Full-Scale War Breaks Out in China
After years of brutal infighting the government finally delivered
a sensible ruling on the question of whether the Royal Air Force or the Royal
Navy should control naval aviation. Control had devolved on the RAF when it was
formed from the Army’s RFC and the Navy’s RNAS in 1918 but compared to the
service’s obsession with “strategic” bombing, it had been treated as only a
trivial responsibility. The government overrode the anguished complaints of the
RAF and its backers to give control of ship-borne aircraft to the Royal Navy.
Land based aircraft involved in naval warfare remained under the RAF’s control,
in the eventual guise of Coastal Command. The decision was long overdue but it
meant that the Fleet Air Arm went into WWII with obsolete or ill-designed
aircraft. Mercifully the US Navy had jealously guarded its own aviation and US
designed carrier aircraft were available to make good the woeful inadequacy of
British designs.
The Sino-Japanese war which is generally considered to have been a
few weeks before with the “incident” at the Marco Polo bridge turned into a
full-scale conflict with a large mutiny by Chinese troops who turned on
Japanese garrisons inflicting heavy casualties. In turn, the Japanese launched
an all-out offensive to take control of Peking and its port city. This was the
first and the longest-lasting of the various armed conflicts that was to
coalesce into WWII.
Belgrade was rocked by large-scale protests triggered by the death
of the Orthodox Patriarch Varnava. He had resolutely resisted government plans
to grant greater powers to Yugoslavia’s minority Roman Catholic church, which
was especially strong in Croatia. It was
widely suspected that the Patriarch had been poisoned. His death was declared
to be from natural causes but the matter has never been settled conclusively.
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