How Britain conned the US into entering the war
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more watchful man’, sailed from Liverpool to New York on the MV Britannic. Once separated from its protective convoy, ‘this elegant, ageing liner was on its own’, Henry Hemming writes, noting that the same was true of Britain and ‘salvation for both lay in the New World’. Shortly after America entered the second world war in December 1941, a plane left for Britain carrying just a handful of passengers. Stephenson was among them. Over the intervening 18 months he had become Britain’s extraordinarily effective ‘Man in New York’. Not only did