The U.S. military plans for war with Germany, Rainbow 5, were leaked and appeared in two major newspapers. The spectacular leak, the source of which has never been determined, showed an intent to build a 10,000,000 man Army and deploy 5,000,000 men to Europe to defeat the Germans by 1943. The resulting furor was enormous.
Naval trainees, 1941.
The Germans ridiculed the plans as impossible, but the German General Staff took it seriously and argued for a hiatus of offensive operations in the East in order to attempt to take the United Kingdom out of the war before Britain could be used as a staging area for American troops. Hitler rejected the idea. Rainbow 5 did in fact become the basic plan adopted by the United States during the war.
Japanese tasks forces set out for destinations in Malaya and Thailand. Japanese aircraft scouted Wake Island undetected.
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