Motivated by his childhood intrigue, a young Gozitan engineer named Matthew Curmi, 24, has authored a book on aircraft losses in Gozo during the Second World War. His book reveals unique insights into this tumultuous period through the lenses of some of the very Gozitans who witnessed these airplane crashes.
Curmi - a Nadur native - has recently published his book, entitled "Waqa' Ajruplon - Chronicles of Fallen Aircraft in Gozo," that focuses on nine major air losses and themes of WWII for Gozitans at the time. To collect this data, he interviewed people who were present and old enough to vividly remember these events. Resultantly, he interviewed several elderly in their 90s and even one centenarian back in 2023. The book title is spelled as is to replicate the simple phrase Gozitans used to tell each other whenever an airplane crashed on the island, in their distinct accent.
On top of collecting dozens of anecdotal recounts from eyewitnesses, the young author also went through historical archives, police records, hospital admissions, books, and went above and beyond to track down some of the crashed airmen and their descendants.
In Curmi's words, his book highlights the glimmer of humanity present during wartime and enshrines the elements of folklore around these airplane crashes. He told this newsroom that the first-hand accounts he collected shed light on new perspectives that were previously unknown or neglected.
Curmi developed his fascination towards WWII aircraft crashes when he was just 10 years old. He recalls being mesmerised at the sight of a contorted piece of scrap metal, which he got to know used to form part of an aircraft in the past. He told this newsroom that he longed to visit crash sites around Gozo in hopes he could find any tiny component of a fallen aircraft - like a rivet or a piece of plexiglass - and he did so thanks to his father. During this trip, Curmi met the man who, over a decade later, ended up providing the first recorded eyewitness recount used to substantiate this book.
He began working on this book while pursuing his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Malta.
Curmi remarked that in the early 1940s, the concept of an aircraft was totally foreign and unheard of to Malta, "let alone the people of Gozo" - akin to seeing a UFO.
Aside from new folktales, Curmi looked into Gozitans' reactions to these aircraft losses, how they reacted to these crashed airmen, what happened to fallen aircrafts afterwards, how these events shaped their rudimentary lives, and the sentiments of trauma and PTSD also incurred during wartime.
While discussing his book, a surprising aspect of the young author's interviews with people who lived through WWII and witnessed these aircraft losses was their nostalgia for the time. He noted that certainly, some people were traumatised by scenes they experienced during the war, including his own grandfather, though when interviewed by Curmi more than 70 years after the war, some interviewees talked to him about these aeroplane crashes with a sense of fondness - chuckles were not uncommon reactions and some of them were moved to tears of happiness, he said.
"Wartime created an event - a spectacle - for these people to run to. 'A plane went down? Let's go run down there and see what's happening. A bomb crash-landed on that building? Let's see what's going on there,'" Curmi said.
This idea of viewing wartime like a feast, in Curmi's view, is probably due to the interviewees' youthfulness at the time. Curmi remarked that those who were young teenagers during the war were not old enough to be conscripted into military service, nor old enough to recognise the genuine fear of war that their elders felt. At the time of these events, his interviewees were adolescents, in their late teenage years, or at most, in their early 20s.
Curmi narrated that in the occurrence of any plane crash, it was typical for Gozitans to rush to the site. There, they'd more often than not, go check on the pilot, sever their harnesses, safely extract them from their cockpits, and tend to their injuries appropriately. This treatment did not waver depending on the pilots' origin, though Curmi found that among Axis airmen, Italians were better treated than Germans.
He added that on some occasions, some airmen, despite crashing their plane, were fit enough to escape from their aircraft and interact with the people of Gozo. Curmi noted that some were violent and threatened Gozitans with their pistols, though Gozitans' sense of compassion towards these airmen still prevailed on most cases.
Curmi said that writing this book has humbled him deeply. He learned how people were forced to deal with trauma and mental troubles by "walking it off," and believes that the war should be viewed from this perspective as well.
L-għaqal tal-Għawdxin - how Gozitans dismantled and repurposed crashed aircrafts
While writing this book, Italian colleagues of Curmi reached out to him to ask about a particular plane that had belly-landed in Gozo and remained relatively intact in its crash landing. They thought, surely, given the remarkably good state it landed in, it must be preserved in a museum somewhere. His response: "of course not."
Following a crash landing, after initial examinations by local authorities, these crashed aircraft would be left to the public, and once authorities had left the scene, locals "would scour the aircraft for whatever conceivable bit of material they could take out of it." This thrift culture echoed themes of poverty, ingenuity, and creativity, the author said.
"Whenever a plane crashed in Gozo, more often than not, every part of the aircraft was torn off and repurposed for some reason," Curmi said.
Amongst some popular crashed aircraft parts taken for re-use by Gozitans during the wartime were Perspex, smears of fuel in the fuel tanks, instruments, aluminium, landing gear, engine blocks, and others. Curmi noted that one witness told him that, at the time, aluminium was such an "exotic material" that they had not ever even heard of the word "aluminium" till discovering the metal on the crashed planes.
Curmi mentions some of this recycling work in his book and even incorporates some picture examples. For instance, one such creation was a water channel in his hometown of Nadur that was originally a leading edge of an aircraft's wing. Aircraft parts were also used to smith keys, make rabbit traps for hunting, hair combs, makeshift stoves (kuċinieri), and allegedly even pulleys, sandals, and pasta machines.
In one unique case, the author encountered minted coins "literally stamped out of an aircraft."
In cases where materials were too mangled up to be repurposed, they were melted down and cast into boċċi balls, Curmi added.
On a more personal note, Curmi said that his great, great grandfather had used bits of a crashed aircraft to forge a ring for his wife.
"This is precisely why finding a bit of aircraft these days from these aircrafts in Gozo is very hard. In most cases, you would find a bit of an aircraft because the aircraft crashed so violently that it literally buried itself into the Earth. Otherwise, you would only find them in recycled means," Curmi said.
Tracking down the airmen and the recurring themes of guilt and trauma
Writing this book, Curmi did his utmost to track down the aftermath of each one of these plane crashes - including what happened to the aircraft, as well as the affected airmen after the war if they survived. He said that finding out who these airmen truly were was the most challenging aspect of his research.
The Gozitan author recounted that on several occasions, finding out who these pilots were required extensive digging. He recalled that "what's out there already is nothing short of a name and a surname, if spelled correctly, [and] if they're genuine"; additionally, one would be lucky to find their date of birth paired with their full name.
Curmi wasn't able to reach out to all of the airmen or their descendants as in some cases, their family lineage had died out.
However, there were some fortunate cases where he was able to contact a pilot's nephew or even their children. He said that there were no two cases alike. In one case where he managed to trace an airman's lineage, Curmi found their descendants through the popular genealogy website ancestry.com, while others were "fiendishly difficult."
To track down these airmen, Curmi reached out to the communes they were from via Facebook. Some airmen came from small villages with populations of circa 1,000 people, and so they were known on a first-name basis, as well as their relatives.
In one unique case, he managed to reach out to an airman's relative by simply googling their name. He said that "nothing really came up" apart from a forum from around a decade prior by an enthusiast who had modelled an aircraft. This enthusiast wrote in German that the model on display was the aircraft that his uncle had flown and crashed in the island of Gozo. Unable to contact this person directly through this web page, he found it was connected to a Facebook page, through which he managed to connect to the page administrator. They then reached out to the airman, who later provided some key details that Curmi used in his book.
Curmi found that there were two categories of Axis airmen: some who were "genuinely radicalised" and others who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most of the Italian airmen Curmi mentioned in his book "were merely flying for the love of flight" as they happened to live in this wartime era where "being a pilot back then meant being a fighter pilot." He stated that these pilots carried the guilt of shooting down enemy aircrafts for the rest of their lives - some said they were anti-fascist back then.
"Some airmen had it in them to literally look at a civilian target and open fire on it, so there were war crimes committed in Malta - that was a genuine aspect - though I dare say that was the exception, rather than the rule," Curmi said.
Detailed recounts on the guilt and aftermath of pilots who went on to live their lives after the war can be found in his book.
Curmi believes that the way WWII is perceived should be viewed through a different, less rosy lens.
For instance, while his great grandfather used to seize in bed reliving the nightmares he experienced during WWII, his wife would dismiss others from waking him, saying that he was "just" dreaming of his time at sea as the sailor he was. In reality, Curmi believes that this was a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); his great grandfather survived the war, though his son and mother did not, and his brother was also a wartime casualty.
Another example of wartime trauma carried for life lives through Curmi's 90-year-old grandfather. Aged 8, he saw two children around his age come across an undetected, unaccounted bomb that was dropped in Gozo but did not detonate. He saw them throw it into a bonfire as they were playing with it. They died at the scene as the bomb exploded right outside his house. Curmi's grandfather recalled how their splattered blood, flies, and the scent of decomposition lingered in that area for months afterwards.
Curmi said that his grandfather carried this story with him his whole life and shared it for the first time when he told his grandson while he was working on this book, aged 90.
Today, this plot lies in a development area with the possibility of being built over one day. This tragedy is not commemorated at the site, Curmi said, and his grandfather has even passed remarks to his grandchildren for them to watch out for any undetected bombs in the area, should they develop land themselves.
How Ċensu Tabone saved a pilot's life and how this plane made a cameo in Nolan's Dunkirk
When asked to share a little anecdote from his book, Curmi provided some details on the already publicised event when Vincent "Ċensu" Tabone - who later in life became the fourth President of Malta - saved the life of a British RAF pilot who had crashed on Dwejra's cliffside.
On 27 March 1943, Percy Stratford was flying his Spitfire fighter jet when he crash-landed near Dwejra, Gozo. His Spitfire was dangling off a cliff edge when first responders appeared and courageously tended to his injuries. One of these persons was Ċensu Tabone, days after he had celebrated his 30th birthday and nearly two decades before he entered politics.
Stratford was found unconscious with an open fracture; he had broken his arm, snapped his leg, and was concussed with lacerations on his face.
The road that exists today connecting Dwejra to the rest of Gozo did not exist at the time, making Stratford's journey to Victoria Hospital in Rabat all the more treacherous. Stratford survived the crash, was operated on, and recovered under Tabone's care.
Instead of pulling the Spitfire back and away from the cliff's edge, Gozitans opted to push it into the sea below. Curmi commented that his grandmother used to swim in the area when she was younger and recalled seeing the Spitfire Mk Vb deep below. This fighter jet was later recovered in the 1970s and sent back to the United Kingdom for restoration. Curmi said that the vessel itself was no longer serviceable, though "perhaps the engine block was retained" or other key parts; however, the aircraft was serviced to an airworthy state, meaning that it was able to fly again.
Following the end of the war, most Spitfires were scrapped, resulting in the best-preserved wrecked Spitfires to have been those laying at the seabed.
When Christopher Nolan was filming his 2017 film Dunkirk about the Dunkirk evacuation of early WWII, he needed three Spitfire Mk I jets for filming. Only able to find two such airworthy fighter jets, Nolan's crew opted to disguise this very Spitfire, the restored one Stratford crashed in Gozo in 1943, match it with the others, and have it fly in his blockbuster.
In March 2023, Stratford's daughter and two grandchildren, together with Tabone's children, visited his crash site to commemorate 80 years since his plane crash, with mementos from the event. Curmi said he had personally ensured for Tabone's children to meet the descendants of the pilot whose life was saved by the President Emeritus.