By Mark
Weber
President Franklin Roosevelt was a master of deceit. On
at least one occasion, he candidly admitted his readiness to lie to further his
goals. During a conversation in May 1942 with Treasury Secretary Henry
Morgenthau, Jr., who was also a trusted adviser, the President remarked: “You
know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does
... I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North
and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore, I am
perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.”
Roosevelt was not the first or
the last American president to lie to the people. But rarely has a major
American political figure given a speech of such brazen falsehood as he did in
his “Navy Day” address of October 27, 1941, made at a large gathering at the
Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, and broadcast live over nationwide radio.
This was part of the
President’s ongoing effort to persuade the American public that Hitler’s Germany
was a grave and imminent threat to the United States, which therefore required
large-scale U.S. military support to Britain and Soviet Russia. The campaign
was not working as well as intended. Most Americans still opposed direct
involvement in the European conflict.
President
Roosevelt delivers his “Navy Day” speech, Oct. 27, 1941, which was broadcast
live to the nation. This historic address was part of his effort to promote
public support for war against Germany. This photo is a still from a newsreel
report.
A lot had happened in the
preceding months. On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill into
law, permitting increased deliveries of military aid to Britain – a policy that
violated U.S. neutrality and international law. In April Roosevelt illegally
sent U.S. troops to occupy Greenland. On May 27 he claimed that German leaders
were set on “world domination,” and proclaimed for the U.S. a state of
“unlimited national emergency.” Following Germany's attack against the USSR in
June, the Roosevelt administration began delivering military aid to the
beleaguered Soviets. These shipments also blatantly violated international law.
In July Roosevelt illegally sent American troops to occupy Iceland. And in
September Roosevelt announced a “shoot on sight” order to U.S. naval warships
to attack German and Italian vessels on the high seas.
The President began his Navy
Day address by recalling that German submarines had torpedoed the U.S.
destroyer Greer on September 4, and the U.S. destroyer Kearny on
October 17. In highly emotional language, he characterized these incidents as
unprovoked acts of aggression directed against all Americans. He declared that
although he had wanted to avoid conflict, shooting had begun and “history has
recorded who fired the first shot.” What Roosevelt deliberately failed to
mention was the fact that in each case the U.S. destroyers had been engaged in
attack operations against the submarines, which fired in self-defense only as a
last resort. In spite of Roosevelt's “shoot on sight” order, which made
incidents like the ones he so piously condemned inevitable, Hitler still wanted
to avoid war with the United States. The German leader had expressly ordered
his submarines to avoid conflicts with U.S warships at all costs, except to
avoid imminent destruction.
And so, as part of his effort
to convince Americans that Germany was a real threat to their security,
Roosevelt continued his Navy Day speech with a startling announcement: “Hitler
has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the
Atlantic Ocean ... I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by
Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of
South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize
it.” This map, the President explained, showed South America, as well as “our
great life line, the Panama Canal,” divided into five vassal states under
German domination. “That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only
against South America but against the United States as well.”
Roosevelt went on to reveal
that he also had in his possession “another document made in Germany by
Hitler's government. It is a detailed plan to abolish all existing religions –
Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike” which
Germany will impose “on a dominated world, if Hitler wins.”
“The property of all churches
will be seized by the Reich and its puppets,” he continued. “The cross and all
other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever
silenced under penalty of the concentration camps ... In the place of the
churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international Nazi
church – a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi
government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be
imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be
put two symbols – the swastika and the naked sword.”
Roosevelt emphasized the
importance of his sensational claims. “Let us well ponder,” he said, “these
grim truths which I have told you of the present and future plans of
Hitlerism.” All Americans, he went on, “are faced with the choice between the
kind of world we want to live in and the kind of world which Hitler and his
hordes would impose on us.” Accordingly, “we are pledged to pull our own oar in
the destruction of Hitlerism.”
The German government
responded to the speech with a statement that categorically rejected the
President’s accusations. The purported secret documents, it declared, “are
forgeries of the crudest and most brazen kind.” Furthermore, the official
statement went on: “The allegations of a conquest of South America by Germany
and an elimination of the religions of the churches in the world and their
replacement by a National Socialist church are so nonsensical and absurd that
it is superfluous for the Reich government to discuss them.” German propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels also responded to Roosevelt’s claims in a widely read
commentary. The American president’s “absurd accusations,” he wrote, were a
“grand swindle” designed to “whip up American public opinion.”
At a press conference the day
after the address, a reporter asked the President for a copy of the “secret
map” document. Roosevelt declined, but insisted that it had come from “a source
which is undoubtedly reliable.”
The full story did not emerge
until many years later. The map did exist, but it was a forgery produced by the
British intelligence service at its clandestine “Station M” technical center in
Canada. William Stephenson (code name: Intrepid), head of British intelligence
operations in North America, passed it on to U.S. intelligence chief William
Donovan, who had it delivered to the President. In a memoir published in 1984,
wartime British agent Ivar Bryce claimed credit for thinking up the “secret
map” scheme.
It is not clear if Roosevelt
himself knew that the map was a fake, or whether he was taken in by the British
fraud and actually believed it to be authentic. In this case, therefore, we
don’t know if the President was deliberately deceiving the American people, or was
merely a credulous dupe.
The other “document” cited by
Roosevelt, purporting to outline German plans to abolish the world’s religions,
was – of course – just as fanciful as the “secret map.”
In 1941 few Americans could
believe that their President might deliberately mislead the public with such
seeming conviction about matters of the gravest national and global importance.
Millions accepted his alarmist claims as true. In his historic Navy Day
address, Franklin Roosevelt thus succeeded in further frightening Americans
into supporting, or at least tolerating, his campaign to prod the U.S. into
war.
This is the “secret map” document cited
by President Roosevelt in his 1941 “Navy Day” address. In fact, it was a fraud,
produced by British intelligence agents as part of a well-organized campaign to
encourage American support for war.
Sources
John F. Bratzel and Leslie B.
Rout, Jr., “FDR and The ‘Secret Map’,” The Wilson Quarterly (Washington,
DC), New Year’s 1985, pp. 167-173.
James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt:
The Soldier of Freedom (New York: 1970), pp. 147-148.
Documents on German Foreign
Policy, 1918 -1945
(Washington, DC), Series D, Vol. 13, pages 724 -727. Documents No. 439 and No.
441.
“Ex-British Agent Says FDR’s
Nazi Map Faked,” Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene (University
Publications of America), December 1984, pp. 1-3.
“Fälschungen gröbster und plumpester Art: Eine
Amtliche Verlautbarung der Deutschen Reichsregierung,” Freiburger Zeitung,
Nov. 3, 1941.
Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), pp. 600-603.
“President Roosevelt’s Navy
Day Address on World Affairs,” The New York Times, Oct. 28, 1941.
“The Reich Government’s Reply
To Roosevelt’s Navy Day Speech,” The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1941. ( http://ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/411101a.html )
Joseph Goebbels, “Kreuzverhör mit Mr. Roosevelt,” Das
Reich, Nov. 30, 1941. Nachdruck (reprint) in Das eherne Herz (1943),
pp. 99-104. English translation: “Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined.” ( http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb2.htm )
For Further Reading
Herbert C. Hoover, Freedom
Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its
Aftermath (George H. Nash, ed.). Stanford Univ., 2011.
Warren F. Kimball, The
Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton Univ. Press,
1991)
Lynne Olson, Those Angry
Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939- 1941
(Random House, 2013), esp. pages 402- 403.
Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s
Secret War : FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001),
esp. pages 125-128.
Mark Weber, “President
Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” The
Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983.
(http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html)
(http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html)
Mark Weber, “The ‘Good War’
Myth of World War Two.” May 2008.
( http://www.ihr.org/news/weber_ww2_may08.html )
( http://www.ihr.org/news/weber_ww2_may08.html )
This item was originally
published in The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985 (Vol. 6, No.
1), pages 125-127. It was revised in Nov. 2010, in April 2016, and in Nov.
2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment