The Cemetery where the service men are buried the headstone holds the names of the men that were blown up while working on hand grenades, one of the names is (Gunner Guseppe Bonnice age 28 years old which was my grand father) in which although I never knew him I like to Dedicate this page to him and all the service men who lost their lives in World War 1 ~~ and World War II

On 3rd August 1914 a proclamation was published directing the Royal Naval Reserve be called into actual service and placing the Volunteers at the disposal of the Admiralty. Three days later, on the 6th of August, the King's Own Malta Regiment (K.O.M.R.) and the Royal Engineers (Militia) Malta divisions were ordered to assemble. The following morning the whole regiment reported for service.
When the call for the Naval Reserve was issued, hundreds volunteered for enlistment in the Navy and 300 were eventually chosen, increasing the existing force to 700. By the end of September 1000 Maltese were serving with the British Fleet.
On the 25th of September a movement was started for a Maltese battalion to offer their services for Lord Kitcheners 's New Army for the front. During the day 200 pledged enlistment and by the first week of October the number reached 1000. In the beginning of the New Year the Army Council informed the Malta Government that it had no use for these volunteers. The Governor of Malta asked the General Officer Commanding Egypt if he would make use of them but the latter replied that he had no use for untrained men.
In March 1915, in the House of Commons, Colonel Yate M.P. urged that it was necessary to give a chance to Maltese and Cypriots to share in the imperial defence. The Maltese militia and artillery both aught, he urged, be given a turn at the front.
In June 1915 the Governor at Malta proposed a detachment of 500 officers and men from the K.O.M.R. militia be sent to join the Expeditionary Force in the Dardanelle's. The Governor proposed that while away from Malta on service, the Maltese should be paid the same rates and given the same conditions as British territorial units doing the same work. The scheme was not approved for financial rea­sons.
Also in June Sir Ian Hamilton, commander at the Dardanelle's required a large quantity of hand grenades and asked the Malta government to help. In a short time Maltese workers under British supervision manufactured and despatched 68,112 hand grenades to the Dardanelle army. During the production a serious accident in the laboratory tent led to an explosion which killed 16 gunners of the Royal Malta Artillery who were engaged in the work.

And they who for their country die shall fill an Honored Grave for Glory lights a Soldiers Tomb and Beauty Weeps the Brave

---

On August 11, 1915 the Inspector General of Communications of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force reported to C. in C. Malta: 'We urgently need 1000 men for stevedore work on the beaches of the (Dardanelle's) peninsula at once, possibly under fire, 'can help'?)

Although employment in the dockyard, the military workshops, etc., was not lacking, about 1200 volunteered to join the labour corps. They were paid 2s 6d a day as stevedores and 4s a day as gangers. From these 864 were selected and on the 1St of September 1915 sailed for Mudros.
Some difficulty was met in maintaining discipline owing to lack of staff and to the presence of a number of 'loafers' and some 'bad characters' in the contingent. Groups of 70 a month were still sent from Malta as replacements for invalids, medically unfit and 'bad characters'. From the original group 55 "useless and insubordinate" men were sent back at once and 247 poor workers and 'complaint makers' sent back after two months.
The rest did useful work loading and unloading cargo, blasting, laying roads, cutting stone and wood, digging wells and stevedore work at ANZAC, Hellas and Suvla beaches in the Dardanelle's where 478 worked and at Mudros. Causalities during the first three months were one dead from wounds received and six wounded.
On August 15th, the War Office asked for two more labour bat­talions, one of stevedores and one of labourers, for employment at Salonica, in Greece. On the 4th and 5th of September 300 stevedores and 400 labourers were enrolled. Another 100 labourers were recruited from Gozo. The contingent contained a number of Maltese officers and priests. The men were all subject to military law.
In February 1917 the number of Maltese serving was substantial considering the size of the island. Five officers and 42 men from the RMA and several militia officers were with the 1,108 Maltese in Gallipoli and the 1,300 in Salonica. Seventy-five other officers were in the British services outside Malta and 300 officers and men with Canadian and Australian armed forces.
When further plans for the employment abroad of Maltese soldiers were mooted, the number of volunteers was disappointing mainly because the British authorities would not pay them the same rates of British soldiers. Also calls for volunteers by the Army Service Corps, the Air Service and the Navy offered better terms and these were naturally preferred.
On top of this was the fact that the Maltese people had been seeing the terrible state of the Allied sick and wounded brought to Malta from the Dardanelle's. The reality of war was driven home and replaced the blind enthusiasm of the opening days when volunteers flocked to the colours. Despite all this about 24,000 Maltese joined the various British services during the war.
During the First World War Malta earned the title of "Nurse of The Mediterranean." In March 1915 Malta was formally declared a Base hospital although the island was only equipped to cater for a few Hundred patients. By March of the following year there were 20,000 Convalescent soldiers, with the first convoy of some 600 wounded from the Dardanelle's arriving in May 1915. Twenty-seven hospitals and convalescent camps were set up, with many public and private buildings including school being converted for the purpose.
During the whole war period about 80,000 wounded and sick Allied officers and men were cared for in Malta, many of them - estimated at 20,000 - being from the Australian Expeditionary Force. Whilst the vast majority of sick and wounded eventually recovered, a number also died in Malta. For example there are 204 graves of Australians who died in the First World War, in Malta.
The Australian Government did not reciprocate Malta's kindness to the Australian sick. In August 1916 the Government placed a virtual prohibition on Maltese immigration because of pressure from the labour movement, which regarded the Maltese as 'cheap labour', and the White Australia racists who regarded the Maltese as 'black' or 'semi-white'. It was not until 1944 that the Australian Government finally placed the Maltese on the same immigration footing as other "White British subjects", according to the official terminology.
Malta also hosted hundreds of prisoners of war and civilian inter­nees. All nations allied to the Kaiser's Germany were represented in the camps, including Egyptians, Arabs and Greeks suspected of German sympathies. Among the most "illustrious" were the captain and crew of the cruiser "Emden".
This warship was sunk after a successful commerce-raiding cruise in the Indian Ocean. The captain von Muller and the ship's officer's -including Lieutenant Franz, Prince von Hohenzollern of the German Royal family - were locked up in the Verdala Fort. The crew were interned in a nearby Fort.
At first the atmosphere in the camp was relaxed but the successful escape from Verdala and the island by Ensign Fikentscher and an Austrian civilian internee led to more restrictions and a more vigilant guard. All privileges were denied and for the next two years the prisoners were not allowed out of Verdala despite the lack of exercise space for a camp population of 400.
Until the entry of the United States into the war, the US Consul in Valletta officially represented the prisoners. Afterwards the Swiss Consul.
looked after their interests In 1915 the prisoners set up German-Austro-Hungarian aid organisation, later being joined by the Turks. Von Muller was president of this organisation set up to help those prisoners, which were bereft of any resources. In 1917 von Muller was transferred to Britain but the rest remained in Malta until the end of the war.

Meanwhile enemy submarines sailing from the East Adriatic ports infested the main waters of the Mediterranean, making them only second to the English Channel as an operation area for submarine warfare. These submarines menaced all allied forces that Were dependent on the Mediterranean supply route: in Macedonia, at Salonica, Egypt, Palestine and those operating against Turkey from the Eastern islands, like Mudros, and at Gallipoli.
During the last six months of 1916 U-Boats in the Mediterranean sank 256 ships totalling 662,131 tons. Several U-Boat commanders had great success. Kurt Harting of U-32 celebrated the New Year, 1917, and his arrival in the Mediterranean by sending three torpedoes into the British battleship Cornwallis a few miles off Malta. Otto Hersing of U-21, who sank the battleships Majestic and Triumph off Gallipoli and sank the old French cruiser Admiral Charnier, had another success when he sank the liner City of London off Malta.
Other ships were victims of submarine laid mines. The old battle­ship Russell sank after running into a minefield laid by U-73 in the approaches to Malta. A tragic victim was the 7,308-ton hospital ship Rewa that left Malta with 279 patients on board and was torpedoed by Wilhelm Werner of U-55 despite the fact that the Rewa was clearly marked as a hospital ship.
Defences were initially meagre due to a shortage of material. At one time Malta was defended by a line of painted oil drums to mislead U-Boat commander into assuming that they were net defence buoys marking the edge of minefields.

as allied defences strengthened and the convoy system was enforced, U-Boat successes declined although they remained the main danger to Allied shipping until the very end of the war. One of the last attacks in the central Mediterranean came from a relative newcomer, Oberleutnant Karl Donitz who brought his UB-68 on the surface for an assault on a Malta bound convoy. The escorts were wide-awake and the sloop Snapdragon blasted the submarine with her guns to such ef­fect that Donitz had to scuttle his boat and surrender. Donitz who was to be the architect of the Nazi German submarine campaign during the Second World War, spent the rest of the First World War in a prisoner-of-war camp, first in Malta and later in Britain.