James Holland

That's the point of it, I think.

So yes, to go back to 1947, the world is in a bad way, despite the peace.

Well, they are, but they've also had this... Greece has had this terrible civil war.

It's had the civil war from the moment the Germans leave in 1943.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it's left over to the Italians.

But this is going on with sort of, you know, communist andates, you know, partisans.

Yeah.

fighting against government, all the rest of the British come and intervene at the end of 1944 into 1945, and peace is declared, and a new government's set up, the king's restored, and all the rest of it.

But it then erupts again.

And the problem is that financially, by the spring of 1947, Greece is about to collapse completely, and so is Turkey.

And Britain has been trying to sort out Greece, and it has been Britain that has been championing Greek efforts to kind of avoid the takeover of the communists and getting it behind the Iron Curtain.

But it can't anymore.

It just doesn't have the money.

It can't prop it up anymore.

So Britain has appealed to the United States to say, you need to help or else communism is going to spread.

The Iron Curtain is going to spread.

Churchill's done his Iron Curtain speech the previous year, previous March 1946.

And we'll get onto that a little bit later on in the series.

But they're about to collapse.