WWII veterans start arriving for reunion

About 400 World War II veterans, their carers and family members will be meeting in Malta between today and September 29 in a Battle Of Malta reunion.

The veterans will be travelling to Malta from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Jersey, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United States. About 60 are resident in Malta.

The aim of the reunion is "commemoration and celebration". It will commemorate "all those that paid the ultimate price during the battle" and celebrate "the life of those veterans who survived the struggle and are here this week to reunite with the Maltese nation and rekindle old friendships".

"It is indeed a reunion of minds, bodies and souls on the very soil that saw conflict, fear, severe hardship and, ultimately, victory," project director Brian Essex wrote in the magazine Malta Invicta.

The press liaison officer of the Battle Of Malta Veterans' Reunion, Richard J. Caruana, said yesterday the veterans will start arriving this afternoon and they will be greeted at Malta International Airport by re-enactment teams.

The veterans will be presented with a commemorative medal on Friday and they will be seated in a special enclosure for the air show on Saturday where they will see displays by two defender aircraft, a Hurricane and a Spitfire, which will fly to Malta from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford in the UK, and by the Red Arrows.

The highlight of the reunion will be a march from the Lion's Fountain to the War Memorial, in Floriana on Sunday at 5.15 p.m.

President Eddie Fenech Adami, Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg, a representative of the Labour Party, ambassadors, high commissioners and service representatives will place wreaths at the foot of the monument.

An air raid siren will be sounded. This will be followed by the last post and a 25-pound gun salute will herald a two-minute silence. The reveille and an all-clear air raid siren will follow together with a flypast by the Hurricane and the Spitfire which will drop poppies. There will also be a flypast by the Red Arrows.

Project coordinator Terence Mahon, a war veteran who was on HMS Ashanti, one of the tribal class destroyers that had taken part in Operation Pedestal, yesterday praised the people of Malta during the war, saying they "had been so brave. Many were ill, they were hungry, they had nowhere to go. They were absolutely, essentially brave. And the middle aged and the older generation are so modest about what they did. It was their resolution and steadfastness that did it".

Had the Santa Marija convoy not made it to Malta, the island would have had to surrender two weeks later, so Operation Pedestal remained known as "the convoy that saved Malta".

Mr Mahon said he felt "horror, fear and utter disbelief" whenever he saw friends and colleagues getting killed in the war.