The hazard of aircraft development gives RAF fighters a mercifully large slice of the budget.
At least in terms of finance
Britain was getting the bit between its teeth in the struggle to rearm again
Nazi Germany. Military spending for 1938/1939 was to increase by 23% to £343m.
The prime beneficiary was the RAF where spending was to rise 25%. This was six
times as much as had been spent annually before the expansion began. The
pattern of new aircraft development meant spending was weighted towards fighter
aircraft rather than the bombers adored by the Air Marshals. Development of the
Hurricane and Spitfire monoplane fighters was well advanced and they could be ordered in quantity whilst the far more
complex four engine bombers that the air staff imagined would win the war
lagged years behind. Wisely the air staff preferred to spend money on a smaller number of modern planes rather than larger numbers of obsolescent one. But for this, Fighter Command would have been in much weaker condition in the Battle of Britain.
The replacement of Sir Anthony
Eden as Foreign Secretary by Lord Halifax attracted some unfavourable comment,
in part because a member of the House of Lords was to hold a great office of
state. RAB Butler his under-secretary in the Commons was then a relatively low
profile figure. Halifax’s appointment was publicly welcomed by the Nazi regime.
Halifax could be counted on to implement Neville Chamberlain’s conciliatory
foreign policy and not to risk upsetting
Hitler. The previous autumn he had gone to Berlin and Berchtesgaden as
Chamberlain’s unofficial representative.
The latest round of the show trials in Moscow by which
Stalin was butchering leaders from earlier phases of the Soviet Union was
shaken by the refusal of Nikolai Krestinsky to plead guilty unlike his fellow
accused who docilely admitted to Menshevism, contact with the Trotsky family,
British or German agents. Krestinsky went on to claim that all his previous
statement had been a perversion of the truth. Calm was restored the following
day when he retracted these statements, presumably after the NKVD had reasoned
with him in its usual fashion overnight.
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