The Secret British Campaign to Persuade the U.S. to Enter WWII

In June 1941, the Americans heard of an extraordinary British mission to France occupied by the Nazis. Newspapers, including the Baltimore sun and New York Post, describes in detail how the British parachuted an airfield with shotguns and hand grenades, overpowered the guards and destroyed approximately 30 aircraft. All the members of the team returned alive to Great Britain via torpedo boats, accompanied by 40 German prisoners. It was an incredible story.

She was also fully made up.

Unbeknownst to the United States, the British foreign intelligence service known as MI6 planted the story in the press as part of a secret influence campaign to convince the country to enter the Second World War. With Hitler aggressively gaining ground across the continent and dropping bombs over London, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had worriedly lobbied Franklin D. Roosevelt for reinforcements against the Germans, but America firmly resisted to be drawn into another bloody war on the European continent. In May 1940, after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and France, a Gallup poll reported that only 7% of Americans believed that the United States should declare war on Germany. In April 1941, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee waged a massively popular campaign against the entry of the United States into World War II, a conflict that many Americans did not consider to be win-win.

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