Overlord

Wings over the mountains by Baghdad and the Dead Sea, three planes from the supreme headquarters of Britain, the United States, and the USSR bring to the capital of Persia the leaders of the war against Germany.

This is for the three-way conference so long expected, so often postponed.

Tehran is a hugely important conference.

It's the first time The Big Three get together in person.

You've got Joe Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.

You got Roosevelt, President of the USA, and you got Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the warlord of the British Empire.

This is the central organizing brain for the Allied war effort, and they're gonna establish at this conference the roadmap, the blueprint, for how they're gonna defeat the Axis in the Second World War.

[suspenseful music]

Since the US entry into the war, American and British military strategists have debated the best way to defeat Nazi Germany.

The British want to prosecute this war as they have prosecuted past ones, mastery of the sea, control of commerce, raids around the periphery until the enemy simply collapses.

The British advocate for campaigns in North Africa and the Mediterranean.

But American military leaders, along with the Soviets, want the Allies to directly attack.

The Red Army's been carrying the burden of the land war for years, millions, literally millions of casualties on a thousand-mile front.

And so the big concern for Stalin is when are you going to open a second front?

So the Americans are looking at the map and saying, "We can cross the channel from Britain, hit France.

Why wouldn't you just do that?"

For the British Empire, they could think of nothing worse.

Churchill's entire generation of British politicians either fought in or commanded in the First World War, and was scarred.

And so the idea of gambling everything on a cross-channel invasion into France, the exact place, by the way, that so many terrible things happened in trench warfare back in the First World War, all that mattered was we don't do that again.

Winston Churchill is thinking, "Maybe we land in Greece or Yugoslavia.

Maybe we push up through Slovenia.

Maybe we land in Norway." Stalin says, "I don't care about any of this stuff.

It's nonsense.

Get in some ships, cross the English Channel, land in France, and open up that proper second front against the Germans."

If you think about Allied leadership, it looks as if it's The Big Three, but what Roosevelt understands, what Stalin understands, and what Churchill, to his great anguish, is coming to understand, is that there's only room for two people at the summit, and that the fate of his nation was to be somewhat in eclipse.