It wasn’t until June 5, 1940, that the FCC completely banned amateurs from working foreign stations.  And it wasn’t until after Pearl Harbor that amateur radio was put off the air entirely. But even before the ban on foreign contacts, U.S. amateurs had been prohibited from communicating with any of the belligerent countries, and even some neutral countries had shut down amateurs as a precaution. So there wasn’t much DX to be found, as the ham in this cartoon from the April 1940 issue of Radio News has discovered.