During World War II, German bombers dropped 6,700 tons of bombs on Malta, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, for 154 consecutive days and nights of hell—the longest bombing raid in history. In 2009, almost 70 years after the siege of Malta, Andrew Worley may become the youngest living survivor of that attack.
Worley, then 11 years old, was looking for suitable airsoft targets while on a family camping trip. He says he was “digging through the rubble of the walls looking for boxes” to shoot when he picked up a strange rusty cylinder. He assumed it was a car oil filter and began to “look it over” and “shake it” before taking it back to the campsite. His father, fortunately, saw the German words carved on the round wick, and being a keen lover of history, at once took them from his young son.
The container turned out to be the TNT-filled central core of an old butterfly. More than half a century after it first fell, the bomb was still intact, sitting in the rubble, waiting to be picked up by a fearless toddler. Malta’s army bomb disposal personnel deemed the find too dangerous to proceed with, so instead of attempting to dispose of it, they detonated it in situ.
A graphic designer and illustrator now in his twenties, Worley was one of the lucky children who escaped the grim fate of cluster bombs. And while the bombings took place long before Worley was born, he speaks of their aftermath today without worry or sense of abnormality, as if dealing with the consequences of this dark history is a natural and even everyday fact of Maltese life.
Stories like Worley’s are all too common. A popular podcast, My favorite murdereven recently aired an episode in which the hosts read a letter from an elderly listener who, as a child, had thrown rocks and picked up an unexploded bomb-sized piece of explosives from the beach out of concern for the safety of “beloved sea creatures.”
Historically, 98 percent of cluster bomb casualties have been civilians, due to the way the munitions are introduced into an area before — or sometimes even without — the deployment of troops, according to a 2011 study. of the expert on foreign policy and terrorism Bo Groskauk. This was a tactic the Nazis would use to clear land they wanted, and ironically they used it heavily against Russia. After a so-called “saturation attack” unleashed on a Russian forest, as Leatherwood describes in his book on the subject, a German general said: “The German ground forces could go in … without meeting resistance – the forest was really dead.”
