What if Malta had fallen?

Brian Blouet, author of The Story Of Malta, speculates on what Europe would be like 'had Malta surrendered during the second siege in World War II', from The Times:

Prof. Blouet is in Malta finalising a new book - The Story Of Valletta, A History And A Guide - to be published by Progress Press later this year. His Story of Malta has been reprinted 11 times. "It is remarkable how this little island withstood such heavy bombings. Had Malta fallen in 1942, Rommel would have probably won the North Africa campaign, the war would have dragged on and the Red Army would have reached the Rhine. Some historians believe that to end the war, the atom bomb would have had to be dropped on Germany and one could only imagine what the consequence of such a disastrous affair would have had on the geo-strategic relations and on the unification of Europe later," Prof. Blouet said.

"While the Maltese were hungry at the time, little did they know that Italians were in a worse situation than they and there were bread riots during the war, so the possibility of having more food if the Italians came to Malta was even more remote. "The importance of Malta can be seen by the fact that Churchill was prepared to risk losing whole fleets to try and get a ship or two with supplies to Malta."

Prof. Blouet's Ph.D. was about how the landscape in Malta changed during the Knights of St John. "It's remarkable how the demography in Malta changed under the Knights. Whole towns were built and the population increased from an estimated 20,000 to around 100,000 in under 300 years. "Research in parish registers shows that the raid by the Ottomans in 1551 had a bigger impact on the population than the siege.My research showed that there were very few births for a long time after the 1551 raid, which denuded Gozo of its population. But the impact was felt in many Maltese villages as the birth rate dropped and remained low for many years," he said. Putting the finishing touches to the manuscript of his new book on Valletta, Prof. Blouet has been around the city "typescript in hand to make sure that anyone using it would be well guided by what I wrote".