Lascaris War Rooms

The Lascaris War Rooms are a network of tunnels cut into the limestone beneath the Lascaris Bastion at Lascaris Ditch in Valletta, Malta. The tunnels began as storage and cisterns built by the Knights of St John in the seventeenth century, and were adapted by the British as a military headquarters in the late 1930s. From 1940 they housed the combined operations rooms for the defence of Malta, which was besieged by Italian and German air forces between 1940 and 1942. The Malta Command and the three armed services directed anti-aircraft guns, fighter squadrons and naval forces from these rooms. In 1943 General Eisenhower and Admiral Cunningham used the complex to plan Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, from the secure underground space. After the war, the rooms continued in military use during the Cold War, with a NATO role, and were later used by the Royal Navy until the British withdrawal in 1979. The complex was neglected until it was restored and opened as a museum by volunteers and heritage groups, who rebuilt the operations rooms with period maps, plotting tables, telephones and radio equipment. The Filter Room, the Plotting Room, the Naval Operations Room and the Cold War area can be visited, with mannequins and recorded voices recreating the atmosphere of 1942. The tunnel architecture is rough hewn stone with steel doors and wooden partitions. The presentation is immersive and partly chronological, moving from the war years to the Cold War. The visit follows guided or self-guided routes through narrow corridors, and the cool temperature underground is consistent throughout the year. The rooms are well preserved, and original cipher and map equipment remains on display.