1941 Bail Out the Brits Again

In June of 1941, Americans read about an extraordinary British mission into Nazi-occupied France. Newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and New York Post, detailed how the British parachuted into an airfield with tommy guns and hand grenades, overpowered the guards and destroyed about 30 planes. All of the team members made it dorsum to Uk alive via torpedo boats, forth with twoscore High german prisoners in tow. It was an incredible story.

It was too completely made-upward.

Unbeknownst to the United States, the British foreign intelligence service known as MI6 had planted the story in the press as part of a covert influence campaign to convince the state to enter World War 2. With Hitler aggressively gaining basis across the continent and dropping bombs over London, British Prime number Minister Winston Churchill had been anxiously lobbying Franklin D. Roosevelt for reinforcements confronting the Germans, just America firmly resisted being fatigued into another encarmine war on the European continent. In May 1940, after the Nazis invaded the Depression Countries and France, a Gallup poll reported that only 7% of Americans thought the U.South. should declare state of war on Germany. In Apr 1941, the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and the America Commencement Committee led a massively pop entrada against U.S. entry into WWII, a disharmonize many Americans didn't meet equally winnable.

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"Americans mostly did not see Great britain as some close, beloved marry at the outset of the Second World War," says Henry Hemming, author of Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into Earth War Two. "United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland was instead one of the major economic rivals to the United states." In addition, the colonialist British Empire, which America had proudly detached itself from, "was hugely unpopular, and understandably and so."

Past Nov 1941, though, polls suggested that a majority of Americans now favored entering the war to help defeat Germany. Why the shift? Before that year, according to Hemming's book, William Stephenson, a decorated WWI fighter pilot and source of inspiration for James Bond (Ian Fleming noted Stephenson's martinis were "shaken, not stirred"), was installed every bit the head of MI6's U.Due south. office. A personal friend of Churchill, Stephenson (lawmaking name: "Intrepid") began to utilise new tactics to sway public opinion about the war—and convince the U.South. to come up off the sidelines.

READ More: x Things You May Not Know Nearly Winston Churchill

The British worked to seed U.S. intelligence

General William J. Donovan, wartime OSS principal, presenting the medal for merit to Canadian-born Sir William S. Stephenson, who was director of British Security Coordination in the Western hemisphere from 1940-45, circa 1946.

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"There are iii major strands to what he does," Hemming says. One was to persuade the U.S. to constitute its first intelligence office and convince William "Wild Beak" Donovan to run it. Both of these events unfolded in July 1941, when President Roosevelt created a new intelligence arrangement called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, or COI (a predecessor to the CIA), and appointed Donovan—whom Stephenson had been courting as a sympathetic marry—to lead information technology.

"Most of the material that [the COI is] passing on to the White House…originates with MI6 and British sources, and that givens Stephenson enormous power in terms of what American authorities officials are reading about the stakes of the war," he says. "That plays a pregnant and sometimes overlooked role in helping to precipitate this shift towards the thought that the British are doing alright, that the war in winnable, that Nazi Germany should exist taken on."

READ MORE: World War Ii's 'Most Dangerous' Allied Spy Was a Woman with a Wooden Leg

MI6 quietly bolstered anti-isolationist groups

Another office of the covert entrada involved infiltrating U.Southward. pressure groups that were already trying to get the U.S. to enter the war. MI6 operatives influenced these organizations' campaign strategies and made certain they had adequate funding.

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In Apr 1941, MI6 operatives helped organize a protest of an America First rally in New York City. When a female protester approached the mostly male person ralliers that 24-hour interval, one of the men charged at her and punched her in the confront, sparking violent clashes between the groups, Hemming writes. MI6 operatives used the media attending to promote their messages almost the state of war.

"Reports in the next mean solar day'south papers focused on the violence, with most articles likewise listing the dissimilar interventionist groups involved in the march and what their spokespeople had to say nigh Lindbergh and America Commencement," Hemming writes in his book. "Anyone reading these with a keen eye might have noticed that some of the activists used very like language. It was almost as if they were reading from the same script: which, as it happened, some of them were."

READ MORE: FDR, Churchill and Stalin: Inside Their Uneasy WWII Alliance

The South American map and other 'fake news'

Adolf Hitler with General Wilhelm Keitel (left) and General Walther von Brauchitsch viewing a map, circa 1941.

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The third role of the campaign involved setting up an function for MI6 operatives to distribute imitation news. These were stories like the one most the bogus British raid meant to convince the public that the state of war against Deutschland was winnable and the U.S. should join Britain in the fight.

At its peak, the function planted more than than twenty stories a week. For one, Stephenson's office drew a faux map purporting to show Adolf Hitler's plans to invade South America, and fabricated sure this map ended up on FDR'southward desk at the White House.

It did. In October 1941, FDR gave a speech declaring that the map "makes clear the Nazi design not merely confronting South America but confronting the United states of america likewise."

"When Hitler hears about this, he's furious, he'southward outraged, considering he knows that this map is a false," Hemming says. "And when Hitler gives his side by side public speech communication, he can talk of about zippo simply this particular map."

READ More: How South America Became a Nazi Haven

The map, Hemming argues, not only influenced America's determination to go to state of war against Germany. It besides influenced Hitler's determination to declare war on the United States on December 11, four days later on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This was something Germany had no obligation to do after the U.S. alleged war on Japan.

A few hours after declaring war on the The states, Hitler explained his reasons for doing so in the Reichstag, Nazi Germany's pseudo-parliament. "A lot of the reasons are about Roosevelt," Hemming says.

"Starting time he incites state of war, then falsifies the causes," Hitler declared on December 11, 1941. "So odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war."

Both the United States and Hitler's Germany were now primed for the fight.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-campaign-mi6

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