World War II Unwound

Send us Fan MailEpisode Title: The Architects of Deception — The Men Who Planned D-DaySeason 1, Episode 4 — The Spies & Secret WarsIn the spring of 1943, a small planning staff in London was handed the largest problem in military history: design the invasion that would end the war in Europe. No commander had been named. No location was finalized. No resources were guaranteed. They had eighteen months.Led by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan under the deliberately unglamorous title COSSAC — Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander — this small team built the framework for Operation Overlord: the airborne assault, the naval armada, the deception that held German Panzer divisions at Pas-de-Calais, and two entire artificial harbours — each the size of Dover — designed and built in roughly six months because the invasion force would have nowhere else to land its supplies.On June 6th, 1944, more than 13,000 paratroopers dropped into Normandy on schedule. Almost 7,000 ships crossed the Channel on schedule. By the end of the day, 156,000 Allied troops were ashore.This is the story of the people behind the plan — the architects whose names mostly aren't on any memorial, and the eighteen months that made D-Day possible before a single soldier ever set foot on a beach.In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the planning behind the largest amphibious invasion in history.Send your thoughts and story ideas to [email protected] us at www.beststorypublishing.comTags / Keywords: WWII, World War II, D-Day, Operation Overlord, COSSAC, Frederick Morgan, Normandy, Mulberry Harbours, Eisenhower, Allied Invasion, Military History, Podcast

Send us Fan MailThe Germans believed it was mathematically impossible to break. The number of possible configurations ran into the hundreds of quintillions. No human being could check them all. No process known to exist could narrow them down fast enough.They were wrong.In a Victorian country house fifty miles north of London, ten thousand people — most of them women — worked in absolute secrecy to do the impossible. They cracked the Enigma code. They read German military traffic in near real time. And they kept that secret for thirty years after the war ended.In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the full story of Bletchley Park — the Enigma machine and how it worked, the mathematical genius of Alan Turing and the Bombe that broke it, and the terrible moral arithmetic of an intelligence operation so valuable that sometimes it could not be used — even when lives depended on it.And the man at the center of it all, Alan Turing, who may have done more to win the war than almost any other individual — and who was destroyed by his own country afterward.Send your thoughts and story ideas to [email protected] us at www.beststorypublishing.com

Send us Fan MailEpisode Title: The Zigzag Spy — The Bravado of Eddie ChapmanSeason 1, Episode 2 — The Spies & Secret WarsHe was a safecracker. A criminal. A man who had escaped custody twice before the war even started. When Germany occupied Jersey in 1940, he didn't wait to be liberated — he approached the Abwehr and offered to spy for Nazi Germany.They trained him for over a year. Radio operation. Sabotage. Parachute insertion. Document forgery. In December 1942, they dropped him into Cambridgeshire with orders to destroy one of Britain's most important aircraft factories.Within twenty-four hours, he walked into a British police station and offered to work for Britain instead.Eddie Chapman — code name Zigzag — went on to pull off one of the most audacious deception operations of the entire war. The Germans trusted him so completely they awarded him the Iron Cross. He was working to destroy them from the moment he landed.In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the extraordinary story of the man who deceived both sides — and somehow came out the other end.Send your thoughts and story ideas to [email protected] us at www.beststorypublishing.com

Send us Fan MailThe Man Nobody Wanted — How Juan Pujol Garcia Fooled Hitler and Saved D-DaySeason 1, Episode 1 — The Spies & Secret WarsHe had no military background. No intelligence training. No government connections. British intelligence turned him away. So he went home, sat at his kitchen table in Lisbon, and invented an entire network of twenty-seven secret agents — none of whom existed — and began feeding Nazi Germany some of the most consequential false information in the history of warfare.Juan Pujol Garcia — code name Garbo — would go on to help save D-Day. The Germans trusted him so completely that they awarded him the Iron Cross. He was working to destroy them from the moment they met him.In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most extraordinary intelligence stories of World War II.Send your thoughts and story ideas to [email protected] us at www.beststorypublishing.com