Winston Churchill: The Unknown Story 3/6 - A Gathering Storm

Winston Churchill, a giant of history, famous for his inspiring leadership. Advanced Britannia long lived the cause of freedom. But behind the legend lies a complicated character. People tend to see Churchill the icon, Churchill the bulldog warrior, and, of course, that's not the whole story. He was an aristocrat and a man of the people. It says a lot for his charisma and his humility that he was accepted and liked. A trailblazer who also had questionable beliefs. He is an old-school imperialist. He calls Indian people the dusky nation. This is the story of the man behind the myth, using rarely seen footage, personal photographs and told by those who knew him well. When my grandfather was at home, everything revolved around him. It seemed to be a natural way of life. This is the real Churchill. This time, we'll follow the remarkable story of how a political has-been... People thought he was too old, it was all slightly embarrassing. ..makes one of the greatest comebacks of all time. He sees it as being almost a form of salvation. And goes on to become the heroic war leader many still celebrate today. We shall never surrender. The Second World War has been raging for nine months. Prime Minister Winston Churchill is on his way to the House of Commons to make the most important speech of his life. Churchill knew how much was riding on his words when he spoke on 5 June 1940. The British Army has just suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Nazis. Some in Churchill's War Cabinet have been calling for a British surrender. If he's going to go on, then he needs not just to carry his government, but to carry the country with him. The course of the Second World War depends on what he says next. But not so long ago, the idea that Churchill would one day be leading the nation was unimaginable. He's out in the political wilderness. It's a decade earlier. Churchill's in deepest Kent, at his much-loved country home, Chartwell. Chartwell becomes very much the centre of Churchill's world. This is somewhere where, when everything else was going wrong or where everything else was frustrating him, he would be able to retreat and relax on his own terms. He loved the swimming pool, which he kept heated practically to bath temperature. Churchill had everything put in as he wanted it. Churchill is clearly an individual who is used to getting his way. Churchill bought Chartwell back in 1922. Ever since, his wife Clementine has hated the place. Chartwell was the only time that Churchill did something behind her back during their marriage. They'd been to see it together. Initially, she'd been rather fond of it. Wonderful views and things. She realised it was an impossible house. It faced the wrong way, it was dark, it was damp. It would need a huge amount of work. And she said, this is a money pit, we shouldn't go anywhere near it. But then she had Mary, and while she's recovering from the birth, he goes and buys it behind her back. And she always resented it. Churchill doesn't care. Chartwell is his perfect home. Chartwell represented England for Churchill. The first time he saw it, he fell in love with the sense of British history that Chartwell exuded. To keep himself in the manner he has become accustomed to cost Churchill a fortune. Chartwell needed a lot of staff. He was a chauffeur, the chauffeur had to have uniform. It's not just the house, the grounds were enormously important to him. His fishponds, the tennis courts. It's money Churchill doesn't have. Just a year earlier, in the Wall Street crash, he lost the equivalent of £1 million in today's money. Churchill did spend money as though it was water, and he ended up owing huge amounts. He just never really tried to cut his scale of expenditure to his income, it was always the other way round. They ate and drank extremely well. He bought a Rolls Royce, and he spent quite a lot of money gambling each year. And on average, he lost in today's money £50,000 or £60,000 each year at the tables. It's not just that he's flat broke. Churchill's marriage is in trouble too. Churchill was a difficult man, he had a very bad temper, lots of frustration, couldn't take any noise in the house. Clementine was always trying to get the kids to be quiet, he particularly hated any whistling or anything like that, so it was a great struggle to keep things calm and happy for him. I'm sure they still loved each other, but they could only exist by spending quite a lot of time apart from each other. In 1934, Clementine leaves Chartwell for a break. Clementine goes off on this cruise, and there's this charming, obeying, amusing art dealer who rather falls for her. It's all rather glitzy and dreamy, and she rather falls for him. And she came back feeling quite estranged about life with Churchill. On top of everything, his political career is going nowhere. He's a backbench MP who last held a government post in the previous decade. Churchill is quite an isolated figure in the House of Commons. He is someone who is considered a bit of a maverick, a bit of a loner, and also a bit of a dinosaur. This is someone who had made his name in the Edwardian era before the First World War. But Churchill refuses to be silent on the big issues of the day. The trouble is, every time he wades in, he seems to get it wrong. Churchill was out of touch with mainstream political opinion. He has hegged his career on a number of causes which have turned out not to be frontrunners. When Churchill believes in something, he won't back down. His approach is probably encapsulated by his famous saying, never give in. Churchill is an obsessive. He was obsessed, to the point of near political suicide, about causes he really cared about. And so, when the country is thrown into a constitutional crisis, Churchill can't help but get involved. King Edward VIII brings the vast British Empire to a turning point. Mrs Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American, is the choice for Queen. For her, he creates the greatest British crisis in centuries as he clashes with Cabinet and Parliament. Edward VIII is being called on to give up his throne and marry his divorced lover, Wallis Simpson. Churchill defies the consensus and supports the lovestruck King. He makes a serious political mistake because he romanticises monarchy. He is friends with the King. He wasn't going to rush to condemn. Churchill argues the King should be given more time to consider his position. He's actually shouted down, and it's one of the rare occasions in the House of Commons where he's not really able to make himself heard. Churchill makes a serious political mistake. It is one of a series of events which causes people to question Churchill's judgement. But there is one issue that will damage Churchill's career and political reputation more than any other. India. Ladies and gentlemen, are you following the Indian situation with the attention it demands? After 70 years of British rule, by the 1930s, the government is making moves to grant India a degree of self-government. A lifelong imperialist, Churchill refuses to stand by and watch. Churchill vehemently and completely opposes any form of self-government for India. This is a visceral feeling. It is your duty as citizens of the British Empire to form a clear opinion and make up your mind what ought to be done. He has a vision of empire formed from his own experience. This is a man born in the end of the 19th century. He served in India, Queen Victoria on the throne, and it's the zenith of empire. She is the Empress of India. It's the jewel in the crown for the British Empire. He later admitted that it was difficult for him to see Indians as equals because of the master-servant relationship that he'd had with them when he was a young man. But that had been nearly 40 years earlier. Churchill's views for the 30s are extremely conservative. He is an old-school imperialist. He calls Indian people the dusky races, the dusky nation. There's a definite sense of Indian people being inferior, therefore their wishes, their desires, their ambitions for freedom are not important. Churchill directs his anger at the figurehead of those ambitions, Mahatma Gandhi, who believes independence in India will only be achieved through non-violent means. I don't think Churchill understands non-violent protest. Churchill is belligerent and he cannot understand somebody who is not belligerent. It's very interesting to see the differences between how Churchill looked and how Gandhi looked. If you look at the corpulence of Churchill, his signature cigar in his mouth, his petulantly upturned lip, it's very different to the frail, slight Gandhi. Even when it becomes clear that self-government is going to become a political reality, Churchill doesn't let up in his attacks. He calls Gandhi a thoroughly evil force. He calls him a malignant, subversive fanatic. Churchill viewed those around him as furniture to move around. The point about Gandhi is here was somebody that wasn't going to be moved around. Thanks to his die-hard attitude on India, Churchill's political career now lies in tatters. Winston Churchill appears a has-been, and it would seem inconceivable to most people that this man would ever return to front-line politics, let alone become Prime Minister. He'd been on the wrong side of the argument in the abdication. India, he was again on the wrong side of the argument. People thought he was too old. It was all slightly embarrassing. So how does this political has-been, who spends his days in deepest Kent, become arguably Britain's greatest Prime Minister? Winston Churchill is in his study at his country home Chartwell, writing furiously. He forged his name as a writer, as a war correspondent at the end of the Victorian Empire, and he underpinned his whole political career with books and newspaper articles. Today, he's writing an article for the Daily Telegraph, and it's on a topic he's returned to time and time again. This obsession has once again alienated Churchill from the political establishment. In the article, Churchill warns of Hitler's plans to dominate Europe. Churchill is deeply alarmed by the rise of the Nazis. His first warning, he says, these people, marching through the streets of Germany with the light in their eyes to suffer for their fatherland, are looking for weapons. And when they have weapons, they're looking for war. Nazi Germany increasingly became Churchill's hobby course, and he just wouldn't let it go. He keeps banging on about that bloke Hitler. You know, he must be wrong about that, too. Churchill is a man of his word. He is a man of his word. He must be wrong about that, too. With his uncompromising stance, Churchill sets himself up in direct opposition to the government. Since becoming prime minister a year earlier, Neville Chamberlain has been following a policy of appeasement, making ever-increasing concessions to Hitler to avoid war. European peace is what I am aiming at, and I hope that this journey may open the way to get it. The policy of appeasement in order to avoid war was extremely popular, and it was almost sacrilegious to argue for any other cause. Undeterred, Churchill transforms Chartwell into his alternative seat of power and persuades his wife Clementine to be his second-in-command. She remembers, why did I marry this man, for all the difficulties that my marriage has brought me? I married him to be his political partner, to be his absolute chief advisor and supporter, and he's right about Hitler, and I'm going to be right there with him. From then on, she does nothing except help him, almost like with an alternative government, so they're collecting information about what the Nazis are doing, they have an intelligence network of their own across Europe, people are meeting secretly at their home down in Kendal the whole time to talk about it, and she's right there with him. Chartwell becomes a hub of intelligence. A huge amount of the information that he was gleaning about German armament and Nazi preparations for war were brought to him at Chartwell. Many of Churchill's sources are secret sources coming from the government. These are civil servants or members of the armed forces who are deeply concerned by what is happening in Germany and are leaking information to Churchill. In Chartwell's visitors' book, you see a real dip in signatories, even though you have more people visiting, because at that point, people are aware that by visiting Churchill at Chartwell, they are risking a great deal to be seen to be associating with Winston Churchill and providing him with information and evidence about German rearmament. Other individuals who visited but who didn't sign include Albert Einstein, and he comes to Chartwell to try and support Winston Churchill and give his observations of what's going on in Germany. Chartwell's role does genuinely warrant the phrase the most important country house in Europe at that time. It is an embodiment of Winston Churchill's campaign against appeasement. Churchill's stock is certainly rising. He's continuing to plug away on key messages, but unless events turn in his favour, that in itself isn't going to be enough to bring Churchill to a position where he's going to be brought back into office. Churchill is at home in Chartwell when the phone rings. It's the news he had been both fearing and predicting for years. Nazi Germany has invaded Poland. The German foe begins its ruthless march of conquest and sets the stage for World War II. Britain is Poland's ally. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has no choice but to declare war on Germany. The fateful hour of 11 has struck and Britain's final warning to Hitler having been ignored, a state of war once more exists between Great Britain and Germany. It is the ultimate vindication of the warnings that he has been giving for nearly ten years. And yet, there's very little satisfaction for Churchill that Britain does end up going to war. War was a grim business and he knew it was a grim business, but if war it had to be, then he wanted to be at the centre of events. Churchill immediately drives to London to speak in an emergency debate in the House of Commons. Here, he gets a note asking him to see the Prime Minister. If Chamberlain is to have any sense of credibility in the country and if he seriously wants this war to be won, then he must include Winston Churchill. He has proven to be right about the danger of Hitler. Churchill leaves the meeting in shock. He's not only been asked to join the War Cabinet, but he's been given one of its most powerful roles. This is one of the first photographs of the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. It is a dramatic moment for him. It marks a homecoming to the front rank of British politics. There he is, beaming, utterly delighted with this new role, where most people would balk at the prospect of having to face the Nazis. Churchill's been waiting to take the action to the enemy. As First Lord, Churchill's in charge of the Royal Navy, the largest in the world. He wears an ornate uniform and it's one he's worn before in the First World War. He marched back into his old rooms in the Admiralty. The signal sent out to the fleet was, Winston is back. Churchill will barely see his beloved Chartwell for the next six years. The great struggle of his life is about to begin. Britain has been at war for two weeks. Winston Churchill is on a train heading north to the Orkneys and the naval base at Scarpa Flow. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he's going to throw himself into that job 100%, in fact, possibly more than 100%. Since becoming First Lord of the Admiralty, he's travelled the length and breadth of the country, making sure he's across all aspects of the Royal Navy and its ability to take on the enemy. The level of industry, how hard Churchill works in this early period, it's eye-watering. When he's in Whitehall, Churchill works around the clock. He was a dynamo, and he would appear in the map room in his dressing ground at seven in the morning. He's sending mimets and men of Miranda all over the place, from the quantities of fish that are being caught to the medals being worn to the signals that people are sending to what operations are called. His extraordinary energy and idiosyncratic methods of operating do drive people up the wall. Churchill's post-war secretary, Lady Williams, remembers her boss's ways well. There is no doubt he was a very hard taskmaster. He drove us, and he really gave praise. He worked so hard himself and was so absolutely dedicated to the task in hand that he expected the same from others. Churchill bombards his Cabinet colleagues with minutes and telegrams on all aspects of government business. He's going to do everything he can to support the war effort. Churchill expands his brief to include propaganda. Five months into the war, Churchill's at Plymouth Harbour. HMS Exeter returns to England, and Mr Churchill, with the First Sealord and the Chancellor, is there to lead the cheering that welcomes the battle-scarred cruiser. HMS Exeter is limping home, having just fought the first major naval engagement of the war, the Battle of the River Plate, a fight that severely damaged two British cruisers and didn't even end with the Royal Navy sinking the enemy. Spotting an opportunity, Churchill makes sure he's on the quayside when the ship returns. Before the Battle of the River Plate, there is an issue in terms of selling this war. Everyone's lives are disrupted, the economy has come to a standstill, people have been evacuated, but there isn't really very much fighting. You almost need action to justify the disruption. Churchill understands this better than anyone. A week later, he puts on a victory parade. The City of London delights to honour the men who won the victory. The Premier and the Cabinet are there at the special invitation of the First Lord, for whom it must be a really enjoyable occasion. The River Plate battle is portrayed as a significant victory. Churchill is very good at taking a story and extracting the absolute best from it. This is a man who's been very present in the press. This is a man who knows it's all about the spin. At the parade, Churchill, alongside the King and Queen, pays tribute to the 100 men who were killed or injured. Churchill moves to very quickly comfort this girl who is crying because she has clearly lost either her father or her brother in the Battle of the River Plate. It shows Churchill's more emotional side. Churchill was someone who had experienced war first-hand, had seen people killed in front of him, so the grief that she's feeling is not a sort of abstract concept to him. He was very emotional, Churchill, in the most lovely way. He had the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met, and he was human and interested in the human race. Three months later, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, calls Winston Churchill to Number 10 for a special meeting. He's also invited the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. He is the supreme opposite of Churchill. Halifax is an immensely respected Conservative politician. He's part of the old guard. He is respectable, he's trusted, he's steady. Chamberlain wants to discuss what to do in the wake of Britain's first major defeat of the war in Norway. If ever there was a quintessential civilian unsuited to the task of war, it is Neville. He was not a war leader. He detested all aspects of war. Chamberlain no longer has the confidence of his own party. There's no confidence in his government, which he sees as no confidence in himself, and therefore he feels that he can no longer go on. A new Prime Minister must be found. Chamberlain turns to his two most important ministers to look for a successor. The atmosphere must have been extremely tense because the stakes were very high. There's no doubt that Halifax is actually the favourite. Many in Whitehall and many in Westminster within the Conservative Party still see Churchill as a maverick, an opportunist, someone who might lead this country into rash and dangerous exploits. Chamberlain asks Churchill if he can think of any reason why Halifax should not be Prime Minister. It would be very hard to believe that someone who had such a strong sense of his own destiny, others would say egomania, as Winston Churchill, ever really gave up on the idea that he could become Prime Minister. Churchill knows that. What he needs is for Halifax to write himself out of the equation, which will then lead to him automatically being seen as the right choice. For once in his life, Churchill chooses to say nothing. Churchill claims that he just kept quiet. He said it was a very long silence, longer than the two-minute silence that occurs on Armistice Day. Churchill plays it brilliantly. Eventually, it's Halifax who breaks the silence. He turns down the top job. At the critical moment and out of crisis, Britain gets the war Prime Minister of her desire. Behind Mr Churchill, the country rallies solidly and resolutely to the task of defeating the most sinister madness that ever aspired to world conquest. The man to beat Hitler is Winston Churchill. Against all the odds, Churchill has come back from obscurity and is now Prime Minister. This photograph is taken on the day Churchill takes office. This is a man who appears to have almost no worries in the world, and yet he has just assumed awesome responsibilities. But here he is, smiling, cigar in the hand, as though he had hardly a worry in the world. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Churchill's sense of destiny comes from overwhelming self-belief and I think he'd always fantasised from his time as a soldier serving in India in the late 19th century that it would fall to him to be the supreme defender of Britain and her empire at her greatest hour of crisis. On his first morning as Prime Minister, Churchill gets straight to work. Just hours earlier, the Germans launched an attack on Holland, Belgium and France. It could not be at a more critical moment in Britain and, indeed, the world's history. The Germans are advancing at an alarming rate. Churchill, who had always had this incredible respect for the French military, is staggered by just how effective the Germans are on the ground. He didn't expect the Germans to go through the French like a knife through butter. Less than a week into the job, Churchill crosses the Channel. He arrives to discover the Germans are only 110 miles northeast of Paris. He turns to the French top brass, hoping there might be something in their tank that they've got this surprise card they're going to pull out of their back pocket, and there is none. And that's, I think, devastating for Churchill. The Allied forces are in real trouble. Over a quarter of a million British troops are on the continent, the bulk of the nation's army, and all are now in serious danger of capture or massacre. Churchill calls a meeting of the War Cabinet. What they have to consider in these claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms with the latest bad news coming in from the front is whether or not, at this point, Britain can fight on. Most people in the War Cabinet believe that almost the entire British army is going to be lost. The Germans will shortly be at the Channel in a position to launch an invasion of the British Isles. In these dire circumstances, Lord Halifax quickly suggests surrender. He wants to open negotiations with the Germans as soon as possible. And Chamberlain agrees. It was actually about simply surviving, about keeping the British Isles as an independent political entity and safeguarding the empire. And if Hitler was prepared to offer reasonable terms, then Halifax thought that these should be explored. Churchill is outraged. He sees it in black and white terms. We're in this war to win it. Because if Halifax, who was the other option, had become Prime Minister at the end of May, by the end of June, Britain would have been out of the war. That's how key Churchill is as leader. Despite his opposition to any talk of surrender, Churchill isn't in a position to dismiss it. He has only been Prime Minister for two weeks, and he realises that he has very little support in Parliament from his own Conservative MPs. And so this crucial War Cabinet meeting ends with no resolution. Later that evening, Churchill is back at Number 10, waiting for news. A major new operation is under way. It's codenamed Dynamo, and it will become one of the defining moments of the entire war. In a desperate bid to salvage as much of the British army as possible, men are being evacuated from France... ..at Dunkirk. It's a humiliation. You've sent your best troops, you've sent your best equipment, but they've proved in battle that they couldn't last more than a few weeks, and you have no choice but to evacuate. It was an incredibly difficult operation, mounted at the last minute, no real preparation or planning for it. They're long, flat beaches, and also the tide runs out a long way, so your ability to actually bring boats in close to shore is limited. As you try to evacuate off the beaches, you're going to be fired upon by tanks and guns and planes. It will be an incredibly challenging mission to try and withdraw any forces. There is a real fear that actually we're only going to be able to save a fraction of the army. The initial estimates are that we will be lucky to get away perhaps 50,000 men. Unless they get the troops home from France... ..and Churchill convinces his war cabinet to fight on, the war will be lost. Winston Churchill has been Prime Minister for less than a month. His premiership has started with a nightmare... ..as the Germans launch a devastating attack on Holland, Belgium and France. Operation Dynamo has been under way for four days, evacuating British troops from Dunkirk. Churchill is fighting desperately and simultaneously on two fronts. He's fighting to salvage everything he can from the beaches of Dunkirk, but he's also having to fight a rearguard action against his own foreign secretary, who is now proposing peace negotiations. In his study at 10 Downing Street, Churchill starts to prepare a speech. It will be a speech on peace, In 10 Downing Street, Churchill starts to prepare a speech. It will break the news of the evacuation at Dunkirk to the House of Commons. He is a military man. He knows better than anyone what this evacuation has cost us. It is nothing short of defeat. As Churchill works on the first draft of his speech, news comes through from France... ..and it forces a major rethink. Far more men are being rescued than he ever thought possible. Sailing with one of the relieving vessels, we pass ship after ship, packed with men whom the long arm of the Royal Navy has brought off the beaches of Dunkirk. Every kind of small craft, destroyers, paddle steamers, yachts, motorboats, rowing boats, have sped here to the burning ruins of Dunkirk to bring off the gallant British and French troops. Churchill anticipated they'd be lucky if they get, say, 50,000 men away, and, in fact, they get over 300,000 men away. Churchill was obviously relieved, but he does not see this as a moment of great triumph, quite the reverse. He sees it as being almost a form of salvation. From little hope or anticipation of getting many troops away to having the rump of the army back in Britain, this gives him something that he can actually use. Churchill's belief is, yes, we can fight on, but he needs to be able to convince others that that is the case, and that's what he sets out to do. He's now got less than a week to write the most important speech of his life. And when you think of all of the other things that he is dealing with as Prime Minister, it's amazing, in a way, that he found the time to focus on finding the right words. But, of course, Churchill knew that words mattered. After decades in public life, Churchill's speech-writing process is well-honed. First of all, he would dictate it. He always dictated. He would dictate it the whole way through. It might be a speech of 40 minutes. He could sort of roll the phrases around. He wrote in a way that needed to be listened to, and he liked to mutter the sentences to himself and then try them the other way round. And then he'd say, I've got it. So the secretaries had a tough time trying to keep up with what the final version was. Then, from that speech, which was then typed up, he would correct it probably four or five times. And so each speech, it was perfection. And when the speech is in its final form, it would have been taken away by the duty secretary and retyped, his words set out in a blank-verse format like poetry, designed to give him the rhythm, to give him the pauses, to give him the emphasis for his delivery. Churchill is on his way to Parliament with the final draft of his speech. The incredible thing about Churchill that we think of him as this great orator, it didn't come naturally to him. He found it very difficult. He would labour over speeches again and again and again, rehearse them, so his speeches had to be absolutely pin-perfect before he was prepared to stand up and give one. This speech really needs to work. Britain has just suffered a humiliating defeat. Some in the War Cabinet have been calling for surrender. This is Churchill's chance to keep Britain in the fight. At 3.40pm, Churchill stands up in the House of Commons. When, a week ago today, I asked the House to fix this afternoon as the occasion for a statement, I feared it would be my hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history. He begins by updating his fellow MPs on the events that have taken place in France over the past week. The whole root and core and brain of the British Army seemed about to perish upon the field or be led into an ignominious and starving captivity. He always thought that the British could hear the worst. If you were honest with them, then they would travel with you further and longer and trust you. We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. Almost no politician could get away with the language which Churchill used. And the only reason that it works so well for Churchill is that it matches the extreme drama of the moment. This speech is the most important and the greatest that Churchill ever produced. What Churchill did was to mobilise the English language and to send it into battle. If, which I do not for a moment believe, this island were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas would carry on the struggle. This guy's an imperialist, for better or for worse. And what his belief in the empire gives him is the belief to keep on fighting and convince the British nation to keep on fighting. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. It is the quintessence of defiance amid adversity. What's vital is he's able to take the country with him on that decision. And in fact, I think the way he does it is he doesn't present it as a decision. It's a fait accompli. We will fight on. There is no question mark. Victory was the only option. And then he finishes with this flourish and they are magnificent words and phrases which is why they resonate today. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Churchill is no longer speaking to his fellow politicians. He's speaking direct to the British people in a way that only Churchill can. One of the things that makes Churchill the right man for this moment is his inner confidence and his own self-belief in adversity which is a belief that he's now able to project onto the nation. His own career had been a sort of roller coaster from which he'd come back from many moments that might have destroyed another political career. What that had taught him over more than half a century was resilience. And I think we can't underestimate the powerful impact of those failures and how it helped make the man that history recognises in World War II. We shall never surrender. Next time, we'll discover how Churchill seals his place in history as Britain's supreme war leader, risking everything. There is a real possibility that he might die. A victory in the Second World War.