Lend-Lease.

By the summer of 1940, Great Britain was the major European opponent of Nazi Germany’s conquest of Europe. The Soviet Union was allied to Germany by the August, 1939, nonaggression pact between the two totalitarian states. The United States was officially neutral, bound by several neutrality acts that forbade the export of arms and ammunition to foreign nations engaged in war. That prohibition had been modified in 1939, after the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, to allow the sale of war materials on a “cash and carry” basis, but with the stipulation that such items could not be carried on American ships.