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Hello and welcome to another World War II podcast.

I'm Angus Wallace.

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It's always nice to share other people's news and views.

In this episode I'm joined by Alexander Fitzgerald Black.

Alex gained his MA at the University of New Brunswick.

His thesis, Eagles Over Husky, the Allied Air Forces and the Sicilian campaign,

investigates the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. The invasion of Sicily would be the largest Allied amphibious landing at that time yet undertaken.

After just 38 days of bitter fighting, the Allies conquered the island, but thousands of Germans had escaped capture evacuated over the streets of Messina.

The Allied Air Force had a crucial role to play but it wasn't just over Sicily that they

operated in support of the operation.

Alex, thank you for joining me.

So what was the situation in the Mediterranean in 1943?

In the turn of 1943, we have the big British victory at Al-A-Lamain where Monti does this thing and it starts

pushing slowly but surely pushing the Africa Corps and the rest of the Italians back towards Tunisia and then you have the landings in North Africa and so you're at a point where the Germans are really hemmed into a bridgehead in early 1943 in Tunisia. And at the same time you have this big conference that happens at

Casablanca where basically all the combined chiefs of staff meet from the UK and from the United States.

Depending on what you read, you'll find different interpretations of that, but from what I've seen,

the big message that comes out of it is the British were very much by this point they'd seen

approximately three years of war and this war and then they'd gone through the First World War as well.

So their chiefs of staff, I guess,

...