World War II Unwound

Alan Best

Little known or forgotten stories from World War II. The spies, heroes, decision-makers and the moments that changed everything. Hosted by U.S. Navy Veteran and World War II historian Alan Best

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S2 · E8
Today · 33 min
The Question That Doesn't Close - Churchill, Dresden, and What Victory Costs
Send us Fan Mail They called it the Florence of the Elbe. Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Its baroque architecture, its opera house, its art galleries, its bridges and palaces — centuries of accumulated human achievement concentrated in a single city on the Elbe River. It had been largely spared the bombing that had devastated so much of Germany. Its population had swelled with refugees in early 1945, civilians who had come to Dresden because it felt safe. Because it had been spared. On the night of February 13th, 1945 — with Germany losing the war, with the end three months away — 796 RAF Lancaster bombers flew toward Dresden in two waves. The first wave opened the buildings. The second wave dropped incendiaries into what the first had exposed. Three hundred and eleven American B-17s followed the next morning. The firestorm burned for days. Between 22,000 and 25,000 people died. The medieval city was destroyed. The Frauenkirche — the great baroque church that had stood for two centuries — collapsed when its sandstone walls, weakened by heat, could no longer hold. Its ruins sat in the center of Dresden for decades. And then Churchill — who had approved the operation — wrote a memo six weeks later describing the bombing as increasing the terror, questioning whether German cities were being destroyed simply for the sake of terror, though under other pretexts. He called it terror bombing. After approving it. The memo was so incendiary that his own Air Chief Marshal called it one of the most remarkable documents of the entire war. Harris, who had spent years conducting area bombing with Churchill's full support, was furious. Churchill was forced to revise the memo. But the original survived in the records. And it raised a question that nobody involved in the decision ever fully answered. Was Dresden a war crime? A military necessity? A moral catastrophe that was also a defensible strategic decision? Or something that resists all three categories simultaneously? In this Season Two Finale, Amanda and Harry examine the decision chain, the arguments on both sides at full strength, Churchill's remarkable distancing memo, and why the question that closes every other Season Two episode refuses to close here. Eight episodes. Eight decisions. The last one doesn't resolve. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E7
September 1 · 29 min
The Weight of Knowing - Churchill, Ultra, and The Decisions Nobody Talks About
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Weight of Knowing — Churchill, Ultra, and The Decisions Nobody Talks About Season 2, Episode 7 — The Decision Makers Imagine you know an attack is coming. You know the target. You know the time. You have intelligence specific enough that a warning could save lives — real lives, people who would otherwise die. But if you warn them, the enemy will know their codes have been broken. And if they change their codes, you lose the intelligence. And the intelligence you're protecting isn't just saving lives on this one day — it's routing convoys around U-boat wolfpacks, revealing German operational plans before they're executed, and slowly, steadily, turning the tide of the entire war. So you don't warn them. You don't act. You watch it happen. And you carry it. This is not a hypothetical. This is what Ultra required, repeatedly, throughout the Second World War. And this is the specific, lonely burden that Winston Churchill carried for the entire war — the knowledge that a very small number of decisions, made within a system he controlled, had allowed people to die who might have lived. Coventry. November 14th, 1940. Five hundred and sixty-eight civilians killed. The medieval cathedral destroyed. Did Churchill know the raid was coming? Did he choose not to warn the city to protect the Ultra source? The honest historical answer — examined with full access to the primary records — is more complicated and in some ways more disturbing than either a simple yes or a simple no. The Atlantic convoys. Sailors who died on routes that Ultra intelligence might have protected — and the documented cases where cover story management constrained the actions that could be taken. People died so that the secret could live. The people who made those decisions understood that explicitly. And Churchill — who carried the full picture when almost nobody else did — wrote six volumes of war memoirs that won the Nobel Prize for Literature and contained a fundamental omission he was legally and operationally committed to maintaining. He died in 1965. The Ultra secret wasn't made public until 1974. The goose that never cackled. The golden eggs. The price that was never publicly named. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the most morally complex intelligence story of the entire war — and the man who carried it from beginning to end without ever being able to explain why. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E6
August 24 · 29 min
Now I am Become Death - Oppenheimer, Truman, and The Decision That Changed Everything
Send us Fan Mail Now I Am Become Death — Oppenheimer, Truman, and The Decision That Changed Everything Season 2, Episode 6 — The Decision Makers At 5:29 in the morning on July 16th, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the world changed. The device they called the Gadget detonated at the top of a steel tower. The tower was vaporized. The fireball was visible from two hundred miles away. The desert sand fused into glass. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching from an observation bunker, felt a line from Hindu scripture move through his mind: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Twenty-two days later, the Enola Gay released Little Boy over Hiroshima. Eighty thousand people died in the initial blast. Three days after that, Fat Man fell on Nagasaki. Between 140,000 and 220,000 people were dead by the end of 1945. Japan surrendered. The war ended. And a debate that began before the bombs fell has never stopped. This episode carries the full moral weight of that debate — honestly, without evasion, and without a verdict. Two men. Two decisions. J. Robert Oppenheimer — the most gifted theoretical physicist of his generation — who built the weapon, watched the Trinity test, and spent the rest of his life trying to prevent the next, worse one. And Harry Truman — who had been president for four months, who had only been told about the Manhattan Project thirteen days after taking office, who inherited simultaneously the war in the Pacific, the emerging Cold War, and the most consequential weapon ever constructed — and who gave the order. What did Truman actually know? What alternatives were on the table — and why were they rejected? What did the scientists who built the bomb try to tell the people in power? Why weren't they heard? What does the historical consensus actually say now, after eighty years and the opening of archives on three continents? And what did Oppenheimer believe — for the rest of his life — about what he had done? This is the episode Season Two has been building toward. There are no easy answers here. There never were. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the decision that changed everything — and the questions that eighty years of argument still haven't resolved. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E5
August 16 · 27 min
The Desert Fox's Last Argument - Rommel, The Atlantic Wall, and The Decision That Wasn't Made
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Desert Fox's Last Argument — Rommel, The Atlantic Wall, and The Decision That Wasn't Made Season 2, Episode 5 — The Decision Makers He was right. Erwin Rommel — the Desert Fox, the most celebrated German general of the war — spent months in the winter and spring of 1944 walking the beaches of France, studying the Atlantic Wall, and making one of the most compelling strategic arguments of the entire war. Put the tanks near the coast. Position the armored reserves within striking distance of the beaches. Because in 1944, Germany no longer owns the skies over France. Allied fighter-bombers are hunting every tank column that moves in daylight. By the time a centrally-positioned Panzer reserve receives permission to move and fights its way through Allied air attack to reach the coast, the beachhead will already be established. The battle will already be lost. The only chance of defeating the invasion is to fight it at the waterline — on the first day, in the first hours. His superiors disagreed. Hitler kept personal control of the most powerful armored reserves and required his own authorization before they could move. On June 6th, 1944 — D-Day — Hitler was asleep. His staff were reluctant to wake him. The Panzer reserves sat in their dispersal areas while the beachhead was being established. By the time the release order came, it was afternoon. The divisions that moved toward Normandy in daylight were immediately attacked from the air. The beachhead held. Exactly as Rommel had predicted. And where was Rommel on the day that proved him right? In Germany. Visiting his wife on her birthday. Having assessed — from the same weather forecasts that hadn't predicted Eisenhower's narrow window — that the invasion was unlikely in the coming days. The man who argued most forcefully that the first day would decide everything spent the first day of the invasion away from his command. This episode tells the full story — the Panzer doctrine argument, the Atlantic Wall, D-Day itself, and the final chapter that ended in a German forest on October 14th, 1944, when two generals arrived at Rommel's home carrying a message from Hitler and a cyanide capsule. His son Manfred was fifteen years old. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the most consequential correct decision that wasn't made in the entire Second World War. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E4
August 11 · 32 min
Not One Step Back - Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned the War
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: Not One Step Back — Stalin, Zhukov, and The Battle That Turned The War Season 2, Episode 4 — The Decision Makers Two million. Two million people died in and around the city of Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943. German soldiers. Soviet soldiers. Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian troops. Civilians. People who died in the fighting, in the cold, in the rubble, in the prisoner of war camps that swallowed the survivors of both sides. Two million people. Five months. One city. Before Stalingrad, Germany was advancing. After Stalingrad, Germany was retreating. The momentum of the Eastern Front — the most brutal and consequential theatre of the entire war, where eighty percent of German military casualties occurred — shifted at Stalingrad and never shifted back. And it shifted because of two decisions. The first was Josef Stalin's. As the German Sixth Army drove toward the city that bore his name, Stalin issued an order of brutal simplicity: Not one step back. Every soldier who retreated without orders would be shot by blocking detachments positioned behind the Soviet lines. Every man would hold. Every man would fight. The city would not fall. The second was Marshal Georgy Zhukov's. While Soviet soldiers died by the tens of thousands inside the burning city — buying time with their lives — Zhukov was secretly assembling over a million men, nine hundred tanks, and thirteen thousand artillery pieces for a counterattack the Germans never saw coming. The plan: strike both flanks simultaneously, close the pincers behind the Sixth Army, and trap three hundred thousand German soldiers with no way out. Stalin's decision was born from terror and will. Zhukov's was born from patience and genius. Together, they produced the most significant turning point on the most significant front of the most destructive war in human history. On January 31st, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus — the first German Field Marshal ever to be taken prisoner — surrendered to Soviet forces in the ruins of the city he had been sent to capture. Hitler wept. And the long retreat to Berlin began. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the battle, the decisions, the men, and the moment the war turned. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E3
August 4 · 28 min
The Order That Made No Sense - Hitler, Dunkirk, and The Decision Nobody Can Fully Explain
Send us Fan Mail Season 2, Episode 3 — The Decision Makers In May 1940, Adolf Hitler had the British Expeditionary Force cornered on the beaches of Dunkirk. His Panzers were within striking distance. His generals were urging him to finish it. He had the most powerful armored force in the world positioned to destroy or capture over 300,000 Allied soldiers and effectively end the war in the West. He stopped them. Three days. Seventy-two hours. That is the margin that made Dunkirk possible. During those three days, the Allied perimeter was consolidated, the evacuation was organized, and 338,226 men crossed the English Channel to fight another day. Those men came back. They fought in North Africa. They fought in Sicily. They came back to Normandy in 1944. The accumulated military experience of the British army — the officers, the sergeants, the soldiers who had been in the field and survived — was preserved. If they had been destroyed on those beaches, the entire trajectory of the war in the West would have been different. And to this day, nobody can fully explain why Hitler gave the order. Was it Göring — who told Hitler the Luftwaffe alone could finish the job, and wanted the glory for his air force? Was it logistics — a sound operational pause by a commander who understood the risks of overextended armor? Was it political calculation — a deliberate decision to let the British army escape, keeping the door to a negotiated peace open? Was it psychology — a first-time field commander's anxiety at the moment of maximum success? Historians have been arguing about it for eighty years. The German generals who were there couldn't believe the order was real and asked for it to be confirmed in writing. Hitler himself gave different explanations to different people at different times and never offered a complete account of his reasoning. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside one of the most genuinely mysterious command decisions in the history of warfare — and come out the other side understanding it better without being entirely sure they understand it at all. That is not a failure of the episode. That is the truth of the history. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E2
July 29 · 24 min
The Sleeping Giant - Yamamoto, Pearl Harbor, and The Decision He Knew Was Wrong
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Sleeping Giant — Yamamoto, Pearl Harbor, and The Decision He Knew Was Wrong Season 2, Episode 2 — The Decision Makers He attended Harvard. He drove across the American South and watched the oil fields of Texas stretch to the horizon. He served as Japan's naval attaché in Washington and studied American industrial capacity with the cold precision of a man who understood exactly what those numbers meant for any future war. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto knew America better than almost any other senior officer in the Japanese military. And what he knew terrified him. He spent years telling anyone who would listen that war with the United States was unwinnable. That Japan's industrial base could not sustain a prolonged conflict against American production capacity, American population, and American resolve. That the arithmetic was simply, irreversibly wrong. And then he designed the attack on Pearl Harbor anyway. Not because he believed it would win the war. Because he believed it was the only possible chance of not losing it immediately. On December 7th, 1941, the strike force Yamamoto had planned and coordinated with devastating precision destroyed the American Pacific Fleet in a matter of hours. 2,403 Americans were killed. The United States entered the war the following day. Yamamoto would later be quoted as saying he feared all Japan had done was awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. The exact origin of that line is disputed — and this episode addresses that honestly. What is not disputed is that it captured precisely what Yamamoto believed before the first aircraft ever left the deck. He was right. He lived long enough to watch himself be proved right. And on April 18th, 1943, American fighters — guided by intercepted Japanese intelligence — shot his aircraft out of the sky over Bougainville. This is Season Two's first episode from the other side of the war. And it is one of the most complex, most human, and most genuinely tragic stories in the entire series. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the man, the decision, and the war he knew Japan could not win. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S2 · E1
July 23 · 28 min
We Go - Eisenhower, The Weather, and the Decision That Changed Everything
Send us Fan Mail We Go — Eisenhower, The Weather, and The Decision That Changed Everything Season 2, Episode 1 — The Decision Makers It's four in the morning at Southwick House, England, June 5th, 1944. A North Atlantic storm is battering the coast. A hundred and fifty-six thousand soldiers, nearly five thousand ships, and eleven thousand aircraft are waiting on one man's word. Dwight Eisenhower had heard every assessment, every forecast, every argument. Now the room went silent — because the decision wasn't theirs. It was his alone. He stood, walked to the window, and came back with four words: Okay. We go. Then he sat down and wrote something no one saw for decades — a note, in his own hand, accepting full personal blame if the invasion failed. He carried it in his pocket while he watched the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne board their planes for Normandy. In this episode, Amanda and Harry take you inside the room, the weather window, and the man who carried the weight of D-Day before he knew how the story would end. Season Two: The Decision Makers begins here. Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Tags: WWII, World War II, D-Day, Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, Normandy Invasion, Operation Overlord, James Stagg, Southwick House, Supreme Allied Commander, Military History, World War 2 History, WWII Podcast
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S1 · E8
July 15 · 22 min
The Catcher Was a Spy - Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Catcher Was a Spy — Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich Season 1, Episode 8 — The Spies & Secret Wars — SEASON FINALE He was a backup catcher with a .243 batting average. He was also fluent in seven languages. He held a law degree from Columbia. He read six newspapers a day in multiple languages — in the dugout — while his teammates played cards. A teammate once said of him: "He can speak twelve languages, but he can't hit in any of them." In December 1944, Moe Berg sat in a lecture hall in Zurich, Switzerland, with a loaded pistol in his jacket pocket and a cyanide pill in his shoe. Across the room, Werner Heisenberg — Nobel laureate, founder of quantum mechanics, and the man Allied intelligence believed was at the center of Nazi Germany's atomic weapons program — was about to deliver a lecture. Berg's orders were precise: listen carefully. And if anything in that lecture suggested Germany was close to building an atomic bomb, find a way to be alone with Heisenberg afterward. And do not let him leave. This is not fiction. This is the true story of one of the most extraordinary human beings of the Second World War — a man who filmed the Tokyo skyline from a hospital rooftop during a baseball goodwill tour in 1934, a decade before anyone asked him to. A man who crossed the Atlantic with a pistol that nearly fell out of his pocket at 30,000 feet. A man who was offered the Medal of Freedom after the war and turned it down — because it would embarrass him. His final words, spoken to a nurse in a Newark hospital in 1972, were a question: "How did the Mets do today?" Season One began with a man nobody wanted — who fooled Hitler's entire intelligence operation from a kitchen table in Lisbon. It ends with a man nobody expected — who sat across a dinner table from one of the most dangerous physicists alive, made a judgment call that may have changed the course of the war, and then went home and never really talked about it again. This is the Season One finale of WWII Unwound. And it is something else. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the most genuinely unbelievable true story of the entire season. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E7
July 6 · 24 min
The Cambridge Five - Five Men, One Betrayal, Thirty Years
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Cambridge Five — Five Men, One Betrayal, Thirty Years Season 1, Episode 7 — The Spies & Secret Wars Every story this season has been about deception aimed outward — at Nazi Germany. This one is different. Five men. Recruited as students at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. Educated at one of the finest universities in the world. Trusted completely by the British establishments they entered — the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6, and Bletchley Park itself. For decades, they passed everything they learned to Moscow. Kim Philby rose to become head of MI6's counter-Soviet operations — the man responsible for stopping Soviet espionage, who was himself a Soviet agent. Donald Maclean gained access to the most sensitive Anglo-American atomic intelligence discussions of the war. Anthony Blunt walked through Bletchley Park and handed decoded German signals intelligence to Moscow at the same time it was shortening the war for the Allies. John Cairncross worked at Bletchley Park directly. And Guy Burgess was everywhere, passing everything. They weren't recruited for money. They were recruited in the 1930s — when fascism was rising, when the Spanish Civil War was burning, when communism looked to many intelligent young people like the only serious response to what was coming. That context doesn't excuse what followed. But it explains how it began. What followed cost real people their lives. This is the episode that changes the shape of the entire season — and sets up the finale. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most significant intelligence failures in the history of the Western world. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E6
June 30 · 23 min
Operation Mincemeat - The Spy Who Never Lived
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: Operation Mincemeat — The Spy Who Never Lived Season 1, Episode 6 — The Spies & Secret Wars He had a fiancée. A bank manager who was annoyed with him. Theater ticket stubs from a night out in London. A locked briefcase full of secret documents, chained to his wrist. He had never been alive. In the spring of 1943, the body of "Major William Martin" washed up on a beach in neutral Spain — and within days, the documents in his briefcase had traveled from a Spanish fisherman, to Spanish naval intelligence, to the German embassy in Madrid, to Berlin, to Adolf Hitler's own desk. What those papers said convinced Hitler that the Allies were about to invade Greece and Sardinia — not Sicily, the target every map in Europe pointed to. He moved real divisions. He sent Erwin Rommel to guard a coastline that was never going to be attacked. None of it was real. The man in the uniform had been a homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michael, dead of rat poison, with no family to claim him. Every detail of "Major Martin's" life — his love letters, his overdraft, his engagement ring receipt — had been invented from scratch by two British intelligence officers with an almost obsessive eye for the small, unglamorous details that make a fake life feel real. It is one of the most successful deception operations in the history of warfare — built entirely around a man who never lived a single day of the life that fooled Hitler's high command. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the planning, the boots that wouldn't fit a dead man's frozen feet, the nine agonizing days of waiting in Spain, and the captured German archives that finally proved the whole thing had worked. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E5
June 22 · 19 min
The Limping Lady - Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch.
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Limping Lady — Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch Season 1, Episode 5 — The Spies & Secret Wars The Gestapo in Lyon called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. They circulated wanted posters across occupied France. Their chief — Klaus Barbie, the man who would become known as the Butcher of Lyon — said he would give anything to lay his hands on her. He never did. Virginia Hall was an American from Baltimore who had been turned away from the U.S. Foreign Service because of a hunting accident that had cost her her left leg below the knee. She walked on a seven-pound wooden prosthetic she had nicknamed Cuthbert. In 1941, the British Special Operations Executive sent her into occupied France under cover as a journalist for the New York Post — and told their colleagues privately she wasn't expected to last more than a few days. She stayed for fifteen months. She built one of the most productive SOE resistance networks in France. When the net finally closed around her in Lyon, she escaped over the Pyrenees into Spain — on foot, in winter, on that wooden leg — rather than be taken. And then she went back. In 1944, Virginia Hall returned to occupied France disguised as an elderly French peasant woman, organized and armed fifteen hundred Resistance fighters in the Haute-Loire, and helped destroy bridges, rail lines and German supply routes ahead of D-Day. She received the Distinguished Service Cross — the only one awarded to a civilian woman in the entire war. In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most remarkable true stories of the Second World War. Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E4
June 15 · 27 min
The Architects of Deception- The Men Who Planned D-Day
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Architects of Deception — The Men Who Planned D-Day Season 1, Episode 4 — The Spies & Secret Wars In 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 BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com Tags / Keywords: WWII, World War II, D-Day, Operation Overlord, COSSAC, Frederick Morgan, Normandy, Mulberry Harbours, Eisenhower, Allied Invasion, Military History, Podcast
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S1 · E3
June 9 · 30 min
The Secret That Won The War — Bletchley Park, The Enigma Code, and The Man Britain Forgot To Thank
Send us Fan Mail The 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 BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E2
June 2 · 24 min
The Zigzag Spy — The Bravado of Eddie Chapman
Send us Fan Mail Episode Title: The Zigzag Spy — The Bravado of Eddie Chapman Season 1, Episode 2 — The Spies & Secret Wars He 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 BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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S1 · E1
May 26 · 19 min
The Man Nobody Wanted - How Juan Pujol Garcia Fooled Hitler and Saved D-Day
Send us Fan Mail The Man Nobody Wanted — How Juan Pujol Garcia Fooled Hitler and Saved D-Day Season 1, Episode 1 — The Spies & Secret Wars He 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 BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com
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