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Eighty years ago a newspaper cartoon touches a raw nerve

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    Little better illustrates the strains with which Churchill and his government were having to cope under the combined assault of military defeats and discontent with his premiership, than the wild and disproportionate reaction to a cartoon in the left-wing and immensely popular tabloid  Daily Mirror : one of the most famous of the war. Philip Zec's savage image of a survivor from a torpedoed ship clinging to a raft above the line, "The price of petrol has been increased by one penny - Official", hardly deserves to be considered subversive. Zec's claim that it was an attack on waste might have been somewhat disingenuous; the sailor's suffering is the true price of petrol. But Churchill's assertion that it was an attack on profiteering by petrol companies barely stands up to examination. The Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison supported Churchill but, perhaps fortunately for them, the government failed to suppress or punish the Mirror . Labour
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Eighty years ago Colonel Lindbergh's mask slips

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    After months of being the most effective voice of isolationism and the leading figure in the America First movement against US involvement in the war, Colonel Lindbergh hero of the first solo flight across the Atlantic, let the mask slip to reveal publicly the hateful sub-text of his appeal. In a speech at Des Moines that was broadcast on the radio he denounced the “war agitators”: “three important groups have been pressing this country toward war: the British, the Jewish, the Roosevelt administration.” Some of his claims could have come from the mouth of Goebbels: the Jews’, “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He claimed to admire both the British and Jewish races, but made it plain that he did not consider Jews to be American. He issued barely veiled threats, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they
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Eighty years ago Roosevelt's forward policy in the Atlantic starts to bear fruit.

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  After some weeks of pursuing a forward policy in the North Atlantic, President Roosevelt was finally rewarded with a German attack on a US warship that could be presented as an act of aggression and challenge to the freedom of the seas. The U-652 fired a torpedo at the USS Greer . The torpedo missed and the American ship responded with depth-charges. The US communique stated blandly that the Greer was carrying mail to Iceland. The Germans claimed the Greer had attacked first. In fact the Greer was in practice hunting the German submarine, vectored towards its target by a British aircraft, but this was not immediately disclosed. The British, too, enjoyed a success in the war with submarines when the U-570 was severely damaged by depth-charges from an RAF Hudson. She surrendered after diving briefly and prominently displayed a white sheet from her conning tower. RAF aircraft shadowed her until British warships could reach the scene. A grimly farcical episode then saw the British r
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