OUR MAN OF HOPE
In the 1930’s Winston Churchill was the only voice sounding the alarm against Hitler. His fellow Conservatives shunned him, and he was not offered a position in the government.
But Churchill was a man of action. Not content to sit on the sidelines as a spectator, he became England’s formost expert on the details of Hitler’s plans. He assembled a personal network of intelligence agents, men who defied Britain’s government and risked their careers to provide secret information detailing Germany’s resurgence: details on troops, production figures for arms factories, even advance copies of Hitler’s speeches.
One of Churchill’s most valuable contacts was Ralph Wigram, the head of the central department of Britain’s Foreign Office. Wigram had a personal reason for fearing Nazism: his four-year-old son suffered from a mental disorder and would be treated as damaged goods under Hitler’s master-race schemes.
At the Foreign Office, Wigram and his team produced reports tracking the growing might of Hitler’s armies, only to find--to their astonishment--that the information was ignored by government ministers. For years Wigrams team secretly passed these documents on to Churchill and the great communicator used them to expose Hitler’s plans.
Increasingly, attention turned to the man who for years had warned Britons they must prepare for war. Political cartoons depicted an angry Britannia pleading with [British Prime Minister] Neville Chamberlain to bring Churchill into the government: "Bring Churchill back--it's your
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