Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Summer of 1942, what a decisive, what

I dunno, even more than summer 1943, it was the hinge point, the pivot of the Second World

War. The Pacific, you've got the Japanese rampaging across the Pacific, you're going to

be stopped dead in their tracks at the Battle of Midway in the US, so counteroffensive

could begin in the Soviet Union. You've got German forces pushing deep into Russia, really

reaching Asia, the Caucasus, the Volga River, little else that he calls Starlingrad, then

the catastrophic village Germans counterattack of other Soviets at the end of 1942. In North

Africa, German forces running white, rumble threatening the Suez Canal, Egypt, the oil

of the Middle East, then later in the year, Montgomery's victory at Alamein and the gigantic

Allied landings in North Africa. And in the Mediterranean, you've got a bitter battle

for control of that vital inland sea, a battle that came to be focused around the small,

rocky outcrop of Malta, a ridiculously well placed from a strategic point of view or

badly placed from the inhabitants of one of your maps, Ireland, archipelago really, in

between Italy and North Africa. It had been, before the war, the headquarters of the British

Mediterranean fleet, and it sat astride the supply lines from Italy to her chief colony

in North Africa, which was Libya. So the Axis needed to crush, to neutralize, to capture

even Malta, and they went about it with blockade and a gigantic air assault. The multi-population

was around 250,000 people in the outbreak of war, and well over 1,000 people were killed

at many more wounded and traumatized. The island suffered so terribly that King George

VI famously awarded it and its inhabitants the George Cross, the highest medal for

valor awarded to civilians. And in fact, President Roosevelt presented a United States presidential

citation to the people of Malta as well. So what was going on in Malta in the summer

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