False Flag Bomb at World’s Fair in NYC to bring the U.S. into WWII

Americans had been thoroughly disillusioned by the First World War and were overwhelmingly opposed involvement in World War II. In a 1940 (election-year) speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt stated typically: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” But privately, the President planned just the opposite: to bring America into the World War as Britain’s ally, exactly as Woodrow Wilson had done in World War I. Roosevelt dispatched his closest advisor, Benjamin Gitlow, founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, wrote in I Confess (1940):

When I was in Moscow, the attitude toward the United States in the event of war was discussed. Privately, it was the opinion of all the Russian leaders to whom I spoke that the rivalry between the United States and Japan must actually break out into war between these two.

Lt. Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence drafted an eight step plan to get the US into WWII by provoking Japan. The eighth of the eight-step plan was: “Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.” McCollum’s next sentence was: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.” So we know there was a plan to provoke Japan, but the American people also had to be warmed to involvement in the war. False flags are a common use by governments to trick their people into anger against a perceived foe.

In 2017, The Daily Mail published an article on the subject. Here’s some excerpts:

NYPD Lt. Bernard Whalen has studied the World’s Fair bombing extensively for two books he wrote on the history of New York’s finest.

…Whalen refused to point fingers in the unsolved bombing, but said, ‘You could draw the conclusion that it was an inside job’. Exactly a month before the July 4, 1940 bombing, the British evacuated their entire Army from Europe after the Nazis pushed them back to Dunkirk. That same month, Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched Sir William Stephenson to New York City to set up a spy shop for the British intelligence agency, MI6.

One of Stephenson’s U.S. spies was Ian Fleming, who went on to author the James Bond novels. And he based the character after World War One hero Stephenson, who he described as ‘very tough, very rich, single-minded, patriotic, and a man of few words’.

Both Stephenson and Churchill shared the opinion that the British needed the Americans to win the war, so one of his main jobs was turning U.S. public sentiment against the Germans and their allies. At that point, many Americans were still torn about which side to support, and the British were hardly the only groups maneuvering to win American hearts and minds.

There was friction between these competing groups as well. Just two weeks before the World’s Fair bombing, the German Library of information in the New York City German Consulate building, was bombed, as were the offices of The Daily Worker newspaper, then the outlet of the Community Party. The Soviets at that time had a peace agreement with Hitler.

And just days before the July 4th holiday, the British pavilion at the World’s Fair received a phone threat, saying to ‘get out of the building. We’re going to blow it up’.

On the day of the bombing, it was an electrician that found the bomb in air conditioning space of the British pavilion, which was showing off the Crown Jewels and an original Magna Carta. That man alerted security at the pavilion, all of whom were current or former British military. The bomb was taken out of the building to a spot along a fence, out of the way of the World’s Fair traffic, and the NYPD’s six-man Bomb and Forgery squad was called to investigate. Joseph Lynch was at home celebrating Independence Day with his family when he got the call. He picked up his partner, Ferdinand Socha, on the way to the fairgrounds.

Back then, officers in the bomb squad didn’t have any special tools or gear to protect them, so Lynch used his pocket knife to tear open the bag.

Inside, he found twelve sticks of dynamite attached to a timer. He turned to his partner and said ‘It’s the business’. Those would be his last words, as the bomb then exploded, creating a five-feet-wide by four-feet-deep whole in the ground. Lynch and Socha died and five other officers were injured – two of them critically.

The NYPD immediately began investigating the bombing, and the FBI joined in. A German emigre and Bund member was eventually deported in the course of the investigation, but nothing actually connected him to the bombing.

Today, the case remains unsolved and open.

Whalen says the way the British security men at the World’s Fair reacted after the bombing is suspicious. He says the case file shows that after the bombing there were ‘indications that police could not speak to security staff without permission, which was not freely granted’.

‘If I wanted to solve a crime, I wouldn’t impede investigators in any shape or form,’ Whalen says. ‘It could have just been the stuffy British attitude, but the authorities at the Pavilion were interfering’. He also finds it strange that the FBI never seemed to follow up on any leads. When he asked the FBI for copies of their investigation into the bombing, they told him they had nothing.

Whalen says that the idea of the bombing being an inside job by the British to get support from the Americans would have made sense. ‘You’d get a lot more sympathy [for the British cause],’ Whalen speculates, ‘if brave guys were killed.’ And if someone was trying to get the attention of the American people, Whalen says that the World’s Fair would have been the perfect target.  ‘If you were going to do something to garner world attention, you couldn’t pick a better target.’