Who Leaked FDR's War Plans?

[bucolic_frolic]

https://www.historynet.com/who-leaked-fdrs-war-plans.htm

Manly studied the 350-page tome and wrote his story the next day. Though the plan was a military secret, Manly believed the public was entitled to know about it, and he got the go-ahead from Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, a strident isolationist and ardent foe of all things Roosevelt.

“F.D.R.’s War Plans!,” screamed the front-page banner headline in the Tribune’s Thursday, December 4 edition. Smaller headlines proclaimed, “Goal Is 10 Million Armed Men” and “Proposes Land Drive by July 1, 1943, to Smash Nazis.” The Tribune’s sister paper, the Washington Times-Herald, played the story big, too.

The secret military plan was a “blueprint for total war on a scale unprecedented in at least two oceans and three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia,” Manly wrote, and he reported that July 1, 1943, was the date fixed for an Allied invasion of Europe. The plan called for a U.S. armed force of 10 million men, more than seven times the strength at the time, with five million slated to be deployed to Europe. The War Department admitted that Britain and Russia alone could not beat Hitler, Manly noted, and that victory would require the United States to enter the war. An ecstatic McCormick congratulated Manly and the rest of the Tribune’s Washington bureau on what he called “perhaps the greatest scoop in the history of journalism.”

The story was a complete surprise to the government and hit official Washington like a bomb. “Nothing more unpatriotic or damaging to our plans for defense could very well be conceived of,” Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson confided in his diary. While never denying the story’s accuracy, angry government officials vowed to track down whoever had leaked the plan to Manly. The FBI interviewed hundreds of people—but no one was ever charged and the mystery remains unsolved to this day, at least officially. Still, there are clues, some only revealed decades later, that show how the details of a top-secret war plan ended up on the front page of the Chicago Tribune just three days before the Pearl Harbor attack.

[superpatriotman]

1. Probably Fred Trump

Given the recent history of our nation

[keithbvadu2]

2. Trump would give them away in his bragging. Jared would sell them.

Trump would give them away in his bragging.

Jared would sell them.