The Blitz Hoax by Earl Lee Warner

Some men are not content to accept the conventional wisdom; they have a relentless need to dig beneath the surface and uncover the hidden truth. Such a man is Dr. Earl Lee Warner of Lubbock, Texas (DDS, Bob Jones University, 1988). In his astonishing new book, The Blitz Hoax: The True Story of Operation Budgie (Crown, June 27, 2009), Dr. Warner uncovers the truth about the most important British disinformation campaign of the Second World War: Operation Budgie, the great "Blitz" hoax.

As Dr. Warner reveals, in the summer of 1940, following the conquest of France by Nazi Germany, Hitler began pressing the British government to recognize Germany's dominant position on the European continent, and to accept peace on that basis. Although Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused, Hitler felt that his position was strong enough to allow him to outlast Churchill. He would leave Great Britain alone, and the British people, tiring of the stalemate, would eventually force Churchill out of office and accept Hitler's terms.

Churchill, meanwhile, knew that Britain would need American aid to defeat Hitler, but that American interest would wane during a long, bloodless stalemate. So, in order to win over the American people to Britain's cause, Churchill created Operation Budgie, a disinformation campaign designed to convince the American people that Britain was suffering a sustained aerial attack by the Germans -- an attack known to history as the Blitz.

Aided by the Roosevelt administration and sympathetic American journalists such as Edward R. Murrow, the British government systematically flooded the United States with accounts of German air raids. Murrow staged fake broadcasts nightly over CBS radio, while doctored photographs of "damaged" buildings, including St. Paul's Cathedral and Buckingham Palace, appeared in American newspapers and magazines. The British government even recruited thousands of orphaned children to be "evacuated" to the United States. With the help of Operation Budgie, President Roosevelt was able to convince a nation of isolationists to extend ever greater amounts of military aid to Great Britain, climaxing with the passage of the Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941.

For decades, the deception promulgated by Operation Budgie remained unchallenged, until Dr. Warner began noticing discrepancies in the official story of the Blitz. He found that buildings that had supposedly been "damaged" during the attack and then "restored" after the war showed no signs of repair work. People who supposedly had been killed were found to be still alive. Through years of meticulous investigation, Dr. Warner has at last been able to present the world with the truth about the so-called "Blitz". As noted political commentator Pat Buchanan notes in his introduction, "There's always been something a little bit fishy about the Blitz. No American who wants to know the truth about America's path to war in 1941 can afford to ignore this stunning work of historical revisionism."