The Island That Survived 3,000 Axis Air Raids in Two Years

In June 1940, Italy declared war and turned its bombers on Malta, a small British colony in the central Mediterranean, barely a stretch of open water from the airfields of Sicily. On paper the island was indefensible, defended by a handful of obsolete biplanes and crowded with a quarter of a million civilians. Yet it was the only Allied base between Gibraltar and Alexandria, which made it one of the most fought-over targets of the entire war. For the next two and a half years, the Axis tried to bomb and starve the island into surrender. The Luftwaffe moved in with dive-bombers, the raids climbed into the thousands, and by the spring of 1942 Malta was absorbing day after day of unbroken attack, its people living underground and its food running out. Convoys were torn apart trying to reach it, and the island came within weeks of collapse. This is the full story of how Malta became one of the most bombed places of the Second World War, and how it refused to fall.