The Social Life of an Artillery Battery: A Historical Anthropology of Malta’s Heavy Anti-Aircraft Defence
Year: 2025
Type: article
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.
Author: Debono, Nikolai
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W6908179402
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: