These few aging artillery pieces lacked the range and firepower that would be needed to fend off a capital ship, and the activities of German commerce raiding pocket battleships and cruisers were of great concern, especially as Bermuda became a forming-up point for trans-Atlantic convoys.

Other inviting targets in Bermuda included the dockyard, and the Royal Naval Air Station on Boaz Island, the Royal Air Force Darrell's Island airbase, the trans-Atlantic telecommunications cable of Cable & Wireless, and facilities which aided trans-Atlantic navigation by ships and aircraft.

In 1942, with the buildup of American units and artillery in Bermuda, as well as the containment of the German and Italian surface fleets to home waters, the moratorium on drafts overseas from the local units (which had been emplaced after a BVRC contingent had been sent to the Lincolnshire Regiment in England (with BMA and BVE attachments joining their respective corps) in June 1940) was lifted.

The support the neutral US had provided to Britain included co-operating on various levels of foreign policy, enabling Britain to purchase war materiel from American manufacturers, co-operating on counter-espionage (all trans-Atlantic mails from the US to Europe were secretly landed at Bermuda for inspection by British censors searching for secret communications that enabled the discovery of Axis spies in the USA), the US Navy and the US Army Air Forces were taking an increasing role in protecting allied shipping from German U-boats (the first US Navy vessel lost in the war, the destroyer Reuben James, part of the Neutrality Patrol, was sunk by the German U-boat U-552 while escorting Convoy HX 156 across the Atlantic from Halifax in October, 1941), and relieving British forces from guarding strategic neutral territories, and her own overseas territories, allowing British forces to be redeployed to more active theatres of war.

This last included the agreement by which Britain handed over to the US the duty of guarding Iceland from German invasion, the first American units arriving there on 7 July 1941.

The most important result was the Lend-Lease Agreement, and its precursor, the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, by which the US Government loaned war materiel (primarily 50 First World War-era destroyers) to the British Commonwealth (and later to other allies) in exchange for 99-year leases of land in British territories for the purpose of building US military and naval bases.

This was portrayed to American voters as a major coup for the US, gaining at little cost the use of bases that would be invaluable to US national security for the next century.

Ultimately, neither of the two most important base locations, both from the perspective of defending the United States from attack, and for the purposes of aiding and protecting air and sea transport across the Atlantic, was in the West Indies.

As they were not originally part of the Agreement, the 99-year leases granted to the US for bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland were consequently free, with no destroyers or other war materiel received in exchange.

When American surveyors arrived in 1941, the Bermudian government was horrified to learn that tentative plans called for depopulating and levelling most of the West of the archipelago and infilling the Great Sound to create an airfield.

Whereas the RAF, Imperial Airways, and Pan American World Airways used Darrell's only as a staging point for trans-Atlantic flights, the US Navy based a patrol squadron at its base to maintain air patrols within the area (a role that had been performed 'til then on an ad hoc basis by the Fleet Air Arm at Boaz Island).

[citation needed] In addition to the airbases, the US built up a large garrison to protect its new assets and the entire archipelago from attack or invasion.

[6] The United States Army Coast Artillery Corps deployed coastal defense weapons in Bermuda beginning in April 1941.

[11][12] The US coast artillery firing batteries included:[13] The railway guns were placed on short sections of track that were not connected to rail lines.