Shortly after the start of World War II, Great Britain took a series of actions behind the scenes to encourage the United States to join the war, and they changed the American people's thinking about war with Germany by creating fake news and other means. Before the U.S. military entered the war, the American people were quite pessimistic about the war situation, and a series of behind-the-scenes operations of the British successfully reversed this situation, laying a solid foundation for the Americans to join the war.
Fast forward to June 1941, when the war between Britain and Germany was in full swing, the American public saw a news story of Britain on a special mission in Nazi-occupied France. The news reverberated widely in the American media, with newspapers including the Baltimore Sun and the New York Post detailing how British troops used submachine guns and grenades to parachute into German-occupied French military airfields, quickly subdue guards, and destroy about 30 fighter jets. After the mission was completed, all the participants returned safely to England by torpedo boat, accompanied by 40 German prisoners. The story recreates the battlefield scene through a detailed description, and the picture described is incredible. However, the story is completely fictional.
What Americans don't know is that these stories, which Britain's foreign intelligence agency MI6 used in the media to spread widely in the United States, were an important part of Britain's secret influence campaign to persuade Americans to join World War II. With Hitler's massive offensive on the European continent, Hitler personally formulated the "Sea Lion Plan" and began to drop bombs on London, England, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been eagerly lobbying the United States for Franklin D. Roosevelt to reinforce Great Britain and fight germany together, but the American people resolutely resisted the bloody war involved in the European continent.
In May 1940, after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands and France, a Gallup poll showed that only 7 percent of Americans believed the United States should declare war on Germany. By April 1941, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and the First Committee of the United States even launched a huge anti-war campaign, firmly opposing the participation of the United States in World War II, and many Americans even thought that World War II could not be won.
"At the beginning of World War II, the Americans did not see the British as close and respected allies." Henry Hemming, author of "Agent Influence: A British Campaign, the Secrets and Conspiracies of a Canadian Spy Who Brought the United States into World War II," said that "instead, Americans consider Britain to be America's main economic rival." Moreover, the colonial British Empire was "very unpopular with the American people", and in a sense it was very easy to understand without waiting to see the British.
By November 1941, however, polls showed that a majority of Americans began to support the United States in entering the war to help the British defeat Germany. Why is this change happening? According to Heming's book, earlier that year, when William Stephenson was appointed head of MI6's U.S. office---- Stephenson was an awarded World War I fighter pilot, as well as a source of inspiration for James Bond and a source of archetypal characters (Ian Fleming had pointed out that Stephenson's martini was "rocky, not well-stirred", which also brought 007 into Bond's iconic feature). As a personal friend of Churchill's, Stephenson (code-named "Fearless") began using new tactics to sway the American public's perception of the war and to try to persuade Americans to stop being bystanders to the war.
General William J. Donovan, director of the Wartime Strategic Intelligence Bureau, awarded the Canadian-born Sir William S. Stephenson medal of honor.
"There are three main aspects of his work," Heming explains. First persuade the United States to establish its first intelligence center, and persuade William " Barbaric Bill" Donovan (who was British Director of Security Coordination in the Western Hemisphere from 1940 to 1945 (circa 1946). ) to manage the information center. Both incidents occurred in July 1941, when President Roosevelt created an intelligence agency called the Office of Information Coordination (coi, the predecessor of the CIA) and appointed Donovan, whom Stephenson had been wooing, to lead the agency.
"Most of the information COI forwarded to the White House came from MI6 and the British mainland, which gave Stephenson enormous authority to influence U.S. government officials and really understand the stakes of the war," Heming said. "This information transmitted by Donovan played a very important role, prompting people to think that the British were doing quite well on the battlefield, and that the British side was very likely to win the war, that the United States should fight Nazi Germany, and that Donovan's approach was untraceable, so that the Americans ignored the authenticity of this information."
Another part of the covert operation is infiltrating the U.S. political bloc that has decided to put the United States into war. MI6 agents influence the campaign strategies of these groups and ensure they have sufficient funding.
In April 1941, MI6 agents helped organize an "America First" protest rally in New York City. When a female protester tried to approach the predominantly male procession, Heming wrote, one of the men rushed over and punched her in the face, triggering a violent clash between the two groups. MI6 agents spread the word about the war by channeling media attention.
"The next day's newspaper coverage focused on the issue of violence, and most of the articles also listed the different appeal groups involved in the march, as well as their speakers' different views on the question of who would give priority to Lindbergh and the United States," Heming wrote in his book. "Anyone who takes a closer look at these articles with a keen eye is likely to notice that some radicals use very similar wording. It was as if they were all reading the same script: in fact, some of them had indeed planned it that way. "
Adolf Hitler with General William Keitel (left) and General Walter von Brauch at the map, 1941.
The third part of the operation included the establishment of a dedicated office for MI6 agents to spread false information. These news included the British raid on the German army, etc., the purpose of which was to convince the American public that the war against Germany could be won, and that the United States should join the British in the fight and jointly divide the war dividends.
In its heyday, the office was able to produce more than 20 "true stories" every week. Stephenson, for example, drew a fake map in his office, claiming to be Adolf Hitler's plan to invade South America, and made sure the map eventually appeared on President Roosevelt's desk at the White House. In fact it really did. In October 1941, Roosevelt gave a speech declaring that the map "clearly shows that the Nazi conspiracy was not only directed against South America, but also against the United States."
"When Hitler heard the news, he was immediately furious, he was very grumpy---- because he knew that the map was forged," Heming said. "And then when Hitler gave his public speech, he said almost nothing but this fake map."
Hemming stressed that the map influenced not only the U.S. decision to go to war against Germany, but also Hitler. On December 11, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States. In fact, after the United States declared war on Japan, Germany was not obliged to do so.
Hours after declaring war on the United States, Hitler explained why he did so at the Reichstag (the pseudo-parliament of Nazi Germany). Hemming argues that "most of the reasons Hitler did this were actually related to Roosevelt."
On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared: "[Roosevelt] first instigated the war and then falsified the cause of the war." "Then he abominablely wrapped himself in the cloak of Christian hypocrisy, and slowly but purposefully led the Americans to war."
But by this time, both the United States and Hitler's Germany were now ready for battle, and the British had finally gotten the results they wanted through this series of efforts.
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