This week in the War, 22–28 November 1943: The Tehran conference

This week in the war, 28 November 1943, saw the start of the Tehran conference where the ‘Big Three,’ Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to confer on the future conduct of the war. (Rumours—all unsubstantiated—have persisted that SS officer Otto Skorzeny was to have headed an operation to assassinate the three Allied leaders but that the operation was deemed unpractical and later called off.)

Churchill used the occasion to present the ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ (made in Sheffield) to Joseph Stalin to honour the heroic defense of Stalingrad.

Items agreed upon at the conference included the decision to try to persuade Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side, a decision to provide arms to the Yugoslavian partisans, and the decisions to launch Operation Overlord (the invasion of northern France) and Operation Dragoon (the invasion of southern France) in 1944.