Spending on the RAF jumps but the introduction of new types lags




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 formation of new squadrons and the necessary recruitment of personnel was going ahead relatively smoothly but the the delivery of new types was slower than hoped because the advances in aircraft technology had made manufacturing them appreciably more complex than older types.

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eighty years ago a newspaper cartoon touches a raw nerve

Image
    Little better illustrates the strains with which Churchill and his government were having to cope under the combined assault of military defeats and discontent with his premiership, than the wild and disproportionate reaction to a cartoon in the left-wing and immensely popular tabloid  Daily Mirror : one of the most famous of the war. Philip Zec's savage image of a survivor from a torpedoed ship clinging to a raft above the line, "The price of petrol has been increased by one penny - Official", hardly deserves to be considered subversive. Zec's claim that it was an attack on waste might have been somewhat disingenuous; the sailor's suffering is the true price of petrol. But Churchill's assertion that it was an attack on profiteering by petrol companies barely stands up to examination. The Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison supported Churchill but, perhaps fortunately for them, the government failed to suppress or punish the Mirror . Labour
Read more

Eighty years ago Colonel Lindbergh's mask slips

Image
    After months of being the most effective voice of isolationism and the leading figure in the America First movement against US involvement in the war, Colonel Lindbergh hero of the first solo flight across the Atlantic, let the mask slip to reveal publicly the hateful sub-text of his appeal. In a speech at Des Moines that was broadcast on the radio he denounced the “war agitators”: “three important groups have been pressing this country toward war: the British, the Jewish, the Roosevelt administration.” Some of his claims could have come from the mouth of Goebbels: the Jews’, “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He claimed to admire both the British and Jewish races, but made it plain that he did not consider Jews to be American. He issued barely veiled threats, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they
Read more

Eighty years ago, the defenders of Crete pay the penalty for weak air cover

Image
  The German naval foray into the North Atlantic got off to a good start when the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen encountered HMS Hood , the largest warship in the world and a veteran of World War One, and HMS Prince of Wales , the navy’s newest battleship. Hood was destroyed by a massive explosion killing almost all of her crew and Prince of Wales failed to damage the German ships seriously. The reputation of the “mighty Hood” far outran her actually military worth and the loss was a severe blow to public morale. Thus began a frantic hunt for the Germans which sucked in practically all the British capital ships in the region. Bismarck was located by a Catalina flying boat flown by a USN pilot covertly “on loan” to the British. A torpedo from a carrier borne Fairey Swordfish disabled Bismarck and she was finished off by a large concentration of British heavy warships. Air power began to prove decisive in the battle for Crete. It lay within range of German aircraft operating from
Read more