-It's 1940.

The Battle of Britain is raging.

♪♪ Hitler orders a full scale attack on Britain.

But as the country cowers, the world's most scandalous couple set sail for an island Paradise.

Edward, the former king, and Wallis, the woman for whom he gave up the throne, are banished 4,000 miles to the Bahamas.

♪♪ -There's no way to sugarcoat sending him to the Bahamas.

It's exile.

-But exile didn't end the Wallis and Edward problem.

-This man looks like a potential catastrophe to his family and to his government.

-For the first time, this film exposes in detail the Duke and Duchess's little-known war years in the Caribbean, revealed in top secret files.

♪♪ -It does seem pretty damning evidence.

So many different people are saying the same things.

-Newly uncovered British government and FBI records reveal shocking secrets.

-People did say it's a sunny place for shady people, but the Bahamas were where the rules melted.

-Spending on a lavish scale at the height of war.

-Wallis insists that her hairdresser from Saks Fifth Avenue is flown in, darling.

-Fraternizing with known Nazi sympathizers.

-They didn't have the correct advisors to say, "No, really, I wouldn't be seen with him."

-Disastrous interventions in global politics.

-He's supposed to be upholding British foreign policy, but he is actually wholly against it.

-And intimate involvement in a notorious unsolved murder.

-It's not up to the Duke to get involved in a criminal police investigation.

And that's where the suspicions about his motives arise.

-Previously unseen documents and archive lay bare the most outrageous years in the life of a notorious royal couple.

-Their attitudes were suspect.

Their connections were suspect.

They were suspect.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The Bahamas, a cluster of islands just 50 miles from the coast of Florida.

They would be home to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for almost five years during World War Two.

The story of how they ended up there is extraordinary.

On December 11, 1936, King Edward VIII had made the shocking decision to abdicate the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

For some, it was a fairy tale romance.

For others, a betrayal with Wallis to blame.

After the abdication, she was shunned by the royal family and denied the title, "Her Royal Highness."

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor settled in Paris.

Two years later, Britain declared war with Germany.

Then in May 1940, the Nazis invaded France.

-He's in the worst possible place as it turns out, in 1940, he's sitting in France and he can no longer stay in France because, brutally, he risked being captured.

-When the Germans invade France in 1940, the Duke flees to the south of France, where they have a house with the idea of coming back to Britain.

But at the same time, and during the summer of 1940, he's in discussions with the Nazis.

-The Duke's flirtation with Nazi Germany was nothing new.

Back in 1937, Edward and Wallis had made a highly-publicized tour of Germany.

A chance to enjoy the royal treatment Wallis had been denied in Britain.

-The Duke and Duchess of Windsor visit Germany.

There's a big crowd at the station to catch a glimpse of His Royal Highness and the Duchess on their arrival from Paris.

-Hitler even granted Edward a private meeting.

The Duke was deeply impressed, declaring Hitler's Germany to be a miracle.

-The Duke of Windsor got seduced into coming to Germany, and then he got seduced again when he was in Germany.

And then he continued to get seduced after he came back from Germany.

I think Edward wasn't backwards in coming forwards in talking about how he admired many of the things that the Nazis were doing.

-Now the nations were at war.

The British army was facing defeat at Dunkirk.

And the Windsors, with their uncertain loyalties, were on the loose in Southern Europe.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered them to go to neutral Portugal, but the situation was about to get worse.

-I'm holding back and actually saying he was a traitor, because I think that's such a strong, extreme thing to say.

I think the problem for Winston Churchill in 1940, when Duke of Windsor was in Portugal, is that there was credible evidence that, at the very least, the Duke of Windsor was pro-Nazi.

Certainly in the sense of wanting to negotiate some kind of peace with Hitler.

-What he doesn't understand is he sees himself as, I don't know, a de facto ambassador and a statesman.

He is none of those things.

So what he is is a raging liability.

-Secret German documents discovered after the war reveal an even more disturbing plan.

-The Germans want to have him as some sort of figurehead that they can place on the throne, should they successfully invade Britain.

-They want him to go and bat for Team Nazi.

Horrible.

Not at all surprised.

-The one thing the Germans knew was that the Windsors were potential assets.

And that's quite a frightening thing.

-Edward and Wallis were a danger to the Allied war effort, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill demanded they come back to Britain.

But the Duke had conditions.

-One, he wanted a new job.

He wanted something serious, substantial, and ideally, the ambassadorship in Washington, D.C. And secondly, his obsession with the Duchess of Windsor being granted Her Royal Highness status.

-He is trying to demand extra treatment for his Duchess wife should they come back to Britain, should they take on a role.

-He's behaving, Churchill says, like a petulant baby and he's pretty fed up with him.

-Now, you're not sure about what the Windsors real opinions are.

You're not sure about the ways in which the Windsors could be used.

You have to get them out.

-What Edward and Wallis didn't know was that they were being watched.

-The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were being monitored by a whole series of organizations.

Churchill was being been kept aware of what exactly is going on.

Indeed, his brother George VI is fully aware of what's going on.

-On July 4, 1940, Churchill drafted a memo to the Prime ministers of the British colonies.

It was frank about the dangers he believed the Duke posed.

-Well, this is a remarkable document, written in Churchill's own hand, with a heading "Most secret and personal.

Decipher yourself."

And it reads, "The activities of the Duke of Windsor on the continent in recent months have been causing H.M. and myself grave uneasiness, as his inclinations are well known to be pro-Nazi and he may become a center of intrigue."

And then it says, "In all the circumstances, it has been felt necessary to try to tie him down in some appointment which might appeal to him and his wife.

And I have decided, with His Majesty's approval, to offer him the governorship of the Bahamas.

I do not know yet whether he whether he will accept."

-It's one of the only things you can do is try and remove him as far as possible from "A", the line of fire, but "B", from all these rumors about his Nazi proclivities and just get him out of the way.

And an island in the Caribbean, it's as good as place as any to put them and just hope they stay quiet.

-The Duke was reluctant to leave Portugal and only agreed to go when Churchill threatened him with court martial.

-He basically says to him, "If you don't just do as you're told, at this point, I'm just going to say that you disobeyed orders and we'll just arrest you."

That's essentially what he says to him, and he comes back with, "I can't believe he's just basically threatened to arrest me," and I'm like, "I can."

-But Hitler didn't want the Windsors in the Bahamas.

The Germans hatched a plot, codenamed Operation Willi, to convince Wallis and Edward to stay in Europe, ready to seize the throne when the time came.

-And an SS officer was sent to persuade them to take on this role should Germany invade Britain.

And he's offered 50 million francs and the opportunity to sit out in Switzerland until the invasion takes place.

-This man looks like a potential catastrophe to his family and to his government.

-Churchill reaches the point where he's worried that he may well be tempted to go to Switzerland to take the 50 million francs and to come back as some sort of puppet king.

And stories suggest a man called Peter Russell, who's an intelligence officer, is actually sent to keep an eye on the Duke and to shoot him and Wallis if they move to Switzerland.

-There are no words.

There are no words that aren't expletives.

-In a further ploy to delay the Bahamas trip, the Germans allowed the Duchess's maids safe passage to their house in occupied Paris to retrieve possessions they'd left behind.

Documents recently unearthed in the National Archives reveal dismay at the special treatment given to Edward and Wallis by the enemy.

-It's headed "Most secret," and it's relaying what has been going on, which is the Germans have fulfilled all the dukes desires.

"Special cameo was sent to and fro, and a detailed inventory list was made of all the furniture and personal property of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which was shown to the Duchess for approval to give her an opportunity to say if there was anything missing.

The desire of the Germans to please the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was absolutely marked in evidence."

-I'm sure it's completely true that the Windsors were desperate to get their things.

Why were they desperate to get their things?

Because they felt so displaced.

Because they'd been rejected from the country that they loved.

If you are in exile, the things around you take on huge importance.

-Now, I can't imagine anyone else who had property in Paris who was getting this Rolls-Royce service from the Germans.

So one has to sort of wonder what game was being played here.

-The Duke and Duchess were communicating with the enemy.

They procrastinated and asked for favors from all quarters.

-And of course, we have Operation Cleopatra Whim, which is a request to rescue Wallis's green swimsuit, great favorite, from their home in La Croix in the south of France.

-Sending two people to get your swimming costume from the south of France is utter nonsense.

-As the time to leave for the Bahamas drew near, the Germans made a last ditch attempt to stop Edward from going.

-They try and scare him.

They say that he's going to be to be killed when he gets to the Bahamas.

They throw stones at the window.

They send threatening messages with flowers.

His luggage is stolen.

Everything, just to make him feel that he shouldn't leave.

But he does leave on the first of August.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in the Bahamas on August 17, 1940, banished from Europe because of their Nazi sympathies.

They didn't want to be there, and from the moment they stepped off the boat, there were problems.

-They weren't lucky about the time they arrived.

It's mid-August.

Mid-August is hurricane season, a time of real nervous tension.

It affects everybody.

-It's very hot in August.

Very humid.

He's dressed in his major generals outfit.

He's perspiring very heavily.

She's very chic in her silk dress.

♪♪ Thousands of Bahamians turned out for them and sang "Rule Britannia," and they were seen clearly as celebrities.

-I think for many of the local people, they would have been absolutely overjoyed as a member of the royal family coming to their small island, at last they've been recognized.

Whether or not the love is reciprocal is another matter.

-Edward and Wallis took an instant dislike to the Bahamas.

-She considered it a dump and "a moron Paradise."

-The Duke had gone from being emperor of India to, you know, ruling over somewhere that was the size of Hereford.

-In 1940, the Bahamas had a population of just 70,000 people, spread over many tiny islands, and it was not an equal society.

-There was a strong divide between the rich and the poor, between the Black and the white.

People of African descent who are now citizens of the British Empire, this would be the overwhelming majority of the people that he was being governor over.

But in 1940, there was an extraordinarily large number of people in the Caribbean who were very, very royalist.

There was also a very strong European population there, people of European descent.

And it's that population that had most of the economic and the political and social and cultural power.

-It was this privileged white minority who crowded into the Bahamian parliament building to see the Duke take his oath of office.

But it didn't go as he had hoped.

-Of course, one of the reasons I think, that Edward was keen to take up the position of governor was he was, he thought, "Well, at least my wife will be afforded the status of a governor's wife."

And so he was utterly shocked and appalled and furious when they arrived.

And the women had been instructed to do a half curtsy to him, and nobody curtsied to the Duchess.

And then it is revealed that, of course, the directive has come from the palace, from the Foreign Office, that the Duchess is to be addressed as your Grace.

No one is to curtsy to her.

The pettiness, the viciousness of the palace in Britain did not abate.

-After being sworn in, Edward used a press conference with American journalists as an opportunity to air some grievances.

-Both the Duchess and I were very disappointed not to pass through New York on our way here.

But we look forward to going to your country and the Duchess's country later on, although it is too early yet to make any definite or detailed plans.

-They wanted to do a detour via America before they arrived in the Bahamas.

Incidentally, that was kiboshed, that idea.

-Now, the excuse that was given by the British authorities to keep them out of America was that as governor and commander in chief of the Bahamas, this would go against the neutrality of the Americans.

But the real reason was to keep them away from the isolationists.

-The isolationists believed the United States should stay out of foreign conflicts and not join Britain against the Nazis.

Edward and Wallis supported this view.

-There were factions in the USA that were firmly against committing to war, and there was the feeling that if the Duke and Duchess arrived with their political sentiment, it might shift public opinion towards that leaning.

-America getting involved in a war doesn't mean that you will win it on the battlefield, but what it does do is doom Germany to defeat eventually, because America is so big and so rich and has so much manpower that eventually they'll win that way.

They will just keep going until you cannot keep going anymore.

Um, and that's what we want to happen.

♪♪ -Over a pathway strewn with flowers, enters His Royal Highness, the Governor General of the Bahamas.

-Five days after their arrival, the Duke and Duchess were formally presented to the African Bahamian citizens, and the Duke promised great things.

-He gave a very impressive speech.

He had great plans for economic reform, to improve the lot of the 90% who were basically being kept down.

-And he did speak out Against poverty and the prevailing economic conditions that they faced.

And many felt that he would be their champion.

-There was some hope that there might be a break in the endless, endless, endless dominance of the white merchant classes.

-The problem was that he really had very limited powers.

The budgets were controlled by what were called the Bay Street Boys.

These were a group of merchants who had their offices in Bay Street in Nassau, and they basically ran the island for their own purposes.

-Since they were interestingly corrupt, and since they had been rum runners and on the side, cocaine runners, were not going to give up power very easily.

They had too many secrets to protect.

Quite apart from their business and their wealth to protect.

-And the Duke really was told, if you want to succeed here and have statues put up to you, then basically just go and play golf.

If you want to cause trouble.

Then we can cause trouble too.

-It was clear that social reform would be difficult to achieve, and it was not Edward's first priority.

He had more pressing concerns in the shape of his new home, Government House.

-Charming colonial building, but not quite up to their standards.

And the first day there, deeply depressed.

She goes round.

She thinks it's infected by termites.

The peel-- It's just been decorated.

But she claims that the paint is peeling.

It's a disappointment.

-Correspondents newly discovered in the records of the Colonial Office reveal that Edward tried to leave the Bahamas immediately for his ranch in Canada, with the idea of returning when Government House was fully renovated.

He demanded an extra £5,000 for the work.

About a quarter of a million today.

The Secretary of State for the colonies was horrified.

-He said., "Frankly, I do not see how I could comply with such a request in similar circumstances from any other colonial governor, for I want to protect Your Royal Highness from any accusation, however ill founded of extravagant expenditure."

So he he's spinning it completely around in a very politically clever way and saying, "Look, I'm defending your reputation by not giving you this money.

He later says, quite explicitly, that that sum of £5,000 could be better invested in a fighter aircraft, you know, like a Spitfire or a hurricane.

-The Windsors ignored the warnings and went ahead with the renovations to the disgust of the British government.

-I mean, we have at one point the British government, which is attempting to prosecute a conflict against a very powerful and mighty enemy.

And on the other hand, we have people who should be the pillars of the British establishment, who are asking for more money to renovate their house.

-While work was underway, they were offered the use of a house belonging to sir Harry Oakes, one of the island's best known residents.

-Harry Oakes is one of the richest people in the British Empire.

The Canadian gold millionaire billionaire.

-Oakes had made his money in Canada, had a large estate again in the Bahamas, and they became very close.

-It was several months before the Duke and Duchess moved back into government House.

Wallis had transformed what she called "the shack" into a luxurious mansion, with a new wing for staff and novelty decor.

In the end, the Duke and Duchess had to pay for most of it themselves.

Back in Britain, it was a different story.

The Blitz had begun, and in the cities people were sheltering underground while above their homes were destroyed.

To make matters worse, rationing had been introduced, leaving the population short of food.

But there were no shortages for Edward and Wallis.

-They lived very extravagantly.

They had flowers flown in from Miami.

They spent extravagantly on wines which they were able to get tax free.

They had a very large staff, a much larger than previous governors.

And they felt that, you know, because he'd been the former king, he should continue to live in the same way.

-Most people in the Bahamas were living in poverty levels.

So the contrast between their lavish lifestyle and their citizens was quite substantial.

-Wallis Simpson insists that her hairdresser from Saks Fifth Avenue is flown in, darling.

And Edward was as bad.

Edward insisted that his valet was recalled from military duty.

There are between a rock and a hard place because on the one hand, what are they?

If they don't have the armory of their status and image, and if they are expected to slum it in the Bahamas, that is, if you like, disarming them.

-In autumn 1940, life in the Bahamas for Wallis and Edward was an endless cycle of minor civic duties.

They were bored.

-Well, the Duchess wrote letters in which she scratched out the words "government House, Nassau" and wrote "Elba," thinking of Napoleon's exile.

It was not somewhere they wanted to be.

-But they were now under constant surveillance.

Churchill believed they had to be stopped from colluding with the Nazis.

Top secret FBI documents reveal the extent of concern about the Windsors behavior within weeks of their arrival.

A detailed report was supplied to the FBI by the British secret services and copied to President Roosevelt himself.

-September 13, 1940.

It says the Duke is in such a state of intoxication most of the time that he is virtually non compos mentis.

-But more shocking still is what the document says about Wallis's Nazi connections.

-"The British government has known that the Duchess of Windsor was exceedingly pro-German in her sympathies and connections, but shortly prior to them coming to the Bahamas, they established conclusively that the Duchess of Windsor had recently been in direct contact with Von Ribbentrop and was maintaining constant contact and communication with him.

-In 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop was the Nazi Foreign Minister.

It was rumored that he and Wallis had been intimate before the war, and that he'd sent her 17 carnations every day, representing the number of times they'd slept together.

For a British subject at a time of war, passing information to the enemy carried a death sentence, which may be why the report blames only the Duchess, a citizen of neutral America.

-It does seem pretty damning evidence against her.

Both she and the Duke have been warned repeatedly by representatives of the British government.

They should be exceedingly circumspect in their dealings with the representatives of the German government.

The Duchess has repeatedly ignored these warnings.

We have to be very grateful to the FBI for releasing this document, because without this release, we wouldn't have been aware of the suspicions at this time against Wallis.

-This level of espionage surrounding members of the royal family was unprecedented.

Now, in a joint effort between the British and American secret services, every move was monitored.

Wallis's letters were read.

Even their laundry was suspect.

-So this is, um, October the 19th, 1940.

And it's on the headed notepaper of John Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.

And it's a memorandum for a Mr. Tolson.

Um, and it's, you know, it's saying, "in the course of my duties as classifier, I notice that the Duchess of Windsor was reported as being violently pro-German.

On subsequent date, I noticed that her clothes were sent to New York City for dry cleaning.

The possibility arises that transferring of messages through the clothes may be taking place.

It's all very kind of CIA, FBI secret squirrel, isn't it?

I mean, a lot of those things were going on then.

-Wallis's communications in the Bahamas could be restricted, but the secret services could not control who the Windsors met.

And one Bahamian resident was singled out by the FBI as a possible threat.

His name was Axel Wenner-Gren.

-Axel Wenner-Gren was a figure who was known throughout the world.

He was enormously rich and extremely well connected.

-He was also a suspected Nazi agent.

-He certainly knew Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's most important lieutenants, and head of the Luftwaffe.

And so that attracted the attention of the FBI and MI6 and the intelligence agencies in terms of putting him under surveillance and investigating him.

-So there's a great deal of suspicion around Axel Wenner-Gren.

The Americans, in particular, were deeply suspicious of his activities in the Bahamas.

There were suspicions that on his estate in the Bahamas, Shangri-La, he was building harbors, deep harbors for U-boats to be refueled.

He had bought Howard Hughes yacht, the Southern Cross , and there were suspicions that that was being used to spy shipping that was being sunk in the Caribbean.

-Wenner-Gren was in favor of making peace with Germany, and he was tasked with getting close to Edward and Wallis, who he was promised, held sympathetic understanding for totalitarian ideas.

-And though the Duke was warned not to have anything to do with him, they became very friendly.

The Duke saw him as a kindred spirit.

-So [chuckles] you send him to the middle of nowhere, like a hot little island in the middle of nowhere, so that he can be anonymous and stay out of trouble, and he manages to find a massive Nazi sympathizer with a lot of money.

-The British government hoped to stop the Windsors from meeting Wenner-Gren contacts in the United States.

But in December 1940, Wallis needed urgent dental treatment, and Churchill reluctantly agreed to let them visit Miami.

-They go across on in Werner-Gren's yacht, and the Windsors must have realized that they were under surveillance, ordered by Roosevelt himself.

The suspicion was that this trip to the States was not just about having medical treatment done and seeing their financial advisor.

It was to do with getting in touch with the isolationists.

For example, there were American businessmen who basically were trading with the Germans throughout the war.

They had huge business investments in Germany, and the Duke was very, very close to them.

-The first trip to America lasted just over a week, but it had set a dangerous precedent for future overseas travel.

-Now that we have found our way to America, we look forward to an early opportunity of another visit.

-Axel Wenner-Gren's involvement angered the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, but the Duke was about to complicate Anglo-American relations even further.

-He then gives [chuckles] -- gives an interview to an American magazine.

And this would be terrible at any point because he basically tells America, "Don't get involved in the war, it's not worth it.

You'll be better off staying out of it and helping rebuild a new order afterwards, you know.

And that might be Germany.

It might be a Nazi Europe, or it might be Britain."

-Well, that's the last thing that Churchill wants the Americans to hear.

He wants, you know, fight them on the beaches kind of thinking.

And he wants America to join Britain.

-It's a strange kind of situation that he's in, in which he's supposed to be upholding British foreign policy, but he's actually wholly against it.

-So you can see why this is a really sticky wicket.

And he's thoroughly scolded.

-That scolding came in the form of a strongly-worded letter from the British Colonial Secretary.

-It says, "Exception is taken also in the United States to Your Royal Highness interview, recently published in Liberty , of which it is said that the language, whatever was meant, will certainly be interpreted as defeatist and pro-Nazi.

I could wish, indeed, that Your Royal Highness would seek advice before making public statements of this kind."

And the Duke is challenged on this.

He claims that he -- The words were taken out of context and changed, but the fact is he had actually had approval and seen the original text, so he's lying.

But he realizes he's gone too far.

-If the United States had done as the Duke wanted, it would have spelled catastrophe for Europe.

As the Blitz on Britain continued, it was Edward's younger brother, King George and his Queen, who helped boost the morale of the nation.

Meanwhile, exiled in the Bahamas, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor seemed to be helping the enemy.

-That man did not have a shred of self-awareness, ever.

And that's the issue here.

♪♪ -From Nassau to Miami, come the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

And Florida gets another chance to see the popular royal couple.

-The Windsors returned to Miami in April 1941, the first of several trips that year.

And this time the FBI placed them under even tighter surveillance.

-They were watched all the time, and people were reporting back all the time.

Their attitudes were suspect.

Their connections were suspect.

They were suspect.

-One question was where the dollars were coming from.

Wherever they went, Edward and Wallis attracted attention for one thing -- excess.

-Edward always loved America.

He loved the jazz music.

He loved the celebrity.

He hooked up on the Hollywood vibe.

His wife was American.

He got America.

-So the Windsors were extremely extravagant.

They were also renowned for the amount of luggage they travelled with, reputed to be 85 pieces of luggage to the extent that they had to store them in hotel corridors.

There wasn't room in their suite.

-They would move into a whole suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

Very expensive hotel.

-There are some sort of grumblings.

I mean, her shopping doesn't help.

Bearing in mind what the people of Europe are going through at the time.

-And certainly in the British press, it went down very badly.

There were indeed questions raised in the House by MPs about the extravagance at a time of national shortage and sacrifice, and they kind of just did what suited them.

-Newly discovered Foreign Office documents show that the British government thought the spending not just ill judged, but highly suspicious.

-The British government were effectively investigating the finances of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The document shows that the Duchess of Windsor had two bank accounts, with a total amount of 39,000 USD in 1941, so it's quite a large amount of money.

In the previous year, in 1940, the balance in the Duchess of Windsor's bank account was $1,197.

And so the obvious question then is where did that $38,000 come from?

So they clearly demonstrates that there was a concern about their finances.

-It involved suspected Nazi agent Axel Wenner-Gren and the illegal movement of money.

-Axel Wenner-Gren, who is the very wealthy Swedish businessman, had this bank in Mexico and he owned this bank, and the documents show that certainly hasn't been totally proven, but certainly enough evidence that the Duke of Windsor and other individuals were moving cash out of the Bahamas, into Mexico, into this Mexican bank.

After the Second World War, they would then use that money to speculate in international currency and then make the profit from that.

-But it does look as though money was being held in Mexico City for the Windsors.

It looks as though it had been shipped by Wenner-Gren on the Southern Cross , and that could have been a devastating thing to discover.

-The great concern is that Mexico was on the borders of America.

It was a strategic threat to America.

And of course, it was a center for Nazi intrigue.

-It was an illegal operation.

And then if you elevate it a bit higher, the extent of his financial relationship with Wenner-Gren.

If you say that Wenner-Gren is a Nazi agent and the Duke of Windsor has financial dealings with Wenner-Gren, then he is trading with the enemy.

And that's really heavy stuff.

-US intelligence reports accused Axel Wenner-Gren of economic warfare, and he was soon to be blacklisted and forced to leave the Bahamas.

The Duke was never formally accused of financial wrongdoing, but his association with Wenner-Gren had placed his judgment in even greater doubt.

-Again, I don't think eye roll would even cover it with Churchill at that point.

I think just utter exasperation.

-On the December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, and America entered the war.

Exactly the outcome that the Duke and Duchess had campaigned to avoid.

The consequences for the Bahamas, and for Edward and Wallis, were immediate.

-With America coming into the war, the Bahamas becomes much more important.

And they suddenly realize that the Duke hardly has any protection.

There are only two machine guns on the whole island.

The pillboxes are made of palm trees.

They only have literally a dozen soldiers there guarding the Duke.

So this is a very interesting telegram from Churchill.

It's in his personal minutes and it reads, "The dangers of a kidnapping party from a submarine.

The Germans would be very glad to get hold of the Duke and use him for their own purposes.

In my opinion, continued protection against an attack by 50 men during darkness should be provided.

Very considerable issues are involved."

-As a Nazi captive, the Duke would be a valuable asset to be traded for prisoners or even placed as a puppet king on the British throne.

-So from this point on, there is a great deal more protection for the Duke.

But the Duke had been a problem all his life, in fact, throughout the war, the question is what do we do with him?

How do we keep him safe?

How do we stop him speaking out and making trouble?

How do we stop him engaging with pro-Nazi figures?

And he must be a nightmare.

These are busy men fighting the war who spend an awful lot of time dealing with the Windsor problem.

-Now, the war was very close to home, and the Windsors had a chance to prove they could be genuinely useful.

So they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

The Duchess in particular, relished the opportunity.

-Wallis got stuck in.

She was president of the Red Cross, she created two infant units somewhere on Providence Island for ailing children.

She really absorbed herself in charitable works and doing good on the island.

-Wallis Windsor was extraordinarily impressive.

She talked about the welfare of black families, for example.

There was an appalling syphilis rate.

Wallis talked about that and wanted to start some kind of procedures to actually deal with the problem.

In fact, on the whole, she not only saw problems that nobody else did, broke taboos that nobody else was prepared to break, but she also, quite simply, did things in a rather humane way.

This may not be the Wallis Simpson that people think they know, but when she was given a job to do, she did it extraordinarily well.

-While Wallis had work, the loss of the tourist trade left many local workers unemployed.

So in April 1942, a new scheme known as The Project brought a welcome injection of American money.

-The Americans wanted airfields in the Bahamas and airfields were an absolute godsend.

It meant money was coming in when the tourists weren't.

It meant that there was employment for people in the Bahamas.

It was wonderful in some ways.

-But something terrible was brewing, and the project would produce one of the most public crises of the Duke's time in the Bahamas.

2,000 Bahamian workers were taken on to build a new airfield.

The seeds of discontent were sown when a smaller, mostly white workforce was brought in from America.

-They discovered that the American workers on the site were being paid up to six times as much as the Bahamian workers.

That was a scandal, and this began to brew a kind of discontent that people had not seen in Nassau before.

-On June 1, 1942, over 1,000 local workers marched on Nassau's Parliament building, demanding better pay and conditions.

-These protests, because they were handled very, very badly by the colonial government, led to riots and disorder.

-All hell broke loose.

The destruction of property, the burning of buildings, and the shooting.

-Local police opened fire on the crowds and five Black protesters were killed.

-The Duke is actually in Washington when it breaks out and returns immediately.

Indeed, with 100 Marines.

Roosevelt is very concerned about protecting the air base.

-While he was in the United States, the Duke made a phone call to the Bahamas to discuss the riots, a conversation laid bare in a record discovered by Michael Pye and included in his book about the Windsors.

-This is a document which nobody should have seen.

It's a document, a transcript of a wiretap of a phone conversation.

Duke of Windsor, his colonial secretary, went through the Office of Censorship in Washington.

And there the records are supposed to be sealed down tight.

Well, sometimes bureaucrats slip a piece of paper into the wrong filing cabinet, and people like me are lucky enough to find it, which is how we know what the Duke of Windsor said to his colonial secretary heap after the riots.

-Edward was keen to find a scapegoat and suggested pinning the blame on one of the white American foremen supervising work on the airfield.

-Windsor wants the foreman given the Dickens of a talking to.

"I told you they are a nasty lot, some of them.

These people could be anything."

-His immediate thought is "Who's behind these riots?"

Heaven forfend that Black people might be rioting.

You know, off their own back as they're being poorly treated and underpaid.

His initial thought is, "Oh, are communists involved?

Are Jews involved?"

-But worse is revealed in the secret transcript.

-And then the Colonial Secretary says he's been out to the fields to see the men at lunch, and they were complaining about the rotten fish in their Friday meal.

And Windsor's reaction is, "Oh, God."

Well, naturally, the Colonial Secretary says, "I don't believe them."

"And the lunch when we were there was damn good.

And Windsor says, 'Well, I know.

I have seen it.

Of course I haven't tasted it.'"

-It sort of sounds like Marie Antoinette saying, you know, "Why can't they eat cake if they haven't got bread?"

It's sort of that type of notion of not understanding the people that you are supposed to be governing.

-The Duke reckons that the Black workers are, quote, "so dumb and they would snatch at anything for a complaint."

This is a man who despises the intelligence of the Black people, whose interests he is supposed to be protecting, but at the same time, they are objects of pity.

It's an absolutely wretched set of attitudes.

But he did manage to get the pay for Black workers on the airfields put up.

He did manage to get the work to continue.

-I will take the 25% pay rise he got for those Black people in the Bahamas.

Well done.

You did your job.

Did you then go and, you know, ruin it a bit by being outrageously judgmental and racist about those same people?

Yeah.

For me, you did.

-Of all the scandals to engulf the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their exile in the Bahamas, the most infamous was the murder in 1943 of their friend, gold mine tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, found dead in the very bedroom they had slept in when they first arrived on the island.

This was no open-and-shut case.

-On the morning of July 8, 1943, Harold Oakes was found murdered in his bed.

He's been hit with with a boat hook.

The body has been set alight.

-The bedroom which Oakes had slept was in a state of complete disarray.

The mattress and the headboard were badly burned.

There was smoke everywhere on the walls, on a rather elaborate screen by the bed, and a pillow that on the bed had burst open.

And there were these little feathers sort of sticking to his body.

And they were fluttering slightly in this sort of breeze.

-It was about the greatest sensation you could imagine.

It's somebody who has found gold and become infinitely rich in a tropical Paradise, in circumstances which imply possibly mafia, possibly voodoo, possibly any of the things that people associate with that kind of place.

-Oakes was the leading citizen of the Bahamas.

I mean, he'd bought up about a third of the island.

So he was, you know, he was a, you know, a major player in Bahamian society.

-Harry Oakes was one of those people that the Duke of Windsor could not not know.

I mean, he was too important to the Bahamas.

-Harry Oakes' body was found by another member of the Windsor's circle, prominent property developer and Bahamian politician Harold Christie.

-Harold, Christie and Oakes were very much in business together.

Christie, who'd been a bootlegger in the 1920s and actually had an FBI record, was basically the premier property developer in the island.

-He had spent the night, he said, sleeping in the room next door to where Oakes was.

He'd been a dinner guest the night before.

They were planning to go out to meet some journalists the next day, and he said he'd heard nothing during the night until, you know, the next morning, he'd gone to wake up Oakes for breakfast and found the murder scene.

-And it turns out that he wasn't necessarily in the house all night.

He was spotted by the police on Bay Street driving somewhere for some purpose.

His friend said, well, he was just he was going off to see a woman and he was being gentlemanly by not saying this.

Well, possibly.

On the other hand, that means that he'd chosen to leave the house at exactly the time that murderers were coming in to assassinate Harry Oakes.

So Harold Christie's actions were a little bit suspect, let's say.

-The Duke was told of the murder immediately and in an unorthodox move, decided to take charge of the investigation himself.

But why?

-His difficulty was that he didn't have any confidence in the police force, which was a small one.

Didn't really have any experience of this kind of crime.

Didn't have the resources to investigate this kind of crime properly.

And so Windsor then had what he thought was a bright idea.

-He immediately orders a news blackout.

And instead of ordering police from the local RAF base, or indeed from the FBI in New York, he asks for two cops from Miami who he knows to come out.

Both of them have connections with the mob.

And it's almost as if he wants to keep the story under wraps.

-The detectives were fingerprint expert James Barker and his boss, Edward Melchin.

Melchin had acted as the Duke's bodyguard on his early trips to Miami.

Within hours of hours of their arrival in the Bahamas, Melchin and Barker were focusing their attention not on Harold Christie, the man who'd found the body, but instead on one of the island's most colorful characters.

Alfred de Marigny was a Mauritian born Playboy.

Twice divorced, he had married Harry Oakes's daughter and heiress Nancy, the day after her 18th birthday, to the fury of her father.

-Fred de Marigny was a figure of mystery to a lot of people.

He used his title of count.

People weren't absolutely sure really whether he was entitled to that.

But again, that sort of added a certain allure to to him.

He didn't get on very well, really with the establishment in Nassau either.

He and the Duke had had a fair number of rows.

He wasn't very deferential, really, and he was somebody who quite liked sort of sticking up two fingers, really, to authority.

-De Marigny was arrested by the Duke's detectives within hours of the investigation beginning.

-The man who was arrested, Alfred de Marigny, cannot account for his jacket from the previous night.

He has burns on his arm, and the conclusive evidence, which is only produced actually after he's arrested, is his fingerprint is found in the murder room, and if he is found guilty, the man will hang.

The Duke seems very happy with the fact that Marigny has been arrested.

-Today, de Marigny is on trial for murder.

Paramount newsman Doug DuPont gets the first pictures of the accused.

-There was no keeping this story under wraps.

De Marigny's arrest and trial attracted huge press interest.

-Apparently, his trial opened in October 1943.

Everybody thought he was guilty.

The story that they'd ordered a rope for his execution already.

-The Duke very deliberately makes himself absent from September through to November, the period of the trial.

-The Duke had arranged for himself and the Duchess to be in America again, which led to quite a lot of talk.

-With the trial underway, the prosecution presented its case.

-This was a key piece of evidence that the American detectives said they'd found was a fingerprint on this rather elaborate Chinese screen that was by Oakes' bed.

If that was the case, then it seemed that de Marigny must be guilty.

-However, his defense team set out to prove that the Duke's fingerprint expert, James Barker, had planted the evidence.

-It became apparent that the fingerprints in the murder scene were not only faked, they were crude fakes.

-The suggestion was probably what Barker had done is that when he'd been interviewing de Marigny at some stage, he'd given him -- this is all old dodge -- He'd given him a glass of water and unsuspectingly de Marigny touched that, and he'd left his fingerprint on it.

And that was probably the one that Barker had lifted and then pretended that he'd got from the screen.

So in effect, he'd he'd framed de Marigny.

-This basically gets de Marigny off the hook.

-And that leaves the interesting problem for the Duke.

The police he's brought in have tried to frame someone.

The framing hasn't worked.

-It does raise questions about why he was so keen to shut this story down, and very keen to have de Marigny brought forward to basically take the rap.

He must have realized the evidence against de Marigny was pretty thin to send the man to the gallows.

-The case against de Marigny collapsed, but he was forced to leave the Bahamas and the killer of Harry Oakes was never found.

Soon after the trial, the victim's daughter, Nancy, hired a famous private detective called Raymond Schindler to try to solve the case.

In a letter later written to the Bahamian authorities, he implicated the Duke of Windsor in a conspiracy to conceal the truth.

-He's reporting some of the evidence he's finding, showing that the investigation was flawed and palm prints and things weren't looked at.

But one of the most interesting bits is that, uh, that there was basically pressure being put on him not to pursue this case.

"There was some power emanating from the government House, which stopped the reopening of the investigation, and have done nothing in the matter since then."

This letter doesn't surprise me.

The Duke of Windsor had tried to stop this case being pursued literally from the day of the murder.

The Duke did not want to go there.

-The murder of Harry Oakes and the suspicions raised around the Duke's involvement are an enduring stain on the Windsors Bahamian legacy.

-The Duke's reputation never really recovered.

It was so obviously his actions which had created the circumstances that made it possible to make such a mess of an investigation of what might have been a quite straightforward murder case.

Who knows?

But in fact, it was done in such an inept way that it became a scandal.

-Why did the Duke intervene in the case?

Was he protecting someone?

Did he have something to hide?

There are no clear answers.

-I think it's very interesting that the Scotland Yard report is still closed.

It does suggest that there may be more to the story than meets the eye.

-On June 6, 1944, the allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.

The push to victory had begun, but 4,000 miles away in the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis were fighting a different battle.

Despite efforts to improve the lives of locals, scandal after scandal had left its mark and whispered rumors were coming out into the open.

Recently discovered FBI documents reveal that in 1944, he was also being blackmailed.

We know the details because the Duke asked the FBI for help.

-So this is an FBI file.

It's a briefing document for the director.

Uh, Hoover.

And it's about a woman called Rhoda van Bieber Tanner Doubleday.

This was a woman who was about the same age as the Duke.

She had actually had an affair with him in the 1920s and '30s.

She was now working as a shop assistant in Fifth Avenue.

-It's quite sensational, actually.

She seems to have got it into her head that she was, you know, going to be his queen.

Mrs. Doubleday appears to have been writing letters to him, threatening to mention their affair in her memoirs.

And it now says that he'd -- basically she'd sent back some jewelry to him, which presumably he'd given to her as a token of his affection, and she'd sent it with a note asking him to buy it back off her, in effect.

So it's really a sort of a kind of a blackmail threat.

-He took it sufficiently seriously to report her approaches to the FBI and for them to investigate her.

-The Duke was sort of, you know, so surprised, you know, about how much they knew and what was going on that he sort of practically fell off his chair.

-It was by now clear to the authorities that the Duke and Duchess were never far from a fresh financial or sexual revelation.

They were a risk to the reputation of Britain and the royal family.

-I think there are quite a lot of sexual scandals with the Duke, so this doesn't surprise me.

I mean, this was just some of the old mistresses coming back to haunt him.

But yes, I think there's a lot more still to come out about his private life.

-The Duke and Duchess were expected to serve out a five-year term in the Bahamas, taking them to August 1945.

But they didn't want to spend another hot summer in the Caribbean, and debates raged about where they would go next and what they would do.

-Every governor and his wife was accorded a meeting at Buckingham Palace after their tenureship was over, in which they would be officially thanked for the role that they carried out.

So he thought, "At last, my wife Wallis, is going to be greeted and received at Buckingham Palace," and the message from the palace came back.

"No, no, the rules are different in times of war.

That only happens in times of peace.

-Wallis wasn't welcome, and Churchill allowed Edward to end his term as governor early, on condition that he and his wife did not return to Britain.

Edward resigned in March 1945, in what was known as the second abdication.

A month later, the war in Europe was over.

♪♪ -New York, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor sailed for France to resume residence in the same Paris house they left in 1940.

-The Windsors exile in the Bahamas was over, but their reputation had been ruined.

-When the Duke and Duchess left the Bahamas, they were irrelevant.

In some ways, they'd made themselves irrelevant.

In some ways, they just had no role to play.

-The King and Attlee and Churchill were all adamant that he should be given no public role whatsoever.

-Shunned by the British establishment, Edward and Wallis finally settled in France.

The secret documents reveal how they brushed with treason, murder, riot, financial scandal, and blackmail.

They would never be trusted again.

-From that moment on, they were on their own.

And the Bahamas was his last official duty.

And then they had the rest of their lives to live out together looking back on the life he had and could have had.

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