. Operation Halberd wasn’t just a naval convoy; it was Malta’s lifeline and, in many ways, the moment the island’s wartime identity was forged.

**The Gauntlet**

Gibraltar lay 1,000 perilous kilometres west. Between the Rock and Malta prowled an Axis gauntlet—Italian submarines, German E-boats, relentless air patrols from Sicily only 90 km north. Yet the War Cabinet knew Malta had to be fed and fuelled: our island was the cork in the Mediterranean bottle, choking Rommel’s supply lines to North Africa. So, under cover of darkness on 24 September 1941, Force H—centred round the battleship HMS Nelson and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal—steamed east with merchantmen whose rust-streaked hulls belied priceless cargoes: 81,000 tons of food, ammunition and, crucially, 18,000 tons of fuel oil.

By the time the convoy skirted the Tunisian coast, Sicily’s bombers were waiting. Wave after wave of Junkers Ju 88s and Italian torpedo bombers dived through the RAF’s umbrella of Hurricanes and the Ark Royal’s Fulmars. The merchant ship Imperial Star was crippled; destroyers raced alongside to rescue 1,400 troops and civilians she carried as passengers. SS Talabot took a direct hit but refused to sink, her Maltese engine-room crew plugging leaks with mattresses. When the cruiser HMS Kenya was struck, Able Seaman Carmelo Zahra—born in Sliema, serving in the Royal Navy—was seen passing shells hand-to-hand though his turret was ablaze. He would later receive the Distinguished Service Medal; Maltese papers hailed “il-bahar tagħna” (our sea) fighting back.

**A Harbour Transformed**

At dawn on the 28th, the skyline was thick with black smoke but also with church bells—an impromptu peal banned since 1940 so as not to guide bombers. Crowds surged past bomb craters to the Customs House steps. “We queued for flour, yes, but also for news,” recalls 92-year-old Emanuel Caruana from Floriana, then a 13-year-old messenger boy. “My mother sent me with a tin to collect kerosene; I came home saying I’d seen bananas for the first time in two years.”

Dockyard workers—men and women, many still dusted with limestone from nights spent sheltering in catacombs—unloaded 26,000 tons of cargo in 48 frenetic hours. The spectacle was captured by local photographer Kevin Casha’s father, who developed the negatives in a dark-room under his Mosta garage. One image shows a priest blessing crates of bully beef while children scrape spilled grain from the quay with their bare hands. Within a week, Valletta’s communal ovens were baking 30,000 loaves daily; the smell of fresh ħobż wafted over a city whose last untouched street had seemed an endangered species.

**Legacy in Stone and Story**

Operation Halberd delivered more than supplies; it delivered symbolism. The convoy’s arrival became shorthand for Maltese endurance, referenced in wartime poems printed on church bulletins and in the 1942 New Year’s regatta, where winning boats were renamed Nelson and Kenya overnight. Post-war, Halberd Day was informally marked by dock families on 28 September, a date later folded into the national Victory Day celebrations. Even today, tour guides point to the pockmarked façade of the old Naval Store in Birgu and tell cruise-ship visitors: “Those scars arrived the same week Halberd saved us.”

In a wider sense, the operation cemented Malta’s role as a strategic ally, accelerating the building of RAF Ta’ Qali and the submarine base at Manoel Island—economic engines that would power reconstruction well into the 1950s. The influx of British, Commonwealth and even American personnel broadened local horizons; jazz records, tinned peaches and English slang entered Maltese vernacular almost overnight. “We realised our harbour wasn’t just ours,” says Professor Henry Frendo, historian at the University of Malta. “It was a crossroads where Malta’s fate met the world’s.”

**Conclusion**

Operation Halberd lasted four frantic days, yet its echo still reverberates in Malta’s collective memory. It reminds us that Grand Harbour is more than a scenic backdrop for Instagram selfies; it is a stage where courage, hunger and hope once converged beneath tracer-lit skies. Each September, as fireworks burst over the Three Cities, older residents glance seaward and recall the roar of 1941—not of bombs this time, but of an island cheering the ships that refused to let it starve. Halberd didn’t just resupply Malta; it re-defined what it means to be Maltese: resilient, resourceful, and forever open to the horizon.