Eighty years ago this week Churchill gets his wings

 

 The RAF celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation in an atmosphere of patriotic self-congratulation. The king spoke of the 'imperishable renown' that the service had won and  announced a plan to award standards to operational squadrons for length of service or achievements in combat. Winston Churchill was awarded honorary RAF wings - a distinction usually reserved for royalty - to complement the honorary rank of air commodore awarded in 1939. The chief of the Air Staff laid a solitary wreath at the Cenotaph.

Britain and the US had managed to keep their differences over military strategy quiet but were not so successful in the field of post-war economy planning. Experts on each side - John Maynard Keynes on the British and Dexter White on the American - had been working on  international schemes for monetary cooperation to avoid the debacles of the 1930s without reaching agreement. Keynes's idea was further reaching and would have attempted to neutralize surpluses through an International Clearing Bank; White's stabilization mechanism would have been far more limited, leaving the US as the greatest surplus economy with far greater power. Probably in order to force the pace the British went for unilateral publication of their plan and the US followed suit. Both plans annoyed residual isolationists in the US but the public little realized the scale of the disagreement, doubtless because of the arcane nature of the monetary debate. Weirdly the proposals were extensively discussed in the German press which generally favoured the British one.