The Forgotten Secret War

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The Forgotten Secret War

By Philip Jenkins - MAY 05, 2017

This past December, the United States commemorated the 75th anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.  Most commentators rightly played down any conspiratorial suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately provoked that particular attack, although they agreed that the U.S. had been putting heavy diplomatic pressure on Japan in the months leading up to it.  What virtually nobody mentioned in this context was that, during that exact time period, FDR had been attempting to provoke quite another war, and with enormous success.  For much of 1941, and entirely without congressional approval, the United States was in a de facto state of active conflict with Germany.

By late 1940, Great Britain was the last major country resisting Nazi Germany, and British and Canadian naval forces were struggling to defend the North Atlantic trade routes against U-boat attacks.  FDR wanted to lend his support, but was very conscious of the passionate antiwar sentiment at home.  As late as August 1941, the House of Representatives came within a single vote of refusing to grant FDR’s request of extending the Selective Service Act of 1940—the first peacetime conscription in U.S. history—beyond its original term of 12 months.  Soldiers drafted under its provisions were making loud threats of desertion, about going “over the hill in October”—hence the popular graffiti OHIO, seen widely around military bases.     http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2017/June/41/6/magazine/article/10839552/