The Social Life of an Artillery Battery: A Historical Anthropology of Malta’s Heavy Anti-Aircraft Defence

Abstract

Eighty years after the Second World War ‘Siege of Malta’ memories of air-raid shelters and wartime hunger live on. All of Malta’s war museums are related to authentic sites from the conflict, and commemorations often take place at specific monuments and historical locations. However, other sites linked to the war remain discarded in public memory. Anti-aircraft batteries are a case in point: a network of concrete structures and guns built to hit back at Malta’s aerial attackers. This article explores the origins of these sites and, much more importantly, the social life that blossomed within them as a unique way of being. It examines the close connections forged between gunners and their guns, and it explores how anti-aircraft sites have been both memorialised and forgotten.