This is CBSI and the world. I'm John Batchel. The book is Coffee with Hitler, the Untold

Story of the Amateur Spies, who tried to civilize the Nazis. Charles Spicer is the author,

and these are revelations of scenes and conduct that I had no knowledge of all these decades of reading about the

catastrophe of the Second War. We now go to September 1935 at Nuremberg, the annual

rally of the Nazi Party, capped off by a speech by the dictator. We introduce Graham Christie, a man who is quite as romantic as Hollywood could imagine.

Charles Spicer has done us the extreme favor of recovering Graham Christie in his modesty and his heroism, his whole life.

He was an aviator, a war hero, and a man who risked his life again and again to find a way to avoid the war that was ahead in 39.

Charles Graham Christie is so much, it's so overwhelming.

What is important to know about him and his role in the Anglo-German fellowship?

It's very important to understand his First World War track record. And he was an engineer. He'd been a school in Britain, which he'd hated, and went straight from that, from high school

to Germany, where he studied as an engineer, where he excelled. So he's completely fluent in

German and a Germanophile. He learns to fly. He's one of the first people, you know, one of

the first aviators in the world, one of the first people to achieve powered flight. He commissions his own plane in 1913 and tours the north of England demonstrating with another pilot. It's a two-seater, this biplane, to people who've never seen aircraft before. And when the war breaks out in the summer of

1914, by that point he owns two planes. He gives them to the British Army and signs up as a junior

officer, even though he's in his 30s, so quite old when the average pilot's only 20.

He joins up and he flies throughout the war.

And he is, as well as being a brilliant engineer, he's a brilliant aviator.

He was one of the very first people to do tactical bombing.

And that's bombing from a plane in the middle of a battle over a key, key asset to try and just disrupt

the enemy. He's taking a, I worked out, he's flying an aircraft which weighs about the same

of a horse as a horse, and he's taking a bomb up with no bomb launching capabilities. He's just

dumping it over the side of the open plane, a bomb that weighs about the size

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