History

Arms to Britain, Southwest Virginia style

This advertisement appeared in a Roanoke, Virginia, newspaper in 1940. It was reprinted in a special supplement on the history of the city in Thursday’s Roanoke Times.

Remember that Americans who wanted to aid Britain in the fight against the Nazis were challenged at the time by a powerful isolationist lobby led by the America First Committee, which had 800,000 members at its peak– including future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald R. Ford.