The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXX: An Indian Affair Part I - A Local Matter.​

The dawning of 1937 was seen by Austen Chamberlain as a chance to start putting his own agenda into action; much of the previous year had been taken up with the war, the subsequent peace negotiations and reacting to various affairs overseas. Having spent so much time dealing with inherited problems it is unsurprising that Chamberlain was keen to put his own mark on the premiership with a new programme. Interestingly despite the decidedly international flavour to the previous year, and the example of Churchill's fall from grace, Chamberlain returned to overseas affairs and made dealing with India one of they key pillars of his programme. While the problem of India did indeed need dealing with it was perhaps not the best political option as it added to the growing perception the government was ignoring the tough domestic issues to focus on the glamour of international affairs. The domestic portion of the programme did not help change that opinion, consisting mainly of the ideas outlined in the Conservative electinon manifesto, while this was not in itself a bad thing using the policies of his predecessors predecessor did not give the impression of a deep interest in the subject matter. In the event however this became something of a moot point as events, both foreign and domestic, would once again distract the Chamberlain government from it's intended programme.

We begin though with India, a perenial problem for British governments as political opinion and policy failed to keep pace with the demand for change. This typically led to a government fighting hard to get concessions through Parliament that were barely acceptable to the Indian National Congress (INC) and the other major Indian groups. Perhaps the finest example of the problems this caused was the 1935 Government of India Act, such a compromised and weasel worded Act that it had no preamble or stated aim, for the simple reason that any formulation would offend either the die-hard Conservatives, Indian nationalists or, worst of all, both. Indeed it was fortuitous that the Act failed as it would likely never have worked in it's proposed format, perhaps even causing larger problems when the system inevitably collapsed.

However just because something needed to be done did not make it any less politically risk for Chamberlain to re-open the matter, it had after all felled the Baldwin government and remained a potentially explosive issue. On the positive side Chamberlain did possess several advantages Baldwin had not; he had significant political capital after the war and subsequent peace deal with Italy, the progress of Rhodesia towards Dominion status had 'soften up' die-hard opinion towards colonial independence and he had managed to neutralise Churchill. This achievement, removing the arch die-hard and ring leader, cowed many potential rebels into silence and was key to at least dampening down opposition in his own party. That Churchill would back down over India owes much to the man himself, having having only recently championed Chamberlain's ascent to the premiership, and with his own bitter memories of being forced from office, he could not bring himself to agitate against the new Act. The single largest advantage however would not come from domestic politics but from a most unexpected source in India itself; The insurrection of the Faqir of Ipi.

The exact cause of the uprising need not detain us, while the details remain debated all agree it was the usual mix of tribal and religious conflicts all too common in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas of India, it's effects on India were far reaching and worthy of examination. First of all it must be stated the timing for the start of the revolt was fortuitous; the Army of India was in a decidedly weakened state with the British Army in India along with much of the regular Indian Army either in transit or still in North Africa. Thus the rebels had no problem over-coming the much weakened Waziristan Field Force and, despite the best efforts of the local RAF contingent, were able to threaten the key garrison town of Razmak. With the revolt threatening to spill over from the Tribal Areas into British India proper the local Princely States committed their own state forces, the Alwar Lancers and the Jammu Brigade being prominent in that contingent. However due to over-confidence and the poor equipment and training of the forces deployed (the cream of the Princely State forces served with the Indian Army proper, those that stayed behind were territorial units at best) the Faqir's forces were able to defeat that force and encircle Razmak, much to the shock of many in India not least The Times of India which occasionally bordered on the hysterical in it's coverage.

No.31 Squadron RAF, the Goldstars. As the squadron motto indicates ("First into Indian skies") the squadron had strong links to India going back to the Great War. Operating Hawker Audaxs the squadron was one of the hardest working units during the insurrection, tasked with aiding the defence of Razmak and trying to harass and delay the rebels until Army reinforcements could arrive.​

In this environment the reaction of the various factions would be telling and shape the subsequent political situation. Perhaps the most ill-judged reaction was that of Mohandas Ghandi who implored the local population to "Lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you for, if the Faqirs men choose to burn your homes and land, you should vacate them." Unsurprisingly this did not go down well, prompting many to say it was very easy to pontificate about non-violence when it isn't your home being burnt and your family terrorised. Stung into action Gandhi made the fateful decision to visit Waziristan where, just prior to his violent death, he discovered that the spectacle of ranks of non-violent protesters letting themselves be killed did not, as he had previously thought, melt aggressors into surrender but merely encouraged them. Second to Gandhi's fatal decision in the bad choices stakes must come that of Subhas Chandra Bose who glorified the rampaging tribesmen for their victories over 'The puppets of British imperialism'. His ranting earned him a very long prison sentence for treason and discredited his followers in the court of public opinion and the INC. The mainstream reaction from the Indian National Congress was decidedly muddled as the organisation struggled to get over the loss of one of it's spiritual leaders. Such would be the pressure of trying to find a response that stayed true to non-violence, didn't attract ridicule and didn't offend the myriad groups Congress that the INC leadership mostly stayed silent, a choice that ironically provoked the very splits they were trying to avoid. Finally we come to the British reaction where the Raj lived up to it's unflappable reputation by staying calm but exuding confidence that everything was in hand. This was personified best by the local Waziristan resident, Sir Sidney Diamond, who over-saw the defence of Razmak in fine style until the army returned from North Africa, whereupon it massacred the Faqir's forces and brought the Faqir himself back for trial.

With the more hot headed elements either discredited or imprisoned, the INC splintering as it struggled to cope with the loss of Gandhi and the Princely States weakened after their forces defeat at the hands of the Faqir Indian politics was at it's most pro-British for many years, indeed many a nationalist had been secretly pleased to see the ranks of British troops crushing the rampaging tribesmen and securing the border. As an added boost the Anglophilic Indian Liberal Party would get a not inconsiderable boost as it's promotion of the advantages of the British presence in India, in particular the military presence, was seen as correct. In this environment Chamberlain would find his biggest problem with the new Act would come not from India but Britain.


Notes:
First off I will concede this is almost certainly a bit too pro-British but what the hell. If you can't pick the most optimist outcome occasionally what's the point of writing? While perhaps not the most likely outcome I would argue the above is at least possible, which is good enough I feel.

First; The Faqir of Ipi's revolt did indeed happen and prompted a several year campaign till he was finally brought under control, however it was only control he remained at large and dangerous pretty much till Pakistani independence. OTL he defeated the first columns sent in but then backed away into the mountains after his first encounter with heavy forces. TTL he gets down onto the plains, gets over confident so can be crushed and caught when the divisions come home. With most rebels dead and the Faqir captured the rebellion crumbles.

Second; Austen Chamberlain did indeed support the Government of India Act in OTL, indeed his support was considered key by Baldwin so not a big leap for him to do it now. Indeed I've seen a few sources where he even expected that some degree of Indian Home Rule was inevitable in the future. As that was during his time as Secretary of State for India in ~1916 I think 1936 is 'future' enough. Would Churchill back down, for anyone else I think not he'd resign instead. But after throwing Austen in at the deep end at the leadership election I think he'd feel honour bound not to stab him in the back scant months later. He wont be happy though.

Third; Would Gandhi actually tell people to give up and not resist rampaging tribesman? Well he told Britain to surrender to the Germans in 1940 so it seems more than likely he'd say something just as inane to his own people. Would he actually go out and non-violently resist himself? Well he had a big ego and refused to equate non-violence with cowardice so I think he could be provoked into it by a hostile press. On a similar note Bose sided with the Japanese so clearly had no morals whatsoever and fairly bad political judgement, I can see him cheerleading for the Faqir if he gets some early success.

Fourth; The Princely States did indeed have their own armies and they were very mixed, some did indeed serve along side the regular army, some though were ceremonial at best. With their dependence on British power having just been very obviously exposed they're not in the strongest position to resist any reform, particularly when the Raj starts turning the screw.

Finally; The INC splintering, again perhaps too helpful but on the other hand the organisation was regularly on the brink of collapse. With Gandhi dead and his protege Neru discredited (non-violence? what good is that against rampaging hordes?) I don't think there's anyone who's got the profile, personality and reputation to hold it together.

Next up we go back to Britain where we will see political scheming, and this time it will not all fall neatly for Chamberlain I promise you that!

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXI: An Indian Affair Part II - Ambitions and Loyalty.​

Chamberlain's plan for India came in two stages. The first was to pass a stripped down but clarified version of the original 1935 Government of India Act to sort out the more urgent issues and prepare the ground work for self government, the second to despatch a mission to the sub-continent to thrash out the details for a planned Dominion of India Act once a constitution was agreed. To take advantage of the conductive atmosphere in India the first Act made a big play of officially committing Britain to an Indian Dominion and scrapping 'dyarchy', the practice whereby certain (less important) ministers were responsible to the provincial legislature but key ministries were responsible to the Viceroy appointed provincial governor. The Act made all provincial ministers responsible to the legislature as well as establish direct elections to those bodies, greatly extending the role of Indians in provincial government. The final part of the Act was a selection of territorial re-organisations, formally detaching Aden and Burma from British India and breaking up the larger provinces into more manageable territories. As the mission to India was far from certain to be well received, there had been more than enough commissions and round table talks to leave the Indian groups with a healthy suspicion of the motives of British ministers sent to 'make progress', considerable efforts were expended to make clear that a Dominion was the guaranteed end result and the talks were concerned with the detail of a constitution progress did prove possible. As an added flourish, and to curry royal favour, an Imperial Durbah was arranged for King George VI, the new monarch to have his coronation as Emperor of India celebrated by the 'Court of Dehli'. Though not universally popular most of the post-INC breakup groups were brought off with the promise the King would publicly commit Britain to Indian domestic self government and Dominion status, enough of a compromise to ensure the threatened boycott and disruptions never materialised and the ceremony went off smoothly.

If conditions in India were favourable, those in Westminster were far more challenging. It soon became obvious the most determined resistance would come not from the opposition parties but from the government benches. The biggest single obstacle to progress on the new Government of India Act was in fact the Secretary of State for India, Baron Lloyd, a man hand picked by Churchill precisely because of his opposition to significant change in India. A secondary problem was finding the makeup of the mission to India, naturally it had to be all party and include enough government 'heavy hitters' to ensure it was taken seriously. Finally the Prime Minister also had to pay the political price extracted by Churchill for his grudging abstention over the Act; promotions and preference for his supporters. Taken together the obvious solution to these issues was a cabinet re-shuffle, an option Chamberlain was reluctant to take as it was barely six months since the last one. However circumstances forced his hand so the Parliamentary year began with a hastily arranged reshuffle as Chamberlain tried to balance the competing demands and still end up with a useful cabinet. Before that however he chose to concentrate on the Indian mission as his top priority, judging it was necessary to move quickly to keep the pro-British momentum. It was perhaps this very haste that caused his initial efforts to come so badly unstuck.

The key problem with selecting the head of the mission to India was that it wasn't an especially prized job, but would nevertheless require the candidate to be an experienced senior minister to give it the necessary political weight. Consequently it was expected that anybody approached about the role would have to be induced into going, either with carrots, stick or both. After much deliberation and debate the first choice candidate emerged as Sir John Simon, the National Liberal leader and incumbent Home Secretary. As past chair of the Simons Commission he had the necessary experience of India and it was believed that sending him back with a completely different frame of reference would be a good demonstration of the change in British policy. As a added bonuses, from Chamberlain's perspective at least, it would remove the the unpopular Simons from British politics for several months, reduce the National Liberal's influence and free up a great office of state for promoting his own man. The carrot offered was an additional National Liberal in the cabinet while the stick was the threat to reduce the number if he didn't go. Unsurprisingly Simon didn't see it that way, heading up the mission would be a significant personal demotion and leave him vulnerable to replacement as National Liberal leader while out of the country. Moreover the implication that the party's cabinet representation was little more than a bargaining chip did little to endear the offer to the rest of the National Liberals. Insulted by both the blackmail and the implication behind it Simon refused the position and declared he wished to stay at the Home Office. With his authority threatened, and more than a hint of personal dislike as motivation, Chamberlain dug his heels in and gave Simon an ultimatum; India or nowhere. Simon's response was just as unequivocal, he resigned from the cabinet and announced the National Liberals were pulling out of the Government.

Before moving on it is worth briefly discussing one of the more prevalent conspiracy theories about the reshuffle. While there were many good reasons for Simon's selection, there were also excellent reasons he shouldn't go, many of them the flip side of his supposed advantages. For instance while he had got to know the main characters of India he had made his usual bad impression with most of them, he was not a natural diplomat nor especially persuasive. Indeed he had mishandled local relations so badly the government had been forced into pre-announcing several conclusions to the commission just to keep order. This did not mean his mission would have failed, his final report had still formed the basis of much of the revised Government of India Act and he could undoubtedly have produced a decent constitution, but it was not ideal. Thus the conspiracy theory goes that Chamberlain had never intended him to go, as he would have been a disaster, and only offered him the job knowing he would refuse and so could be forced from the government along with the rest of the National Liberals. The supposed evidence for this is the lack of Tory reaction to the departure of Simons and his party, the idea the Conservative back benches saw less National Liberals as a way to increase their own personal chances of advancement apparently being insufficient explanation for this. Whether or not one believes this chain of events probably comes down to a personal preference between conspiracy or cock-up, though it is certainly worth repeating that history indicates the latter is far more prevalent than the former.

In any event the departure of the National Liberals, though it shattered the convenient fiction of a 'National' Government, was not Chamberlain's first concern. His pressing requirement was to fill the gaps left by the departed ministers and get the mission out to India to strike while conditions were still favourable. The Indian mission was therefore first to be decided, Chamberlain selecting the President of the Board of Education, Viscount Halifax. As a member of the cabinet Halifax ticked the seniority box while his time as Viceroy of India gave him the necessary contacts and sub-continent experience. While his tenure as Viceroy had been mixed at best, he had left on a high note and was thus viewed as a relatively successful Viceroy. Crucially he was also motivated to go to India, having allied himself with Baldwin and appeasement his career had stagnated following the former leaders fall from grace, indeed he was only still in the cabinet due to his standing with the declining 'dove' wing of the party. The chance to re-start his stalled career by returning to the sub-continent naturally appealed, the deal sweetened by the assurance of a promotion from the relative backwater of Education should be succeed. With the rest of the cross-party mission relatively easily filled out Chamberlain could concentrate on his cabinet reshuffle.

Viscount Halifax, the man sent to India to negotiate the fine detail of the new constitution. His tenure as Viceroy had been one of extremes, at one end he had imprisoned the entire Congress leadership while at the other he had overseen the peaceful end of Congress' Civil Disobedience. Having left shortly after negotiating the latter and setting the ground for the Round Table Talks his stock in India was still good, giving him the necessary credit to ensure attendance at the constitutional conference. An additional advantage was his good relations with King George VI, forged during the crisis over the succession, helping to ensure government and monarchy were in agreement throughout both the Durbah and subsequent talks.​

While referred to as a reshuffle it was perhaps more accurately a reconstruction, in trying to balance all the groups within the party Chamberlain would promote, move or replace almost half his cabinet. Beginning at the top the job of Home Secretary went to Duff Cooper, promoted from the War Office on the back of good work managing the post-war review (discussed in detail in later chapters) and the high profile successes of the British Army on the North West Frontier in India. His successor as Secretary of State for War was the high flying Oliver Stanley, following in the footsteps of his father who had also served in the office during the Great War much was expected as he had faced the tricky task of putting Cooper's review into practice. The appointment of Neville Chamberlain to the freshly expanded Ministry for Pensions and Welfare Reform was another early certainty, an attempt to utilise the work he commissioned from the Conservative Research Department to underpin the government's weak domestic agenda. The hot topic of India saw one of the surprises of the reshuffle as Samuel Hoare continued his rehabilitation by returning to the Indian Office as Secretaty of State For India and being given responsibility for passing the new Government of India Act. The displaced Baron Lloyd was moved sideways to the Colonial Office, removing him from Indian affairs and acting as a reassurance to the die-hards that the actions over Rhodesia and India were not going to be hurriedly replicated across the rest of the Empire. Staying on the Indian theme the replacement for the sub-continent bound Lord Halifax at Education was his associate Rab Butler, selected as much for his standing in the Halifax group in the party as anything else.

Moving to the 'Churchill' area of the reshuffle we see the heavy price extracted for his abstention over India, at least two cabinet posts with perhaps considerable influence on a third. The two clearest cut cases were Brendan Bracken at Agriculture and the Marquess of Londonderry as Lord Privy Seal, the former had been a confidant of Churchill for years while the latter was more complex. Formerly the Secretary of State for Air he had publicly toed the government's line while in cabinet had tried to defend the RAF against vicious cuts and disarmament 'gestures' that would cripple it. These actions saw him first forced from the Air Ministry and then from the cabinet as he became a political embarrassment, accused by many of being a 'warmonger'. Subsequent events had proved his warnings correct, not least the RAF being initially out-performed by their Australian cousins in the Abyssinian War, and his return to the Cabinet gave Churchill another pro-RAF vote for defence spending and Chamberlain another hawk on defence and foreign policy. The third post is interesting, after excellent work on aircraft production Lord Beaverbrook's elevation to Lord President of the Council was purportedly so he could extend his efforts beyond aviation to other industries, logical as far as it went but clearly not the full story. While such a job would be easier from a cabinet level position the obvious choice would have been been either a new Ministry for Industry position or President of the Board of Trade, that he instead became Lord President of the Council suggest scheming and compromise not a fully confident decision. The remaining changes are listed mainly for completeness, a selection of junior ministers and rising stars moved in to replace the departed National Liberals.

• Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons - Austen Chamberlain
• Lord Chancellor and Leader of the House of Lords - Viscount Hailsham
• Lord President of the Council - Lord Beaverbrook
• Lord Privy Seal - Marquess of Londonderry
• Chancellor of the Exchequer - Leo Amery
• Home Secretary - Alfred Duff Cooper
• Foreign Secretary - Anthony Eden
• Colonial Secretary - Baron Lloyd
• Dominions Secretary - Lord De La Warr
• Secretary of State for War - Oliver Stanley
• First Lord of the Admiralty - Viscount Monsell
• Secretary of State for Air - Winston Churchill
• Secretary of State for India - Samuel Hoare
• Minister for Co-ordination of Defence - Harold Macmillian
• Secretary of State for Scotland - Walter Elliot
• President of the Board of Trade - Earl Stanhope
• President of the Board of Education - Rab Butler
• Minister for Pensions and Welfare Reform - Neville Chamberlain
• Minister of Agriculture - Brendan Bracken
• Minister of Labour - Ronald Cross
• Minister of Health - William Morrison
• Minister of Transport - John Moore-Brabazon
• First Commissioner of Works - Howard Kingsley Wood
• Attorney General - Thomas Inskip

Notes;
An update! And all for a svelt 2,700 words.
First off, I'm fully aware some will yawn at British politics and be disinterested in who goes to what job, I am however resigned to the fact you can't please everybody all the time and promise boat porn later (after one more politics update, sorry.)

So onto the update, Halifax in India? Why not I say? Gets him out of the way and gives him a chance to restart his career. It stalled in the late 1920s before he became Viceroy so I can see him hoping to do the same trick again.

The Beaver as Lord President probably has to be wrangling, you wouldn't put such a schemer in a high profile job unless you had to. Ideally he'd have been just a Minister without Portfolio and told to get on with poking at British industry, however he's managed to scheme himself a grand title and a position at the heart of government.

Nev at Pensions and Welfare is something of a demotion from Lord President, but the CRD was pretty much his personal toy and so he's one of the few senior Tories to actually have a welfare agenda. As the PM knows the Conservatives are weak domestically (Churchill wasn't interested and Austen's been distracted) Nev is drafted to bolster the new programme, though if it's too little too late is another problem.

Lord Londonderry's promotion, he was indeed an early anti-disarmament campaigner and was called a warmonger by Attlee (Labour at the time being committed to completely abolishing the RAF). However OTL after being thrown out of the cabinet he lost his nerve, over-reacted and ended up heavily pushing Anglo-German friendship and appeasement, thus putting him in a worse position than when he started. TTL he didn't get a chance as the Germany's pull out of the Naval Talks then war with Italy intervened, thus he looked clever and fore-sighted. Churchill didn't think much of him so he didn't make his cabinet, but as a pro-Air man who will bolster the RAF vote I can seem Churchill asking for him as a loyal stooge.

Bracken and Butler come in as minions to their masters, Duff Cooper and Stanley continue rising up the ranks after solid work while at the bottom I couldn't resist Moore-Brabazon, I intend a strong British civil aviation industry and he was mostly right on the ideas even if the implementation wasn't that solid.

After this we look at the fall out from the Nat Libs buggering off and have a tentative poke at domestic politics. Boat-porn after that then some tanks. That at least is the plan.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXII: A Third Way.​

When Sir Johns Simons announced his grand gesture of leaving the government he managed to carry his party with him, both the MPs and constituency associations agreeing they had been marginalised and couldn't tolerate being blackmailed or their leader unceremoniously demoted. However it soon became apparent this unity did not extend to any clear idea of the party's next move, a problem only exacerbated by the emergence of something of an existential crisis amongst the membership. To understand this problem we must first note that the original rift in the Liberal Party over trade had, if not healed, then certainly scabbed over well enough to be worked around. Therefore, as the remaining differences in political platform were considered scalable, there was a strong body of opinion in the National Liberal party that a merger with the Liberals was not only possible but desirable. In pursuit of this tentative talks had been attempted several times, however they always broke down over the question of support for the National Government. It is therefore easy to see why many wondered what the point of being a National Liberal was if they were not in government, with the single biggest barrier to merger removed it was hoped a reunification could be engineered and with it the dream of a Liberal majority government. The key problem for the party was the significant portion who did not think that way, those who drew the opposite conclusion and decided they should abandon the pretence of being a different party and just merge with the Conservatives they had supported for years. Had this problem occurred in isolation it is likely the party would have split along such lines and the body politic moved on with a rump National Liberal Party withering to extinction as it was squeezed between the Conservatives and Liberals. However it did not occur in isolation, as Simons was leaving Downing Street the Labour party was involved in a most almighty fight over it's own future, a fight that provided the impetus for a most unexpected development.

The Labour row had been brewing since the election of the TUC's (Trade Union Congress) candidate, Arthur Greenwood, as Labour leader at the 1936 spring party conference. In the months that followed Greenwood and the TUC had worked tirelessly behind the scenes to reshape the party, increasing trade union influence at the cost of the other pillars of the party. As one unchangeable Labour Party rule was that 'Party conference is the supreme authority of the party" the first real fruits of their efforts blossomed at a specially arranged autumn conference in early October. The tone was set when the union block vote pushed through the solid union man George Dallas as the new chair of the National Executive Committee (NEC), Dallas being selected for his vehement anti-communism and 'reliable' views on nationalisation. The following week would see the conference presented with several large changes to the party programme (the specific policy proposals and ideas which formed the basis of any manifesto and to which the whole party was theoretically committed). The changes began gently enough, dropping the commitments to collective security and disarmament in favour of re-armament and stronger Imperial Defence. While this riled the still somewhat pacifist Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) the rest of the conference fell into line, recognising that a continuation of their old policies, especially such extreme ideas as trying to abolish national air forces, had been unfortunate mistakes. However as the week progressed and the emphasis shifted to economic areas this limited sense of agreement vanished, divides opening up between the "worker" and the "intellectual" wings of the party. The first issue was trade policy, from the TUC the matter was clear; Empire Free Trade and Imperial Preference had worked and helped to keep their membership employed and safe from foreign competition. This was in stark contrast to much of the PLP and the socialist societies who believed full free trade was the correct path, in the event however they were outvoted by the unions and the constituency associations who recognised it's populist appeal. The problems only worsened as the arguments continued over the latest interpretation of Clause IV, the clause of the Labour constitution that committed the party to "Common ownership of the means of production". After two Labour governments had entirely failed to deliver meaningful progress towards this objective, the TUC was keen for a nailed down and unequivocal commitment to nationalisation of the 'commanding heights' of the economy as a top priority, complete with either worker control or significant worker representation. This was opposed by both the economic moderates of the right and the constituency associations; the former believed in 'public ownership' where industries were run for the good of the country not just the workers, while the latter feared it would undo all the work of MacDonald's government in making Labour seem 'safe' and electable. However with the TUC, socialist societies and the remainder of the PLP united this too was pushed through on the final day of the conference.

The Labour MPs Herbert Morrison and Philip Baker. Entirely aptly their position in the photo mirrors their party allegiances, Morrison on the right while Baker is on the left. Both men were out of favour with the new leadership though for different reasons; the tireless disarmament campaigner Baker falling foul of the new policies on re-armament and arms exporters (his books such as "Hawkers of Death: The Private Manufacture and Trade in Arms" being thought particularly unsuitable) while Morrison was considered 'unsound' as his nationalisation of London's transport system into the London Passenger Transport Board had not ensured 'suitable' trade union and worker representation. While there was unarguably a degree of personality clashes in such exclusions the dominant theme was of a union clampdown, having gained control the TUC was determined not to 'waste' the next Labour government on MPs who it didn't completely trust to carry out the new policy platform as soon as possible.​

As the party digested the conference it appeared party unity would triumph over disagreements, the end of the Parliamentary recess certainly helped matters as it allowed the PLP to focus back onto Westminster and away from the bruising encounters of the conference. However hanging over the party remained the issue of the shadow cabinet elections, Labour having the unique practice of electing the membership of it's shadow cabinet, the party leader reduced to the role of assigning jobs from a selected 'pool' of MPs. With the election delayed first by the conference, then by overseas matters the date was finally set for the New Year and the PLP moved into full on electioneering move, 'going on manoeuvres' in Westminster speak, to push their own cause and get a shadow cabinet position. After the squeeze at conference the PLP hoped their acceptance of the TUCs programme would lead to a return to normal party politics and a few gestures of reconciliation, in both expectations they were to be sorely disappointed. As the rounds of voting and back room dealing progressed the key problem soon became apparent; the TUC's idea of compromise and a 'Shadow Cabinet reflective of the Labour Party' didn't match the visions the PLP and constituency parties had. For the union barons having the entirely non-union Clement Attlee as Deputy Party Leader was considered a major compromise, while letting the 'troublemaker' Aneurin Bevan in the shadow cabinet at all was their version of an olive branch (Bevan's 'crime' being to speak in favour of a British Popular Front of all left leaning parties, including the harder left parties so despised of the TUC). In the eyes of much of the PLP however it was the final straw, already marginalised on the NEC and with declining influence over party policy they now saw their career prospects reduced to hoping for favours from the Union barons. Strained too far the PLP moved to open revolt and the party splintered.

On the left of the party the pacifist grouping around Stafford Cirpps and George Strauss, still cowed after Cripps' disastrous leadership election run, saw the writing on the wall and decamped to the more left leaning Independent Labour Party to continue their dreams of disarmament, a Popular Front and 'true socialism'. Those on the right however faced a somewhat more complex problem, not only did they lack an existing party to jin but they were a less cohesive group to begin with. Indeed on purely policy grounds the differences were not insurmountable; disagreements over the exact definition of "Common Ownership" were not serious enough to cause a split in normal circumstances while the differences between 'fair trade' as opposed to 'free trade' were fairly academic when Labour was already committed to state control of prices and all imports and exports. The problem was therefore partly personality but mostly one of trust, men such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton were just not trusted to implement the new party platform as they were both on the right of the party and had been a part of MacDonald's 'failed' governments. The latter was particularly serious and, though a select few MacDonald men were let in as a gesture, many were not as the leadership pinned it's hopes on the new generation of candidates standing at the next election. Unsurprisingly the rejected MPs did not relish the prospect of a life on the backbenches as 'penance' for something many were actually proud of and began looking for alternatives. They soon realised that the only sensible options were acceptance of their fate and hoping for a change in the leaderships thinking or the radical option of leaving the party. While staying and hoping was unpalatable, especially to the ambitious, without the 'grass roots' support of volunteers and constituency associations leaving the party would mean all but certain defeat at the next election, and for much the group it was thought better to be a back bencher than a no-bencher. It was at this stage that Labour right's search for a better option overlapped with the ongoing Liberal reunification talks, a long and liquid meeting between the parties at the House of Common's bar prompting a most radical solution; a new party of the left.

Sir Archibald Sinclair, Liberal Party leader. Sinclair had continued the leftward drift of the Liberal party that had began under Asquith and Lloyd-George, preferring the legacy of 'social' liberalism and the retributive 'People's Budget' to the 'classic' liberalism of Gladstone. There was however a distinct lack of ideological drive or vision for the country, successive leaders had limited their horizons to holding the party together and trying to shore up their vote, limited goals that Sinclair's predecessor Herbert Samuel had failed at so badly he had lost his own seat and seen the party slip to fourth place in the 1935 election behind the National Liberals. When the idea of a new party was proposed therefore the problems would not be policy, though there were differences (Temperance 'reform' being one, introducing Prohibition to Britain was not considered a good idea by the Labour contingent) there was also much common ground on ideas such as free trade, massive state interventionism and nationalisation (though not the worker control favoured by the TUC) and punitive redistributive taxes. One distinct Liberal policy that did interest the Labour group was electoral reform, their conversion to the policy coinciding with their discovery of the advantages proportional representation gave to smaller parties.​

The new grouping was inevitably based on the Liberals, the local Liberal Associations were the only organisation that could form the basis of the vital constituency machinery and they initially had more MPs, though as notional National Liberals returned to the Conservative Party and wavering Labour members defected as the party gained momentum that advantage became slenderer. The knotty question of Leadership threatened to derail the entire project; after tense negotiations the Labour contingent agreed to settle for a Liberal leader provided they could propose one of their own as an influential deputy leader, a vital concession but one that merely highlighted Liberal divisions. This should have been a simple problem, the National Liberal leader John Simons indicated he had no intention of joining the new 'leftist' party and indeed was trying to turn his fellow party members against it, thus the Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair should have been the only choice. However Sinclair was not an impressive character, having been selected as Liberal leader almost by default he had failed to tackle the large hole where a vision for the country should have been while his main leadership idea (opposition to continental dictatorships) had been thoroughly hijacked by the other parties with his party gaining almost none of the credit. Worse still he had a personal manner to rival that of the thoroughly dislikeable John Simons, hardly an ideal qualification for a man who had to weld several disparate groups into a cohesive party. The choice therefore fell to the National Liberal deputy leader Ernest Brown, his key qualifications being the cabinet experience deemed vital for the party to be taken seriously and a broad base of support, quite aside from the remaining National Liberals he was well thought of in Labour circles for his efforts assisting distribution workers to form trade unions and his work on wage control and compulsory labour arbitration. That just left the question of a name, while many favoured keeping a 'Liberal' based name that was a double edged sword, while the tag of 'Liberal' still carried both cachet and votes it was a confused label; it was not uncommon for pure Conservative candidates to claim to be 'National Liberals' to boost their vote, worse the previous election had seen some constituencies producing ballots containing the options Liberal, Liberal National, National Liberal and Independent Liberal and thoroughly confusing the voters. The decisive requirement though was the need to reflect the permanent leftward shift of the party, a vital condition of the Labour contingent and recognised as a necessary step to end the Liberal confusion. In stark contrast to the earlier wrangling the naming debate was mercifully brief, the new leadership rapidly settling on the somewhat unwieldy choice of Liberal Social Democrats or LSD.


Notes:
Another beast of an update but what can I say? How often do you get to start a new party named LSD? Should be fun if they survive till the 1960s!

Was this likely? Well the TUC never had much faith in it's MPs, McDonald's two governments weren't particularly effective or indeed very socialist so the strains were already present. The reason given by McDonald's apologists was such timidity was needed for the party to 'become respectable', an argument that only works if the party does indeed make progress. Now TTL the TUC isn't seeing that progress, the 1935 election didn't go well (OTL they gained 100 seats, TTL barely 50) and they blame the MPs for being too pacifist and not being bold enough enough and they're probably right on both, certainly the PLP was pacifist and wasn't very bold on anything till after the war was well under way. Therefore I can see the TUC saying going for a clear out, what's the point in compromising your beliefs for 'electability' if you're not even getting elected?

The new party, now that is less clear. Cripps and Co. heading off for the far left is easy enough, he was thrown out OTL for wanting a popular front and was an avowed Marxist so would never get on with the anti-communist TUC. The Liberal-Nat Liberal merger was apparently regularly on the cards but kept stumbling over the 'support the national government' blocker, presumably there was some fudge on trade policy and the rest of the Liberal platform was so vague no-one noticed the huge policy chasms elsewhere. So I can see it happening, but with a great deal of Nat Lib MPs jumping ship and formally joining the Tories as they don't like the new leftward lean of the new party.

The big question though is would the Labour right join? Morrison was not popular with the unions and was massively ambitious so he would certainly do something, while Dalton was on the right of the party (look at his protégés Gaitskell and Crosland) and was not above scheming or madcap ideas. So not impossible or indeed even that unlikely I'd say. For those who charge me with another convenient event I say two things; 1. Wait and see and 2. If I was doing convenient change I'd have a proper classical liberal party come back espousing economic liberalism and personal freedoms and then install them for 50 years of constant rule ala the LDP in Japan.

Anyway for those bored of politics and such you will be relieved to hear I have abandoned plans for making welding interesting and will go straight to the boat porn in the next update.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXIII: A Questionable Race.​

The late-1930s saw the culmination of a low level building competition that the popular press had, with typical alliterative subtlety, a battlecruiser building battle. Quite aside from the minor detail that many of the ideas and design produced at the time never made it to the docks, the sobriquet did hinge on a definition of 'battlecruiser' that encompassed everything between a treaty heavy cruiser and a full blown balanced battleship. In fairness however the latter was not an unreasonable move for the layman, there were more classifications than actual ships; large cruisers, cruiser killers, pocket battleships, battlecruiser, light battleships, light fast battleships, the permutations were endless. The problem of designation was not helped by the production of plans and schemes by all the major naval powers and several not so major. Typical of the problem was the Soviet Project 25, with three triple 305mm (12") guns and only moderate armour it was far more powerful than a Treaty heavy cruiser but no match for a proper modern battleship such as the Royal Navy's King George V. Naturally the Soviets referred to the design as a battleship for reasons of prestige, but in reality it fell into one (or possibly several) of the related categories outlined previously. In the case of Project 25 the saving grace was that it was never built, Stalin soon demanding a larger and far more powerful design be produced so that particular problem never arose.

Sadly this 'solution' was not so easily applied to the major powers, the United States Navy's championed the Alaska class 'large cruiser' while the Imperial Japanese Navy was outlining a 'super-A-class' cruisers to fit in above their heavy cruisers but beneath the battleships. The Alaska was a somewhat desperate bid to modernise the USN fleet on the cheap, as the Navy correctly doubted a large battleship (or even a small one) would be approved the 'large cruiser' designation was an attempt to sneak extra tonnage into service without attracting attention. Sadly a combination of naval disinterest from the new President and Congress, domestic priorities and the ever present budget crisis killed the idea. Conversely the IJN's problems were not financial but strategic; there was no clear idea on what vessels would be needed and how they should be employed. With the battle over Strike North and Strike South still raging, not to mention the arguments over fleet carrier vs 'super battleship', the future fleet designs were officially on hold. Despite this work on the new design, dubbed Design B-65, continued though strictly 'off the books', the decisive battle faction illicitly diverting funding to their pet project. The final programme worthy of note was the Dutch Project 1047 and was perhaps the most interesting. Though the design was still some way from finalisation and would go through several more evolutions, it deserves a mention as the one of the few battlecruiser projects to emerge from outside the established major naval powers.

The Japanese B-65 project was intended to replace the venerable Kongō class battlecruisers in the IJN's Yasen Butai, the Night Battle Force. Tasked with launching the first attack on the enemy fleet, the B-65s were designed to break through the outer screen with their powerful 12" guns and open a gap for destroyers and lighter cruisers to launch torpedo attacks on the enemy battleships. The main Japanese battleline would then destroy the weakened enemy fleet the next day with the B-65s supporting as needed. The 'enemy' was traditionally assumed to be the USN's Pacific Fleet but the growing strength of the Royal Navy's Eastern Fleet increasingly made it a target as well. Though the surface faction could find funds for the design work, to get construction approved they would have to face down the carrier advocates who had entirely different ideas about how to counter an enemy fleet.​

For now though let us concern ourselves with the those vessels that were either in service or on the slipway and that, for different reasons, dominated naval thinking and planning. Despite being designed at similar times and having similar tonnages (around 30-32,000 tonnes standard) these ships were radically different and represented the different priorities, strategies and abilities of their respective nations. Before we consider these vessels in detail it is worth examining the class that was the first shot in the 'building battle'; the unquestionably unique Deutschland class. The last, indeed only, great hurrah of the pre-Nazi Reichsmarine they are generally known as innovative ships which, while true, misses their real impact as political vessels. While all warships are political statements to some degree the Deutschland's were an extreme example, any strategic or military role was almost incidental to their intended political purpose. The design requirements from the politicians, such as they were, indicated the ship had to be powerfully armed but still treaty compliant, trivial details such as who she was intended to fight and how were not even mentioned. To deal with this the then Commander in Chief of the Reichsmarine, Admiral Hans Zenker, fell back on the then default Weimar Republic assumption of any future war being against an alliance of France and Poland, with Britain and the US being unfriendly but formally neutral. Under this scenario the Reicshmarine's role would be to control the Baltic and the German coast, doing this would cut Franco-Polish naval supply lines and prevent any French amphibious landings. While surface raiding was discussed it is interesting to note that it was not considered a top priority, with the Atlantic trade dominated by neutral shipping (the French merchant marine, never particularly large in any event, was concentrated in the Mediterranean) there were felt to be few legitimate targets but a great risk of getting Britain or the United States involved. This focus on Baltic and coastal operations to the detriment of 'blue water' operations would have serious design consequences that would hinder the class when they were later re-tasked to convoy raiding.

The basis of the design were the treaty limits, primarily the official tonnage limit of 10,000 and the unofficial, but very real, restriction to 11 inch main armament. These restrictions were intended to limit Germany to coastal defence ships similar to the pre-war, pre-dreadnought Brandenburg class, vessels sufficient to match a second tier navies such as Sweden but not challenge a Great Power. Unwilling to produce a crippled battleship Zenker determined instead to produce a superlative heavy cruiser, directing the design bureau, the Marineamt (MA), to start work on the design. Unfortunately the late 1920s MA was not the same impressive organisation it had been in the Tirpitz era; it's a strongly technical ethos where promotion was by skill and ability had been lost in successive re-organisation and budget cuts. In an attempt to find homes for unwanted fleet officers they had been shunted into high positions in the MA to avoid retiring them, consequently these officers had imposed a more military approach to design and promotion, one which prized time served and discipline over technical experience. The effect was that the Tirpitz dictum of producing designs superior to the direct counter-part was lost, as was the superlative under-standing of the requirements for strength, stability and sea-keeping. On the other hand losing the dead hand of Tirpitz was not all bad, freed from the restrictive 'best practices' of their predecessors the MA was able to consider options that would never have been contemplated previously, though in fairness to their predecessors some of the ideas weren't contemplated for the very good reasons they were just bad ideas.

The 'K' class light cruiser was typical of the new MA, technically innovative and a triumph of new technology but with an unclear military purpose and several crippling flaws where technology and innovation had not lived up to their promises. While attracting attention for having two non-centred turrets aft and only one forward, to support a dubious 'hit and run' scouting doctrine, it was her innovative but fatally flawed construction that was their main claim to fame. The first substantially electrically welded warships the ships suffered serious structural issues, when Admiral Raeder dispatched the Karlsruhe an ambitious round the world cruise in 1934 the ship was forced into conducting an embarrassingly public extended repair in San Diego when her hull plating began to fail.​

The Deutschland design started life as an un-scaled 'K' class cruiser, as both designs faced tonnage limits and had similar missions (not to mention the lack of technical or political direction for the MA) this was a logical place to start. The weight saving triple turrets were retained, though not the less than successful turret positioning, as was the wide-spread use of welding in the hull which saved considerable tonnage, an unfortunate decision. Another fateful choice was to dispense with the unusual dual propulsion system of the 'K's and go with diesel engines alone. While removing the weight of the steam turbine and dual fuel system saved a large amount of tonnage the cost was high; almost a 4knot drop in top speed even after the diesel plant had been considerably enlarged. These decisions were consequences of the assumed mission; operating in the Baltic and southern North Sea high speed and rough sea stability were not key requirements, unlike the requirement to at least be close to the tonnage limit.

Appropriately for such political ships their first 'kill' was a political one; when the Grand Coalition of Chancellor Herman Muller collapsed in 1930 one of the sticking points in the budget was the continued procurement of the class, the differing wings arguing over the relative merits of social spending vs finishing the Deutschland and laying down the Admiral Scheer, the failure to agree forced Muller from office and propelled Heinrich Brüning to the Chancellor's office, starting the chain of events that would eventually propel Hitler to power. Compared to the Reichsmarine the Nazi's Kriegsmarine had far more ambition but also a better realisation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Deutschlands. Despite their formidable and well armoured turrets the rest of the ships armour was poor, thinner than a comparable 'treaty' heavy cruiser while by the mid-1930s the strength and stability issues with the welded hull had become well known. Quite simply the much vaunted 'roll damping' tanks had not worked as planned and this, combined with a very wet forward, made the Deutschlands marginal fighting vessel in any kind of rough weather. More seriously the bold claim 'He can outrun what he cannot fight', which had never actually been true for the Royal Navy. had finally been completely undermined by the French Navy launching the Dunkerques, considerably reducing any lingering deterrent value the vessels had.

As their deterrent value declined the class began their drift towards the convoy raiding role that had been dismissed so early in their design. The start of this movement had been the retirement of Admiral Zenker and his replacement with the more cerebral Admiral Raeder who was keener on convoy warfare by all means, including surface raiders. From this position he saw in the heavy guns and (unintentional) vast range of the diesel engined vessels great potential. Quite aside from any value from the sunk convoys such heavily armed ships would force any enemy to exert considerable efforts to strong convoy escorts and powerful escorts, considerably reducing the strength of the fleet that could be kept to counter the battlefleet he hoped Plan Z would provide. It as by this circuitous route that the Deutschlands finally found the strategic role that many assume she was always built to perform. Her new mission was flagged to the world in early 1935 when the Deutschland herself made a long distance cruise to Brazil and back without supporting vessels, covering over 12,000nm at 16knots without refuelling in a feat that even the long legged USN cruisers would struggle to match. While this triumph was, naturally, heavily publicised in truth the cruise had been less than successful, when the ship returned to Germany serious structural issues were found in the hull and particularly the motor rooms as the welded joints struggled to cope with the rough seas and vibration from the engines. As a consequence the ships would keep to the Baltic and North Sea, only venturing out when the Spanish Civil War errupted and her presence was required in the Bay of Biscay, an ominous sign for a vessel expected to operate in the North Atlantic for extended periods when war broke.

In truth though by the mid-1930s the Deutschlands were somewhat out-dated, though her extended cruise may have garnered some public attention the focus of the professionals was on the ships that had followed her, beginning with the direct French reaction, the Dunkerques.

Notes:
Random facts on this update;
The Project 25 was an entirely genuine Soviet battleship design from 1936/7 and was indeed rapidly dumped by Stalin as not big enough. The battleship design eventually grew into the vast 65,000t Sovietsky Soyuz while Project 25 became a mere battlecruiser the Kronshtadt, neither of which were finished (though building started on four Sovietskys for but a mere 1/3rd of the entire defence budget.) TTL Stalin still Project 25 is too small and Soviet industry still isn't good enough for the job, however Stalin may be reconsidering his technical partners, perhaps after fighting side by side in Spain the French may loan him a few designs as they almost did OTL.

The Dutch 1047s, OTL they were attempted Scharnhorst copies which never even made it to the final designs stage before it was too late due to the Recover then Rearm approach of the government. TTL the Dutch government is considering the 'Rearm to Recover' idea, not to mention the generally more tense atmosphere in Europe, so are pushing ahead with the design work. The big question remains though how does the RN Eastern Fleet affect the Dutch East Indies, do the Dutch need such vessels or can they risk relying on perfidious Albion?

The Alaska, well the design process started early 1930s for a ship to counter the Deutschlands, TTL the USN just brought it forward abit as they really want some new tonnage but no there's no hope of anything much larger than a 'cruiser' (Think the RN's sleight of hand with through-deck cruisers to get aircraft carriers). More seriously they do need something with a bit of speed as the battleline remains un-modified Standards so badly decayed they aren't even capable of 21knots any more.

The Deutschlands, I'm perhaps being a bit harsh on them but in hindsight they really weren't very good, far too fragile both in armour and hull and something of a betrayal of pre-WW1 German ship building. Still they were pushing technology to the limits and the design offices were in serious trouble so I suppose they were always going to have some problems.

The fall of Herman Muller, well he did fall at that time, it was due to budget arguments and there was a big gap between Deutschland and Admiral Scheer so it seemed logical to me those facts could have been connected.

The long distance cruises and subsequent trouble, all historical and part of a general trend for Hitler to send the fleet off around the world and show off. What he mainly succeed in doing was proving German welding technology wasn't up to having a completely welded hull, sadly the Reichsmarine flatly refused to learn that lesson and kept thinking 'next time we'll weld properly and it will work'. It didn't.

Naval buffs may ask, but where are the Admiral Hippers? Answer they were delayed when the Anglo-German Naval Treaty was aborted back in 1935 then got pushed to the bottom of the pile as the Germans madly pushed the Scharnhorsts forward. They may yet emerge or they may end up as a 'What if' of the Kriegsmarine, depends on how hot the naval race gets.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXIV: Same Question, Three Answers.​

We begin in France with the Dunkerques which were, in many ways, the complete opposite of the vessels that prompted their construction the Deutschlands. Where the German ships were overblown heavy cruisers looking for a role the French vessels were cut-down battleships designed for one purpose; countering a surface raider. Of all the vessels discussed in this chapter they were probably the most balanced, in the sense of having fire-power in proportion to their armour, and was the only ship to be blessed with experienced designers who had time to work, though this was not a uniformly good thing. In the finest French traditions the design has focused on the mission, opposing the German Panzerschiffes, to the detriment of a more rounded capability (this was a reflection of French naval thinking that saw combat as a distraction from the mission, in contrast to for instance the Royal Navy which saw engaging the enemy fleet as a 'mission' in and of itself.) A direct result of this thinking was the most striking feature of the design, the heavy all forward main main armament. Concentrated in two quadruple turrets they represented the culmination of a decades long obsession by the French Naval Staff. The pre-Great War Lyon and Normandie designs had both featured quad turrets and after their cancellation this feature had become an article of faith in Marine Nationale circles, to the point that no other turret configuration was ever seriously considered. This was somewhat out of character with the rest of the design which was bedevilled by that other great French tradition, the promotion of theory over experience.

To look at the positive 'theory' did have bequeath the Dunkerques with several good features; welding was widely used and an all or nothing armour scheme was adopted, both of these significant, but successful, risks for a nation that had not built anything larger than a heavy cruiser for over two decades. The downsides however were far more numerous due to the unfortunate tendency of ideas that worked perfectly on paper to not live up to their promise in practice, in particular the much lusted for quad turrets never lived up to their expectations. Despite being more of a dual-twin that a true quad turret the guns were far too close together and consequently had severe dispersion problems, the brand new RPC (Remote Power Control) system never worked properly being slow, unreliable and inaccurate and due to lack of space in the turret and a poor shell supply system the hoped for rate of fire was also never met. Quite aside from theses serious technical problems the quad turret arrangement meant half of the ships fire-power could be knocked out with a single shot, a risk the French Naval Staff never truly took seriously until it was too late to do much about it. Such problems abounded throughout the ships as new systems that offered advantages on paper failed to translate into practical success. Despite such problems the good mostly outweighed the bad and their is no question they were well suited to their design role; engaging a fleeing Panzerschiff at long range in good to reasonable weather. However if forced to operate outside of that ideal window the balance shifted as the advantages fell away and the design flaws came to the fore. The trick for the Marine Nationale would to be ensure they were always able to control the terms of any engagement, an impossibly demanding requirement even for a far larger navy let alone the somewhat stunned French fleet.

Moving onwards chronologically, at least in terms of completion, we come to the Scharnhorst class. To describe their design history as torturous would be a considerable under-statement and, while the full contortions of the design are far too lengthy to describe here in detail, a brief summary will help understand the problems facing her designers and builders. Originally intended to be two additional Deutschlands the appearance of the Dunkerque prompted a redesign, changing the diesels for an experimental high pressure steam plant and improving the armour. Construction was started (as Panzerschiffs D and E) but stopped scant months later and the keel broken up as yet another redesign was started, this one in response to the Strasbourg and aimed at adding a third turret and lengthening the gun to increase fire-power. Though what emerged was the 'final' effort the design was still not fixed, it continued to evolve as the class was laid down and problems emerged. Indeed such was the drift many have split the class into two sub-classes, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in one and the Von der Tann and Moltke in the other. However several key characteristics remained the same across all four vessels; they were all poor sea boats with wet forwards and low free boards, all had an obsolete 'complete' multi-layered armour system and poor torpedo protection and crucially they all retained the same 11.1" main guns.

KMS Scharnhorst undergoing fit out. It was only at this late stage that several significant problems were discovered; the main armoured deck was below water level, almost completely negating the 'armoured raft' concept, the boilers had proved vulnerable to the vibrations of installation casting serious doubt over their response to incoming shell fire and a constant stream of design improvements and additions was threatening to overwhelm an already over-loaded hull. In response the following ships were bulged, their beam increased considerably to improve stability and sea keeping, the designers also scaled back their ambitions for the high pressure engines and used lower pressure, thicker walled boilers. Unfortunately all this had a price, the higher drag and lower power dropped the top speed considerably, the final vessel KMS Moltke barely being capable of 30knots but at least she was reliably capable of such speeds. Sadly the stream of changes had not stopped and extra deck equipment, particularly that Kriegsmarine obsession fire control systems, kept arriving during commissioning and the hoped for sea keeping and stability improvements never materialised.​

In the interests of balance we should attempt to look for positives, areas were the design excelled or at least achieved the average. The two areas that stand out are the guns and the armour, though far from perfect both areas were strengths of the design if judged by their own standards. The calibre of the main battery had been limited by Hitler himself, an entirely political decision intended to allay British fears about a naval arms race and to limit any damage to Anglo-German relations. Despite the unimpressive calibre the weapons themselves were well designed, maximising muzzle velocity to get the longest range and best belt armour penetration out a relatively light projectile. More importantly for their designed role the turrets were actually capable of their intended rate of fire, reaching a sustained 3.5 rounds a minute, double what the Dunkerques turrets could hope to practically achieve and sustain. Turning to the armour the quite colossal size of the main belt was quite literally a key strength of the design, the side protection was by far the strongest of any comparable ship and one of the main reasons the Kriegsmarine felt justified in classifying the vessel as a battleship not a battlecruiser.

On balance therefore the Scharnhorsts must be considered a success if measured on their own terms, though it must also be noted that their ideal 'window' of operations was even tighter than that of the Dunkerques. In a mid-ranged engagement in very good weather they would be formidable opponents, especially against their intended French rivals, provided of course the French were unlucky or foolish enough to engage at such a distance and not attempt to open up the range. Forced to engage at longer distances their vast belt would be far less important while their thin deck armour would leave them vulnerable to plunging fire, worse the poor deck penetration of the 11.1" guns would leave them less able to strike back, a situation made all the worse by the Dunkerques being optimised for such long ranged engagements. It hardly needs saying that in bad weather, anything above a Sea State 4 in fact, the ships were in at least as much danger from the sea as from any potential enemy, an unfortunate limitation given bad weather provided the best opportunity to control the range of any engagement. However we can conclude our look at the Scharnhorsts by noting the one area where the designers achieved an outstanding success; not intimidating the British, the 'light' main armament convincing the Royal Navy to deem the vessels as battlecruisers due to a lack of fire-power. The exact value of this political 'success' is questionable, while the Admiralty and Government were not particularly intimidated by the laying down of the Scharnhorsts the British Press still questioned why Germany needed a navy at all, raising the old issue of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the controversial 'Baltic Dominance' clause. As one might expect this did not do a great deal for Anglo-German relations which, due to Spain, remained formally cordial but with Germanic enthusiasm for a grand alliance even less welcome than before in Whitehall.

At last we come to the Royal Navy's late entrant in the battlecruiser race the Swiftsure class. Given the entirely unenviable task of following one of the most famous warships afloat, HMS Hood, they attracted a great deal of domestic attention and more than their fair share of foreign interest. A somewhat controversial design the ships are considered by many as one of the finest examples of 'fighting the last war' and, unfortunately for those who like their adages simple and absolute, were a successful design in spite (or perhaps because) of that. While we can leave the debate over the difference between learning lessons from a conflict and planning to re-fight it to others the important point to take away is that the design of the Swiftsures was heavily influenced by the Abyssinian War experience and expectations that future battlecruiser operations would be similar. This was not an unreasonable position to take, the Royal Navy's battlecruisers of Force H had spent the war successfully hunting Italian heavy cruisers squadrons and on shore bombardment, leaving the battleships to tackle the enemy fleet and the heavy cruisers to convoy raid. Looking at the Royal Navy's expected foes the German surface raiders were too fast for a battleship but a tough nut for a treaty cruiser while the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed a formidable force of cruisers well in excess of Treaty limits. Both these missions seemed tailor made for a battlecruiser squadron in the style of Force H so, given that starting point, studying the performance of already successful designs was unquestionably a wise move. The criticism comes over the degree of specialisation, just as the Scharnhorsts and Dunkerques have been marked down for their window of operations so must the Swiftsure be criticised for lacking flexibility, not tactically but strategically.

HMS Swiftsure working up prior to deployment with the Home Fleet. A compact and somewhat functional design she lacked the handsome lines of HMS Hood, in particular the post-war standard 'block' type forward superstructure was contrasted badly with that of her admired predecessor. It is therefore somewhat amusing to note that the under pressure Royal Corps of Naval Constructors had taken key elements of the design from the 'large repair' plans prepared for Hood. This shot shows the main features of the design; the four twin turrets using the same 15"/45 guns as in the King George Vs, the twin large funnels needed for her 32knt top speed and the complete lack of any aviation facilities. Less obvious is the 'all or nothing' armour scheme which, though not thick enough to make her a balanced design (in the sense of being armoured to resist her own firepower) was more than sufficient against her intended foes at medium to long ranges. Finally the choice in secondary armament should be noted, instead of the large 5.25"/50 guns used on the King George V far lighter twin 4"/45s were selected, a significant change from normal Royal Navy thinking.​

The key point about the Swiftsures were their dependence on operating alongside a carrier, though in stark contrast to modern thinking the carrier was seen as the escort and the battlecruiser the main unit. The theory ran that the carrier's aircraft would perform the classic Fleet Air Arm mission, 'Find, Fix and Strike', then the battlecruisers would move in for the kill and carry out the actual sinking. The plan was very much in line with the current Admiralty thinking that still saw big guns as the primary weapon and was only slowly getting to grips with the potential of naval aviation to do more than scout and harass an enemy. The most visible impact of this thinking on the Swiftsures was the lack of any float planes or supporting equipment (catapult, crane, hangars, etc), making them utterly dependent on an escorting carrier for everything from scouting to spotting fall of short. The other key change was a general thinning out of the secondary armament, dedicated as the design was to hunting enemy raiders and cruisers little need was seen for heavy anti-ship secondaries, destroyers were thought to lack the legs for surface raiding. More importantly with space and tonnage at a premium something had to be sacrificed and the torpedo tubes and large 5.25" guns were an easy target, in their place lighter twin 4" weapons with a lighter shell but higher rate of fire, guns more suited to anti-aircraft work than rapidly sinking an attacking destroyer.

If we hold the Swiftsures to the same standard applied to their French and German rivals they must stand equally condemned of being over focused, good ships on their own terms but flawed out of that comfort zone. However the Royal Navy was the world's largest and most powerful navy while, to be brutal, the Kriegsmarine and the Marine Nationale weren't, it is therefore of somewhat dubious value to use the same standards for them all. The Dunkerque and Scharnhorst would serve their nations as flagships, the prides of their respective fleets and the biggest stick in their government's naval arsenal. Conversely the sheer size of the Royal Navy meant the Swiftsures would not be burdened with such expectations; the far more potent King George Vs would serve as the big sticks while the glamorous 'Mighty Hood' would remain pride of the fleet for as long as she remained in service. Quite simply the Royal Navy could afford for the Swiftsure to be a specialised design as they had other options while the Dunkerque and Scharnhorst classes they were the only large, modern, capital ships in their respective fleets and so had to be 'all rounders', making their lack of flexibility far more of a damning failure.

--
Notes;
First a message to the loyal tanker hordes; your salvation is now one update closer. Only the Fleet Air Arm to go.

Onto the ships, France gets the D&S as per OTL, the war was too late too change the upgrades on the Strasbourg even if they were in response to the threat of now non-existent Italian ships. On balance they probably would have been good ships if the quad turrets had actually worked properly, though as nobody ever got their quads to work as hoped that was never really on the cards.

German gets four Scharnhorsts, yes four. But that's because they also get no Bismark (yet...?); if your trying to keep Britain sweet BCs are probably OK but a battleship is right out, particularly with no AGNA to justify it. I consider the ships themselves to be, as you may have guessed, terrible. Tough buggers with a thick belt and long ranged guns certainly, but they were the only redeeming feature in a design otherwise littered with problems. Even then the guns were permanently wet and on occasion flooded and forced out of action. The last in line Von Der Tanns though could have been good ships, slower but stronger and with reliable engines, however I think the German obsession with loading a ship with every bit of kit going would probably end up ruining them in the end.

Finally the Swiftsures, named as I just like the word and it's a good capital ship name. Considerably better armed and armoured than a non-modernised QE she still only rates a battlecruiser as the KGVs are even stronger. One on one with any of the the others she has the edge in firepower, the thinnest belt armour but wins on deck armour (the 'plunging fire' obsession of Keyes). All else being equal I think she wins a long ranged engagement but would lose a short range fight, particularly against the Scharnhorst in good weather. But then in good weather she'd never fight that close so that's hardly a critical problem. Have I been too kind to them? Perhaps but I think actually having fought someone gives a massive advantage to the designers as does not having to push the envelope. E.g. the twin turrets may be out dated and somewhat wasteful of tonnage compared to a quad, but you can be damn sure they'll be reliable and accurate. And isn't that more important?

More over the point here is; the RN still doesn't trust carriers and doesn't want to 'waste' BBs escorting them. As I'm not going for CVLs this will probably end badly for the battlefleet but I think they're just too gamey with their instant range closing. If someone can give me a good reason to go for it I will, but at the moment I can't justify it.

Game effects;
Two Dunkerques in the French queue
Four Scharnhorsts for Germany
And a number of Swiftsures for the RN, more detail come the next budget update in (some number) time. There is a reason for this lack of detail I assure you.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXV: Jacks of Trades.​

For the men of the Fleet Air Arm the New Year brought the prospect of a budgetary wrangle with the Treasury, made all the more tricky as it would have to be contested indirectly via an Admiralty and Navy Board who had their own views on the matter and moreover were engaged in their own negotiations over the 1937 Navy Estimate as a whole. There were essentially two views on the state of the FAA, one held by the Treasury and one by the FAA themselves, and while they agreed on the major points they drew entirely different conclusions, hence the wrangling. The Treasury view was that the Fleet Air Arm had done really rather well the previous year, receiving not one but two new aircraft types rushed into squadron service with yet another on the way. Quite aside from this were the sums lavished on setting up an independent FAA support system separate from the RAF; training schools, engineering facilities and the myriad other shore based establishments needed to support a modern air force. The Treasury therefore believed that, as the FAA would soon have a fleet of new modern aircraft and equally new infrastructure to support them, funding could be cut back as the existing spending programmes ended. Naturally the FAA disagreed vehemently with this interpretation, while they conceded they had new aircraft they argued the Gloster Gladiator and Fairey Swordfish could in no way be considered modern, certainly not in comparison to the designs the RAF was putting into service. The 'yet another' type however was a different matter, while the Blackburn Skua was certainly a more 'modern' design than the biplanes just mentioned the internal arguments it generated in the FAA amply demonstrated that while the Naval Air Staff were clear what they didn't want they were far less clear on what they actually did want.

To understand the Skua we need to look at it's predecessors, in particular the aircraft it was intended to replace in FAA service the Hawker Nimrod and the Hawker Osprey. These two venerable aircraft were navalised version of the once ubiquitous Fury fighter and Hart bomber, the RAF following their grand tradition of denying the FAA purpose built carrier aircraft wherever possible. The single seat Nimrod was intended as a pure fighter while the two seater Osprey was initially used in the spotter/reconnaissance, however it soon became apparent that the Osprey was by far the more useful aircraft, being only fractionally slower than the Nimrod but possessing a longer range and capable in multiple roles (fighter, bomber, reconnaissance and spotter). While the attraction of the Osprey to pilots and Air Operations Officers was obvious (a bomber or reconnaissance aircraft that could defend itself almost as well as a fighter was clearly quite a prize) the Admirals had their own reasons for appreciating multi-role aircraft; worried about aircraft capacity on the smaller carriers and the ever present threat of Treasury (or Air Staff) cuts a multi-role design was thought to allow more punch for the same hangar space and more importantly the same money. The problem was that the change to single wing aircraft and the general development of aeronautic and engine technology left that view badly out of date and the FAA, deliberately denied connection with aircraft design and development by the RAF, was completely unaware of such changes. It is therefore not surprising that when given the chance to develop their own specification the FAA went for a multi-role design, an approach the Air Staff tacitly approved of as a chance to reduce the number of aircraft the FAA 'stole' from the RAF.

A Fleet Air Arm Hawker Osprey flying over HMS Eagle. The Osprey's flexibility attracted considerable foreign interest which Hawker were able to translate into moderate sales success. The float-plane version had a particularly varied career, serving in environments from the Indian Ocean on board Portuguese colonial guard ships to the frozen north as the air wing on the Swedish seaplane cruiser Gotland. The conventional wheeled version also gained sales abroad with Spain taking out a licence for production of the 'Spanish Osprey', a modified version with a Hispano-Suiza engine in place of the Rolls-Royce Kestrel. ​

The specification for the Skua, O.27/34, was drawn up, as the name suggests, in 1934, a time when the RAF was somewhat interested in dive bombing; specification P.4/34 (which would produce the Fairey Battle and Hawker Henley light bomber prototypes) was issued at around the same time. More significantly it was during one of the periodic defence scares over Japan, the proclamation of the 'Great Empire of Manchuria' (or the illegal puppet state of Manchukuo as the rest of the world more accurately called it) had been accompanied by a string of bellicose announcements from the Japanese about their 'sphere of influence' in China and the East in general. To counter the concerns of both Houses of Parliament and the press the government responded with a modest increase in defence spending; Singapore's progression from 'merely' a vast naval base into a legendary fortress was accelerated, the Royal Navy began the design of the 'T' class submarine for Pacific service and the Fleet Air Arm began work on O.27/34. Having only received funding on the basis of the threat from Japan the FAA was obliged to justify it's design on those terms, thus the official purpose of the design was sinking enemy (Japanese) aircraft carriers. At first sight this is somewhat out of character for the Admiralty, certainly it seems a quite amazing piece of foresight to predict the need for an aircraft dedicated to sinking carriers, however this would be a somewhat erroneous conclusion to draw for two reasons. Firstly, as we will see many times when looking at defence procurement, the official mission is primarily a political statement that doesn't always correlate with what the services actually intend to use the equipment for. Secondly the mission was in fact a good fit with Royal Navy doctrine of the time, with carriers being only support vessels the Japanese were expected to keep them well clear of any battle fleet and it would be tricky to force such swift vessels into gunnery combat. The logical conclusion for such thinking was the need for aircraft to strike at the carriers that couldn't be brought to a decisive battle and that could be a threat unless hunted down and sunk.

The Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier Kaga prior to her 1934 refit. The Japanese expansion of their carrier force had accelerated considerably during the early 1930s, aside from the refit to Kaga the light carrier Ryujo had been commissioned the previous year while the purpose designed fast fleet carrier Soryu would be be laid down before the end of 1934. Traditionally the Royal Navy had assigned such targets to submarines and the torpedo bombers of the Fleet Air Arm, however there were concerns that the proliferation of bulges and bulkheads could render torpedoes less effective weapons against warships. The Admiralty responded with a twin pronged approach, a new generation of heavier and faster 'burner-cycle' torpedoes to overpower the new protection and the FAA's dive bomber as a backup should that fail.​

The specification was, the Admiralty believed, decidedly ambitious calling for an all-metal monoplane with enclosed cockpit and retractable under-carriage, all feature entirely new to the FAA. In keeping with standard naval practice the engine had to be radial and in line with RAF thinking on self defence for bombers a rear gun was specified with attendant TAG (Telegraphist Air-Gunner) to man it. It was at this point that things began to go wrong for the design as a heavy (for the time) forward armament of four .303 machine guns was also specified, twice as many as the then front-line Hawker Nimrod fighter carried. While not a problem per se this requirement loaded unrealistic expectations of fighter-esque performance onto the design that it would never be able to meet. The problems continued with the TAG who was given precious little to justify the Telegraphist part of his title; no radio was specified, communication back to the carrier was to be by morse code and communication to another Skua was by hand signals or Aldis-lamp, hardly ideal for a supposedly modern bomber let along a fighter. On the dive bombing front a load of 500lb was specified, identical to that in the RAF's light bomber specification and more than enough to penetrate an un-armoured carrier deck, though even the AP version would scarcely dent a well protected cruiser. Despatched to the manufacturers for tender only the Blackburn design met with enough approval to be put forward to prototype, the other tenderers dropping out or producing design that weren't consider 'fighter' enough, a reaction that clearly should have started ringing alarms bells but unfortunately didn't. Indeed so much faith was shown in the Blackburn design that a large order was almost placed in early 1936, only the diversion of funds into emergency programmes for the Sea Gladiator and Swordfish stopped the order going ahead.

Thus it was at the start of 1937 that Blackburn finally unveiled the Skua to a world that had changed considerably since pencil was first put to paper for the design. As the first prototype was put through it's paces it became apparent quite how much the world had moved on, quite simply the Skua was abysmally slow. With a top speed of barely 225mph it was outpaced not only by the RAF's light bombers but even by the biplane Sea Gladiator which could beat 250mph. Compared to the Spitfire and Hurricane, which also had their roots in a 1934 specification, the Skua was markedly inferior; almost 100mph slower, with half the forward armament and decidedly unpleasant handling characteristics it was clear any modern land based fighter was leagues ahead. For the old FAA this would not have been a problem, it was never expected that carrier aircraft would encounter much in the way of opposition, chasing away fleet shadowers and attacking the stragglers from a torpedo attack was the limit (it naturally being assumed that a fleet had more than enough AA power to defend itself during an attack). Post-Abyssinian the Admiralty had changed it's tune, the raid on Taranto and the missions in support of the Army's advance along the coast of North Africa had shown that carriers could be called on to operate close to the shore and thus be in range of land based fighters. So serious were the problems that not only was the fate of the Skua in the balance but the entire concept of multi-role aircraft was also reconsidered.

The first victim of the rethink that followed the Skua's first flights was it's sister aircraft the Blackburn Roc. A turret fighter in the mould of the Bolton-Paul Defiant it had been ordered in 1935 as the FAA was dragged along in another of the RAFs passing interests. As the Roc shared the same airframe and powerplant as the Skua it was predicted to be at least as slow, if not slower once the weight and drag of the turret took it's toll, performance the post-war FAA believed to unacceptable. The Skua itself survived though as it proved to be a superlative dive bomber, with excellent visibility from the low sided cockpit and very large Zap flaps the Skua could level out from a vertical dive in barely 200 ft of height and moreover could perform such a feat safely and at very low levels. However while the basic airframe may have survived it was still sent back to Blackburn for many radical changes; the nose was lengthened, the wing trailing edges swept up, a radio and self-sealing fuel tanks were added and the forward armament was thinned out to only two .303s with their ammo load cut from the ambitious 600 rounds per gun (twice that of a Hurricane) to a more realistic level. As is often the way of these things one of the forced changes, switching from the in-demand Bristol Mercury (as used on the heavily produced Bristol Blenheim) to the un-tested Bristol Perseus, would be amongst the most beneficial, the sleeve-valved Perseus had far more development potential than the older Mercury. At the time however it was cursed as an example of Air Ministry bias and somewhat resented as the RAF once again appeared to be getting preferential treatment.

The Blackburn Skua. One of the most common misconceptions of the Skua is the role of the second crewman. Contrary to popular believe the TAG was not a navigator, indeed as the TAGs were not required to attend pre-flight briefings it was not unknown for them to have no idea where a mission was going until they got there. Navigation was the responsibility of the pilot who kept the maps and compass in his cockpit and who was ultimately responsible for finding the target. It's also worth emphasising the TAG was not responsible for spotting or reconnaissance, that job was left to specially trained Observers. One of the best example of the FAA division of labour is the Fairey Swordfish with it's three man crew; pilot, observer, TAG, each with a defined role. That said the Skua was the first FAA aircraft to use the new 'homing beacon' technology, a rotating beacon installed on the carrier transmitted brief radio signals that, provided one knew the rotational speed and sequence of the beacon, could guide an aircraft home. This system was operated by the TAG who fed the information to the pilot, it is perhaps this system that caused the popular misunderstanding.​

Before we leave the Skua it is worth considering one of the more popular 'might have beens' of the Fleet Air Arm. After the initial flights of the prototype the Admiralty serioulsy considered dropping the Skua completely and, as word of this spread through the tight-knit world of aviation, they received an intriguing offer from Hawker. Essentially the plan was a rehash of an old tradition, equipping the FAA with navalised versions of RAF aircraft, in this case a Sea Hurricane and Sea Henley. There was much to recommend the scheme, the Hurricane was leagues ahead of the Gladiator while the Henley, if perhaps not as good a dive bomber as the Skua, was far faster and longer ranged. From the logistical view point the Henley and Hurricane shared a common base, greatly reducing maintenance costs and the number of spares needed while on the cost point co-opting the Hurricane would have saved the FAA the cost of specifying and designing a brand new fighter, to say nothing of the savings from leaveragig the far larger Hurricane production run. Of course the performance advantages may not have survived the navalisation process and it was unclear if the design would be amenable to folding wings, an important consideration for the smaller lifts on the older carriers, but it was not hard headed considerations like this that killed the idea. It was politics, empire building and fear.

Quite simply the newly independent FAA was unwilling to co-operate with the RAF and was determined to have it's own aircraft as a point of principal, this dislike of co-operation was reciprocated by the RAF's Air Staff who feared being dismembered and generally saw 'working together' with the other services as a first step towards extinction. Whether this was truly a lost opportunity is unclear, given the patchy history of land based monoplanes converted to carrier service it could just as easily have been a lucky escape. It does however illustrate that despite the best efforts of the Ministry for Defence Co-ordination inter-service rivalry remained alive and well and would continue to play a large role in defence procurement and planning for years to come.

To conclude the FAA's negotiations with the Treasury being surprisingly favourable, due in no small part to the redesign of the Skua. The final agreement saw the budget frozen for the 1937 Estimate, the outline plan being for programmes to be rolled over rather than cancelled. As such the existing Sea Gladiator and Swordfish contracts would be completed then funding transferred to Skua procurement at the end of the year when the redesign would be complete. While far from ideal, the RAF after all had cancelled all it's biplane work, the tooling and ramp-up costs had already been incurred under wartime emergency contracts so there was little money to be saved by cancellation, only the (relatively) small marginal cost of each frame could be recouped. More interesting was the development budget the FAA had carefully carved out, initially allocated to the Skua redesign it would be rolled over for a second project later in the year, the Treasury conceding that biplanes were in fact perhaps not modern aircraft after all. The question for the Naval Air Staff would be which aircraft most desperately needed replacing, a debate that would force the Royal Navy into further consideration of carrier doctrine.

---
Notes;
But a mere 3,000 words. And in only just over 10 days. It's a triumph I tell you, a triumph.

Starting big picture; RN carrier doctrine. It's still a bit hazy, mainly as the Admiralty can't/won't project forward aircraft development and so are still taking small steps grudging steps towards using carriers more. In terms of the FAA motto they're happy with 'Find' and 'Fix' but are putting great limitations on 'Strike'. Hitting ports, unarmoured ships and the like is OK, but attacking a battlefleet is right out. To be fair in a Skua and Swordfish that's probably the correct idea, it really wouldn't be pretty unless darkness and luck was on the FAA's side.

The question is will doctrine evolve with technology or not? OTL the FAA was so far behind the Admiralty never got a chance till it was really too late. With more modern planes they can hardly fail to do better, though it will take something very special to shift the battleship from centre stage.

Onto specifics. The Skua, poor maligned beast. Terrible fighter of course, awful in fact, but I had no idea till I started this quite how good a dive bomber it was. The diving ability was quite excellent in the hands of an expert, far, far better than a Stuka for instance. The problem was it wasn't really an idea aircraft to transition from biplane to monoplane with, which is what the FAA was forced to do. Hence a lot of the problems of that transition (stalls on take off, excessive spins, etc) got loaded up on the Skua when it really wasn't the aircraft's fault, at least not in the eyes of the RAF pilots who flew it.

The Skua emerges on schedule and with the OTL problems (no radio and comms by lamp!). Most of the redesign is OTL as well, but with a few war time lessons learnt as well, like radios and the fact it's just too damn slow as a fighter. Should emerge a little faster and with better handling than OTL, but it will still be easy prey for almost any modern fighter. But then what 1st gen dive bomber wasn't?

The Roc though is dead, an aircraft that managed the seemingly impossible and was in fact worse than the Boulton Paul Defiant. While balance required me to have one I refuse to have both and the Roc was just one of the many dreadful aircraft that cemented Blackburn's pre-war reputation for being reliably awful.

The question of the next FAA aircraft is still up in the air, for now we must reward the faithful men of tanks. The time had come for tanks, trucks and other things probably not beginning with 'T'. It's the army update next and I have a feeling it will probably end up a two parter. At least...

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXVI: A Shell for the Navy?​

The post-Abyssinian War review of the British Army was not a welcome experience for the Imperial General Staff and senior officer corps who's problems with the review started with the fact it was happening at all. It was the view of many in the Army that any such analysis of the war should have been an in-house affair, conducted by a few Staff officers and used for low level lesson learning and, more importantly, to justify more funding and army expansion. Views such as that encapsulate the key problem facing army reformers, quite simply the war had been won, victory doesn't inspire the deep soul searching and humility necessary for the fundamental reconsideration of cherished doctrine and the enthusiastic adoption of new ideas. Instead, while recognising that the war had been a close run thing, requiring stripping many theatres to their bare minimum, the key point much of the officer corps wished to draw was that the army should be larger, but not necessarily much different. What little impetus there was for reform, outside of the ranks of the hard-core modernisers, came from wounded pride at the prominent position give to the role of the Royal Navy in the conflict. Sir Edward Grey's infamous line "The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the Navy" had bothered the Army from almost the moment it was uttered, reflecting as it did the relative rankings of the two services within the political establishment. Thus the view that it was the Navy that had won the war, with the Army serving as little more than glorified marines, rankled immensely, especially as it contained more than a grain of truth. It had been the Navy that had brought the Army to North Africa, supplied it when it arrived, stopped supplies reaching the Italians through blockade, kept the Italian air force grounded through lack of fuel, moved troops along the coast when the road network couldn't, led the amphibious assaults that had so daringly 'leap frogged' along the coast and provided bombardment when the artillery couldn't. Even the most myopic of Army observers were forced to concede that without the Navy the war would have been longer, bloodier and riskier, hardly the best of conclusions for a service that had wanted a decisive victory to prove it's worth. It was however at least partially fertile ground for a review to work with, any reform that could reduce reliance on the navy would be warmly welcomed.

The choice of chairman for the review was a delicate one, technically the Ministry could appoint anyone they wanted and then compel the Army to co-operate and follow any recommendations. However the then Minister for War, Duff Cooper, realised that this would be furiously resisted by a service already upset they had been denied an in-house review. It would therefore be key to appoint someone who would be respected by the army hierarchy but would also be independent of the pressure that same hierarchy would apply, this combination of requirements naturally suggested a retired senior officer. The problem then became which one, for the choice of officer would doubtless heavily influence not only the content of the review but how enthusiastically (if at all) the recommendations were taken up by the Army. At one extreme were the old guard reactionaries who believed the campaign have proven foot infantry and the lightly mechanised cavalry were more than adequate and the only question was how many more divisions Britain needed, for these gentlemen the only possible choice was the recent Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Field Marshall Montgomery-Massingberd. At the other extreme the mechanisation theorists and the Royal Armoured Corps who's arguments revolved around the need for wide-spread all arms mechanisation and the need for a more modest expansion to save funds for new modern equipment, this faction mostly fell in behind Montgomery-Massingberd's predecessor as CIGS, the Baron Milne. The War Office took the political decision that neither of these candidates could be suitable, for the simple reason that their appointment would alienate the opposing faction, hardly an ideal way to get the whole Army on side. Instead a list of requirements was drawn up and compared against the possible candidates, top of the list was rank, the appointee had to be a Field Marshall to have the necessary gravitas compared to the alternatives, experience in Desert Warfare, an open mind on mechanisation and a degree of detachment from the infighting inside the Imperial General Staff completed the list. After consulting the exceptionally short list of retired Field Marshall's alive and fit enough to do the job one name stood out; Field Marshal Philip Chetwode.

Field Marshal Chetwode. Aside from his Great War service Chetwode had been most well known for his work in India, in particular for his founding of the Indian Military Academy and for giving the institution the credo which is still inscribed on the entrance hall to this day; "The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first, always and every time. The honour, welfare and comfort of the men you command come next. Your own ease, comfort and safety come last, always and every time."​

Chetwode obviously fulfilled the rank qualification and, thanks to long service in India as Chief of the General Staff in India and then Commander-in-Chief India, had missed out on much of the acrimonious arguments over mechanisation; not even the most zealous of Fuller's followers had advocated a fully armoured Indian Army, if only for the quite terrifying costs involved. Yet his time in India had not kept Chetwode entirely ignorant of the advances in military technology, the campaigns on the North West Frontier had seen the use of light tanks, tractor towed artillery, motorised supply trains and considerable co-operation with the Royal Air Force. It was however his Great War service that confirmed the choice, after a decidedly average time in command of a cavalry brigade on the Western Front he flourished when transferred to the Near East. One of the few senior officers to emerge with much credit from General Murray's less than stellar handling of the campaign Chetwode was promoted from commanding the Desert Column to command of XX Corps, more importantly his 'Notes on the Palestine Campaign' became the blueprint for Field Marshall Allenby's subsequent victories. While 'The Bull' deservedly took much of the credit, a plan is no good unless it can be successfully put into action, Chetwode's role in that success had not been entirely erased or forgotten. For the War Office then he ticked all their boxes and was thought to be the best shot at a unity candidate as his record could be read to support pretty much any position; the reactionaries saw a senior officer who had fought in battles as far back as the relief of Ladysmith and had been in uniform since before most of the tank advocates had been born, clearly such a man wouldn't be distracted by fancy toys from the true business of soldiering. Conversely the modernisers saw the man who had produced the plans for Allenby's Palestine Campaign, a campaign characterised by rapidly moving columns, air power and strikes at rear areas, then used those same ideas on the North West Frontier in India, proof positive he would clearly recommend the whole Army adopt the same.

The War Office however knew this initial good will could not last and managed to negotiate the services of the Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey, to serve the review. Quite aside from his vast experience of military matters gathered from service on almost every military committee in the Empire, it was hoped Hankey would be able to smooth over the inevitable problems and provide a detached Civil Service perspective on the problems. In the event Hankey's skills would be called into service almost as soon as the review began, one of Chetwode's first request being for the full version of the obscenely late analysis of Britain's performance in the Great War. Almost inexplicably delayed until 1932 the then CIGS, Baron Milne, had finally ordered an analysis of the lessons learned, if they were the correct lessons and if they had been applied correctly to the manuals and training programmes of the Army. Unfortunately by the time the report emerged Baron Milne had retired and Montgomery-Massingberd had taken his place as CIGS. Montgomery-Massingberd, disliking the conclusion of the analysis and not wishing anything 'negative' to be circulated, restricted the report to the highest levels of the Imperial General Staff and instead issued a thoroughly mutilated 'up beat' version to the officer corps. By requesting the full, unedited, report Chetwode was opening a can of worms that the reactionaries had hoped to leave sealed, much to the War Office's alarm. However it should not have been a surprise to them, one of the reasons they had selected Chetwode was his skill at thoroughly 'appraising the situation' and the lessons of the Great War were an obvious part of that. There was however little that could be done, having made a fuss over picking an independently minded man to head the review the War Office had little choice but to back him, a situation Chetwode would take full advantage of.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXVII: Brutal Honesty​

Chetwode's insistence on starting with the Great War review was fiercely resisted by both former and current members of the Imperial General Staff (IGS). The reason for their protestation soon became apparent, reviewing past mistakes was painful enough at the best of times, but when it emerged the same mistakes were still being made almost two decades after they were first made it became positively embarrassing. The Great War review itself pulled few punches, no level of authority escaped scrutiny and few came off unscathed, even the sacred cow of the regimental system didn't escape comment. While some of the problems had been fixed, through technological advances and the limited efforts of the Staff at reform, many of the problems remained and it was these that Chetwode focused on, prompting the two main criticisms that would dog his review; it was too negative and it spent too long looking back not forward.

The first, while something of a weak argument (shooting the messenger to avoid having to read the unpleasant message), was popular amongst the staff for precisely that reason. However it was equally clear that just wallowing in the successes of North Africa would not just be valueless but positively counter-productive. With the War Office, Treasury and particularly the Cabinet all taking an interest, albeit for very different reasons, the IGS were forced to admit a positive whitewash was not an option. The second argument has more than a grain of truth to it, as we shall see the review was far from perfect and perhaps more time planning for the future instead of reviewing the past may have avoided some of those mistakes. However the positives of the approach cannot be over-looked, by finding the same problems repeated the review was able to carry the majority of the Army with it, whether you predicted a re-run of trench warfare or fully mobile warfare the problems raised by Chetwode still applied. More cynically, given the poor history of the British Army in predicting future defence needs on anything beyond the short term it's highly unlikely Chetwode would have correctly anticipated the future even if he had spent all his time looking forward. On balance therefore a fully supported, if occasionally flawed, moderate report must be considered a better outcome than a divisive and likely incorrect revolution.

The problems identified can be roughly grouped into four areas,; Communication, Administration, Professionalism and above all Doctrine. These areas over-lapped considerably, for instance the long standing problems with high level command and control pointed to issues with communication, administration and doctrine, there is no one 'correct' category. To tease out all the inter-connections is left as a task for the reader or, for the interested but less studious, Chetwode's official conclusion does a fine job of knitting the strands together. For our purposes a broad overview of each area followed by the the recommendations and the outcomes will suffice.

We begin with communications where, on a technical level, progress had been made. The early 1930s had seen the Army develop a range of radios ranging from short ranged mobile units to large fixed installations capable of reaching across the vast extent of Empire. Indeed by the time of the Abyssinian War experimental tank specific and man portable packs were entering limited production, with work under way on improved longer ranged and lighter units. However if the technical issues had been cracked, how to use the new radios was less clear, command and control was still exercised as if communications were fleeting and unreliable. The 'Nelson trick', using sometimes fictional communication problems to ignore out of date orders and exercise innovation and flexibility, that had served Great War commanders such as Rawlinson and Maxse so well was no longer available, bringing the issue of central control versus local latitude was brought to a head. That problem ran neatly into the next area, Administration, where one of the key problems was a constant low-level turf war between the War Office and the IGS. With it's control of funding the War Office was immersing itself in minor details that really should have been left to the staff or ideally commanders on the ground. Worse it lacked the capacity to do this effectively, often issuing entirely inappropriate instructions for lack of an idea of the practical difficulties or local conditions. This attitude inspired a related problem in the IGS as the Staff refused to devolve matters down the chain, fearing the War Office would hijack those powers unless central control was maintained, leading to precisely the problems they were accusing the War Office of causing.

The other key problem of administration was the regimental system itself, as mentioned it was something of a sacred cow and there can be no doubt the esprit de corps it produced and the sheer history of the institution counted very heavily in it's favour. However both the Great War review and the Chetwode report through up one serious problem with the system; manpower allocation. With each regiment responsible for recruiting and training it's own troops from it's local area the valuable skilled recruits (engineers, specialist tradesmen, etc) were deployed with no thought to the 'Whole Army' need. An example would be the adjacent Wiltshire Regiment and Somerset Light Infantry, the Wiltshires recruited from a county including the vast Great Western Railway depot at Swindon and so ended with so many skilled specialists many were used as regular infantry men. In contrast the Somersets recruited from a mainly agricultural county and so were regularly short of men with mechanical and technical aptitude, an increasingly important skill to have in a regiment as mechanisation filtered down. Interestingly the other oft quoted problem with the regimental system, that it inhibited co-operation between battalions by encouraging rivalries, received scarcely a mention. Whether this was through the authors ignoring it, pulling their punches or genuinely not believing it to be a problem is unclear, though in the case of Chetwode his reforms in India (with the 'Large Regiment' of 4-5 regular battalions becoming the peace time standard) would suggest it is most likely the latter.

The 2nd Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry on manoeuvres on Exmoor. One of the few issues facing the Army not spelt out in the review was the calibre of recruits, a problem the IGS was aware of but struggled to answer. The problem was the Army couldn't match the modern excitement of flying offered by the RAF (even if most recruits never even flew in a plane, let alone piloted one) and didn't have the heroic national appeal of the Royal Navy who could, and did, play the 'Historic defender of King and Empire' card to pull in the recruits. Such concerns were, and still are, hard to quantify, particularly given the very different attitudes to education in the services themselves. While the RAF had inherited it's founder Air Marshall Trenchard's mania for training (along with other less desirable obsessions) and had formalised the system at every level, the Army left such matters to the regiments, at least for everyone below approximately the rank of Captain, with predictably varied results.​

By comparison the concerns raised over professionalism were very simple; much of the officer corps wasn't. The viewpoint of Montgomery-Massingberd 'Character is more important than intellect' held sway as it had done for many a year. For too many regiments, and especially the cavalry, if you were the right sort of chap then there was no need to study training manuals or think too much (or at all) about the science of soldiering, it would all work out under fire if you had character. Frustratingly for the reformers this attitude had been somewhat vindicated by the war with Italy, it had all worked out and there had been no real disasters. Professionalism links quite neatly to the final, and most important, problem flagged up by Chetwode, Doctrine. Technically speaking the Army didn't even have an official doctrine, though the Army's Field Service Regulations were intended to serve the same over-arching purpose with each branch required to produce and maintain their own specific manuals. Even if the system had worked as intended, which it did not, the key flaw should be apparent; the various branches developed their manuals in isolation. Thus the basic infantry manual could be revised by an officer with no experience of combined arms operations, while the cavalry manual could be left to an officer serving in an unmechanised unit. As bad as that sounds in practice things were worse, the infantry manual was all but unchanged since the 1911 version (An attempted re-write in the 1920s by Liddell Hart was gutted by a disapproving War Office) while the 1935 mechanised cavalry manual was merely the 1930 standard cavalry manual with the note 'When reading this document replace the word horse with the word tank'.

The catalogue of problems listed seems hard to reconcile with the success achieved in North Africa, yet a critical assessment of the campaign there shows all of the issues above were present. Consider the aftermath of the opening British move Operation Vulcan (the attack aimed at capturing Tobruk); the communications net had not been planned for such a rapid advance, inducing severe problems in communicating the success back to HQ. The staff of the BEF were equally unable to keep up with such rapid success and considerable time was wasted in trying to carefully plan the next step when doctrine (or even simple initiative) would have provided a quick answer. Finally the quite serious problem that no pursuit force was available was a direct result of the badly thought out, and somewhat bodged, mechanisation of the cavalry, an area where a more detached, professional approach would have borne considerable benefit, to say nothing of the advantages possible if there had been a joined up doctrine to guide the modernisation process.

Having seen the problems let us now move onto the proposed solutions, a considerably more controversial area. While Chetwode's detailed and historically grounded arguments had convinced the bulk of the army that the problems existed, his solutions did not attract the same widespread approval.

--
Notes:
Seems a bit negative, but then this has been a somewhat depressing bit of research for me. While the RAF had, all things considered, about a good an inter-war as possible (not perfect, but then who was?) and the RN at least made understandable mistakes the Army seemed to just spend almost two decades ignoring things, pausing only to develop and then ignore good ideas. About the only defence one can give is that the Government seemed obsessed with appointing very bad CIGS, Massingberd was an awful pick (particularly after Milne who was one of the best) and Deverell wasn't a lot better. Even Gort, who had a mandate to shake things up, didn't. Sigh.

The manual parts are OTL, Liddel Hart did re-write the Infantry manual chunks of which were then discarded and the Cavaly did just republish old horse manuals for their tankers. On the plus side the radios are OTL, at least they have the technology for really good comms. They just don't know how to use them. The other advantage is that with the bar set so low almost anything will be a vast improvement over OTL, even just admitting there is a problem is an achievement, however I am wary as to how much could be achieved and how much would be fought tooth and nail. Something to ponder.

Still the big, big plus point is that Fuller and Liddel Hart's WW1 narrative 'It was all the stupid generals fault' (aided by a few not very good poets) doesn't take hold. Sure the British generals were a very mixed bunch and made more than their fair share of mistakes, but no senior officer came out of the war well and piling all the blame on a few generals means the real problems were missed. The first step to solving a problem is admitting one, the second is stopping it getting any worse. I believe Chetwode can knock those two of with this report, that only leaves the many follow up problem solving steps and they will not be so simple.

Still, tanks and trucks next along with a bit on the Army reshuffle.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXVIII: Coordinating Communications​

Having dealt with the dispiriting problems facing the Army let us move onto the proposed solutions, a far more encouraging area for the IGS, though not without its problems. The entire package has been dubbed the Chetwode Reforms, something of an unusual choice as such reforms are traditionally named after the Minister for War at the time (for example the Haldane or Cardwell Reforms). However given the relatively high turnover at the War Office, three ministers between the commissioning of the report and it's implementation, there was no convenient Minister to heap the praise, and blame, onto, thus Chetwode ended up as the remembered 'face' of the reforms. A more cynical interpretation holds that the government, aware that there were few votes to be gained but many to be lost in army reform, actively encouraged the phrase Chetwode Reforms to muddy the waters over any fallout. Whatever the reasoning the practical impact was minimal, the successive ministers all gave Chetwode their full backing and ensured that, politically at least, the War Office was on side. Just as the problems overlapped many areas so do their solutions, Chetwode's conclusion made clear the problems found would require several changes to fix and that as such none of the recommendations could not be considered in isolation. It is recommended that modern readers also bear this in mind, each recommendation was expected to partially fix many problems and should be assessed as such.

We begin with what was perceived to be the most straightforward problem and ostensibly the easiest to fix, improving communication. On the technical side the recommendations were simple enough, development in radios was to continue but with more input from front line units to try and avoid the teething problems encountered with the tank and man portable units. On the organisational front the Royal Corps of Signals was to be expanded and to have a greater presence both on the Imperial General Staff and at lower command levels, a move intended to promote a proper understanding of the possibilities and limitations of communications. Interestingly the primary concern cited, problems with reliability at range meaning forward units out-running command and control, was soon solved by advancing technology. Instead most of the new staff officers found themselves dealing with the previously un-encountered problem of capacity, struggling to ensure radio networks didn't break down under the shear volume of traffic as radios proliferated at all levels. This problem was not helped by the most controversial communication proposal; a formalised system for ground forces to communicate with both the air force and the navy at the tactical level.

While Army Co-operation squadrons were well established they tended to work at a fairly high level and were equipped more for reconnaissance and spotting work than what is now termed close air support. The inspiration appears to have come from Royal Air Force's (reluctant) decision to form Strike Command, linking together light bombers with the Army Co-operation squadrons into a single command dedicated to tactical targets as opposed to the strategic focus of Bomber Command. Chetwode's innovation was the realisation that forward units sending messages up the chain of command, across the services to the RAF's hierarchy and the back down to the squadrons was too slow and too unreliable. As we have seen the later would be mostly solved by technological developments, though the 'Chinese whispers' problem of message corruption after multiple transfers would remain, but the former was unquestionably correct.

The Bristol Blenheim, one of the Strike Command aircraft at the centre of the debate. Whether the pilots should be at the beck and call of the ground commanders or if instead the commanders should be mere 'waiters', providing the pilots with a menu of targets to chose from, was the issue at the heart of the debate. Until it was resolved all other issues, including some fairly fundamental questions (Should co-ordination be at Division, Company or Battalion level? What should the make up of the team be? Dedicated aircraft for each unit or free for all?) would be left unanswered.​

While Chetwode sketched out the basic idea for what would become the modern MSC by accident or design he did not address the key issue of primacy, that is to say whether the acronym should stand for Mobile Strike Controllers or Mobile Strike Communicator. Of course such phrases, indeed the acronym itself, are anachronisms but they do neatly sum up the two opposing views, the Army favouring the latter while the Air Force argued for the latter. Before dissecting the two view points it is worth highlighting the level of agreement that existed, while the implementation was argued over both services had (mostly) accepted that better co-operation was not just advantageous but a necessity in modern warfare, proof positive that at least some lessons had been learnt from North Africa. The Army's view was simple, the Air Force should be considered a form of aerial artillery to be deployed as and when the ground commander saw fit onto targets of his choosing. While a not unreasonable position it did somewhat overlook the realities of aerial operations, unless aircraft permanently circled over the battlefield (a dangerous proposition even if fuel capacity allowed, which it usually didn't in aircraft of the time) strike aircraft could expect to find that all but the most stationary of targets had moved on by the time they arrived at the indicated location. The Royal Air Force view was equally service-centric, they believed the Army should use the new liaison officers to provide the local squadrons with a list of targets that they could pick and choose from. While Strike Command may have been able to look beyond the heavy bomber they were still Lord Trenchard's children and so believed air power could win wars (almost) alone, provided of course it was deployed by experts such as themselves. As we shall see when we look at the doctrinal changes in the Army the process of reconciling these two views would be somewhat complicated by the lack of a coherent Army view on the subject, a situation the RAF would eagerly exploit.

Before we move onto the real meat of Chetwode's reforms, the regimental recommendations, the contrast with the Royal Navy's reaction to closer co-ordination of support should be noted. Where the RAF argued and fought and schemed the Admiralty agreed it was sensible and detailed the job to the recently expanded Royal Marines Corps, the Corps responding with Forward Observation parties, groups of marines trained in naval gunnery, equipped with plethora of radios and with enough extra manpower to defend themselves on a hostile beachhead. While the idea still needed evolution, note the focus on naval gunnery and the reluctant to include any Fleet Air Arm expertise, it was at least progress and something that could be put on a more formal footing compared to the ad-hoc arrangements used in North Africa.

Of course the Army was less than happy at the proposal, a party of Marines and Naval Officers running the show was not their idea of co-operation, however there was little they could do to argue with it; it met the requirements and solved the obvious problems. Moreover naval gunnery was only applicable during amphibious assaults or operations near major ports, outside those area it was assumed no sensible enemy would leave any major units within range of the Royal Navy's devastating firepower, it was therefore a fairly specialised activity which would probably be a Royal Navy show in any event. Typically this is seen as the Navy flexing it's muscles by forcing it's solution onto the Army, which it undoubtedly was to a certain extent, more interesting is the fact that the Admiralty even engaged with the problem, they could have instead have applied their political clout to closing the subject down. While the self confidence of the Royal Navy doubtless played a part, as Senior Service they had none of the RAFs fears over disbandment so lacked the reflective fear of co-operation, credit must go to First Sea Lord Keyes who had thoroughly shaken up a somewhat complacent Admiralty and re-introduced some of the professionalism that had been lost since the days of Fisher. As we shall see it was striving for an equivalent Army professionalism, the aim that officers would talk planning and tactics not polo and tiffin, that formed a key part of Chetwode's regimental reforms.

--
Still dragging out this regimental reform, it's not deliberate I swear. I just thought I really ought to get an update out before it got too long (both in terms of length of update and in terms of gap from the last one)

Notes;
Game Effects, first CAS doctrine researched which I'm taking as meaning the idea is accepted but it's not working very well. The first fruits of Strike Command are becoming apparent and I imagine various people are wondering just what they've created.

Signalling was one of the areas Britain got the hang of, technically at least (they may not have been used properly, but that wasn't the fault of the kit). Main change is a slightly enlarged Royal Corps of Signals with a few radios entering service a bit earlier, so probably better able to cope with the flurry of radio messages.

Finally the Mobile Strike Controller term, something of a twist on the OTL British term Mobile Fighter Controller which became the more familiar Forward Air Controller (then a flurry of other acronyms post Cold War as bored staff officers broke out the dictionaries). I'm always in two minds over new terms for innovations/inventions/units. On the one hand it helps emphasise the newness and is probably more plausible; different invention, different name. On the other I wonder if it's just unnecessarily confusing on the reader. I suspect as always I'm worrying about something no-one else has noticed or cares about. :shrug:

 

[El Pip]

Chapter LXXXIX: Regiments, Rifles and Truck-all Else.​

The Chetwode inspired Army re-organisation was logical, direct and solved several lingering problems, it was naturally therefore fiercely resisted by many existing and former Army personnel. The opposition caused consternation in the War Office (and Cabinet) with serious consideration was given to watering down the reforms, perhaps to the point of de-facto abandoning them entirely as too unpopular. Fortunately lessons had been learnt from earlier Army re-organisations and it was recognised that compromise in such matters did not damp down opposition but merely encouraged it. As (almost) all parties involved agreed that reform was needed the government put their weight behind implementation of the full report, reasoning it was better to face the opposition for tangible results instead of a potential 'worst of all worlds' results of a hard fight for little gain, as had happened with the mechanisation of the cavalry and other such efforts.

For the infantry the bulk of the reforms boiled down to grouping the existing regiments together into regional brigades with most, but not all, the administrative functions of the existing regimental HQs transferred to the new central depot. To give an example the The Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge's Own), the successors to the renowned 'Die Hards' of the 57th Foot, was, naturally enough, the regiment for Middlesex and recruited in that county. These recruits were trained at the regiment's depot, the Inglis Barracks in Mill Hill, and allocated within the regiment on the basis of the needs of the battalions. Under the Chetwode reforms the Middlesex Regiment became part of the Home Counties Brigade based out of Canterbury as, using an unusual definition of 'Home Counties', the brigade was also responsible for the regiments of Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Recruitment was directed centrally as was the training and assignment of all new recruits, enabling manpower, especially the valuable specialist manpower, to be distributed across the entire brigade as needed.

It was of course not quite that simple, nothing British is ever that straightforward, the light infantry and the fusilier regiments were combined into their own brigades on the basis of role not region, leading to their recruitment area being scattered across the country. The rifle regiments continued to be almost wilfully different, the two regiments continued to recruit from across the entire country but were still combined into a single brigade, the Green Jackets Brigade, leading to the unusual looking situation of a 'corps, the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, and a brigade, the Rifle Brigade (Prince Consort's Own), both being subservient to a mere brigade. Finally the Scottish, Welsh and Irish regiments were organised purely regionally, hence their fusilier and light infantry regiments were assigned to the relevant regional formations; the Welsh, Lowland, Highland and North Irish Brigades respectively. There was, naturally, an exception, the eccentric Highland Light Infantry which refused to wear a 'highland' kilt preferring 'lowland' trews, was based in and recruited from Lowland Scotland (Glasgow) but nevertheless somehow ended up in the Highland Brigade.

One of the less attention grabbing reforms enacted as part of the re-organisation was the insertion of the administrative brigades into ambitious officers career paths. It became 'expected' that candidates would have experience of running one of the brigades as preparation for more senior roles requiring the same co-ordination skills. Of course in the finest traditions of the Army none of this was written down, the flexibility to do pretty much what they liked was too highly prized by the Imperial General Staff, but it nevertheless became an established precedent, being all the more potent for not being formalised. Along with an expansion of the intake at the Imperial Defence College and the complete restructuring of Camberley Staff College this measure would provide one of the foundations for professionalism of the next generation of middle and senior officers.​

Less public but more significant was the power the administrative brigades would have over training, promotions and expansion. More centralised control of training was resisted by colonels used to almost total control over their regiments but would prove to be invaluable for raising standards and encouraging professionalism in junior and middle officers. While small unit tactics, Company level and below, stayed with the regiment (no-one thought central control of, for instance, platoon small arms drill would be anything other than a disaster) any exercise above that had to be cleared by the brigade. The benefit of this was co-ordination, the brigade would ensure that several battalions from different regiments would work together with as many units from other branches (armour, artillery, etc) as possible, providing invaluable combined-arms experience. Contrary to popular belief the reforms was not intended to remove regimental rivalries but to use them; losing an exercise against a sister battalion was tolerable, but losing to a 'rival' unit would lead to months of mess room ribbing for the unfortunate commanding officers. Aside from this informal, but no less powerful, motivation regional recruiting allowed more tangible carrots to be offered to ambitious officers, instead of army expansion being on the basis of which unit could recruit enough men it could now be used as a reward for 'professional' regiments. For future army expansions the IGS, through the administrative brigades, ensured that regiments that performed well in exercises and who's officers excelled at staff college received the extra battalions. Quite aside from the prestige this was a significant carrot; the officers and NCOs for a new battalion were typically drawn at least in part from the regiment's existing battalions. As it was well known in the Army that the second fastest route to promotion was for your regiment to recruit a new battalion (the fastest being very bloody combat 'creating' a vacancy above you) even officers dismissive of the value of exercises began taking them very seriously indeed.

While the Army would never become 'bookish', indeed it retains an affectation of rugged anti-intellectualism to this day, studying manuals and discussing tactics did lose the stigma the 'amateur army' attached to them. Through the carrot of promotion and preference and the stick of mockery and bruised egos professionalism began to spread through the officer corps, though it would take many years and the retirement of the stubborn hard core before the process could be called complete. Over the long term it was correctly believed the expansion of Army education (through enlarging Sandhurst, Camberley and the Imperial Defence College) would ensure the next generation never knew any attitude other than professionalism.

Before leaving the infantry there is one last change to note, one that links with the tanks to come; the re-emergence of specialisation. The process had began years earlier with the Rifle regiments being designated as the sole source for the new motor-rifle battalions, the building blocks for the Support or 'Pivot' Groups that were intended to support armoured units. For the remainder of the regiments a less elaborate mechanisation was intended; assigned fleets of trucks from the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) they were to become lorried infantry. Despite the RASCs unique status as a combatant rear echelon corps the order of battle for a lorried infantry battalion was essentially unchanged from a foot unit, the lorries were only intended for strategic transport (i.e. between battles) and not for tactical deployment. The Chetwode review recommended that as additional motor-rifle units would be needed to support the expansion of the armoured forces (more on which in the next chapter) it would be wise to spread the burden of supplying these additional battalions beyond the Green Jackets Brigade. The meat lay in one of the reviews rare forays into tactical details, given the mission of the motor-rifle units standard tactics and weapons, including the latest Lee-Enfield Rifle No.1 MkVI, were dismissed as quite inappropriate and dedicated tactics and new weapons were explicitly recommended.

Trucks such as the Morris 30cwt would form the backbone of the lorried infantry, though despite the best efforts of the logistic units there was no standard truck and a variety of manufacturers were approached to contribute subtly different models. Eventually logistical concerns would triumph over ideology and a standard pattern was decreed, depriving the Army of the occasionally nebulous benefits of competition and innovation in favour of the far more concrete advantage of standardisation and mass production. ​

Whether Chetwode intended this recommendation as a Trojan horse with which to completely replace the standard service rifle or if he genuinely just intended that only certain units receive the new weapon is unclear. While the later was a not unreasonable possibility, the armoured units had a distinct supply train from the infantry so it would not have been too logistically difficult to maintain different rifles for different units, the evidence of his analysis of both the Great War and the Abyssinian War indicated the standard .303" cartridge was unnecessarily powerful and long ranged in almost all engagements. While too much power was not itself a problem a smaller, lighter cartridge would be a logistical boon and, more importantly, would also allow individual automatic and semi-automatic weapons that were just not practical with a heavy recoil cartridge such as the .303". It is therefore tempting to believe that total replacement was always the aim and only the Treasury's opposition (based on their deep seated desire to avoid obsoleting the tens of millions of rounds of 0.303" ammunition and associated weapons that lay in warehouses across the Empire) forced Chetwode into the subterfuge.

Regardless of the reasoning it was accepted by the IGS that a new cartridge and weapon would be required for certain units and a requirement was issued for a new semi-automatic weapon based on the most promising cartridge from the 1920s trials, a rimless variant of the .256" British. With the Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield working on both the revised Lee-Enfields and the new Bren light machine gun, the contract went to the Birmingham Small Arms Company who only had the Besa tank machine gun on their books. As a backup a small contract went to the little known Sterling Armaments Company to develop their proposal for a light fully automatic weapon, an option dismissed by many officers as either impractical or downright undesirable, it nevertheless went ahead as the IGS' weapons sub-committee revelled in their freedom to finally escape the .303" monoculture. When the time came to decided which brigade should provide the battalions for these new units there was only one option, one set of regiments already marked out due to their predecessors unusual firearms; the men of the Fusilier Brigade would be the first to receive the new rifles and, when the full potential of them became apparent, become the envy of the rest of the infantry.

---
Notes;

To the men of tanks I say this, I always promised tanks and trucks. And surely a tank is close enough for now?

Game effects, well the big ones you can see. Slight org and morale uplift, more to come when doctrines are developed later, that's also the point I'll add the combat event changes. Other change you can see is the new truck brigade I modded in. Add that to an infantry unit and you get almost, but not quite, a motorised infantry unit but a little cheaper.

Lorried infantry was how the army ran most infantry units, the trucks just carried you to the battle but then you fought on foot. The exception was the Motor Rifle units but even then they weren't really supposed to fight from the trucks along side the tanks, more support the tanks when they stopped or bogged down. I think it's this that left the British Army with a post-war doctrine that you never fought from an APC but instead dismounted as fast as possible.

The defence colleges got a big re-org in 1938 which I've added to as Chetwode was very keen on education for officers, seemed natural he'd apply the lessons from India to the rest of the Empire. On which note all these courses are of course Empire wide with candidates from India and all the Dominions attending. That in fact was part of the OTL problem, spaces were limited and many of them were taken up by Empire students squeezing out British Army candidates.

A new infantry weapon was on the cards for much of the 1930s but the cost of replacing all the old rounds and weapons held it back. The 1920s tests were real as is the cartridge, however the Treasury baulked at the idea so the Army laboured on with the .303". Worse, as they were stuck with it, new weapons like the Bren were expensively re-chambered for it and so it became deeper and deeper entrenched. The cunning plan therefore is to argue that men jumping out of the back of trucks need short range, rapid firepower (hardly arguable) and that the standard rifle doesn't do that. From their the new weapon can sneak across to other units (Paras, Marines, special forces, anyone who needs firepower really) and eventually the rest of the Army.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XC: One Corps, Many Tanks​

The cavalry and the armoured units could have been forgiven for expecting an easy ride from the Chetwode Review. Both branches had already adopted a 'One Corps' approach, with recruits signing on to a single central corps instead of individual regiments, thus making it simple to move manpower around as required. On the training front the Royal Tank Corps had centralised all activities at one depot in Bovington Camp while the Cavalry, after a less than successful cost-cutting move to centralise training in Canterbury (costs had actually risen) had four regional training camps which dispersed troopers on an as needed basis. While these arrangements certainly ticked many of the reform boxes they did not tick them all, not least those marked 'professionalism' and 'doctrine'. The former was a lingering cavalry problem, complaints about the cavalry having too many gentlemen but not enough officers went back decades, while the quite terrible cavalry manuals discussed in earlier chapters clearly indicate the scale of the problem with regards to doctrine. The solution was as simple as it was controversial, the mechanised portion of the Cavalry Corps and the entire Royal Tank Corps were to be merged together into a new Royal Armoured Corps.

While cavalry officers were insulted at being reduced to merely a part of a larger corps, the real injury came when the new hierarchy was announced. Instead of a broad cross section of both units the 'tankers' won out, taking most of the prime positions and dominating those in charge of procurement and doctrine. The reasoning was simple and bluntly spelt out by Chetwode in his recommendations, the cavalry had manifestly failed it's duties in both areas and therefore the existing corps of officers should not be trusted with the new corps, lest they repeat the same mistakes. A harsh verdict, and undoubtedly one of the more controversial sections of the review, but it was well backed up with evidence, decades of indolence over doctrine and repeated poor equipment selection were carefully documented in the appendices of the report to support the verdict. The sole comfort for the cavalry officers was that promotion and training was handled in a more even handed manner, ensuring the good officers in the cavalry did not suffer for the failings of their brother officers.

Though popularly thought of as a merger of the cavalry and tank units the re-organisation was, as with the infantry, somewhat more complicated. While the entire Royal Tank Corps did move across, becoming the Royal Tank Regiment in the process, only the mechanised cavalry regiments moved, the still equine units staying as part of the cavalry until mechanised. The exception to this rule was the Household Cavalry which utilised a combination of political clout and muddying the water over ceremonial roles to avoid the move. For the remainder of the cavalry, both the line and yeomanry regiments alike, there was no reprieve and they were all slated to move to the RAC once they had traded in their horses.​

The choice for head of the new corps came down to either Major-General Giffard LeQuesne Martel or Brigadier Percy Hobart. Both serving officers with a background in tanks they represented two very different approaches to armoured warfare development. Martel was an ex-Royal Engineer and his interest was more technical than theoretical, while in the War Office Mechanisation Branch his focus had been machinery and new tanks while devoting relatively little effort to structures and strategy. Hobart embodied the more traditional British Army focus on the man over the machine, an excellent trainer and developer of men he was more detached from the machinery and would work with what was available. Moreover as only armoured brigadier in the Army he was the most experienced 'tanker' in the senior ranks, Martel's field experience with tanks having been limited to command of the Royal Engineers attached to the Experimental Mechanised Force. It was this combination of armoured experience and traditional Army values that doubtless swung the job in favour of Hobart, though doubtless his service at the Battle of Meggido alongside Chetwode didn't harm his cause. The combination of Martel at the War Office developing new tanks and Hobart at the RAC organising the new divisions and training the men should have been an ideal combination, however as we shall see it did not quite work out that way.

Regardless of these later issues the first problem facing Hobart was, somewhat ironically, Chetwode's requirement for 'joined up thinking' between the branches, the first tentative steps towards a combined arms doctrine. With the infantry undergoing a major upheaval there was no chance of coordinated work and thus a fairly heavy brake was applied to doctrinal thinking across the Army for much of 1937 until the 'core' principals and doctrines were developed and agreed. While undoubtedly a wise long term move it left a short term vacuum with only outdated manuals for official guidance. This was not in itself a problem exterior pressure made it one; having already delayed taking their post-Abyssinian funding the War Office was desperate to get something into the upcoming Army Estimates in time for the budget, doubtless fearing that the Treasury would interpret a second delay as an invitation to re-allocate the money elsewhere. Thus a decision was urgently needed on new procurement, which meant having at least an outline idea on the make-up of the proposed new cavalry and armoured divisions. In the rush mistakes were inevitable, although that said Hobart's big mistake would likely have occurred regardless, oxymoronic as it sounds the biggest flaw in a standard pattern late 1930s British Armoured division was that it had too many tanks.

The somewhat hastily agreed intent of the RAC was to field two types of division; armoured and cavalry. This split was based as much on the perceived limitation of technology as any actual doctrine, available technology was not thought able to combine high speed, strong armour and heavy firepower into one design. The solution to this problem was infantry tanks and cavalry tanks (also know as cruiser tanks) with their different roles obvious enough given their names. In the absence of time to formulate a better idea this principle was taken and extended to the divisional level. The armoured division were intended to fight alongside the main army and so were built around two heavy armoured brigades (containing six infantry tank regiments), a single cavalry brigade (containing three cruiser regiments) and a pivot or support group containing the motorised infantry, artillery, engineers, etc. Equating an armoured regiment to an infantry battalion this gave an alarmingly high tank to infantry ratio of 4:1, a good indication of how deeply the idea of all tank units was ingrained in the RAC and the amount of work that would be required to get down to a more workable ratio.

The Vickers Medium MkII, with just over a decade in service the Medium MkII was still the mainstay of the 'heavy' portion of the tank force. Sporting an equally vintage OQF (Ordnance Quick Fire) 3 pounder gun and with a none too impressive 0.5" of turret armour, with barely 1/3 of an inch elsewhere, it had been slated for replacement for many years, however budgetary constraints saw it soldier on. Despite initially being considered a 'fast tank' it was capable of perhaps as much as 15mph in good conditions, certainly fast for the 1920s but not for the 1930s. It was tanks such as these that had convinced British tankers that firepower, speed and armour could not all be combined in one design.​

In contrast the cavalry divisions were given the role of diversion and pursuit, the aim being to provide the army with the capabilities once provided by mounted units and that were so lacking in North Africa; a fast, highly mobile force capable of threatening flanks, exploiting breakthroughs and pursuing broken enemies. As it was reasonably assumed that such a force would need to defend the ground it had taken, and it was realised that while tanks could take ground infantry were better at holding it, the cavalry divisions contained extra infantry battalions. Specifically the divisions were to consist of two cavalry brigades (each of three cruiser regiments), a brigade of motorise infantry and a support group with extra machine guns and artillery compared to it's armoured equivalent. This gave the division an overall ratio of tanks to men nearer 2:1 which, while still high by modern standards, was far more balanced than the armoured divisions.

Despite this less than ideal start the longer term prospects for the Royal Armoured Corps (and for Hobart) were good, in contrast to previous years there would be no shortage of funds for exercises in which to discover their mistakes. This neatly brings us to to our next subject, while doctrine, strategy and organisation were all important factors they were only ideas without the appropriate machinery to put the theory into practice. To describe the new generation of tanks as highly anticipated would be an understatement, after this disappointments of the failed A8 and the aborted Medium MkIII the RAC was unequivocal in the need for new designs. For once the War Office did not disappoint and provided no less than four designs for consideration. The question remained as to whether quality had been sacrificed to deliver such quantity.

---
Notes

So the Royal Armoured Corps a few years early, as you would expect not a universally popular decision. As per OTL the Household Cavalry escapes, far too many important chaps in those regiments, but the rest get dragged in kicking and screaming.

On the new divisions, British Armoured divisions always had too many tanks and it took many years to bash that out of them, I saw nothing that was going to change that so, still to many tanks and not enough infantry to support them.

The two divisions choice is down to a few things. One, they couldn't completely ignore the cavalry, they're not discredited enough. Two, North Africa 'proved' to the politicians the army needs cavalry "just like Allenby had" and the armchair generals have the budget. Three, as I said the doctrine just isn't there, it's rushed and mistakes have been made.

Game effects; Armoured divisions get more hard attack but less soft. Cav divisions the opposite and are a bit faster. Also as seen SP-ART is now available, the British were using Birch guns in the 1920s it's surely not beyond the wit of man to dig those blueprints out of a warehouse?

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCI: An Inauspicious Beginning​

With four tank designs either already undergoing testing or just beginning the process there was no shortage of new designs available for the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps to review. To described the designs as 'mixed' would be a masterful piece of under-statement, while there were genuinely innovative ideas and developments incorporated into some of the designs the crippling 'economy' measures enforced by the Treasury were also present in abundance. However it would be unfair to entirely blame the Treasury, there were more than enough War Office mistakes present to cause problems. This neatly brings us to one of the worst tank designs to ever emerge from a War Office specification; the A11 Matilda.

The Matilda began life in 1934 on the recommendation of Lieutenant General Hugh Elles, a member of the Army Board who who was double-hatted as both Master-General of the Ordnance and Director of the Mechanisation Branch. On paper he was one of the most qualified and experienced tank officers in the British Army, he had been General Haig's representative during the development of the Mk I "Mother" tank on the basis of which he had been appointed head of the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps (the first tank unit in the world). After leading the Branch through the failures at Ypres he had overseen the successes of Cambrai and the formation of the Tank Corps at it's Bovington Camp base. After overseeing the setting up of the Corps and navigating the brutal post-war Geddes Axe on defence spending his armoured career culminated when he became the first Tank Corps inspector. While this is indeed a most impressive tank CV it has one crucial flaw; it shudders to a halt in the early 1920s, after that point his career was a succession of staff roles for infantry units and War Office postings. While this could have been a positive move, giving him a better idea of how tanks and infantry should work together, it was in fact disastrous as his armoured thinking stagnated. Having left the Tank Corps before it gained it's royal prefix his thinking was still based around Medium Mark Cs and trench warfare, the developments of the Experimental Mechanised Force for instance had bypassed him completely.

Thus on his appointment to the Army Board he was almost the stereotypical 'Old Guard' officer, mainly interested in how to re-fight the Great war to best effect, an attitude reflected in his specification for the Matilda. The A11 was to be an "Infantry Tank", a relatively new concept for the Royal Tank Corps and was to be heavily armoured but armed with only a single machine gun and to travel 'as fast as a man on foot'. While this specification could never have produced a worthwhile modern tank the final kiss of death came when low cost was set as a prime consideration, after the Treasury had vetoed the infinitely more capable Medium Mk III on cost grounds the Matilda had to be cheap, this would have disastrous consequences for an already fatally compromised design.

The A11 Matilda undergoing trials on Salisbury Plain. Many of the key flaws in the design can be clearly seen; the small one man turret, the exposed tracks and running gear and the puny single 0.303" Vickers machine gun. Beneath the admittedly thick main armour lurked an asthmatic 70hp V-8 engine from a Ford truck linked to an equally commercial grade gearbox and running gear, a combination that could just about propel the tank to 8mph on road and no more than 6mph cross-country. In every respect bar armour thickness it was far less capable than the tanks that had come before it and so must be considered a regrettable step backwards in tank design.​

The first Matilda prototype was duly delivered by Vickers in mid-1936 to a decidedly nonplussed Royal Tank Corps, while the process of digesting the Abyssinian War experience had barely begun one fact was blindingly obvious; it had not involved any significant trench warfare. It was therefore equally obvious that a tank that was optimised for trench warfare and little else was of questionable value, quite simply there had been no situations in North Africa when the Matilda would have been of much more use than a tankette. Indeed a Light Tank Mk VI was cheaper, faster, more manoeuvrable and with two machine guns better armed, for anything other than charging dug in enemy positions the Matilda would have been inferior to almost every other tank the Corps already possessed. While the design was put through it's paces there was never any question of it being adopted into service, the tests were as much about checking the evolving infantry tank doctrine and identifying the actual requirements of a new tank as an actual assessment of the design.

In the aftermath of the Matilda debacle General Elles was removed from his role as Director of Mechanisation and only retained his post as Master-General of the Ordnance due to political consideration. With the Ministry for Defence Co-ordination (MoDC) lobbying for a general oversight role on all defence procurement the War Office felt removing Elles from the Ordnance would risk providing the MoDC with more ammunition to support their case. However by then end of 1937 Elles would join the growing band of senior officers who took early retirement as modernisation and mechanisation gathered pace. Elles replacement as Director of Mechanisation was his former deputy Giffard LeQuesne Martel who combined experience of the office, a fine mechanical mind and a good vision of armoured warfare. For all those strengths he was perhaps not the most political of officers and would be involved in regular clashes with Hobart at the Royal Armoured Corps over who had responsibility for final sign off on new tank specifications.​

Long before the Matilda was formally rejected, which it duly was at the beginning of 1937, thoughts turned to a new design with a new specification. The sensible move would have been to wait until the new Royal Armoured Corps had developed an idea of exactly what it wanted, however as we have seen the Treasury (or more correctly the fear of the Treasury) intervened and forced a rushed decision. With time of the essence it was not believed possible to start with a fresh piece of paper and so instead the existing A7 medium tank was selected as a base. The A7, originally an experimental tank produced by the Royal Ordnance Factory Woolwich as a test bed, had been under development since 1929 and so was considered a well understood starting point. The new specification, logically enough A12, specified the same thick armour (for the time) of the A11, a full 60mm on the hull and 65 on the turret, a larger three man turret with the then standard Ordnance QF 2-pounder and provision for both AP and HE rounds and a new larger engine, gearbox and running gear to ensure the A12 could maintain the same speeds as the A7 (25mph on road, 15mph cross country) despite all the additional weight of armour.

Almost the only things the A11 and the A12 had in common were their notional roles and the name, the A12 receiving the name Matilda II from it's unwanted predecessor. As with so many decisions at the time this was political, admitting the A11 had been a complete failure would have only strengthened the hand of those who wanted to centralise procurement. It was therefore important that the Matilda be presented as a success to help the War Office and the Army could fend of the MoDC and others who lusted after their budget. Thus the A12 was touted as a development of the A11 and, in order to keep up the pretence, had to share the same name. This 'development' pretence, combined with the need to meet the spring deadline for the budget's Army Estimates, forced the Army Board and Royal Armoured Corps to order the Matilda II straight off the drawing board, hardly the ideal way for the new Corps to begin it's life.

---
Notes

First off apologies for splitting this one, but it should make the men of tanks happy and isn't that worth a two part update?

Game Effects;
A few Old Guard generals knocked out, not all of them but a decent chunk. I mostly removed the ones who had retired in the 1920s or those who like Gowrie were Governor-General of distant Dominions. While I'd prefer a full on purge it was never on, so still plenty of 1 skill old guard generals clogging up the auto-promotion system. The only relief is I can justify getting rid of Massingbeard so at least there's a free F-M slot.

For the rest Elles is entirely historical, he's almost the archetype old guard officer who sadly had too much influence on armoured design. Fortunately not this time round. OTL the Master-General of Ordnance role did disappear in 1938 when the Ministry of Supply started up and did all military procurement (apart from for the Royal Navy and Aircraft production, so basically the Army and all non-aircraft RAF buys). The idea had been around for years so I figured Super Mac would push it as A) more power to him and B) OTL he served there as a junior minister and liked it so probably agreed with the idea. I also think the Cabinet would like it as a stick to threaten the Service Ministries with, just in case.

Onto the tanks, the Matilda I was that awful while my Matilda II will be somewhat different to OTL. Slightly lighter armour and a bigger and better engine will help it to be faster and probably more reliable due to less stress on the engine. I fear the suspension will still be ropey and the turret is too small, but then something had to go wrong. Beside the 2-pdr wasn't that bad, particularly with HE ammo on standard issue. All these changes should also mean it's less of a contrived shape so should be easier to cast and so cheaper to make, the thinner turret armour (65mm not 80mm) in particular will really help and shouldn't impact protection too much, it will still be better armoured than a 1942 Pz IV.

And now onto cruisers!

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCII: A Scottish Restaurant Menu of Tanks​

In comparison to their heavy brethren the men of the cruiser branch of the Royal Armoured Corps had not one but three designs to consider in the spring of 1937, each designed and built to a different specification. While this did give them a chance to review decidedly different interpretations of what exactly a Cruiser Tank should be, this was not the original intention. As with the A11 Matilda we start in 1934 though a few months earlier, hence the first two tanks under consideration, the imaginatively named Cruiser MkI and Cruiser MkII, bearing the General Staff designation A9 and A10 respectively. The two tanks were stable mates and shared many components from the turret on top down to the mechanicals, the differences being effectively confined to armour and armament. While the A9 was always intended as a cruiser design the A10 began life as an infantry tank, only being assessed as a cruiser after it's inadequate armour disqualified it from the infantry tank role. While it would be nice to think this use of a common design was a deliberate choice driven by thoughts of simplified logistics and maintenance, in truth it was a pure economy measure, one of several that would blight both tanks. It would however be unfair to entirely blame the Treasury for the problems of these designs, certainly their economy measures did not help but the then Royal Tank Corps (RTC) should not be absolved of their mistakes, the A9 and A10 in particular were ill-fated from the start.

The A9 was a RTC original, unlike the Matilda which had originated from the Army Board the A9 project had involved the RTC from the start, which was something of an indictment in itself as the first predecessor of the A9 could be dated back to the mid-1920s. Simply put the A9 was a refined version of the aborted Vickers A6 / Medium MkIII, a design that had been in development since 1926 and had been cancelled due the high unit cost of the final production prototype. While the evolution had markedly improved the design there is a very strong argument that a fresh piece of paper would have been a better choice, certain fundamental problems had never been cured despite years of work. However the RTC would not be deflected and it appears their decision to go ahead with the A9 was not based on a rational judgement of what the Corps needed or wanted, but what it had been denied by the Army Board. While this was bad enough the RTC made matters worse by going along with the cost cutting measures imposed on the project, doubtless determined to avoid the mistakes of the 'over-priced' Medium MkIII. Thus not only where the worst features of the past preserved but whole new problems were added to the design.

The A9 prototype, more formally the Tank, Cruiser, Mk I. While the design was a failure it was not without innovative features; a hydraulically powered turret, effective steering brakes and an auxiliary engine for basic fan cooling of the crew compartments. However the most significant contribution of the A9 came from a feature that didn't even last till the end of it's trial period; it's engine. The original engine, a 120hp unit from a Rolls Royce Phantom II, proved to be under-powered and lacking in torque and was replaced with a marginally more powerful but far torquier Associated Equipment Company (AEC) bus engine. While the Rolls Royce engineers at Crewe were unsurprised at this failure, that an engine designed to move a 2.5 tonne car had failed to adequately propel a 12 tonne tank was hardly shocking, their representative did notice the relative success of the aero-engine derived 'Liberty' units on trial in the competing tanks and reported this back to HQ. The development of the famous Rolls Royce Meteor tank engine can be dated from the point his report on the trials made it's way from the car division at Crewe to the aero division at Derby.​

The most obvious problem with the A9 was the triple turrets, an inheritance that can be traced all the way back to the Vickers A1E Independent, the tank that had started the multi-turret mania back in the 1920s. Quite aside from the marginal value of two turreted 0.303" Vickers machine guns on a tank that already had a 2pdr main gun with a co-axial 0.303", the two 'sub-turrets' were deeply unpopular with the cramped crews who had to man them and compromised the armour scheme of the tank, creating numerous shot traps and weak points. These weaknesses took on critical importance as the A9 was hardly well armoured to start with, having a mere 14mm at thickest on the turret and front hull with only 10mm or less elsewhere it was about as well protected as a Light Tank MkVI; basically machine gun proof but little more. Moving downwards the mechanicals were little better, economy measures had seen the MkIIIs Armstrong Siddeley V8 replaced with a string of inadequate 'commercial' engines and had forced the designers to retain the tried and failed coil spring triple-bogie suspension system, leaving the tank underpowered and suffering with severely compromised off-road performance and the alarming tendency to shed it's tracks under load. A brutally honest assessment would conclude that the Light tank Mk VI had superior speed, better suspension, better reliability, a lower cost and, due to the lack of 'sub-turrets', effectively better armour. The only advantages the A9 had over it were it's powered turret and the 2pdr main gun it contained, not insignificant but hardly the vast improvement that the RTC needed to regain the lead in tank design Britain had frittered away in the 1920s.

The case of the A10 is somewhat more complex, intended to serve as an infantry tank the basic A9 design had it's armour was thickened and, interestingly, the two sub-turrets removed. That aside the design was barely altered and used the same power train and suspension with equally bad results. On it's own terms the up-armouring must be judged a success, not only was the thickness doubled all over to 30mm turret/front hull and 22mm elsewhere but without the two shot trapping machine guns turrets the actual combat effectiveness of the armour was exponentially increased. Sadly the end result of these modifications was a design that fell between the two schools of the RTC; the infantry tank branch soon dismissed the A10 as being under-armoured, compared to the vast 60mm slabs on the Matildas the A10 was indeed paper thin, while the cruiser branch were concerned with the alarmingly slow speed of the design. With the same mechanicals as the A9 no more than 16mph could be achieved on the road and half that off it, hardly appropriate for a cruiser, even for a 'heavy cruiser' as the A10's supporters dubbed it. Despite these flaws both the A10 and the A9 were ordered by the War Office, the outbreak of war in North Africa prompted a minor panic at the lack of any deployable tanks (bar ancient Medium MkIIs and MG armed light tanks) and the War Office reacted by hurriedly ordering of the nearest new designs to hand; the A9 and the A10. After the unexpectedly rapid end to that conflict the larger 'on approval' volume production contracts were cancelled, but the initial trial orders were too far advanced to cancel, leaving the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps (RAC) with several hundred new tanks that they were less than impressed with and had no clear idea how to use.

The A10 or Tank, Cruiser, Mk II. The initial A10 order was for 150 tanks, enough for a full armoured brigade of three regiments and a brigade HQ squadron, with enough left over for a spares and replacement pool. The A9 order was of a similar size and was also intended to form a brigade, though the more complex construction of the A9 delayed it's order relative to the simpler A10. The original plan had been to form two independent armoured brigades for immediate service, without the pressure of war this plan was shelved and the regiments instead hurled into intensive training with the Experimental Mechanised Force to bring them up to speed. In the end the brigades were formed and were used as the basis of the first of the new armoured Cavalry Division, a solution that neatly required all of the otherwise unwanted tanks and took advantage of the logistical advantages of their common heritage.​

The final tank under consideration was far more interesting, though sadly this did not extend to it's name as it bore the entirely predictable designation Tank, Cruiser, Mk III and was the product of the A13 specification. The A13 was the brainchild of Major-General Giffard LeQuesne Martel who, impressed by the Christie-derived BT tanks he had seen while observing Soviet manoeuvres, had arranged for the War Office to investigate a similar design. To this end a Christie M1931 tank had been acquired from it's developer, the American Walter Christie, imported and handed over to the Morris Motor Group for development. It was this original chassis that was under review by the RAC, the newly promoted Major-General Hobart having insisted his Corps have a say in any new tank design and to be allowed to compare it with the existing tanks then in service. With tanks and cavalry united in the RAC the traditional 'divide and conqueror' tactics of the Mechanisation Branch (and indeed the War Office as a whole) were ineffective and Hobart was able to insist on both more 'realistic' (i.e. tougher) trials and to get his own men present to observe. This was unfortunate for the A13E1 (E1 denoting the 1st experimental prototype of a specification) as it easily passed Martel's performance trials, recording tremendous speeds in the process, but was badly shown up by Hobart's longer distance reliability and combat manoeuvring runs, regularly breaking down and shedding tracks. As an added problem the armour, with a maximum thickness of 16mm, was considered too thin and despite a minimal 2 man crew it was clearly very cramped. On the positive side the 'Christie' suspension, for all it's faults and track shedding, was better than the suspension on the A9/A10 and the aero-engine derived Liberty L-12 engine was a success, though the revelation that a 340hp military grade engine was better than a 150hp bus engine should not have surprised anyone.

The two groups involved, Martel's Mechanisation Branch and Hobart's RAC, drew distinctly different conclusions from the trials. Martel still believed in the Christie concept and arranged for Morris to continue with their work, developing a localised version of the Liberty L-12 and revising the underlying mechanicals to improve reliability. By contrast Hobart believed the A13 to be an interesting idea, but ultimately too flawed to continue with and instead pushed for a new 'blank paper' design. Consistent lobbying, and an Army Board wary of ignoring serving tankers after the Matilda debacle, produced results for Hobart in the form of the A14 specification. Despite notionally being a fresh start the A14 in fact incorporated several old ideas, though in stark contrast to previous specifications these were actually successful ideas rather than failed ideas 'with promise'. Starting from the bottom up the tank was to use the Horstmann torsion bar suspension from the Light Tank MkVI, the massive 500hp Thorneycroft RY 12 marine engine that had been tested on the final Medium Mk III prototype and to have armour at least as thick as that of the A10 and, thanks to the mighty engine, the speed of the A9. Interestingly Hobart retained faith in the OQF 2-pounder, though the A14 specification demanded an increased ammunition load to allow large stocks of both HE (High Explosive) and AP (Armour Piercing) shells at the same time, experience in North Africa had forced the RAC to admit they couldn't afford specialised tank-killer tanks; battles refused to develop in the same orderly fashion as staff exercises.

The scene was therefore set for conflict between the Mechanisation Branch and the Royal Armoured Corps over design primacy, with the Army Board and much of the War Office caught between the two sides. Had the matter been merely technical it would have been bad enough, the conceptual differences between the two designs were not insignificant, however politics, of both the Army and Westminster varieties, would complicate matters. Just as an added twist the escalation of the war in Spain would present the British Army with additional (second hand) experience on armoured warfare, this time from a conflict where both sides had significant numbers of tanks to hurl into the fray.

--
Notes;
A9 and A10 completely OTL including the RR car engine, the only change is that the A10 was dismissed by the infantry tank branch then ignored until '38 when it was reviewed again by the cruiser branch and became a 'heavy cruiser'. TTL the RTC just wants some tanks as there is a war on so makes an initial order and plans to sort out the details later, of course the war ends earlier than anyone expected so they get a chance to draw breath and think things through. The initial orders OTL were 175 and 125 respectively, I've just evened that out for neatness and to make the brigades work.

The idea of a RR Merlin tank engine was vaguely knocking around but never got anywhere for two reasons; 1. Morris (later the Nuffield Organisation) had a lock down on using their engine and no-one elses and 2. RR were far too busy making Merlins for the RAF. Now TTL Hobart is fighting 1 while 2 doesn't apply, RR geared up for full war production but now the war is over, it's not a big financial hit (they're probably ahead of OTL money wise) but no boss likes reducing capacity, hence I think they'd be more interested in another application of the Merlin. Particularly as I'm going to try and avoid the Merlin monoculture just for a bit of variety.

The A14 was an OTL(ish) spec, a heavy cruiser spec based on the Soviet T28 and about as successful. I've just had Hobart hijack it and remove the stupid twin front MG turrets. The 500hp marine engine was OTL, very successful but it was pricey compared to a bus engine so not popular, worse it suffered from not being a Nuffield design so they refused to use it. The Horstmann suspension was used and did work on light tanks and eventually ended up on the Centurion so it's a good option and I've decided to use it, which brings us onto the big problem; General Martel

Frankly I'm less and less impressed with Martel the more I read about him, he was borderline obsessed with the Christie pattern and did his level best to push that design to the detriment of other ideas. Christie suspension, while it was better than the A9/A10 design, wasn't that good, it was optimised for speed and not reliability. Everybody who used it had problems with losing tracks, even the T-34 suffered and crews would carry spare tracks because failure was that common. Equally the Nuffield-Liberty engine was underpowered almost from the beginning, certainly by the Mk VI Crusader it should have been obvious, yet Martel as head of the RAC kept supporting it for several generations onwards. It was only once he buggered off to Russia in '43 that things improved; the Sherman Firefly and the spec for the Centurion being the obvious ones. Thus for British tanks to advance Martel must be defeated, step forward Hobo your Corps and your country needs you!

Game Effects;
As trailed, 1 armoured cav division in production (using the A9 and A10s). I've also got a ARM II division in the UK representing the Experimental Mechanised Force, i.e. all the prototypes and various odds and ends being used to develop tactics and test new designs. Finally I've got a LARM in the queue but I can't remember why, it's been a while since I had to actually play the game to advance plot! My guess is that it's a way to represent all the light tank/armoured car units being unified under RAC control, works for me anyway.


Finally, apologies for not responding to the comments but I've been busy and figured you would all prefer an update as my top priority! Replies and vote tallying tomorrow, as I wouldn't want anyone to think I take all the comments (and Davouts songs ) for granted

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCIII: Warfare by Other Means​

The winter months had seen the front lines in the Spanish Civil War go 'quiet', a handy euphemism that meant only light casualties for both sides from skirmishes, raids and snipers, but had seen the overall conflict intensify as the armies re-equipped with new, modern arms and the high commands settled began to settle their differences, though not in the way most had hoped for the previous autumn. Beginning with the later the winter months in Spain were marked by a quiet astonishing number of accidents, senior commanders and political leaders on both sides perishing in crashes, collisions or just simply disappearing. While there were undoubtedly some genuine accidents the shear number of fatal incidents in such a short time span pointed to something more, a conclusion that the factions at the time were quick to leap to. The problem then, as now, is separating genuine accident from deliberate sabotage, the lack of evidence and the surfeit of suspects with strong motivation means any judgment is almost inevitably subjective.

A good example is the death of General Fransicso Franco in a plane crash in late December 1936, his Ju-52 coming down somewhere in the Sierra Madrona mountain range while Franco was traveling from his HQ on the Southern front to a meeting in Madrid. By this time a pattern was already starting to emerge so many people were receptive to the idea that it was no accident, a line heavily pushed by both his local supporters and the Abwher contingent, and with the crash site hidden in the mountains there was no clear evidence either way. It is indicative of the problems in the Monarchist camp that many of the leading suspects were notionally on the same side as the deceased general; the pro-British group around Generals Mola and Sanjurjo, the British themselves acting independently, the monarchist wing of his notional allies the Falange Española (Spanish Phalanx) and, almost as an afterthought, the Republicans and their foreign backers.

The Junkers Ju-52 in Lufthansa markings. The aircraft that crashed carrying General Franco was also a Lufthansa machine but had Luftwaffe pilots who had been 'temporarily' transferred to Iberia just prior to the coup. The aircraft, and pilots, were immediately pressed into military service by the Monarchists and formed part of the air taxi service used by the Monarchists to travel around Spain. After the crash the Abwher contingent in Spain faced the task of explaining the accident to their paranoid masters, as these men would never accept it had been a simple accident there were three choices; pilot error, mechanical error or sabotage. The first two would involve blaming either the skill of picked Luftwaffe pilots or German engineering, hardly wise choices in the poisonous world of German internal politics, and so sabotage was the preferred explanation, the story soon morphing into an elaborate Franco-Soviet conspiracy involving the NKVD and Deuxième Bureau collaborating to undermine German influence.​

To this day there is no definite answer and, to be frank, it is of little importance, save to specialists in the field. Regardless of who was to blame, or if it was in fact just an accident, it was but one death among many. Along with Franco, the notionally pro-British General José Sanjurjo, the Falange leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera (who, ironically, had only escaped a Republican firing squad in the autumn) and the hard right Acción Española (Spanish Action) leader Víctor Pradera all suffered mysterious, but fatal, accidents. The Republicans were not immune from these fratricidal accidents, in the same time period the President of the Cortez Diego Martínez Barrio, the leading Basque politician Juan de Ajuriaguerra and the President of the Parliament of Catalonia Joan Casanovas i Maristany all died in suspicious circumstances. If one accepts that these accidents were in fact deliberate, then it is not a huge leap to conclude that many of these deaths were arranged in retaliation for previous 'accidents', a self feeding spiral that was only broken with the re-starting of hostilities as the factions were forced to unite against their common enemies. However both sides were left weakened and more divided, already fractious relations poisoned still further by mistrust and suspicion and all the work on improved co-ordination and co-operation was undone.

Turning to the matter of the re-arming and re-equipping of the two armies we can see the very definite influence of the foreign backers on the conflict, not just on the battlefield but on the political front; the faction that controlled (or was chosen to receive) the armament flow gaining in power and influence. On the Monarchist side there was an almighty fight between the British and German factions with a Spanish faction in the middle trying to play one of the other to secure the best deal for Spain. The British faction was very much in the ascendancy, with General Mola and the Carlists in control of Madrid and the ports of La Coruna they held both the financial might of Spain and the friendly Bay of Biscay ports. With Spanish waters still hotly disputed, at least inside the 6nm territorial limit, the only safe way into Monarchist Spain was either via Gibraltar or with a Royal Navy escorts, merchants who risked independent blockade running soon discovered the Republican coastal forces compensated for their old equipment with lashings of daring. With the German merchant marine being far too small to carry any noticeable amount of goods and most neutrals hamstrung by their governments refusal to recognise Monarchist Spain (neutral trading rights only applied to recognised governments) the British faction had control of the money, the ports and the shipping, sufficient to squeeze out almost all competition.

The Corta Atalaya mine in Huelva province Andalusia, the founding mine of the Rio Tinto Company and symbol of British influence in Spain. With hard currency reserves being rapidly burnt through, and much of the Gold reserves on their way to the vaults of London, the issue facing the Monarchists was how to pay for further purchases. Where the Republicans had to make do with agricultural exports the Monarchists had the far more valuable option of strategic raw materials, with the best mines in the country under their control the only question was who to sell to. The German contingent pushed government to government arrangements, a plan that would require more centralised control of the mining industry and the breaking of many existing contracts to supply the new Spanish-German trade. While this plan was attractive to the Falangist groups, particularly Franco's successor Manuel Hedilla who saw an opportunity to impose corporatism on the mining industry, it was naturally fiercely opposed by the mostly British owned and controlled mining industry. In the end these groups won out, gaining the support of the ‘Spain first’ faction of the Monarchist coalition by arguing a reduced (German only) customer base could only lead to less competition, lower prices and so less revenue for Spain. In the end therefore the government merely jacked up the mineral duties the mines had to pay and allowed the mines to continue to sell to whoever they pleased, provided the prices stayed high.​

This domination of supply, while excellent for the British arms industry, did not help the Spanish field armies re-equip. There was a marked reluctance in Whitehall to allow anything too modern to be exported, thus when the Monarchists needed new rifles for the new units they were raising (the stockpiles in the Toledo Arsenal having been seized by the Republicans at the start of the war) Britain responded not with the then standard Rifle No. 1 Mk III but with supplies of the older Pattern 1914 Enfield rifle. This strategy also limited the Monarchists to RAF surplus biplanes (of which the RAF had more than enough thanks to Churchill’s cull) and the low mark Light Tanks (in truth machine gun armed tankettes) that the Royal Armoured Corps was rapidly phasing out. There was also a smattering of German equipment as the Reich continued it’s bid for Spain’s raw materials, most significantly a growing number of ‘dual purpose’ Lufthansa aircraft and a company of Panzer Is (another tankette design that the German army considered fit only for training duties). While these new weapons were a vast improvement over what the Monarchists had, years of under funding had left the Spanish army very badly equipped outside the prestige units of the Army of Africa, they were some way from the cutting edge and their effectiveness rested on the assumption France would be equally wary in releasing her best equipment.

The Republicans had a similarly constrained supply arrangement; the simplest and safest way into or out of Spain for any supplies was over the border to France, a route that avoided the risks of the Monarchist naval blockade and the costs of along sea journey to the Soviet Union or even further. This advantage, combined with the French governments covert assistance to the Republican’s trading efforts (through price floors/ceilings and import/export guarantees) made France the main trading partner for the Republicans, the Soviets reluctantly chipping in with grudging credit sales depending on the month to month political situation. It is perhaps worth mentioning the attempts by the Mexican government and it’s revolutionary leader Presidents Lázaro Cárdenas to assist the Republicans, not so much for the actual effect on the Spanish Civil War (which was minimal) but for the political symbolism. That a leader with a history of nationalisations and land seizures would back the Republicans shook the confidence of the US firms who were trading (mostly on credit) with Valenica. While the continuing French presence was enough reassurance for most firms, the efforts of Cárdenas only fuelled the growing unease that President Landon’s ‘Moral Neutrality’ had picked the wrong side to back.

As France was the main supplier of weapons to the Republicans it is on their supplies that we shall focus. To the infantry the French mostly sold obsolete equipment; due to years of neglect most of France’s Great War era light arms were still in front line service with the French Army, so only truly ancient weapons, such as the fifty year old Lebel Model 1886 rifle, were available for sale to the Republicans. In contrast the French aviation industry had kept up with the advance of technology and so had a wide array of relatively modern, but nevertheless obsolete, designs to sell. Indeed the Armée de l'Air was able to follow the example of the RAF and transfer relatively new but unwanted biplanes, such as the woeful Nieuport-Delage NiD 52, onto unsuspecting Republican squadrons. However as the Armée de l'Air had not committed to the complete abandonment of biplanes the most recent, and thus best performing, designs were kept back for frontline service. As such the Republican airforce would remain at something of a disadvantage; a badly handling and lumbering NiD 52 was no match for the far faster Hawker Fury.

There was however one area where the French sales would give the Republicans a massive advantage; armour. Despite intending to follow the example of the other Great Powers and limit sales to tankettes, the catastrophically unreliable but otherwise unexceptional AMR33 was ear marked as an early candidate, the ongoing and politicised saga of French tank development through up an alternative; the Hotchkiss H35. Originally developed as a light infantry tank it had been rejected in late 1936 by the infantry after the final ‘series’ model proved to be significantly worse than the prototypes, particularly off-road. With the economy still in recession and volume production already underway cancelling the order was politically all but impossible, so the design was foisted upon the Cavalry as a substitute for the formidable (but overly complicated and far too expensive) SOMUA S35. The Cavalry however managed to avoid being lumbered with the design by suggesting it instead be sold to France (and not so subtly suggesting they receive the funds raised to buy what they actually wanted).

Thus it was that the Hotchkiss production run ended up in Republican service, by the start of the 1937 campaigns 200 tanks, enough for a full armoured division, had reached the front line. While it was slower and far less capable off-road than the Monarchist’s tankettes, the H35 had a 37mm SA 18 main gun and a full 40mm of turret armour, making it the most deadly tank in Spain at the time, considerably better than anything the Monarchists could field. This success was only enhanced by the failure of their opponents to notice the purchase, the Monarchist instead being distracted by higher profile but actually insignificant arrivals, such as the half a dozen US M2A2s that breached the blockade and were promptly paraded through Valencia to great fanfare. Overall the Republicans entered the 1937 campaigning season with a significant advantage on land, the question would be how they played their new ace to best effect.

---
Notes;

Game Effect is easiest, the Mons get an old LARM division while the Reps get a modern ARM. Both sides also get a dash of supplies and the Reps get a load of oil as well. All that by event naturally. Net result is the Reps actually have slightly more armoured units and enough oil/supplies to keep them running for the year. If the AI can take advantage of that is a different question though.

For the rest a swathe of minister and generals on both sides have been removed, much to my surprise the random generator selected Franco to die on the Monarchist side so I just went with it. OTL of course he was the one arranging the 'tragic' accidents, TTL he's one of the first victims.

Trade wise the blockade is much, much more effective than OTL, mainly because the RN and MN are scouting for their respective factions and unofficially enforcing the blockade. While everyone is safe in international waters both sides are patrolling the 6nm limit (as it was then) with a vengeance.

With no gold the Soviets are not keen while the Mexicans are frustrated by the unofficial blockade, however I imagine it would have spooked US business which is just starting to work out they may be backing the wrong side. On the other side the German OTL scheme to control all Spanish mining dies a death as they just don't have the leverage, hence Britain controls the arm trade and the German raw materials crunch is brought forward a few months.

Finally the H35 was a decent enough light infantry tank for the mid-1930s, however it did have terrible off-road ability so ended up being dumped on the cavalry who didn't actually want an infantry tank. It therefore seemed obvious enough that it would end up being diverted to Spain, a win-win for everyone on the Franco-Republican side.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCIV: Small Acorns​

We now turn our attention to the often ignored subject of agriculture, or at least those parts of the field that are of interest to a student of politics, diplomacy and statecraft. The 1930s would see the emergence of recognisably modern farming, at least as far the agricultural machinery went, and it would be Britain and her Empire at the centre of this change. Indeed it is the involvement of the Dominions in this process that is our reason for studying the area; the development of the modern tractor, no matter how fascinating to the enthusiast, is somewhat beyond the scope of this book. However the tensions and competing interests at the heart of Imperial economic and industrial policy are very much our subject and those topics are found in abundance in the evolution of today’s agricultural colossus Ferguson-Brown-Massey.

The story begins with Ferguson-Brown, the joint venture between inventor Harry Ferguson and the engineering concern David Brown Engineering Ltd, which in the mid-1930s produced the imaginatively titled Ferguson-Brown Model A. This new model incorporated the revolutionary ‘Ferguson system’, a combination of a three point hitch, a hydraulic control system and integrated rear power take off. After overcoming the initial scepticism about its small size and relatively high cost the Model A would propel the new company to the top of the market, out-performing far larger machines and being far safer to boot. Our interest begins with the expansion plans of the company, after the success of the Model A the natural progression was overseas sales, the Dominions being the obvious markets. The traditional pattern for a British firm to expand into the Empire was to either export directly or to setup an overseas subsidiary with a subservient local ‘partner’ as a sop to local opinion. It is likely Ferguson-Brown intended to use the same approach, however after meeting with the Canadian firm of Massey-Harris their plans changed.

The original 1936 Ferguson-Brown Model A. The innovative ‘Ferguson System’ allowed the tractor to efficiently use any powered implement over any ground in safety, the three point hitch keeping it stable while the hydraulic lift allowed control of the level of the implement as the ground changed. Aside from the massive time saving and efficiency advantages this made the Model A considerably safer, the tractor staying stable even after encountering large obstructions. In stark contrast its main rival, the Ford designed Fordson Model N, had a solid hitch so any jolt was transmitted to the tractor, resulting in the alarming tendency to jack-knife when it hit even small obstacles in the soil.​

Massey-Harris was a giant of Canadian industry; with a history stretching back to the 1840s it was well established and with subsidiaries in the United States and Australia was one of Canada’s few international companies. It was also an innovative company, before the end of the 1930s it would perfect the world’s first self propelled combine harvester, a development only rivalled by the ‘Ferguson System’ in terms of impact on modern mechanised farming. The venture was therefore a merger of equals; Ferguson-Brown would not be in a dominant position and would have to work with its new Canadian partner. Indeed in Australia it would be Massey’s subsidiary, H.V. McKay, that would take the lead, already the largest agricultural machinery concern in the Southern Hemisphere they would end up manufacturing designs from both parties, leaving David Brown Australia to focus on gears and industrial equipment. Before the end of the 1930s there would be a lively cross-pollination between the branches of the new venture, including a not insignificant contribution from Australia, which only accelerated development. This process culminated in the 1940s with the seminal TE.20 (Tractor Empire 20hp), ‘The tractor that fed the Empire’ to its supporters, ‘The little grey sales killer’ to rival manufactures. Aside from domination of the British and Dominion markets it was the first tractor to achieve significant sales in India and the rest of the Empire, for many of the world’s farmers mechanisation was synonymous with the TE.20. Significantly the TE.20 was a true Empire-wide development; the engine and ‘Ferguson System’ from Britain, the drive train and chassis from Canada and the attachments and implements from Australia. Quite simply Ferguson-Brown-Massey was one of the first Empire-wide companies that wasn’t just a British firm working overseas, it was a genuine partnership.

The significance of this cannot be over-rated; much of the British establishment saw the role of the Empire in trade policy as somewhere for British firms to export manufactured goods. When Ferguson-Brown-Massey began importing Canadian built combine harvesters into Britain in the late 1930s this was seen as an alarming development, the more extreme even denouncing Imperial Preference and demanding new tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing. Fortunately calmer heads prevailed, the stream of tractors and engines flowing out from Britain to Canada (and the profits from the overseas sales of the machines flowing back to Britain) graphically pointing out that trade was not, in fact, a zero sum game. The specific problem was soon resolved, sales of the combine grew so rapidly a new factory was soon built to meet demand, however the more general concerns lingered for many years, the British establishment and public having to adapt to the industrial and economic rise of the Dominions. While the larger population, economic base and the Royal Navy would ensure Britain remained the most powerful member of the Empire, increasingly she would be forced to become a first among equals and the transition would not be easy. This brings us quite neatly to the second part of our review of all things agricultural; the roller-coaster world of the international beef trade.

--
Notes.
Two updates in a week? Whatever next?! Well don't get used to it, I had some nightshift inspections last week so had plenty of writing time. I will not be so fortunate for quite a while. Moving on to the update;

Britain has to face up to the Empire industrialising and probably isn’t best pleased, the Dominions are supposed to sell raw materials then buy British goods in exchange, they are definitely not supposed to build their own machinery and sell it to Britain. However it is inevitable and after conceding the point on defence the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back, but it will not go smoothly.

OTL Ferguson dumped Brown after the Model A and got a deal with Ford to make the 9N, Ford’s son then stiffed him on the deal in the 1940s and Ferguson went back to Britain to make the TE.20 with Standard Motors before selling out to Massey in the 50s. TTL Ford suffered horribly in the depression and lacks the cash for tractor development (everything is being pinned on the Spanish truck deals) and so Ferguson never meets Ford and stays with Brown.

Massey did produce the first self propelled combine harvester in the late 1930s (designed by an Australian engineer apparently) and so had a big bargaining chip, hence the partnership deal. The OTL TE.20 was actually the Tractor England 20 and was called the ‘little grey sales killer’, I therefore couldn't resist the name Tractor Empire 20 and thanks to Massey 4WD it will sell even better. Handy that.

Finally game effects; all the Empire countries have researched all the 1936 agriculture techs, though you probably could have guessed that.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCV: Affairs of Steak​

The historic international beef trade, doubtless a thrilling roller-coaster of a subject to the specialist, would not merit our attention in and of itself, however it does have merit as an excellent example of the problems that Imperial Preference encountered in the late 1930s. While there are countless other products who's trade could also server as an example of these issues, the beef trade has the added advantage that it was tied up in both Dominion politics and the wider foreign policy situation. As such it is worthy of our attention, if not perhaps are undying interest. The basic situation was simple and had not changed for many years; Britain was a net importer of beef and the Dominion governments, especially the Antipodeans, wanted their farmers to supply that market. How those desires would mesh with Imperial Preference and the wider economic and diplomatic situation is where we will find the meat of this subject.

The UK Beef Market in 1937. Taken as a whole the British Beef market was worth around £70million with total imports comprising half of that for a total of around £35million. To put those figures in context HMS Ark Royal cost in the region £3.5million to take from design to commission and Australian GDP that year was just over £450million. The sums therefore were not insignificant, particularly as demand (and prices) were correctly expected to rise over the coming years as the British economy continued to power out of the Depression. The stakes were furthered raised as Britain was the only major beef importer in the world, accounting for over 90% of world imports, quite simply if you didn't sell to Britain there were no other markets.​

As the above graph clearly shows that Argentina had retained her historic commanding position in the British beef market despite Imperial Preference, a direct result of the Anglo-Argentinian Roca-Runciman Treaty which had put a floor under the Argentine beef trade in exchange for concession to British interests in Argentina. While this did annoy the Dominion, especially the Antipodeans who coveted the Argentinians market share, the entire issue was soon drowned out by the escalating Anglo-Irish trade war which neatly (if inadvertently) solved the problem. With Irish cattle subject to penal tariffs the trade naturally collapsed leaving a void into which the Dominion trade could expand without squeezing the protected Argentine trade. The most pressing problem solved it was convenient for all sides to avoid looking at the fundamental issues involved; as Imperial Preference was perceived to be successful (not least by the various electorates) there was little to be gained and much to be lost by looking for problems. While work continued in the background of government, the political establishment as a whole moved onto new matters, leaving them almost entirely unprepared when the problem re-emerged in a most unexpected location; Canada.

The problem was slow to emerge as Canada was, for the most part, self-sufficient in meat, only after the rapid economic growth on the back of the British war effort and subsequent Canadian re-armament did the nation need to import. Imperial Preference should have ensured that it was Australian or New Zealand farmers who benefited, yet despite the high Canadian import tariffs it was Argentinian beef, especially the much prized Argentine steak, that began flowing into the country. The mechanism was as old as it was cunning, Argentine beef was imported tariff free to Britain, processed so it became a 'British' product for tax and tariff purposes and then shipped equally tariff free to Canada where it was sold as prime Argentinian beef. The extra sea miles increased costs but the large premium on Argentinian steak ensured a healthy profit overall, an outcome that delighted the men behind the venture but annoyed almost everyone else. It was in fact a perfect storm, despite the low volume of material and the relatively tiny sums involved, it managed to hit almost every button simultaneously and exposed the tensions inherent in Imperial Preference.

Quite simply it was not and is not possible to run a coherent free trade block when the member states are free to arrange their own bi-lateral trade agreements. The opportunities for arbitrage are too great and will distort the system as goods 'leak' into the system, a problem made all the worse for the Empire by the vast distances involved; it is 10,000 miles from Canberra to Ottawa as the crow flies, shipping costs over such vast distances are significant even today, in the 1930s they were dominant. For Imperial Preference to survive there would need to be a common trade policy in the Empire which, given the importance of trade to international affairs required co-ordination on foreign and economic policy. As the general drift of Dominion affairs had been towards greater and greater independence on these matters a sudden reversal towards a more co-operative (and inevitably British dominated) state of affairs would require a significant change in policy direction. To add to the problem there many, including important figures such as the Canadian Prime Minster Mackenzie King, who were only lukewarm about "Empire" free trade to begin with and wished instead for full free trade.

The vast Sao Paulo station, the link between the port of Santos and the coffee producing highlands. One of the triumphs of British Victorian engineering the Sao Paulo Railway (SPR) was just one of the countless British owned railways in South America and became a bargaining chips used by the Brazilian governments to ensure access to the British beef market. It was an apt coincidence that the chairman of the SPR was none other than the Earl of Bessborough, the former Governor General of Canada who's calm leadership of the Ottawa Imperial Economic Conference had been key to getting acceptance for Imperial Preference. It was therefore Bessborough's success in Ottawa that caused him such trouble at the SPR; the web of Anglo-Brazilian agreements that provided the SPR with it's favourable position in Brazil could not easily be reconciled with the demands of Imperial Preference. Similar situations existed across South America as long standing British commercial interests butted against those of the Dominions.​

With the political establishment grasping for answers the civil service stepped in with their default solution; a Head's of Government meeting to stall for time and then a Royal Commission to kick the matter into the long grass while the problem was sorted out. Had the problems with Imperial Preference been confined to beef, or even to the meat trade in general, this doubtless would have been acceptable, but the complaints and fears where far more widespread. In Australia for instance there were worries about South American wool exports leaking into Britain through bi-lateral trade deals, this was a serious concern as almost 2/3rds of Australian exports were wool or woollen products, making the country's colossal national herd of 110 million sheep one of the pillars of the Australian economy. These fears were shared by New Zealand and South Africa, both large wool exporters, though not quite so dependent as Australia. For all three nations the continued competition from South America, particularly from nations such as Argentina and Uruguay, was a long standing annoyance and seemed to them to fly in the face of the aims of Imperial Preference.

Conversely in Canada it was the free trade lobby that took the chance to make their case. The main worry for such men was the nations lost US partners, from a pre-Depression high of over £400million cross-border trade had slumped to less than £100million and despite the presence of yet another pro-tariff president in the White House they continued to nurture their free trade dreams. Arching above all of this was the growing problem of industrialisation, if Britain's industries sold to the Dominions where would the nascent local industries find their markets? Equally if the Dominion industries began to dominate their local markets where would Britain's industrialists find replacement customers? As we have seen with defence spending these were live issues which could not be long delayed and, as with defence, the solution would require the co-operation and acceptance of all the parties involved.

Therefore the Royal Commission was vetoed and instead agreement was reached to stage a second Imperial Economic Conference, this time in London, to resolve matters. Where the Ottawa conference had established the foundations of Empire Free Trade it would be up to the London conference to make the grand idea work.

---
Notes:
Next time I suggest anything similar to a beef update tell me I'm an idiot. That was not easy to write and at times not even enjoyable. Thank the lord it's over.

Right so as always the numbers are indeed correct, Australia did have 110million sheep in the mid-1930s or 16 each to put it another way. The jokes really make themselves don't they? Equally true is the terrifying importance of wool to Australia, I've seen a few estimates that exports were half the Australian economy at the time, meaning wool exports were a 1/3rd of the total Australian economy and that's without even allowing for domestic demand and the lamb/mutton trade.

The Canadian trade figure are roughly OTL, the peak number was from 1929 and the lower was an low ball estimate from 1933. In TTL it's probably even worse than that but I didn't want to over do it.

Britain was the only country to import beef in large quantities and I can't really say why, there's not that much good beef country in Britain I guess. OTL it was 85% of the pre-WW2 market with Germany and Italy making up most of the rest, with Italy utterly bankrupt I figure the Italians are probably eating less steak so I've bumped up Britain's share.

The London Conference has to find a way to make Imperial Preference work in a way that doesn't bugger up British investments in South America (well over £1 billion at the time, and British GDP was only £4.5 billion in 1935) or utterly screw over the Dominions exports or industries (even if Britain wanted to, they are now assertive enough to resist). A hell of a circle to square but there are plus points; Alf Landon is very pro-tariff so that'll will deprive Canada (and PM King) of somewhere to run and everyone thinks Imperial Preference saved them from the Depression so there is good will to make it work. Still a tough job.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCVI: Time For a Beer?​

It is fair to say that Alfred Mossman Landon did not have a particularly strong mandate when he entered the White House as the 33rd President of the United States. Having fallen just short on Electoral College votes and a fair margin short in the symbolic (if in practice irrelevant) popular vote he had depended on the support of others and back room deals to win office. This lack of personal mandate, combined with the simple mathematics that had left no one party with control of Congress, was not considered by most commentators to be a recipe for a strong or decisive Presidency. And strictly speaking they would be correct, at least on the second point; the Landon Administration would be defined by it's dealing and compromising nature, very rarely would the President implement a scheme exactly as first proposed. Whether this was entirely down to the unfavourable legislative environment or if instead Landon's personality played a part is an interesting, but ultimately academic question. The simple facts were that as long as Congress remained fractious and divided, compromise was the only game in town.

The issues of the election campaign, which subsequently became the issues facing the political nation, could be boiled down to three areas; Foreign Policy, the Depression and Prohibition. We will deal first with Prohibition, an issue that from an outsider's perspective should have caused a far more problems than it did. Broadly speaking there was agreement on the need for repeal, indeed despite the Democratic holdouts from the Southern States there was even a majority in Congress, what there was not was any confidence the repeal would get past the states. As any change to prohibition would require an amendment to the Constitution (to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment that had introduced the system in the first place) ratification by state legislatures was also a requirement. With those bodies thought to be in the hands of the Temperance lobby ratification was seen as a major stumbling block to repeal, though interestingly that was as far as the thinking went. The fact that a relatively small group of lobbyist had such power over the levers of state government and could block the wishes of the vast majority was seemingly wilfully ignored, instead Washington busied itself with the smaller technical problem of bypassing the legislatures. This oversight seems extraordinary and the only obvious explanation is the deeply cynical theory that Washington had no desire to investigate state lobbying in case the investigation spread to Congress.

The Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit to Windsor. A key border crossing prior to the vast jump in US-Canadian tariffs the bridge had become one of the main channels for illicit alcohol importation into the United States. That this trade had flourished while Ontario (along with much of the rest of Canada) suffered under it's own unpopular prohibition experiment was due to a very lax definition of 'export' that allowed countless breweries and distillers to stay open. The trade's survival is also a testament to the extent of bribery and corruption within local, state and federal enforcement bodies, with only limited crossing points a concerted campaign could have killed the trade dead, yet barely 5% of Ontario 'exports' were ever seized.​

In any event the Twenty-first Amendment was prepared and would duly pass in early 1938 when the final state held it's convention to ratify the amendment. This long lag in which prohibition was still in force gave the gangs that controlled the illicit alcohol trade more than enough time to 'go straight', the few pre-Prohibition brewers that had survived soon fell victim to the 'new' breweries the more far-sighted Mafia bosses established. With a potent combination of vast financial muscle, almost endless physical muscle on the ground and control of the Teamsters transport union the Mafia brewers soon dominated the post-Prohibition market. Theses organisations also ensured that even notionally 'dry' states had no shortage of alcohol, while transporting alcohol into a dry state was illegal (indeed it had the somewhat bizarre status of being unconstitutional) taking it through a 'dry' state on route to a 'wet' state was, after a Supreme court judgement, not only allowed but a constitutional right. As such some of the most circuitous and unlikely delivery routes evolved and whole fleets of lorries started 'losing' their cargo at the most convenient point. This cunning ruse, a blatant violation of the spirit of the law but almost impossible to prove as actually illegal, along with the breweries status as cash laundering but (mostly) legitimate businesses frustrated the FBI and Treasury investigators seeking to bring down the Mob.

While the public were delight at the return of alcohol the other overriding aim, the reduction in crime, must be judged at least a partial failure. Most of the worst excesses had in any event been dealt with, mobsters such as Al Capone had been weeded out through a brutally Darwinian process leaving only the more cunning bosses who hid their wealth, tried to avoid public violence (private violence was naturally another matter) and nurtured judicial and political connections. Thus while low level crime abated somewhat and the police and Treasury agencies could direct their efforts towards more serious crime, the problems of the prohibition era lingered on, not leas the corrosive culture of acceptance of non-violent Mob law breaking in the police and legal systems. There was however at least one significant but normally un-noticed positive to prohibition; a great deal of black market and otherwise illicit activities were suddenly legalised and thus became available for taxation, a boon for cash strapped state and federal budgets. And as we shall see those budgets were in need of such injections of cash as Landon's began to implement his economic programme.


---
Notes;
A little short this one, but rest assured there will be another US update to follow, if only to annoy the Hispanophiles! More seriously it's been a couple of weeks and various other authors are updating so quickly I feel I have to make an effort to keep up, hence short but hopefully sweet. The economic and foreign policy of Landon is up next.

So Prohibition is repealed, four years late and the Mob is even more entrenched, an idea I just couldn't bring myself to drop. Somewhat to my surprise it is unconstitutional to take a beer from a 'wet' state into a 'dry' one, the only other way an individual can breach the US constitution is to enslave someone. There's something wrong there but I'm not sure what...

Equally the Temperance lobby was very strong but rather than solve the problem Washington ignored it and worked around it. As an outsider that seems odd but I'm sure it makes sense to someone.

Game effect? A dissent reducing event for the US seemed about right.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCVII: An Unnamed Deal​

The simplest comparison between President Landon's foreign and domestic programmes is this; the former acquired a moniker "Moral Neutrality", while the later did not. This did not reflect the relative importance of the two, as any political analyst will tell you domestic issues decide almost all non-war time elections, but it did reflect the lack of a coherent ideology behind the domestic programme. There was no overarching vision or desire to remake society, the economy or indeed anything else, the aim was to escape the Depression and then worry about the future. While this may sound short sighted and decidedly lacking in ambition, it was an objective that had defeated the two previous Presidents, three if one counts the stunted term of Garner. So where Theodore Roosevelt had his 'Square Deal', Woodrow Wilson 'The New Freedom' Landon had a blank, an apparently unconnected series of legislation with no obvious or even rhetorical linkage. While this certainly helped to keep expectations low, and perhaps reflected Landon's own preference for delivery over presentation, this does not mean the package itself was devoid of content or controversy.

We have already indirectly covered the bulk of Landon's Foreign policy objectives, the administrations judgement on Spain had induced a rash of exports to the Republicans, a symbolic minority paid for in cash but the bulk on credit. While this trend would stutter as France began tightening the screw, keen to squeeze out 'rival' US goods in favour of their own manufacturers, the generous credit terms of the US exporters kept them in the game. One entirely unexpected outcome of the credit trade was to wake the US financial markets from their slumber, after the Wall Street crash and the systematic collapse of the American banking system the financial system had fallen into a coma. However the export trade to Spain generated a large volume of credit notes, notes the industrial firms were naturally keen to cash but who's value depended entirely on their being a Republican Spanish victory. Therefore there soon developed a market for these 'Spanish Credits', instruments that bore similarities to the 'Cotton Bonds' that the Confederates had issued during the American Civil War; their value rose on news of Republican success, but slumped after a defeat. This development was far from universally welcomed and opposition soon coalesced around the well known Senator Gerald Nye. Nye, who had led the Senate Munitions Committee barely a year earlier, raised the spectre of the Great War and the 'Merchants of Death' who believed had profited from the conflict and who he argued had forced America into the war to protect their investments. Despite Nye's abject failure to find any evidence of this it was a popular argument and a tough charge to refute; the similarities were obvious and the debts were racking up daily, worse the Monarchist government (under British prompting) had explicitly stated they would not honour the war-debts of the Republican Government. For men such as Nye this was a red rag to a bull, a clear sign that America would inevitably be dragged into the war to protect the banks and munitions industries and that only a new, stricter, Neutrality Act could prevent this. While Landon was able to deflect the initial charges by further extending the "Lusitania clause" to cover corporations and financial institutions, his speech on the matter causing a mini-collapse in the value of the 'Spanish Credits', Nye was perseverance itself and the issue would re-emerge as the factions in Spain left winter quarters and began the new campaigning season.

George Gallup, one of the founding fathers of public opinion polling in the United States. Gallup had leapt to national prominence by correctly calling the complex 1936 Presidential Election, the vote distribution part at least; Gallup made no pretence at calculating the post-vote the political wrangling. Keen to build up a regular business in political polling outside of election type Gallup developed his 'Presidential Approval Rating System', a system to gauge popular support for the incumbent President on a rolling basis. Landon would be the first President subject to this monthly ritual and one which soon caught on amongst journalists looking for an easy hook to hang stories or opinions onto. The early months of Landon's Presidency would show a significant upturn in his ratings, though if this was due to the repeal of Prohibition, his modest domestic reforms or the natural tendency for the nation to rally behind a new President after a divisive election campaign is less clear.​

As we leave foreign policy and move onto Landon's domestic agenda it is worth noting the areas were there was no change; both tariffs and the gold standard retained their sacred cow status and no efforts were made to change policy on either front; the 'Strong Dollar' and protectionism were key pillars of the Landon Administration. On the domestic front there is rally only one subject worthy of mention, the Labor Reform Act (LRA), also known as the Norris-Hartley Act after it's two sponsors Senator George Norris and Representative Fred Harley Jr. The LRA is justly accused of being a confused Act, as it was drafted without a guiding vision and had to pass through a divided Congress where majorities were assembled on a vote by vote basis this is hardly surprising. In the grandest traditions of industrial labour relations law the Act was duly acted by unions and employers, both vehemently arguing the legislation was biased in favour of the other. In truth the Act tried to balance off a pro-union change against a pro-business reform but such judgements are necessarily subjective, particularly when the issue of States Rights meant individual states could (and did) make their own changes and when the Supreme Court was not afraid to step in and clarify certain parts. In broad terms the LRA introduced a Federal minimum wage (and allowed States to introduce their own minimum wage), removed the last anti-trust limitations on unions, made it simpler for them to organise and outlawed a range of 'unfair practices' such as intimidation or victimisation of union officials or supporters. On the flip side the 'Closed Shop' (where only union members could be hired) was banned in favour of an assumption 'Right to Work' (where union membership was not compulsory), though States could legislate for a 'Union Shop' (where any non-members had to join with a set time of starting work) should they chose. In addition a list of labour side 'unfair practices' such as wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes and secondary action were all outlawed and the Federal Executive was empowered to seek strike-breaking injunctions in the event a planned or ongoing strike "imperilled the national health or safety".

Whether this mix of reforms was pro- or anti-union depended very much on the exact circumstances, the variation in state's legislation meant a local in one state could be a winner, but in the adjacent state a net loser. As an example the nascent auto-mobile unions in Michigan benefited immensely from the protections on employer 'unfair practices' and were able to severely restrict the infamous Ford Service Department's deplorable campaign of violence and intimidation. On the negative side Michigan did not introduce a minimum wage and despite their best efforts remained a right to work state, severely undermining the unions plan to forcibly unionise the entire industry whether they wanted it or not. In contrast the West Coast aerospace unions in California and Washington saw success as those states introduced the 'Union Shop' and with this in place membership exploded as the major aviation firms of Boeing, Douglas and North American were unionised in short order. The exact popularity, or not, of the LRA is hard to gauge with so much else on-going at the same time, not to mention the fact that it would take several protest, court cases and interpretations before the exact impact of the new Act became clear, however it doesn't appear to have been wildly unpopular beyond the partisans of both extremes.

The only other Act passed at the time that was worthy of note was the Hot Oil Act that passed through Congress almost in parallel with LRA but to considerably less fanfare. The Hot Oil Act was, in essence, little more than the cartelisation of the American oil industry; a decidedly risky area for an ex-oilman such as Landon to enter. There was however a genuine problem, after the East Texas oil find of the early 1930s there was a glut of oil on the US market that flattened prices, to deal with this the Texas Railroad Commission (which had somehow become the oil and gas regulator in Texas) introduced quotas on production. Though these had survived repeated legal challenges they faced the problem of 'Hot Oil', basically over-quota oil being smuggled into pipelines, at which point it was untraceable. The solution was the Hot Oil Act which required permits from anyone using a pipeline, records of production and shipping and extended the quota system nationwide. Such was the success of the Act that it inspired Britain to found the Imperial Organisation of Oil Producing Countries (IOOPC) in the late 1930s. Somewhat amusingly the IOOPC would attract immense vitriol from US politicians for it's "domination" of the world oil market (and price) to the detriment of US oil majors, the irony entirely missing an angry Congress. In the short term however it, along with the sky high tariffs, stabilised the US domestic oil price to the advantage of producers (and the cost of consumers) and doubtless saved several of the shakier oil majors from collapse while pushing smaller, less well connected, producers into bankruptcy.

In summary the Landon Administration's opening months were, overall, a success, he managed to deliver on some of his key campaign promises (Repeal of prohibition, 'Moral Neutrality' and labour reform) and had survived the initial backlash of those opposed to such changes. However the later half of the year would not go so smoothly, not least as his domestic agenda began to run into trouble and the opposition to his Spanish policy grew ever stronger.

---
Notes;
The LRA is an unholy mix of the New Deal labour laws and the post-WW2 reaction against them. Is it balanced? I think so but what do I know? It seemed Landon ish, a few social reforms mixed in with a sweetner for business but I'm sure people will tell me it's actually a communist manifesto/evil opression of the masses.

Gallup Presidential Approval did indeed start in early 1937 and so I thought I'd through that one in as a bit of colour. I'm figuring Landon is probably dragging most of his party with him, the Righters as well and a few moderate Dems, against are the labour friendly Dems and the pro-biz Reps but he's OK at the moment. On that basis I'm guessing public opinion is probably OK at the moment, particularly with beer now an option.

Finally the Hot Oil Act is OTL and was rushed in by FDR after his first attempt was declared unconstitutional and alarmingly centralising. Certainly there was a problem with a collapsed oil price and the solution was a government backed price fixing cartel, OTL this did inspire OPEC but TTL there is no OPEC and instead the world can rest assured it's oil supply is in the hands of Britain and the IOOPC. Sadly I doubt this will stop Congress complaining about evil cartels despite it basically being their own fault. Also I suspect Landon will be far more vulnerable on this being an ex-oil man, FDR basically got a free pass on it but I doubt Alf will be so lucky.

In any event, now back to Britain for a string of updates. Why it's almost as if this were a British AAR!

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCVIII: The Best of Intentions.​

The New Year was supposed to have seen Austen Chamberlain's government move forward with it's domestic agenda, an area that had been sidelined by the more urgent (and more glamorous) foreign policy and military reform endeavours of the previous year. Technically speaking the government achieved it's aim; several Green Papers were published on the coal industry, health and education while the work of the Conservative Research Department was used as the foundation of a substantial White Paper outlining plans to extend unemployment insurance to the entire workforce and reform pensions. Unfortunately these initiatives were comprehensively overshadowed by the catastrophic mishandling of another policy launched at the same time, an ambitious attempt at industrial reform in the ship building industry.

The episode began the previous year with the decision to base a substantial portion of the Royal Navy at Singapore, the resultant 'Eastern Fleet' was nominally compromised of three battleships, two carriers and several cruiser squadrons and destroyer flotillas in support. This posed a significant logistical challenge for the Admiralty, primarily due to the vast distances involved. To supply the Mediterranean Fleet was a three week round trip for a 10knt tanker, including the time taken to load and unload at both ends, in contrast Singapore was more than a months journey from Portsmouth for such a vessel and was almost a ten week round trip away. Therefore, all else being equal, a warship at Singapore would require triple the number of support vessels of one based in Valletta. Even though stockpiling and other efficiencies could bring that figure down, it was clear to the Admiralty they would either need to charter a large number of commercial vessels, expand the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) or some combination of both to keep the Eastern Fleet supplied in the long term, let alone during a conflict. The choice was made simpler as the RFA was already known to be in need of more modern tonnage to replace it's Great War era relics, the Admiralty only delaying in a successful effort to squeeze more money from the Treasury by classing it as 'extra non-planned expenditure' and thus outside the planned Naval Estimates. It was at this point that the entire process was hijacked by the Lord President of the Council, Lord Beaverbrook, and used as a vehicle for a far more ambitious objective; nothing less than root and branch reform of British shipbuilding.

The problems with the British shipbuilding industry had emerged, or more correctly come to the attention of the government, during the Abyssinian War and the subsequent Chamberlain Report. The report noted that shipbuilding had shown the least improvement in production rates, despite the pressure applied and significant bonuses being on offer productivity had remained broadly similar to pre-war levels, a stark contrast to the other war industries which all had seen a significant leap. The reasons outlined in the report were many, and more would be discovered as the Lord President's team began to study the problem in detail, and spanned a whole range of areas from poor management through to archaic working methods and obstructive unions. While some bright spots were noted, the report flagged up the Clyde yards as the worst offenders, a conclusion that was seen as a serious problem; Clydeside was home to over a dozen yards, including such key concerns as Harland & Wolff, Fairfields and John Brown & Company all of whom had contracts for the next generation of Royal Navy capital ships. The cabinet was therefore easily convinced that the matter needed attention and, given the vital defence interests involved, it was "fit and proper" that government intervened to ensure a beneficial resolution. It is interesting to note the efforts made to convince the cabinet the intervention would be strictly limited, despite the partial conversion to the ideas of Keynesian economics to combat the Depression there was no appetite for extended state intervention or open ended commitments, as had happened with the Coal industry at the start of the decade.

The liner Queen Mary under construction. Laid down as Hull 534 she had been one of the more visible symbols of the Depression afflicting Clyde shipbuilding when her owner, Cunard, had been forced to suspend construction. Though government loans had seen work re-start on her in 1932 Clydeside had continued to suffer until the resumption of Royal Navy capital ship building and the upswing of Empire trade saw order books slowly begin to fill. The deeper problems on the Clyde however remained, while the other great shipbuilding centres on Tyneside and around the Mersey suffered from similar problems, the legacies of the 'Red Clydeside' period had left industrial relations heavily damaged with neither side inclined to trust or co-operation.​

The first step in Beaverbrook's plan was to reverse the trend of the previous decade and have the new ships constructed not in private yards under contract, but in the Royal Dockyards where the government could legitimately control the construction process. It was in pursuit of this aim of control that the Rosyth yard was selected, the other Royal Dockyards had existing workforces but Rosyth, having been under care and maintenance since the mid 1920s, had barely a skeleton staff making it a perfect blank sheet of paper, the political benefit of providing employment in a region still struggling to recover was (for once) purely coincidental. Having selected the yard Beaverbrook turned to the ships themselves, drafting in experts from the shipbuilders Cammell Laird and the vast Vickers-Armstrong group to assist on the detail of design and construction. The resultant design drew on the welding expertise of Cammell Laird, who's welding experience stretched from the world's first all welded ship, the Fullagar, up to working on the heavily welded Ark Royal and the modular assembly knowledge of Vickers-Armstrong, who could call upon the expertise of not only their aviation divisions but also their innovative Palmers Shipbuilders subsidiary. The resulting designs, though fairly conventional in size and appearance, were for fully welded diesel engined motor vessels optimised for assembly line construction, a stark change from the riveted, assembled on the slip, triple expansion engined steam ships they would be replacing in RFA service.

Having managed to avoid serious opposition to that point, bar the inevitable complaints of the coal lobby in Parliament who objected to any naval vessel that wasn't coal powered, the problems for the scheme began when recruitment and mobilisation began in Rosyth, bringing the government into direct confrontation with the unions. To explain why the Rosyth scheme was so fiercely opposed it is first necessary to briefly explain the standard system in place at most other yards. A typical Clydeside yard would have in the region of 40 to 50 'Craft' unions, each representing an individual trade such as fitters or boiler makers, almost all of which worked together under an umbrella organisation, the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron and Steel Shipbuilders (USBISS). For an employers point of view this was the worst possible combination, 50 different groups to bargain with made negotiations incredibly time consuming, while the unions co-operation meant a strike by one group could (and often did) result in all 50 going out on strike at once. With such power it is hardly surprising the unions had amassed considerable concessions, most crucially very strict demarcation of work (a hull riveter would not work on the superstructure, even if the alternative was doing nothing) and complete control of the training of all 'craft' staff, which in practice meant almost the entire workforce. That last concession was perhaps the most crucial, from the moment a new apprentice was hired he would become part of the union structure, indeed as union membership was compulsory for all apprentices the union had an effective veto over staff recruitment and promotion. More importantly the unions could, and did, artificially restrict the labour market, ensuring that only the bare minimum of new staff were trained to keep supply low and their wages high.

The combination of a shortage of staff and strict demarcation between roles limited the ability of a yard to speed up production, the system had so little flexibility it only had one speed. More importantly it stifled innovation, any change had to be agreed by dozens of groups and could not involve changing the deployment of the work force for fear of upsetting the delicate balance. Quite aside from these problems the system also ensured that a shipyards workforce was indifferent to management, correctly realising that keeping the union hierarchy happy was far more important for keeping a job and progressing up the ladder. The final problem identified was perhaps the most corrosive to change and control, the system left almost all practical knowledge resting with the unions and not management, in too many yards management just was not capable of supervising and assessing work (or coming up with new ways to work) as they lacked the skills and knowledge. Taken together it was a recipe for stagnation, but a stagnation that favoured the unions and their members, provided of course the clients kept coming and didn't consider overseas yards, a possibility that more and more clients were pondering as the price premium of a Clyde built ship continued to rise.

With this background it is obvious why the Rosyth approach was so controversial. Instead of the dozens of different trades the yard only hired people for generic skills, for instance the scores of carefully demarcated riveter grades were replaced with just a single grade of welder, all of whom were expected to work anywhere on the site as needed. Worse was to come as the apprenticeship system was swept away and replaced with in-house training, a body blow to the power of the union but an entirely sensible decision. A riveter could spend anything up to two years under apprenticeship before emerging on the bottom rung and still needing years of experience before becoming fully qualified; it was estimated an experienced team was over four time faster then a team of just qualified apprentices. In stark contrast a welder could be trained in a couple of months in a classroom/workshop and then go straight to work being something like 90% as good as a man with years of experience, hardly a 'skilled trade' that required years of mentioning and learning on the job. Despite these colossal changes and challenges to the status quo, Beaverbrook and his team were utterly shocked by the scale of the opposition, after all pay and conditions were generous and union organisers were (grudgingly) welcomed and accepted on site. It appears that based on their experience in the aircraft industry, on which they had modelled a great deal of their approach, they believed that these measures would be enough to get the scheme accepted, in this belief they would be comprehensively disappointed.

It is one of the ironies of the national ship building strike that the yard at it's centre, Rosyth, was entirely unaffected by it. After USBISS refused to even visit the site, one of the main aims of the strike was to see it closed and the work given to a 'traditional' yard, the workforce had unionised with the Transport and General Worker's Union (TGWU), slotting into the metalworking trade group with ease. Given the very lose structure of the TGWU, and the bad blood between their metal working members and the boilermakers unions, this was inevitable as the always ambitious TGWU sought to extend it's scope at the expense of the 'arrogant' boilermakers. Unsurprisingly the TGWU did not call a strike in sympathy, there was no appetite for a strike at Rosyth itself while it was unlikely the rest of the membership would have listened to a strike under the circumstances; the TGWU was never the most fraternal union, except when it came to absorbing smaller unions.​

In a most unfortunate coincidence the strike was called on the same day that Beaverbrook announced his final twist, a 'race' between the new Rosyth yard and a traditional yard. An identical design would be put out to contract for work in a private yard and the cost and time taken would be presented to the House for comparison. A typically showy gesture this was probably just an attempt to highlight Beaverbrooks' work and should not be taken as an ambition to bring all ship building back into the Royal Dockyards, though with Beaverbrook one can never be certain quite how far his scheming extended. In any event the lesson most dockyard managers drew was a confirmation of their wisdom in not confronting the unions, combined with a deep dislike of Beaverbrook for provoking a national strike. Indeed the depth of union opposition surprised even veteran shipbuilding experts, this was due to the USBISS' executive deciding to make the issue a 'line in the sand' over control of welding. This was a long sighted decision by the union, all across the country welding was supplanting riveting as technology advanced and techniques improved, victory was therefore essential to ensure they maintained their stranglehold over management even as technology changed.

Coming as an almost complete surprise to the government the first reaction was one of confusion and a hasty cabinet meeting, so the cabinet could find out exactly what 'The Beaver' had done to get them into the mess. The initial relief that the strike was peaceful, and that other unions were not getting involved, was soon replaced by discomfort as it became apparent quite how serious the problem was. With almost all shipbuilding stopped, and countless other industries suffering bottlenecks and slow downs, the impact on the national economy could not be ignored while the political fall out was if anything worse. The only positive was that the press was broadly supportive, particularly the Beaverbrook papers for obvious reasons, though this was as much due to confusion over the strike as anything else; the issues were fairly obscure except to those intimately involved and the workers pay and conditions were never actually an issue, consequently most editors struggled to get a grip on the issue as it didn't fit the conventional strike storyline.

While the cabinet was quickly able to agree they couldn't back down, backing down would severely damage the government's credibility and authority, a solution proved more elusive. There were only two outcomes, either the Rosyth yard stayed open or the government acquiesced to the union demands and returned it to mothballs, there was no obvious third option. Just to make matters that little bit worse for the government the Miners' Federation of Great Britain decided to take advantage of the situation to put the boot in, indicating it's complete disagreement with the Green Paper on coal mining and promising strike action should the subsidies be withdrawn. In the face of these problems Chamberlain's domestic agenda was soon abandoned, discarded as his government tried to extract itself from the mess of industrial conflict it found itself in.

Notes:
Well that's not gone well, well I hope not anyway. Last time I thought an update was bad for Britain I was told it was actually a triumph, so I'm a little wary of declaring something to be bad news. It's also considerably longer than I first thought, who knew welding could be so (hopefully) interesting?

The problems with ship building were noticed in OTL but a little later, the Beaver tried to fix it them in 1940/41 with similar methods as in the update, but was knocked back for a variety of reasons not least an accurate fear over Union opposition delaying war time construction. This time round though the government is a bit too confident and he's a bit more senior so he gets his chance and uses it to charges straight into trouble.

The union rules and figures are true, they did dominate the yards, management were that inept and riveting is, despite appearances, very hard to get the hang of and do quickly where as welding is exceptionally easy to pick up. However in OTL the unions managed to grab welding and, in ship building at least, it became a 'craft' with all the rules and delays that implies. Hence why Britain was still riveting ships well into the late 1950s when almost everyone else had stopped at least a decade before, one of the many reasons for it's decades long decline.

Cammell Laird were indeed the nearest Britain had to ship welding experts and Vickers (along with most, but not all, the competition) did do modular construction for aircraft. Palmers Shipbuilding are an odd one, their Jarrow yard did indeed use modular construction as early as the 1920 to tie pre-made sections together, sadly they used rivets not welding so didn't get the full benefit of the system and were brought by Vickers during the depths of the Depression. The Royal Dockyards were still building the occasional ship at the time, however by the 1930s something like 90%+ of new contracts went to private yards while the Royal Dockyards concentrated on repairs and refits.

Game Effects: Beside the obvious dissent I've added a long serial of convoys and pushed it, along with everything else naval, to the bottom of the build queue. As I've far, far too much stuff in the queue to start with they are therefore all red, nicely simulating the effect of the strike.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter XCIX: A Step Towards a Smaller World.​

Outside of purely domestic concerns the start of 1937 saw one of the landmarks in aviation history, the culmination of decades of theoretical and practical research from laboratories and workshops across Britain. 12th February 1937 saw the first testing of the W.U. (Whittle Unit) jet engine which, though affixed to a bench and far from perfect mechanically, marked the transition of the jet engine from theoretical paper designs to (mostly) functional reality. The W.U. had been produced by Power Jets Ltd under a decidedly unusual government contract, the Air Ministry even thought it was 'irregular' which is about as strong language as a 1930s civil servant ever (officially) used. Essentially Power Jets existed purely to develop the ideas of then Squadron Leader Frank Whittle and had only one product, the centrifugal jet engine, and one customer, the Air Ministry. The result was the 'irregular' Four Party agreement between Whittle, his backers at General Enterprises (a firm specialising in cigarette vending machines of all things), the merchant bank O T Falk and The Air Ministry. The agreement set-up Power Jets and arranged the initial series of development contracts tied to performance milestones such as power output and hours run. Therefore early in Spring 1937 the Air Ministry visited the Power Jets site to review the W.U., check the milestones and approve the next tranche of money. This simple enough visit was enlivened by the presence of the Air Minister himself Winston Churchill.

It is hard to over-estimate the impact a jet engine, even one as Heath Robinson as the W.U., had on those who saw it for the first time all those years ago. Even the mightiest internal combustion engine cannot produce the same impression of power and energy that a jet can, and thus almost everyone who saw it was converted by the 'blazing blue jet flame' into true believers. It was undoubtedly for this reason that Sir Henry Tizard, Chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee (ARC, The Air Ministry body responsible for, among other duties, jet engine work), had invited Churchill to the Power Jets site; the jet engine was not universally popular within the Air Ministry and having the Air Minister's personal support would be invaluable. If Tizard's intention had been for merely a slightly higher priority for jet work with a view to a flyable prototype, the most probable outcome as he was not by nature a gambler, he miscalculated. Completely persuaded by the test Churchill dismissed Tizard's moderate solution, instead pushing for jets to receive the highest possible priority and the immediate development of an operational type.

The Whittle Unit just after it's first triumphant test run. Having successfully taken Whittle's idea of a centrifugal gas turbine jet engine to the stage of a working prototype Power Jets began running into serious problems. The firm was too small, numbering less than a dozen employees, lacked it's own premises (it rented a workshop from the steam turbine manufacturer British Thomson-Houston) and the financial backers were fretting over the expenditure necessary to ramp up for full development work, wanting to wait for Air Ministry funding before spending their own money. This attitude did not endear the company to the Ministry, a significant problem as the company's reputation was already fairly low; in the opinion of many of the Ministry's technical experts Power Jets were just not up to the job, struggling over issues that a larger, more experienced company would have solved in house without bothering the Ministry with.​

While it is obvious in hindsight that jets were indeed the future it was not so at the time, away from the sound, fury and intoxication of the jet tail pipe a rational observer would want to hedge his bets. Within the Ministry there was a strong lobby who supported Alan Arnold Griffith and the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) who were pursing the turboprop engine. (Both a turboprop and jet engine used a turbine to generate large amounts of hot gas, a jet engine expels them out through carefully shaped nozzles to generate thrust, a turboprop uses the them to drive a conventional propeller). To give this some context the Air Ministry in general, and ARC in particular under Tizard, pursued a portfolio approach to all development, spreading funding between speculative high risk projects and the 'blue chip' near certainties. The classic blue chip example was the Merlin, a highly refined and evolved version of the famous V-12 "R" racing engine, it was a long standing ARC project, it's PV-12 (Private Venture) moniker being just one of the many subterfuges the Ministry had to resort to in order to hide their re-armament work from the appeasement lobby. While Rolls Royce had no actual contract for the Merlin, it did have an 'understanding' that the RAF would buy it once completed, and in the 1930s aero industry the word of the right chap at the Ministry was as good as any contract. At the other end of the scale were more revolutionary engines such as the Napier Sabre, a complex 24 cylinder H-block engine that aimed for 2,000hp+ and the unusual V-12 two stroke engine concept that was intended for 'sprint' interceptors that needed maximum power with almost a complete disregard for fuel economy. In the middle lay the engines still under development but that were promising enough to merit inclusion in aircraft specifications, in 1937 that list included the Bristol Taurus and Hercules, both 14 cylinder two-row radials, and the Rolls-Royce Peregrine/Vulture engines, the Peregrine being the final development of the venerable V-12 Kestrel while the Vulture was two Peregrine bolted together on a common crankshaft into an X-Block. While not all of these projects would run smoothly, some would in fact never progress beyond a prototype, there were enough designs at various different stages to ensure a smooth 'production line' of new engines with increasing power and range, which was the Ministry main objective all along. In this grand scheme it was Tizard's preference for gas turbine engines to remain out at the speculative end, at least until the technology matured, an objective very much at odds with that of his newly converted boss.

In an well intentioned attempt to solve the impasse Churchill arranged for his old friend Professor Frederick Lindemann to have a place on the various Air Ministry technical and scientific committees, doubtless hoping that Lindemann could get a better understanding of the problem and convince either Tizard or himself that the other was correct. It was not a bad plan, Lindemann had been a colleague of Henry Tizards and had served as Churchill's unofficial science adviser for years, making him theoretically ideal for the role of liaising between the two. Sadly it did not work out that way, Lindemann and Tizard's relationship soon soured as they began working in close proximity and Lindemann began to ignore his limited brief and started pushing his own ideas, not just on engines but on everything from fuel types to aerial detection. While not entirely a bad thing, it was on Lindemann's recommendation that the illustrious Reginald Victor Jones began his long and successful work with the Air Ministry, normal committee work ground to a halt as meetings degenerated into arguments, typically with Lindemann in a minority of one but confident of Churchill's official backing. It soon became clear that either Tizard or Lindemann had to go, logic would suggest that Tizard's long record of achievements in his years at the Air Ministry would make him the obvious choice, however Churchill's respect for Lindemann's abilities was boundless and it was ultimately the Minister decision.

--
And I'm back, apologies for the delay but here's an update by way of apology.

Ahh the wonderful story of British jet engine development, a triumph of political ineptitude over engineering genius. It's enough to make you weep it really is. Anyway the W.U. date is brought forward a couple of months as (a) more money sloshing around and (b) it fits the narrative better! However the strange story of Power Jets is OTL, not the Air Ministry's finest hour by any stretch. OTL Tizard liked it but the Air Ministry spent over a year messing around between the WU test and the next development contract, which itself was inadequate. Someone really should have been shot over that, it was just criminal.

The WU itself did make a convert out of almost everyone, every account I've seen of RAF staff visiting the test site has them impressed and converted by the power and the "blue flame". The only exceptions where Griffith and his staff (a man I've always felt slightly sorry for) and Stanley Hooker who, after being initially unsure, went on to become one of the greatest jet engineers who ever lived. However as Churchill did not have an engineering type of mind, I can in fact think of few people less well suited to engineering, it seemed inconceivable he wouldn't get excited by it. Mind you it seemed equally inconceivable that he'd get it bang on perfect and not cause almost as many problems as he solved.

Up next; The exciting conclusion to the jet story, then the exciting conclusion to the ship builders strike, then a probably not exciting budget followed by something else!

That just leaves one question for Davout - Does engine porn count?