This info came from a TV series and it was the first I heard about it. Granted before this, my knowledge of the war is severely limited to hearing about Pearl Harbor, Hitler and the Holocaust.
The "deception" I'm referring to is America being aggressive when searching for German subs on their convoys in Iceland, at a time when they were neutral.
If anyone is so inclined to lean toward ELI5, or at least include a ELI5 in their response, I'd appreciate it.
The Greer Incident of Sept 4, 1941 became the catalyst for the US "shoot on sight" policy toward Nazi submarines. FDR colored this incident as an unprovoked attack in his fireside chat of Sept 11, 1941. The only real deception was that the US Destroyer had in fact been working with a British aircraft to trail the submarine, so it's sometimes compared to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which served as a catalyst for another war.
FDR's shoot-on-sight policy wasn't seen as controversial, since it was simply presented as ensuring "freedom of the seas". He'd already committed the US Navy to providing convoy escorts in July of 1941, and "lend lease" had been successfully presented as a way of keeping the US out of the war.
That said, there was simmering concern that FDR was angling the US toward war. Congress had passed the first peacetime conscription act in 1940, and Woody Guthrie's song Plough 'em Under warned that every fourth American boy would be 'ploughed under' in an unwanted war. The looming threat of war played a significant role in the 1940 election, and FDR insisted he had no plans to involve US troops. This, as it turned out, was not quite true. On December 4, 1941, the Rainbow Five war plan for fighting WW2 as a full-on belligerent was leaked and published in several US newspapers. This threatened to cause some immense political embarrassment to FDR and his closest allies, but three days later Pearl Harbor was hit, and the issue became moot.
it would help if you provided a source for this information.