Danny, I think I would have been the recipient of QOF for many of my efforts throughout my life, and I'm not thinking of my W/T efforts!
Your comments on the niceties of the US neutral status of pre 7/12/41 are well made, for they were indeed a very real preoccupation. The well respected Jack Huntington, co-pilot trainer extraordinaire (I have the honour to have been one of his "apprentices"), started his war time career as a transport pilot himself, delivering Lockheed Hudsons across the North Atlantic in that period. He explained that they could not be handed over within the USA then, as that would have been interpreted as assisting a belligerent power. Instead, US pilots delivered them to an airfield adjacent to the Canadian frontier. Teams of horses were then hitched to them so that they could be drawn across the border. Then and only then could the transfer be effected. The actual ferry flights to the UK were a saga in themselves, but that is another story....