November 22, 1939, dawned a very cold day. World War Two was not even three months old and at dusk the destroyer HMS Gipsy commanded by Lt Cdr N.J. Crossley was on standby in Harwich harbour on the east coast of Britain for a North Sea patrol. The ship was with four other destroyers – HMS Griffin, Keith, Boadicea and the Polish Burza.

Micallef was in the water for five hours before being plucked out- Alfred Conti Borda

On board Gipsy were a few Maltese seamen, including Petty Officer Steward Andrew Micallef, Leading Steward John Vassallo and a certain Grech.

Born on March 13, 1908, Mical­lef was known in the Royal Navy as Indrin. He joined the service on January 24, 1929, as Officer Steward and was transferred to the Dahlia, a Flower-class sloop, namely a small warship used for general purposes.

Micallef’s son John narrates: “The Dahlia was on patrol in the Red Sea when the ship suddenly struck a slightly submerged reef, producing a gash on the side. The vessel began to make water and the crew tried hard to plug the hole.

“The Dahlia listed slightly and so it could only travel very slowly to prevent further flooding. After a voyage lasting about six months, Dahlia finally made port where the necessary repairs were carried out.”

On January 14, 1932, Micallef was posted to another sloop, HMS Penzance, then to his last sloop, HMS Hastings, two years later. On October 5, 1935, he joined the crew of the minesweeper, HMS Harrow and on December 12, 1936, he was transferred to HMS Gipsy.

Just after 9 p.m. on November 22, 1939, a German Heinkel 115 seaplane flew low over the entrance to Harwich harbour, machine-gunning the shoreline before swooping out to sea. But no-one realised it had also dropped a magnetic mine inside the harbour approach.

Shortly after the Heinkel disappeared in the darkness, the five destroyers made their way out of the harbour. Just as they passed Landguard Point, the Gipsy activated the mine which exploded, breaking the back of the destroyer and it started to sink quickly in the fairway of the harbour.

In the melee, the surviving seamen scrambled for the deck. Among these were Micallef, Vassallo and Grech. Vassallo was going to leap into the water but Micallef tried to restrain him as his dive was going to be too near to the ship’s propellers. However, Vassallo went ahead and jumped only to be killed by the churning blades.

Micallef donned his lifebelt and, after waiting for the right moment, jumped safely, swimming as fast away as possible from the doomed ship before the stern and the bow separated and it foundered in the coal-black sea.

Many people who rushed to the seafront witnessed a terrible scene, the bitterly cold night lit by searchlights on the water strewn with wreckage and the cries of men fighting for their lives in the oil-covered sea. Many witnesses remember feeling utterly helpless as seamen were washed ashore against the barbed wire defences covering the foreshore. Micallef was in the water for five hours before being plucked out.

About 115 sailors were rescued by small craft and the other destroyers which hurried to the scene. Many were injured or were suffering from swallowing thick fuel oil which covered the water.

Micallef was hospitalised because of the oil-covered water he had swallowed but eventually recovered. However, Grech had swallowed a lot of oil-polluted water and he passed away.

Thirty-one sailors, including the captain, died that night and they were buried at Shotley Church with full military honours.

After recovering from his ordeal, Micallef was shore-based at the RN Station St Angelo pending transfer.

On March 10, 1940, the London class heavy cruiser HMS Sussex called at Malta and he joined it a day later. The ship had a refit in Liverpool and in May it was deployed with other vessels to intercept German ships trying to break into the Atlantic via the northwest approa­ches. Its patrol area inclu­ded Norway, Iceland and the Scapa Flow.

In August a propulsion machinery defect was discovered and in September Sussex made port at Glasgow, to have its turbine blades repaired. Micallef’s job was messman for 200 officers in the wardroom, guard room and in the Warrant Officers’ room.

He sent Charles Paris, a fellow Maltese, with a few other able seamen to buy enough food for all these people.

On the evening of September 17 there was an air-raid alarm and the crew, including Micallef, took up action stations. However nothing materialised. A second alarm followed and again the crew prepared for battle. Again there was no sign of the enemy and so everybody relaxed.

Nobody paid much attention to the third alarm, but this time it was for real. A lone German Junkers 88 bomber stealthily dropped a 250-pound bomb into the Sussex. It exploded and the ship caught fire, threatening the magazines.

The captain ordered the crew to open the sea-cocks and the ship was flooded. The whole crew was evacuated and the vessel settled in the shallow sea until only the upper deck was visible.

Micallef had scurried down the gangway with a few other sailors. He was lucky not to have hurt himself, but his colleague Paris suffered second degree burns from the blast. He was in a coma for five days and had to be hospitalised for some months in Glasgow Hospital (see my article ‘A Maltese POW’, The Sunday Times, September 21, 2008).

In this incident two seamen died and 16 were injured.

All the Maltese staff met at Devonport and Micallef persuaded Paris to join him on the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter. Nobody except the captain and a few officers knew about the ship’s mission. In fact, Exeter had been at sea for quite some time when Captain Gordan announced on the tannoy that they were to escort a large troop convoy by going round the Cape of Good Hope and then make for the Middle East.

Mission accomplished, the ship’s captain was detailed to travel to Singapore. This came soon after the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. HMS Exeter was instructed to join up with the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse.

However when the Exeter was halfway there, these large warships, lacking air cover from the aircraft-carrier HMS Indomitable, a modern vessel with an armoured flight deck, which had gone aground during her working up period, were both sunk by the Japanese air force.

In the resulting Battle of the Java Sea, out of a combined Allied force of 14 American, British, Australian and Dutch warships from the Dutch East Indies, nine were sunk by a superior number of Japanese ships.

This defeat was due to two main factors: lack of co-ordination on the Allies’ part and the absence of air cover, which proved decisive. However, the Allies made up for this defeat a few months later, in June 1942, by winning the Battle of Midway.

After HMS Exeter had been waylaid by Japanese surface raiders at the Sunda Strait from where it had hoped to reach the Indian Ocean, it began listing heavily to port and the captain gave the order to abandon ship.

Paris made a dash for the railings and at the opportune moment leapt overboard, retrieving his lifebelt in the process because he was a good swimmer. It was then Micallef’s turn. He immediately donned a lifebelt and went over the side, dropping about 20 feet into the sea.

As he surfaced he was going to make for a Carley float (a raft made of wood and rope) some distance away but about 14 seamen were already hanging on to it for dear life.

Manuel Pellegrini, another Maltese seaman, could not find a lifebelt, so he called Paris. “Well, get a ruddy drawer from the galley”, was the latter’s reply. All the Maltese were in the water together with most of their British colleagues, including the captain, who had also survived the enemy onslaught.

The survivors were now in dire straits. They were in oil-polluted waters and at the mercy of the elements. The sharks, which had been dispersed by the battle, would return later on to finish off the weak and wounded men. It was a race against time and they were 150 miles from the nearest land.

Luckily Paris was one of the first to be picked up by an enemy destroyer but Micallef spent 27 hours in the sea before being rescued by another enemy vessel. As soon as he reached the deck, he was instantly slapped.

All the survivors had been blackened by oil and made to lie on deck to dry out after their ordeal. They were only given two biscuits and a little water with a few drops of milk. Not all the survivors were picked up.

When the enemy ship’s captain decided he had taken enough prisoners, he ordered his men to haul up the rope ladders and make for the open sea. The rest were left in the water.

The speed with which the Japanese had conquered Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra and later Celebes, Timor, Bali and Java had astonished the Allies. The enemy had long been mobilising for war. Japan had become a very efficient fighting machine, and its armies, after invading Manchuria and China, had been hardened by battle.

In 1941 the Japanese Navy was the third largest in the world and a few months after Pearl Harbour, the rising sun flag of Japan was flying over nearly every Allied port and town in the southwest Pacific.

Many of the Exeter’s survivors had lost their boots in the sea and were obliged to trudge along barefoot for several miles to the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Makassar on the southern end of the Celebes islands. The enemy had captured British, Australian, American and Dutch prisoners.

This was the situation in early March 1942 when Micallef was made a prisoner-of-war by the Japanese. It would be a protracted bitter experience of incarceration, suffering, torture, famine and disease lasting three-and-a-half years.

However, this was slightly mitigated when the dispersed Maltese – Micallef, Paris, Pellegrini, Johnny Zammit, Paul Grima, Ugo Calleja and Maurice Dimech, a survivor from the destroyer HMS Encounter – were reunited in the camp at Makassar. They hugged each other and cried for joy.

Imperial Japan sorely needed the manpower to realise its territorial ambitions, including the building of the nearly 400-mile long Burma Road to India for the eventual invasion of this sprawling British possession, the levelling of ground to make landing strips for its land-based aircraft and the construction of bridges like the one on the River Kwai to facilitate the passage of artillery and infantry over water courses.

The invasion of Australia was also on their mind. (On February 19, 1942, 242 Japanese bombers raided Darwin in Northern Australia).

All 190 British and Maltese POWs in this camp were forced to work on some of these projects.

They toiled from morning till evening with a hoe or a pick-axe, with no pay whatsoever. Any hesitation, misunderstanding, or failing from a POW was met by beatings with bamboo or being hit by a camp guard’s rifle butt.

The prisoners were soon reduced to living skeletons through starvation, overwork and tropical diseases like beri-beri, where malnutrition and starvation causes bloating of the belly, malaria, and dysentery. Their captors took every opportunity to humiliate them.

Some Dutch officers, knowing the terrain well, tried to escape but they were betrayed by the natives.

Paris testifies: “All the POWs were ordered to fall in to witness the cruellest spectacle ever. The Dutchmen were first tortured and made to dig their own grave. They were then beheaded by Samurai swords before being buried.”

Micallef was given a pick-axe and with a party of other POWs, he was forced to work in tin mines, toiling like a slave. He was later made to unload cement bags from a merchant ship.

The prisoners’ meagre rations consisted of just a handful of rice in the morning and two spoonfuls of sugar in the evening. No wonder that, when on their way to work or while resting for a short while under the hot tropical sun, the POWs devoured any edible roots or mangoes they found with relish. Cigarettes were rolled out of old cement bags.

The prisoners were soon reduced to living skeletons through starvation, overwork and tropical diseases- Alfred Conti Borda

The starving prisoners scavenged for leftovers in the dustbins, washed them and gobbled them ravenously. The camp guards just laughed at the POWs’ plight.

No wonder some prisoners cracked under the pressure. They were losing a few men a day and Micallef and Paris helped bury them. However, they never lost hope of being liberated one day.

Stoker John Wilkinson alias Geordie, a very close friend of Micallef’s, was determined to survive. Towering at six feet six inches (1.98m), he was an amateur boxer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

On one occasion, together with his colleagues, he had to unload a cargo of brown sugar from a ship. As the guard’s back was turned, he surreptitiously filled a pair of ‘loot bags’ with sugar in his trouser leggings and tried to smuggle it into the camp to distribute it among the POWs.

Unfortunately he was caught. As Paris, the only surviving Maltese POW of Imperial Japan, recounts: “All the POWs were ordered to fall in and witness a very cruel spectacle. John was beaten across the back and legs more than 200 times with a baseball bat, but simply refused to go down, reducing his Japanese tormentor to such exhausting fury that he pushed the courageous stoker over.”

For six long months, Wilkinson could not sleep on his back as it was blistered and swollen beyond imagination. However, his cour­age earned him the admiration of even his Japanese captors. He survived the war and married his sweetheart Elaine Hudson.

Bill West, another POW, came from Manchester. His anecdotes and poems include a verse dedicated to the Maltese POWs.

The lines he jotted down to be sung by his colleagues kept their indomitable spirit of freedom alive. After all, what was better than a singalong to taunt their captors?

After the war, he would play an important part in the formation of the Manchester and District Ex-Far East POW Association, with connections to their colleagues in Malta.

In 1942 the Japanese captured the Philippines, then an American colony, but US General Douglas McArthur famously promised: “I’ll be back”, a promise he kept about two years later when the Americans recaptured these islands along with many others.

Meanwhile, in Malta, the last thing Micallef’s family heard

from the Admiralty was that he was “missing presumed dead” after the loss of HMS Exeter. Sad and wearing black, Micallef’s wife Mary and the family mourned his loss. Yet Ugo Calleja’s wife encouraged them to spend a short holiday at her house in St Paul’s Bay.

One day, after hearing Sunday Mass with her children, Mary spoke to the parish priest about the tragic loss of her husband. So imagine her surprise when a short time later a police officer called on Mary to inform her that her husband was still alive as a POW “in some unknown place in the Pacific”. Mary nearly fainted with joy.

In 1944, the Allies regained control of nearly all the territories in the Far East which had been occupied by Japanese troops. One day the senior British officer in charge at the Makassar camp addressed the POWs to say that the Japanese needed anyone who could sew or handle a sewing machine to make haversacks. Paris, a master cobbler by trade, volunteered. Micallef too wanted to help out as he was his best friend but he did not know how the machine worked. So Paris taught him.

The POWs worked on this project for eight months, producing an endless number of haversacks. It seemed the Japanese were up to something.

They needed the haversacks for the transport of goods. In late summer of 1945 some natives brought the news to the camp that the war was over but the guards said nothing about it.

One thing the POWs observed was that their captors were becoming more humane.

One day the POWs were ordered to line up in their best clothes. A few hours later, Australian troops landed on the island to liberate the camp. As soon as they saw how the Allied POWs had been reduced to living skeletons, the Australians wanted to shoot the Japanese guards. But they were stopped at once by their commanding officer.

His Japanese counterpart came up to the Australian captain to shake hands but the latter refused to do so. The Japanese officer then led him to a large tent and invited him inside where a beautifully adorned table was laden with tempting food. But the Australian officer just caught hold of the table-cloth, pulled it and everything came crashing down on the floor.

The POWs’ face lit up with joy and they hugged their liberators. Their passage through hell was over at last. They received a scrumptious meal, had a bath and were given new clothes.

Exeter’s men were released and given passage on the submarine depot ship HMS Maidstone. Mi­callef eventually arrived in Malta, via Australia and South Africa, in December 1945. When Mary saw her husband after five years, she could hardly recognise him as he had lost five stone (about 30 kg).

After the war, Micallef joined the depot ship HMS Wolfe (1946-47) and later HMS Forth (1947-48) berthed in Msida Creek. His last ship was the aircraft-carrier HMS Ocean (1949).

In 1952 he met a certain Ronnie Ratcliffe, who had been on HMS Maidstone bringing the former Far East Maltese POWs home, and who was later to become chairman of the George Cross Island Association. They became lifelong friends.

Andrew and Mary Micallef, who were married in 1930, had four children: Joe, Freddy, John and Mary. He was a devotee of Our Lady Stella Maris (Star of the Sea) the appropriate Protector of all seamen, and went to church every day.

In his youth he was a member of the Stella Maris Band, in which he he played the althorn. Although hailing from St Julian’s, he lived in Sliema. He kept fit by walking briskly and loved opera. He died in 1995, aged 86, surrounded by his family and his very close friend John Wilkinson.

The author would like to thank Andrew Micallef’s son John for all the information and Charles Paris, the only former Maltese POW of Imperial Japan still alive.