In March 1941, nine months before America entered the Second World War, President Roosevelt sent a battleship to collect a shipment of gold bullion from South Africa as part of the 'cash & carry' agreement between a beleaguered Great Britain and an isolationist United States Government. An agreement that, through Roosevelt's pressure in enabling the 1939 Neutrality Act, allowed the United States to sell war matériel to Great Britain and its allies. But the system was bankrupting the British Government by having to pay for everything it was using to sustain the war. Churchill said, "We are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone." A few days later the Lend-Lease Bill was passed by the Senate, which effectively ended America's neutrality. Did this gold ever reach the United States? It is surrounded by conspiracy, largely thanks to Churchill's notion that: "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Some took this literally and went in search of the truth. What they found, after half a century of searching, would change their lives forever. This is one man's tale of those events.
