Bomb disposal: rewriting history

As I stared at an email back in 2005 suggesting that Lt Carroll’s war memories of bomb disposal in Malta were imagined, I had to suppress some indignation on his behalf, and focus on the writer’s reality. Why would he doubt someone who talked so extensively, animatedly and in such detail about events nearly 65 years before? As we exchanged messages, it seemed the writer believed he ‘knew’ the facts from what had already been written about Malta – and Lt Carroll’s version just didn’t fit.

I like a challenge: I just had to find out what lay behind this conundrum. It wasn’t going to be easy. I soon learned that there are no lists of who served where in World War 2 to look at. A friend suggested a comprehensive book on bomb disposal in World War II – ‘Designed to Kill’ by Major A Hogben. It had a chapter on Malta, and sure enough only two BD Officers were named during the period of Lt Carroll’s service – and he wasn’t one of them.

Then a visit to the Royal Engineers Library turned up a hand-typed document outlining the history of 24 Fortress Company, RE in Malta, including the wartime bomb disposal unit. The information matched with Hogben’s book. Could this be his source? A telephone call to Major Hogben confirmed it. The last piece of information in the library document was dated 1982. How much detail would be remembered accurately so long after the war?

I decided to try the National Archives. My idea was to write some sort of booklet giving the correct information about who served in Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal in Malta which I could submit to the RE Library and circulate to interested parties – including my Malta doubter, of course!

At this point fate intervened. I was struck down with post-viral fatigue syndrome (aka ME) and spent much of the following months in bed. The most I could do was read, so I did: every book I could find about World War 2 in Malta. I found little or no mention of bomb disposal but I did discover the sheer scale of the bombing. I began to ask myself: what it must have been like to be a bomb disposal officer in those conditions?

My search for the answer began as soon as I was well enough to get out and about. It gave me a rewarding intellectual challenge which helped with my recovery, but also sleepless nights (see future blogs) as it revealed the extraordinary scale of RE Bomb Disposal in Malta during the siege.

I’ve been aware from the start that, once my own book is in print, it‘s open to the same scrutiny by future researchers and historians. I’ve used original ‘primary source’ documents from World War 2, but the story is inevitably my own interpretation of them. Those of us who set out to write about the past can only work with the best information we have and use our own knowledge and judgement to represent it as faithfully as we can.