I'm John Batchel with Charles Spicer.

His book is filled with information that is critical to understand these tragic years,

1933 to 1945 and then afterwards.

We're still scarred by the decisions made or not made by the men we're

talking about and their adversaries in Berlin and Moscow and France, all this, all of Europe,

and it comes back when Europe's in a war and you see how you're in a fog. You don't know what the

future is. Well, that was the case here in May of

1940 when the British Expeditionary Force, the Belgian surrendered, the British Expeditionary Force,

is now in full retreat. The French Army have not provided adequate coverage, and the Germans

have launched a savage and extremely effective attack.

Sometimes using the tanks they got from the Skoda armaments, definitely using the artillery.

And they're overrunning France, Belgium very quickly.

The Belgian army surrenders.

And the British Army, the famous Dunkirk retreat.

However, at this point, the prime minister changes hands from

Chamberlain to not Halifax, but to Churchill. And we've not talked about work Winston Churchill

much at this point because this is the rest of the story. But I want to take this moment, Charles,

to characterize Churchill. He knew about Christy, Conwell Evans, and Tenet. Did he account for

their information? Did he also endorse it? Yes. It seems very clear that he received a lot of

Christie's information in particular via VanCetard,

because he and VanCetart had remained close.

They were the two, with Duff Cooper, they were two of the three leading anti-appeasers consistently in the late 30s.

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