Officially, the United States remained neutral in World War II until the U.S. declaration of war on Japan, on December 8, 1941, following the Battle of Pearl Harbor; however, in October 1939, a month after World War II began in Europe with the invasion of Poland, the United States and 21 Latin American countries jointly issued the Declaration of Panama, creating in the waters of the Americas a 300-mile neutrality zone off limits to all belligerents. In June 1940, the Declaration of Havana reasserted and expanded the Monroe Doctrine. Whereas the 1823 doctrine warned that the United States would regard any attack against any state in the Americas as an attack against itself, the Declaration of Havana stipulated that each signatory would regard an attack against any nation in the hemisphere as an attack on itself. The chief enforcer of the Havana document was the United States, of course, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered U.S. Navy ships to patrol the neutrality zone.

On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt signed into law Lend Lease, which authorized the president to provide material aid to any nation whose defense he deemed vital to the safety and security of the United States. The U.S. Navy presented Great Britain with 50 World War I-era destroyers (valuable as convoy escorts) in return for 99-year leases on British naval bases located on British possessions in the Caribbean. Also early in the year, the U.S. Navy's neutrality patrol was extended to 2,000 miles from the U.S. coast.

On August 14, 1941, President Roosevelt concluded with British prime minister Winston Churchill the Atlantic Charter, which effectively divided the world into spheres of strategic control for the common defense. At this point, American warships began escorting fast convoys partway to Britain, taking escort responsibility in the sea lanes of the western Atlantic, including in the vicinity of Iceland. By mid-September, navy vessels were escorting convoys between the Grand Banks and Iceland. While U.S. ships escorted fast convoys, ships of the Royal Canadian Navy escorted slow convoys.

Escort operations resulted in an undeclared naval war between the United States and Germany, especially in conjunction with the Canadians and the highly vulnerable slow convoys. On September 4, 1941, the destroyer USS Greer was attacked by a German submarine. On October 15, the USS Kearny was attacked, and on October 31, the Reuben James was sunk. The sinking of the Reuben James and other armed exchanges prompted Congress, on November 17, 1941, to amend the latest in a series of Neutrality Acts to permit the arming of merchant vessels and to allow merchant vessels to carry cargoes into belligerent ports.

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