World War II Unwound

Send us Fan Mail WWII Unwound — S03E08 Episode Title: The Things I Saw Beggar Description — The Liberation of the Camps and Eisenhower's Decision to Make the World Witness Season Three Finale — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War On April 4th, 1945, soldiers of the American 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry Division entered a labor camp called Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald s...

Send us Fan Mail WWII Unwound — S03E07 Episode Title: The Rising That Was Left to Die — The Warsaw Uprising and Stalin's Deliberate Pause Season 3, Episode 7 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War At five o'clock in the afternoon on August 1st, 1944 — the moment the Polish resistance called W Hour — the Polish Home Army rose against the German occupation of Warsaw. Approximately for...

Send us Fan Mail WWII Unwound — S03E06 Episode Title: The Slap and the Sideline — Patton, The Incidents in Sicily, and The General Who Was Worth More Benched Than Commanding Season 3, Episode 6 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War On the afternoon of August 3rd, 1943, Lieutenant General George S. Patton walked through the wards of the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia in Sicily. He came...

Send us Fan Mail WWII Unwound — S03E05 Episode Title: The World Divided — Yalta, The Big Three, and The Eight Days That Built The Cold War Season 3, Episode 5 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War There is a famous photograph from the Yalta Conference. Three men seated together in the February sunshine at a Black Sea resort. Churchill on the left, Roosevelt in the center, Stalin on the right...

Send us Fan Mail WWII Unwound — S03E04 Episode Title: The Night of Black Snow — LeMay, The Firebombing of Tokyo, and The Decision Nobody Remembers Season 3, Episode 4 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War We remember Hiroshima. We remember Nagasaki. We have almost entirely forgotten the night of March 9th to 10th, 1945. Three hundred and thirty-four American bombers flew low over Tokyo in da...

Send us Fan Mail S03E03 — MacArthur — Season Three, Episode Three Episode Title: I Shall Return — MacArthur, the Philippines, and The Decision to Leave Season 3, Episode 3 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War At nine forty-five in the evening on March 11th, 1942, four PT boats slipped away from the dock at Corregidor Island and headed south into Japanese-controlled waters. On board were Gen...

Send us Fan Mail S03E02 — Operation Market Garden — Season Three, Episode Two Episode Title: A Bridge Too Far — Operation Market Garden and The Intelligence Nobody Wanted to Hear Season 3, Episode 2 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War At two o'clock in the afternoon on September 17th, 1944, the largest airborne operation in the history of warfare began. Five thousand aircraft crossed...

Send us Fan Mail You already know the story of the Battle of the Bulge. December 1944. The largest ground battle in American military history. A massive German counteroffensive that caught the Allied command completely by surprise. A story of American soldiers holding the line against impossible odds. Bastogne. Nuts. Patton's relief column. American courage in the snow. That story is true. An...

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...

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...

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...

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 mo...

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 rub...

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...

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 wh...

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 Ei...

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 teamm...

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...

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" wash...

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...

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 eight...

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 secrec...

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. R...

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 existe...