Royal Navy and Franco's bombers deter supplies to the Republic, separatists triumph in the Sudetenland and the Red Army struggles to fill its purged ranks
Maritime affairs off the coasts
of Spain neatly captured the British government’s sense of priorities. A number
of British ships bringing supplies to Republican ports were bombed by
Nationalist aircraft sinking two and killing crew members. The Foreign
Secretary wrung his hands, promised stern measures and then went on to mutter
about “practical difficulties.” The
Prime Minister tried to calm any sense of outrage by waving the prospect of
Italian “volunteers” being withdrawn from Spain which was one of the supposed
fruits of his drive for rapprochement with Mussolini. Meanwhile in Gibraltar
the authorities launched the prosecution of a British captain whose ship, the S.S. Stancroft, had
carried aero engines and odd lots of artillery shells allegedly in
contravention of the Merchant Shipping (Carriage of Munitions to Spain) Act,
1936, which had been passed to bolster British “non-intervention” in the Civil
War. These had come to light in a search by a Royal Navy cruiser which was
clearly out to enforce the rules stringently. The prosecution was as misguided
as it was biased as the Act only covered shipping weapons from outside the
country whilst the Stancroft was sailing from Barcelona to Valencia.
Local elections in Czechoslovakia
produced a mixed bag of results for the Prague government. On the positive side
of the ledger Slovak autonomists did poorly. Far more worryingly Heinlein’s
Sudeten German separatist party won around 90% of the vote in German speaking
areas. The pressure for a major revision in favour of minorities was becoming
almost irresistible. Poland was also snapping at Prague’s heals with a
newspaper campaign questioning the legitimacy of the entire Czechoslovak state,
a barely veiled manifesto for measures in favour of the Polish minority.
The ravages of Stalin’s purges
were making themselves felt in the Red Army. 10,000 officer cadets were
commissioned immediately as lieutenants and sent to operational units before they
have even completed their training. Officially this was to give them live experience
of command. In reality it was to replace officers shot or sent to the gulag. Quite apart from ideological
distaste for the idea, the Soviet Union appeared to offer little as a potential
military or diplomatic ally to the British government.
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