Hello and welcome to Battleground with me Patrick Bishop and Saul David. Well, as promised last week on 45, we said we're going to finish off by answering

some of your questions, we've had some great questions coming in, very thought-provoking,

opening up windows on aspects of the war we hadn't thought about or were little understood.

And so this is going to be jumping around all over various aspects of the last stages of the war,

plus some kind of long-term what-ifs.

And we're going to start off with one of those, which comes from Tom in Ontario.

He asks, since you're in mopping up mode on Battleground 45,

I thought I'd ask a question that's faxed me for a long time. That is, why did the Axis

powers in Europe honour some countries' neutrality and not others? In particular, says Tom,

I've always wondered why Hitler and Mussolini honoured Spanish neutrality after they'd helped

Franco win his civil war.

Didn't Franco owe the Axis for his victory?

Why would they let him bow out and be neutral?

Similarly, why honour Swedish neutrality and not Norwegian? And finally, is neutrality still a serious stance in the modern world?

Even Switzerland seems to be reconsidering. Yeah, great question. Well, of course, it's quite clear that if the Nazis felt that they

weren't going to get anything back from the neutral power, they would go straight in. I mean,

they did that, of course, with Belgium. There was no issue as far as the Nazis

were concerned to invade a neutral power that wasn't a belligerent, thereby making them

a belligerent against their will, so to speak. Sweden's interesting because Sweden effectively

gave the Nazis what they wanted, which was passage across their territory.

And indeed, Vichy France did that, very briefly, of course, prior to the Tunisia campaign,

allowing Axis forces into Tunisia, which was a French possession in North Africa,

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