In wartime, truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Winston Churchill, speaking to Joseph Stalin at the Tehran conference.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music Episode 423, Bodyguard of Lies.

I've been telling you for a while now about Winston Churchill

and his seeming aversion to Operation Overlord,

the planned Allied invasion of France in May 1944.

At the Quebec Conference in August 1943,

Franklin Roosevelt got from Churchill a commitment to make Overlord

the Western Allies' top priority, or so he thought.

But at the Tehran conference, Churchill seemed to waffle on that commitment, giving in only after

both the Soviets and the Americans pressed him on it. Churchill kept talking up his proposal to

invade the island of Rhodes and his plan to invade the Balkans rather than France. So what was

going on in Churchill's mind? There are a couple of obvious concerns

he might have had, and both of them were based on his experience in the last war. One of those

experiences was Gallipoli, the failed invasion he had proposed in that war that had done much damage

to his reputation.

Churchill may have feared that Overlord would play out as Gallipoli had,

with the invasion force pinned down on the beaches and suffering heavy losses before it

was at last forced to withdraw. You can understand why that would worry him.

Additionally, even in this war,

the British had felt the painful experiences of Dunkirk and Dieppe. The British army just couldn't seem to win one on the Channel Coast of France, and now the Americans were pushing

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