What do Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 17th-century grand masters of the Knights of Malta, and Cold War Soviet submarines have in common? The answer lies embedded under the sun-splashed bastions of Valletta, the Lilliputian capital of the European nation of Malta. Here, tucked away in an easy-to-miss corner of the city’s imposing perimeter fortifications, is one of the Mediterranean’s most intriguing martial museums: the Lascaris War Rooms. Originally excavated by British forces during the Axis siege of Malta early in World War II, the rooms were named because of their proximity to a terraced garden, formerly the private domain of Grand Master Jean Paul Lascaris.
In a secretive excavation lasting just over two years, 600 laborers composed of Royal engineers, specially recruited Welsh miners, and local Maltese workmen carved the rooms into the Lascaris Gardens’ limestone underpinnings, painstakingly distributing the debris from their work throughout the bombed-out rubble of Valletta to obscure their activity from Axis spies. British forces put the well-nigh impregnable space into action as quickly as possible, initially stationing Naval Intelligence Division personnel in the first completed rooms. As continued digging created more available space, the War Rooms’ portfolio expanded. Their ultimate wartime configuration saw them hosting joint-operations rooms directing activity by the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and British Army throughout the region.
The portion of the rooms comprising the RAF’s integrated air-defense headquarters directed fighter and antiaircraft defenses battling relentless Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica Italiana attacks. As with the Battle of Britain, however, the RAF enjoyed a major advantage in the form of a system of early-warning radars. Cousins to Britain’s famed “Chain Home” installations, Malta-based “Chain Overseas” radars reported to the Lascaris complex’s “Filter Room.” There RAF personnel culled incoming data, before providing information to the fighter directors who controlled the Gladiators, Hurricanes, and Spitfires in their intercepts of Axis raiders.
The War Rooms also commanded offensive efforts, including submarine and torpedo-bomber attacks on Axis supply lines across the Mediterranean. Aided by Ultra signals-intelligence decrypts, Allied efforts slowly strangled Rommel’s logistical lifeline, degrading his vaunted Afrika Korps and hastening its defeat in North Africa. From there, Allied forces launched the July 1943 Sicilian campaign, which was executed from the Lascaris War Rooms by such luminaries as General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Royal Navy.
Following a dormant period just after the war, the Lascaris facility was reactivated by the British in 1949. Expanding throughout the early decades of the Cold War, the War Rooms eventually came to house a ten-story NATO installation, entirely underground. Focused on the threat to NATO’s southern flank posed by the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, this incarnation of Lascaris saw its personnel absorbed in oversight of maritime-patrol aviation and the tracking of Soviet submarines.
The present day visitor, however, sees the rooms much as they were in the period of 1941–43. Such historical verisimilitude does not happen by accident. Indeed, the departure of NATO forces from Malta in the mid-1970s led to a prolonged period of neglect. Incidents of vandalism and the pooling of condensation caused by the cessation of the War Rooms’ complex ventilation system wrought havoc. Finally, in 2002 a local nongovernmental organization called Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna (the Malta Heritage Trust) was granted custodianship of the site. A team of volunteers undertook a painstaking refurbishment of the facility, culminating in its opening to the public as a museum eight years later. Wirt Artna’s work on the complex continues today, with European Union funding supporting an expansion of restorative efforts aimed at facilitating public access to a restored NATO communications center, a Knights of Malta–era Garrison Chapel crypt, and a number of nearby crenellated defensive positions comprising part of Valletta’s bastions. Ultimately, Wirt Artna plans to operate all these sites under the umbrella of one overarching military heritage park, a vision that promises to reveal even more intriguing facets of what is already a sparkling gem in the Maltese military history crown.
Visiting a good museum? Why not contribute a report? Contact us at: [email protected].
St. James Ditch in Valletta, Malta (underneath the Upper Barracca Gardens)
00356+21234717
Open: Mon.–Sun., 1000–1700
Admission: 10 €, adults; 8 €, students; 5 €, children
Website: www.lascariswarrooms.com
Email: [email protected]
Commander Spies is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Naval War College and a former naval flight officer. Now a Navy foreign area officer, he served as the U.S. naval attaché to Malta from 2012 to 2015.
Where ‘the Pen Sharpens the Sword’
On 10 September, the U.S. Naval Academy Museum will open its largest in-house exhibit to date, “Warrior Writers: The U.S. Naval Institute,” which will run until the end of January 2016. It will feature more than 125 artifacts and portraits related to Naval Institute authors, representing more than 100 Navy-affiliated individuals, 22 Marine Corps personnel, 12 civilians, 2 assistant secretaries of the Navy, 59 admirals, 5 generals, and several chiefs of Naval Operations and Marine Corps commandants. Many of the artifacts predate the completion of the authors’ extensive careers, a fact that won’t be lost on midshipman visitors.
Among the extensive variety of items on display will be Admiral Bradley Fiske’s diary, Admiral George Dewey’s sherry glass, Vietnam War hero Colonel John Ripley’s Ka-bar knife, Ernest King’s 1905 General Prize Essay medal, swords and pens belonging to authors, “Lucky Bag” photos of influential admirals and generals from when they were midshipmen, and the first edition of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October as well as the board game it inspired.
According to Lieutenant Commander Claude Berube, director of the Naval Academy Museum, the exhibit’s primary purpose is to inspire midshipmen to write. “I think it’s vitally important for midshipmen to realize that when their predecessors wielded a sword or a gun or manned a ship with 5-inch guns, they also needed to have their pen at their side, because the pen sharpens the sword.”
The exhibit further develops the longstanding relationship between the Naval Academy and Naval Institute, which for many years coexisted in Preble Hall, where the museum is still located. “One-hundred and forty-two years ago, the Navy was falling behind in its technology, innovation, and warfighting concepts,” U.S. Naval Institute CEO Vice Admiral Peter Daly, U.S. Navy (Retired), reflected. “Fifteen Navy and Marine professionals met at the Naval Academy to discuss the need for an open forum to move ideas—irrespective of rank. They founded the Naval Institute and resolved to publish worthy ideas in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. The rest is history. The open, independent nonpartisan forum was needed in 1873, and it is still needed today.”
—Laural Hobbes