Lochery’s book tells the story of Lisbon’s role in the history of World War II, though not a gun was fired there. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis powers operated openly, it was temporary home to much of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the U.S., and a host of spies from every nation fighting in the war, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene at Lisbon's airport as being like the movie “Casablanca,” times twenty.