{"id":63,"date":"2012-02-08T22:16:21","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T04:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=63"},"modified":"2012-08-10T20:40:56","modified_gmt":"2012-08-11T02:40:56","slug":"this-week-in-the-war-5-11-february-1940-pinocchio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/?p=63","title":{"rendered":"This week in the War, 5–11 February 1940: Pinocchio"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On 7 February 1940, the Walt Disney animated movie Pinocchio<\/em> opened in theatres across the United States. The film is named for its wooden puppet hero who is\u00a0promised by a fairy that he can become a real boy if, among other things, he can prove himself truthful. How lying causes his wooden nose to grow longer and longer is one of the memorable parts of the story. The saying Truth is the first casualty of war<\/em> was well known at the time and perhaps not far from the minds of Americans, despite their country’s\u00a0being still at peace. Isolationist senator Hiram Warren Johnson is reputed to have used the expression during World War I. He died near the end of World War II–ironically on 6 August 1945, the day that\u00a0the USA\u00a0dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In fact, the origin of the quote is more ancient and is usually attributed to the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525 BC–456 BC). Using a ruse de guerre<\/em> to conceal the truth was appreciated by no one more than Winston Churchill. At the Teheran conference in November 1943, he famously remarked, “In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”<\/p>\n

Churchill’s comment inspired the title of\u00a0a book by Anthony Cave Brown describing the deception and misinformation\u00a0campaign undertaken by the Allies to\u00a0safeguard the secrets of the D-Day invasion. See Anthony Cave Brown: Bodyguard of Lies<\/em> (Quill\/William Morrow, NY, 1975).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 7 February 1940, the Walt Disney animated movie Pinocchio opened in theatres across the United States. The film is named for its wooden puppet hero who is\u00a0promised by a fairy that he can become a real boy if, among … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,1],"tags":[5,6],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","category-world-war-ii","tag-pinocchio","tag-ruse-de-guerre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1995,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondbysecondworldwar.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}