Interesting article about WWII…

Bermuda Factored In 1942 US Invasion Scenario

A World War Two invasion of the US East Coast mounted and coordinated from an Axis base in Nazi-occupied Bermuda sounds like a scenario dreamed up by a science fiction writer — and it was.

But when “Life” magazine commissioned novelist Philip Wylie to come up with six variations based on the theme of an imminent German/Italian/Japanese attack on the United States, he was drawing on genuine military concerns then prevalent in Washington DC rather than his impressively fertile imagination. In the weeks following the December 7, 1941 Japanese air attack on the US naval facilities at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbour, American nerves were on edge about a possible Axis assault on the mainland.

The surprise military strike on the headquarters of its Pacific Fleet drew the previously neutral United States into World War Two [1939-1945]; four days after the Hawaiian naval base was crippled by two waves of carrier-based fighters, bombers and torpedo planes, Japan’s allies — Nazi Germany led by dictator Adolf Hitler [pictured above] and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy — also declared war on the US.

The Axis grew out of the Anti-Comintern Pact, an anti-communist treaty signed by Nazi Germany and Japan in 1936. Italy joined the Pact in 1937. The “Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis” became a military alliance in 1939 leading to the integration of the military aims of Germany and its two treaty-bound allies.

In early 1942 “Life” — then one of the highest circulation news magazines in the US — approached Mr. Wylie, a “peacetime novelist, who later joined the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington”, as a sort of devil’s advocate to produce a series of speculative enemy invasion plans for the United States.

“When people say the US can lose the war, what they really mean is that some combination of the plans mapped here may work successfully for the Axis,” said the magazine. “Such an outcome, of course, presupposed that the enemy has nothing but good luck and the Allies nothing but bad luck.

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