The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

El Pip · Jun 6, 2014

Chapter CXX: A Political Football.

Politics and sport have been intertwined for as long as both have existed, yet the relationships between the two has never been equal; sport is often hijacked for politics ends, or is itself politicised, but politics is very rarely influenced by sport. A similar thing could be said about sport and technology, sport is not adverse to adopting technology but, save perhaps for Motor Racing, sport does not drive developments in technology. The occasional exceptions to this rule, such as the famous Schneider Trophy which did much to drive technology onwards, soon reveal themselves to be as much about politics as any notion of sport. It is one of these exceptions, one of the rare nexuses of politics, technology and sport that is our subject for this chapter, looking into the less than promising realm of football, a subject full of politics and intrigue certainly, but not famed for its progressive attitude towards technology.

We begin at the 1936 FIFA Congress in Berlin, or more precisely we begin at the empty venue where that conference would have taken place, had it not been cancelled. Originally scheduled for May the then ongoing Rhineland Crisis had seen the FIFA President, Jules Rimet, delay the conference till the summer. However as the crisis dragged throughout the spring there was some concern as to whether even that date would be possible, so the conference was re-located to Geneva. Arguably a sensible move it enraged Germany and concerned those who felt FIFA was straying from it’s ideals of independence from politics and world affairs. The problems began at the Geneva Congress when the French bid to host the 1938 World Cup triumphed in the first round, just beating Argentina into second and leaving an embarrassed Germany in last place having garnered no votes. The furious reaction and allegations of corruption from the German delegation was, in the circumstances, to be expected and would not have amounted to much had it not been for the South American delegations joining in. Put simply there was an understanding that the World Cup venue was to alternate between the Americas and Europe, or at least that was what the South American associations had understood but not what FIFA believed. With nothing in writing to confirm this agreement, and with France the democratic choice of the Congress, Rimet felt he was on firm ground in confirming France as the hosts. This ground rapidly became shakier when the Central and South American delegations departed en-mass, declaring they would hold the ‘real’ World Cup in South America. FIFA’s problems soon escalated when Germany and Yugoslavia followed suit; the ‘rebel’ tournament would have strong representation from both continents, FIFA would be left presiding over a basically European competition.

While none of the nations left FIFA, and Rimet’s belief in the unifying power of the sport meant he refused to countenance throwing them out, neither side was in the mood to compromise. In the weeks after the Congress the argument reached the unexpected location of London, a somewhat surprising move as the Football Association, along with it’s Welsh, Scottish and Irish counterparts had left FIFA in 1928 in an argument over ‘broken time’ payments (payments made to compensate notionally amateur players when on international duty). Briefly the Home Nations had believed that such payments would inevitably lead to sham-amateurism, teams amateur in name but training and practicing together as professional. That this belief had turned out to be correct, the 1930 and 1934 World Cups being won by essentially full time teams from Uruguay and Italy respectively, had not healed the rift, primarily because Rimet, and FIFA, were entirely happy with such an outcome, seeing it as a necessary stepping stone towards their goal of full and open professionalism at the international level. Despite this fundamental disagreement co-operation between FIFA and the Home Nations continued through the IFAB, the International Football Association Board. Originally set up by the Home Nations to agree the laws of the game for internationals between themselves FIFA had, as one of it’s founding articles, declared that the global laws of the game would be those determined by the IFAB. Some decades later, and only slightly grudgingly, the Home Nations agreed that FIFA should have some representation on the IFAB and agreed to let FIFA (and hence the rest of the world) have two votes on the IFAB, while retaining eight votes for themselves. As arbiters of the laws the IFAB, and the Home Nations, found itself dragged into the argument.

Jules Rimet, President of FIFA and driving force behind the World Cup. For a man so closely associated with the sport his lack of interest in the game is startling, not only had he never been kicked a ball or refereed a match he didn’t even appreciate football as a spectator and attended matches only when protocol forced him to. A self made man in a sporting world where the ‘amateur’ ethos still held sway, he believed and fought for players to be treated, and paid, as professionals not just in domestic competitions but internationally as well. In contrast to some of his successors this work was not done for self promotion but out of a genuine belief that football could be a unifying force in the world, an attitude that would be sorely tested during the crisis over the 1938 World Cup.

The unwilling Home Nations involvement began when the breakaway group declared their tournament would be run according to the Laws as determined by the IFAB and FIFA promptly said, as IFAB representatives, they refused to allow it. Strictly speaking this declaration was meaningless even if it had any legal forces, which was doubtful, there was no obvious means to enforce it. But it was enough to get the other members of the IFAB involved, both sides prevailing upon the Home Nations to support their position, if nothing else as the original codifiers of the Laws they still retained a certain moral authority. After establishing that their preferred solution, ignoring it and hoping the problem would go away, wasn't working, the Home Nations reluctantly engaged with the issue, the FA Chairman (and President) Sir Charles Clegg taking the lead. Sir Charles was a man of enormous authority and experience in the game; he had played for England in the world’s first international match, been one of the captains for the world’s first floodlit match, served as a referee at national and international level for many years and had been the first ever FA Chairman, he was also a firm believer in the virtues of amateurism. He was in many ways the complete opposite of his FIFA counter-part Jules Rimet. It was this, and the fact that he had led the Home Nations to not once but twice quit FIFA altogether, that gave the rebel nations hope he would be sympathetic. In contrast FIFA was banking a great deal on his reputation for fair play and honesty, and the years of co-operation on the IFAB, that would lead him to back them as the proper authority on the matter.

While Clegg was certainly inclined towards FIFA as the ‘proper’ authority, the arguments of the breakaway nations were well pitched, the complaint that FIFA had broken a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to alternate the location of the tournament would strike a chord with any English gentlemen. Somewhat surprisingly he also respected the rebels for their uncompromising stance on professionalism; they intended an entirely professional tournament and he appreciated their honesty in contrast to the more slippery attitude of FIFA. There was also the unspoken, but nevertheless real, consideration that France was not held in the highest regard in Britain after the Abyssinian War and that Rimet’s FIFA was a very French organisation looking to hold a major tournament in France. As the process dragged on things escalated from a minor technical argument into a fundamental discussion on the nature of international football, the Home Nations becoming active participants instead of notionally neutral arbiters. This was not a good thing for FIFA as the debate opened up long suppressed fault lines in the organisation, many nations had agreed with the Home Nations on the dangers of amateurism but had chosen to acquiesce to the broken time payment fudge rather than quit, while an equal number agreed with the rebels that full blown professionalism was the future. As they had in the past it was the Swiss FA that came up with the compromise, suggesting a split between a fully professional World Cup and a revived and purely amateur Olympic contest (Football having been absent from the two Summer Olympics held since the first FIFA World Cup).

This was a simple, logical agreement that gave everyone something, so it naturally took weeks of talks and arguments to arrange. Interestingly the Home Nations soon found themselves under heavy pressure to re-enter FIFA, the notional reason for their departure had been addressed and both FIFA and the former breakaways pushed them to re-enter to help unify the sport. In the end it was the desire for the Olympic contest to succeed that pushed Clegg and his colleagues over the edge. The Home Nations agreed to rejoin FIFA provided the FIFA members agreed they would ensure strong, but ‘properly’ amateur, teams were sent to the Tokyo Olympics in 1940. That the Tokyo Games never took place is perhaps symbolic of the failure of Olympic football to ever live up to the expectations of it’s supporters, even when it eventually did re-start it was soon overshadowed by it’s FIFA rival. With that decision made, Rimet was happy to concede a ‘re-consideration’ of the venue for the 1938 World Cup as a small price to pay for international professionalism and Home Nation participation.

We come now, at last, to the technology. The main argument the French delegation had used to gain it’s original success was travel. For the 1930 contest only four European nations had braved the extended sea journey to South America, the entire contest taking over three months once travel time was accounted for. Moreover in 1930 the Uruguayan government had under-written the travel costs, keen for the propaganda coup of such a contest in the year of its centenary celebration. 1934 had seen a similar pattern but in reverse, only three nations from the America crossing the Atlantic to Italy rather than the seven that had competed in Uruguay. The expense was considerable, many of the European FAs finances were still reeling from the Great Depression and the time for a sea journey from Europe to Argentina considerable. It was at this point that the German delegation announced they would be happy to make the Zeppelin fleet available for the transportation of the players to South America at very reasonable rates. The Graff Zeppelin had carried a regular trans-Atlantic service to Rio for years and could easily reach Argentina, while the newer, larger, Hindenburg had just entered service and her, at that point unnamed, sister-ship was confidently expected to be ready by late 1937, well in time for the tournament.

Thus we come to the politics and so the technology. For while both the British and French governments were spectacularly disinterested in football (while they shared a preference for Rugby, the continuing failure of French cricket to recover from the French Revolution was a source on ongoing disappointment for the British) they were united in a desire to avoid gifting Germany a propaganda triumph. And the essentially state owned, and swastika bedecked, Zeppelins of DZR (Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei, the German Zeppelin Transport Company) carrying their national teams to such a high profile contest certainly qualified, particularly as they could be sure German propaganda would highlight that it was the lack of any domestic options that had left them reliant on 'superior German ingenuity and technology'. Thus began the Race to Buenos Aires, a contest that would not be fought on the pitch but in the design offices, in the factories and, eventually, in the air.

---
Notes:

I’ll admit it, even by my own standards this has been an unusual detour. I’ll wager very few other others would even attempt to try and fit international football politics into an AAR update, though there are very good reasons for that. In my defence the World Cup does start next week, so it’s almost topical.

This all began when, while idly clicking through Wikipedia, I came across the 1936 FIFA Congress in Berlin. Now in OTL this was indeed delayed by the Rhineland Crisis but re-scheduled for the Summer, where FIFA duly broke the understanding with South America and France won the vote for the 1938 World Cup and Germany did indeed get 0 votes. TTL of course the Rhineland Crisis was far more serious and went on for longer, so I believed it would have been moved from Berlin and everything else in this update flowed from there. In OTL Football did feature in the 1936 Olympics, but only just and it was almost cancelled, TTL it gets pushed out after all the bad blood in the sport.

The FA and other Home Nations did indeed quit FIFA twice and the IFAB is all OTL, when one considers the amazing deal the FA was able to negotiate post-WW2 for re-entry to FIFA the deals in this update seemed nothing in comparison. Jules Rimet was that disinterested in football as a sport but was that ambitious about what it could achieve and Clegg genuinely kept pushing for amateur football despite losing every battle along the way. While Rimet was entirely correct that only professionalism would take the game to a global audience, the recent allegations about World Cup bidding, and the generally ridiculous salaries of top end players, suggest that Clegg’s concerns about professionalism being a bad influence on the ideals of the game was not without merit.

Now we come to the Zeppelins, with their delightfully volatile filling and flammable coatings. The Hindenburg did indeed start a regular Frankfurt-Rio passenger service in 1936, and the Graf Zeppelin had been running one for years. Hindenburg sister ship was OTL called Graf Zeppelin II (as the original Graf Zeppelin was retired after the Hindenburg disaster) so will need a new name TTL. If nothing else the OTL Hindenburg disaster can’t happen; in 1937 the Zeppelins will be trialling a Frankfurt-Buenos Aries route ready for the World Cup, so won’t be in the right place for the disaster. Now it could be said the Zeppelins are an accident waiting to happen, which is probably true, but that doesn’t mean they are definitely going to go wrong, just that it’s very, very likely.

So up next is the Aerial Race to Rio, how does one cross the Atlantic in the mid-1930s without using a boat or a Zeppelin? Thus voting remains open for those with strong views on what they want to see in the update after next.

El Pip · Jun 16, 2014

Chapter CXXI: Inflated Opinions.

The evocative name chosen by the media, ‘The Race to Buenos Aires’, conjured up images of men and machine locked in a battle for speed. Indeed the contest was regularly compared to the famed ‘Blue Riband’ for trans-Atlantic crossings, a title that had moved between four ships, from four different nations, between 1933 and 1936. This was however not a particularly good comparison, the challenge of getting a liner across the Atlantic had been solved for over a century at that time while Alcock and Brown had only completed the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919. Indeed Zeppelins aside there were no regular trans-Atlantic passenger flights in service in the early 1930s; merely getting a passenger aircraft across the Atlantic would be an achievement, the time taken was relatively unimportant.

The seemingly obvious option for those wishing to challenge the German Zeppelins was another dirigible, but that was not as simple as it may first appear. Before we enter the world of dirigibles a clearing up of terminology will be useful. A dirigible is any powered and steerable lighter than aircraft, a rigid airship has a structural frame and coating to provide the shape of the craft whereas a blimp has no such frame or coating and it’s shape is provided by the pressure of the lifting gas. There was also the half way house of the semi-rigid airship which still relied on the lifting gases to maintain shape but had a reinforced keel to try and provide the same strength at a lower weight. A Zeppelin was therefore a type of rigid airship and it should be clear why only a rigid, or at least semi-rigid, airships were thought suitable for the rigours of long distance travel, though as we shall see merely possessing a rigid frame or a reinforced keel was no guarantee of stability, strength or safety.

The key problem with dirigibles was that while all the great powers, and several not so great, had at some point had an airship programme, they had almost uniformly not gone well. In Britain there was a certain macabre symmetry to the problems, both the first (His Majesty’s Airship No.1) and the last (the R.101) airships suffered severe structural failures. But where HMA No.1, merely broke her back while on the ground (and so never managed to even take off) the R.101 crashed during a storm while on a flight to Karachi, taking with it the then Air Minister and the Director of Civil Aviation. In the twenty years between those two disasters very little had been achieved by airships, the simpler and cheaper blimps proving far more effective, so unsurprisingly the airship programme was cancelled soon after the R.101 disaster. In the United States the problems were if anything worse, out of the five rigid airships that were assigned registration numbers by the US Navy, two broke up in bad weather (the USS Shenandoah and USS Akron), one suffered catastrophic structural failure and ditched in the Pacific (USS Marcon) and one didn’t even survive long enough to get a name, crashing and bursting into flames during initial testing (the R-38/ZR-2). Interestingly the only one to survive, the USSLos Angeles, had been built in Germany by the Zeppelin Company as part of Germany’s Treaty of Versailles war reparations. This was of no real help to her as she was decommissioned and dismantled when the USN abandoned the programme, deciding that maritime reconnaissance would be better carried out by aircraft than airships. The US Army’s record wasn’t much better, the US built Goodyear RS-1 failed to meet any of her design targets but did at least survive to be dismantled, unlike her predecessor the Italian built Roma which collided with high voltage pylons during acceptance testing and crashed in flames.

His Majesty’s Airship 23r with attached parasite fighter, in this case a RNAS 2F.1 Sopwith Camel, at the 1918 experimental trials. The first experimentations with parasite aircraft were carried out by the German Navy Airship Command in late 1917, the plan being that attached Albatross D.III fighters could provide the Zeppelins with a defensive fighter escort. As there was no plan for any ‘hook’ or similar to allow the D.IIIs to ‘land’ on the Zeppelins any D.III pilot that launched was expected to covertly land in the UK, avoid capture and somehow cross the Channel to return back to Germany. Unsurprisingly the plan never advanced beyond proof of concept trials over Germany. The British trials shown above were slightly more ambitious, as were the early USN experiments, as both nations worked to develop the capability to launch, recover and refuel aircraft from airships. While both countries abandoned the defensive fighter idea, deeming airships (even helium filled ones) inherently indefensible in the face of any opposition, the USN went on to work on the ‘flying aircraft carrier’ concept, using the airship as a base for recognisance fighters to extend the eyes of the fleet. The tragic crashes of the first two ‘carrier’ airships, the massive Akron and Macon, and the rapid development of both land and carrier based aircraft, combined to kill the concept off in the mid-1930s

The Italian airship programme itself was effectively ended after the Italia disaster over the Arctic, returning from the North Pole the Italia crashed into the ice and was the subject of a heroic but tragic international rescue effort that claimed more lives than the original crash. In France, despite a long history of dirigibles that easily rivalled that of Germany, the airship had fallen out of fashion after the Great War as successive government looked to the aeroplane not the airship. This process had only accelerated after the loss of the Dixmude (another ex-German war reparation) in a storm over the Mediterranean, an accident that took with the French military’s senior airship officers and with it the last vestiges of military support for airships. This left only two serious programmes still in operation; the Soviets and the Germans. While the Soviets had suffered their own string of disasters, losing no fewer than four airships to crashes in less than three years, with a national leadership practically indifferent to losses this had not stopped the programme. In contrast the Zeppelin company had continued to lead a charmed life, provided one ignored the failures of German built airships in foreign service and the string of wartime accidents. At the time there was a tendency in Germany to view this as proof of their superior understanding of airships and aerial technology, alas hindsight tells us that they had in fact merely been lucky and that their luck would not hold.

With the dirigible route closed the challenge to the Zeppelins would have to come from an aircraft and this would not be an easy task. The direct distance between London and Buenos Aires is some 7,000 miles; in 1937 the world distance record for a non-stop flight by an aircraft was barely 6,300 miles, and that set by a specially built and stripped down experimental prototype. Shifting two dozen passengers across the Atlantic would prove to be a completely different challenge.

--
Short(ish) and barely a week after the last update. What more could anyone ask for? Apart from advancing the plot of course. But Zeppelins! Airships! Lots of firey crashes! That has to be worth a few alt-history points surely.

All crashes are historic as 1920s/30s airships really were that bad, even the helium filled ones (all the US ones bar the ZR-2 and Roma were helium filled.). Of course aircraft were also crashing all over the place, and there was perhaps a more 'relaxed' attitude to fatal crashes at the time, but even so I'm slightly amazed that people kept pursuing the concept when it kept going so badly wrong. As one would expect it was the Soviets who kept going the longest, till well into the 50s/60s by some accounts, which I can only explain by the leadership just not being bothered by all the crashes.

OK so the next update will be on the aircraft that will be racing to Buenos Aries, which I hope to get posted before the World Cup finishes in real time, and then we will be ready for Spain*/South America* (* delete as democratically determined).

El Pip · Sep 11, 2014

Chapter CXXII: Per aspera ad mare?

With national pride ruling out both ocean travel and booking passage on a German Zeppelin, the air ministries of the western powers turned their thoughts to the difficulties of trans-Atlantic aerial crossings. We begin with the Italian solution which had the distinct advantage of being relatively straightforward and, in as much as was possible for any of the plans discussed, well proven. The Italian team would be arriving in South America in a squadron of Savoia-Marchetti S.55Xs, the latest version of what was probably the most famous flying boat in the world at that time. While not the first aircraft to cross either the North or South Atlantic, those honours falling to the Vickers Vimy and Fairey Fox respectively, the original S.55’s claim to fame was built on the famous flights of the Italian Air Marshall Italo Balbo. While others flew higher, faster or further no-one in civil aviation flew on the same scale of Balbo, his master stroke being in 1933 when he organised a squadron of 24 S.55Xs flying from Rome to Chicago, a spectacle that brought him, and the aircraft, well deserved international recognition. There was, almost inevitably in Mussolini’s Italy, a degree of politics involved, as governor of Libya and de facto commander of Italian forces in North Africa Balbo had attracted a great deal of blame over the disastrous course of the Abyssinian War. While this wasn’t a killer blow to his career, almost the entire government from Mussolini downwards was in some way culpable, Balbo was still keen to regain his reputation and saw another large scale crossing, this time of the South Atlantic, as the way to achieve a degree of rehabilitation. For his part Mussolini was happy to see one of his rivals distracted away from domestic matters in Italy and moreover had a weakness for grandiose gestures that could enhance Italian ‘prestige’, so gave the scheme his backing. Unmentioned, but undoubtedly an important factor, was that using an existing aircraft left Italy's engineering firms free to concentrate on re-arming the nation, the air force determined to make a major step forward in both the quality and quantity of their aircraft before the end of the decade. With the loss of the country's African Empire there was, to be brutal, no pressing need for Italy to develop or deploy long ranged transport aircraft, or indeed long ranged anything aircraft, so the diversion of engineering effort onto a dedicated trans-Atlantic aircraft would have been a luxury that post-Abyssinia Italy neither needed nor could afford.

A pair of S.55s in formation showing the unique features of the design; the inclined push-pull engine configuration, the central bubble for the pilot and crew and the two deep floats where the passenger accommodation was located. The entire effort would be on a grand scale, in addition to the eight S.55Xs for the Italian squad and support staff to travel in, Balbo would end up committing two submarines and three auxiliaries from the Regia Marina, half a dozen hired in trawlers to serve as radio relays and the same number serving as weather boats. Such was the price of prestige.

While Italy was re-using a proven idea France intended to show off something new, or at least newer than the Italian effort. As is the case in so many fields the French believed they had invented the flying boat, though unusually they actually had a solid reason for such a belief; Henri Fabre’s ‘Hydravion’ of 1910 wasn’t the first powered seaplane to be built, but it was the first to actually manage to take off and fly under it's own power. His pioneering efforts had not been wasted and the French had embraced the seaplane, but the 1930s there were half a dozen active manufacturers specialising in sea planes, with other firms chipping on the odd design for especially lucrative contracts. Whether such a broad range of relatively small manufacturers was actually in the best interests of the French state is a different question, one we will be looking at in later chapters, but it does demonstrate the enthusiasm for the seaplane. It is therefore unsurprising that in looking to cross the Atlantic the French had naturally looked to the flying boat, what is surprising is that, despite the vast choice of firms and experts to chose from, the French effort would end up revolving around one man, the visionary engineer, and terrible businessman, Pierre-Goerges Latécoère. As the founder of Compagnie Générale Aéropostale (General Airmail Company) he had, along with Lufthansa, Pan Am and Imperial Airways, pioneered long range airmail. Equally importantly by selling out in 1927 he had avoided the scandals with accompanied that companies long drawn out collapse and eventual nationalisation in the early 1930s. Despite this less than promising start the French government had been quick to recognise the value of the vast air-mail network that the new Air France had inherited from Aéropostale, not only did it help to tie together the more far flung parts of their Empire but it was also felt to add to the countries honour and glory, concepts just as important in Paris as Rome. Looking to modernise the disparate Air France fleet, the government found itself turning to Latécoère again who, after being forced to sell Aéropostale, had returned to his family engineering firm to work on seaplanes, with admittedly mixed success. It is with one of his definite successes that we are interested, the vast Latécoère 521 that the French government ‘suggested’ the French Football Federation use to get to Argentina. Designed specifically for trans-Atlantic passenger travel it had started life as merely a very large four engined craft, however problems with the original engines forced a switch to a lower power unit, resulting in a impressively huge six engined monster. For an ideal of scale the Italian S.55X had a maximum take off weight, including fuel and passengers, of less than 9tonnes; a drained and empty 521 tipped the scales at almost 19 tonnes and fully loaded almost hit 40 tonnes.

Thanks to it’s vast size and power the 521 could transport 30 passengers in luxury across the Atlantic or up to 72 passengers in slightly less luxury on shorter routes. This luxury was no extravagance but considered a necessity; with a cruising speed of only 125mph a total flight time of 24hrs or more on trans-Atlantic runs was typical. There was but one issue with the 521; after successfully completing it’s first trans-Atlantic trial flight at the end of 1935 it had been caught in the aftermath of a hurricane of Florida, been flipped over and then wrecked. However by the middle of 1937 it had been salvaged and re-built and Latécoère was confident (correctly as it turned out) that it would prove itself a reliable aircraft in good time for the French team’s crossing. The other slight problem was not strictly a problem with the design; there was only one 521 in existence and, like so much of the French aviation industry at the time, Latécoère was in no way prepared for large scale production, so it would take multiple trips to transport the entire French squad and supporting officials. The seemingly obvious possibility of farming out the work to other manufacturers, or working with Latécoère to scale the company up so it was ready for volume production, was not an option the French Aviation Ministry would even consider, such moves would strike at one of the pillars of French industrial policy; no one manufacturer was to become too large or too powerful.

A shot of the re-built 521 on a test flight in the countryside near Toulouse, an aerial shot being necessary to highlight its distinctive hull form. The six Hispano-Suiza 12Ydrs engines are also clearly visible, the inboard four being in the tractor push/pull arrangement so popular in seaplanes. The switch from four engines to six was forced upon Latécoère after Hispano-Suiza abandoned development of the planned engine, the 18Sbr. With it’s unusual three block ‘W’ cylinder layout the 18Sbr was originally intended as a racing engine to challenge for the 1929 Schneider Trophy, however ongoing problems during development meant the first engine didn’t enter testing till after the Schneider race for that year had been run and won by Britain with the Rolls Royce 'R' powered Supermarine S.6. This disappointment, along with ongoing reliability problems and the failure of the test engines to meet the hoped for power outputs, led to the engine’s cancellation. The ongoing problems at Hispano-Suiza with engine development, and the affect this had on otherwise promising designs, would be a recurring theme in French aviation throughout the decade.

It was something of an article of faith in the French Aviation Ministry that a South American based World Cup should have been delayed until 1942, and not just because of the feeling that France had been robbed of her chance to host the 1938 tournament. The ministry had issued a series of demanding specifications for trans-Atlantic flying boats after the nationalisation of the four leading airlines at the start of the 1930s, a process that had only accelerated after the formation of Air France as the national flag carrier. While the early efforts had proved to be something of a disappointment (the Lioré et Olivier LeO H-47, which had been designed specifically for South Atlantic passenger service, ruled itself out of contention in mid-1937 after the prototype crashed during testing when it’s wing collapsed) there were high hopes for the second generation of large six engined designs on the drawing board that aimed to improve on the 521 and enter mass production. However such designs were still on the drawing board in 1937 and it was unlikely any of them would be in any fit state for testing by 1938, let alone the rigours of a trans-Atlantic crossing, hence the selection of the 521.

In stark contrast in the United States Pan America very much approved of the ordering, while the Sikorsky S-38 and S-40 flying boats had established an excellent ‘Clipper’ service all across the Caribbean and South America the Atlantic was proving a tougher challenge. Co-operation with Imperial Airways had seen survey runs made and a tentative in-direct service via Bermuda tested, Pan Am had decided to wait for the far more capable Boeing 314 to enter service at the end of the decade before establishing a direct, scheduled trans-Atlantic service, making a 1942 contest in Europe almost ideally scheduled. That is not to say Pan Am was disinterested, sounding out some of the liner companies about hybrid routes – across the Atlantic by liner, across the Americas by Pan Am. Quite aside from the revenue it was hoped exposing more European travellers to Pan Am would raise the companies profile and help the ongoing effort to break the European stranglehold on Air Mail in all points south of Mexico.

We come finally to the British Air Ministry which, not unusually for Whitehall, had been distracted completely from the practical objective by arguments about side issues, though the fact that no-one could agree which was the side issue and which the main objective didn't help. In general however the majority saw trans-Atlantic passenger flight as something of a distraction from the real issue of the Empire Air Mail Scheme, though sensitive to Canadian views on the Atlantic crossing such views were not expressed too loudly. However the entire EAM scheme was at something of a crossroads and many of the interested parties recognised a good stalking horse when they saw one, thus the issue of how to get the Home Nations to Argentina received far more interest than anyone in the Air Ministry really thought it deserved.

---
Notes: I thought I was safe when someone posted at the top of the page, then they deleted their post so now I have to update. Response to comments and totalling up the votes later, I just wanted to get this up.

On the actual update, while I accept it was a long diversion hopefully it had some relevance to the plot. If not just look at the pretty planes. All aircraft are historic of course.

One minor detail, which I fully accept will be of interest to the few, is the Pan Am airmail service which is new, historically the US airlines all but abandoned air mail after the Air Mail scandal of the early 1930s which has been mostly butterflied away TTL. Broadly speaking the US government established a massive subsidy for air mail in the mid 1920s, sadly the scheme had massive loopholes (it was per mail bag, but there were no limits on junk mail or airlines sending mail to themselves or just putting stamps on bricks) and the airlines took full advantage to grab what they could. This was found out and Hoover got a new Post Master in 1930 to sort it all out, which was mostly done by changing to a subsidy per plane so extra mail cost the firms money. Alas post-election politics intervened in 1933 and a Democrat Senate committee made all sorts of wild accusations about fraud and corruption (all lies as it turned out) until FDR sacked many people and said the US Army Air Corps would carry all air mail. This didn’t work well as the early 1930s USAAC lacked planes, training, equipment, and funds, with predictably fatal results for an alarmingly large number of pilots. Eventually FDR backed down and allowed commercial firms to bid for a new round of mail contracts, but under such harsh conditions that few bothered, deciding instead to concentrate on passengers.

But in TTL there's no FDR and no Senate witch hunt so the US airlines are still doing air mail and many USAAC pilots don’t crash, which is a plus. But that fiasco did show that the USAAC desperately needed funds and equipment, without that they are still fighting the general view that, as there is no threat of aerial attack on the continental US, they aren’t that important a service. So swings and roundabouts.

It was researching such irrelevant bits as this that, in part, is why this update was so late. I really need to get some self control over this sort of thing.

El Pip · Jun 28, 2016

Chapter CXXIII: An Inconvenient Flight.

If asked, most senior Whitehall mandarins would tell you that the burning sporting issue of mid 1937 was the debate over the ideal number of balls in an over of cricket; six or eight. While the experimentations underway in the Antipodes with the eight ball over had not been an unalloyed triumph, the improvements were perceived as possibly outweighing the drawbacks. The MCC was therefore considering a similar trial in the English domestic game, perhaps as soon as the next season. If pushed for a sporting issue with wider political implications they would likely suggest the knotty issue of the exact sporting status of Rhodesia. Traditionally a match by a British team against a dominion was a full Test match, while matches against territories or colonies were merely touring matches. As Rhodesia was a "full self governing colony" it didn't fit those neat categories so the various sporting bodies, keen to avoid being dragged into a mess of protocol and politics, were looking for direction on quite what to do. With both cricket and rugby union tours of Southern Africa due in the autumn, the governing bodies were desperately hoping an answer would come before the matches actually happened. While we will return to the murky depths of these politico-sporting conundrums later, it should be clear that Whitehall was not gripped by any sort of football fever. Given the disinterest about football in general, and the World Cup in particular, the question is how did the appearance of the various British Empire teams at the tournament become such a contentious issue within the highest level of the British government?

National pride is certainly part of the explanation; London was just as keen to avoid British teams being seen to depend on German transportation as any other Great Power. Another part of the answer can be found in the question, the issue was not just getting the Home Nations to the tournament but the various other teams from across the Empire. With the Home Nations entering the various other entities (for want of a better word) of the Empire all felt free to take advantage of FIFA's famously lax entry standards and enter the competition. The popular belief that FIFA only asked a team have 11 matching kits and a flag was fairly close to the truth; guided by Jules Rimet's belief in the unifying power of sport, FIFA tended to look for reasons to accept an application instead of strictly applying the formal requirements. Consequently the 1938 World Cup qualification would be blessed by the presence of such teams as Rhodesia, Hong Kong and Mandatory Palestine. While this may, or may not, have been a triumph of the unifying power of sport, it left the British government with a logistical puzzle. Technically London could just have left these scattered teams to make their own way, but the realities of Empire were such that the teams transport would have to have a Union Jack on it, which made the logistics very much London's problem.

The Maccabiah Stadium, Tel Aviv, home ground of the Mandatory Palestine football team. The Palestine Football Association (PFA) in theory represented the entire British Mandate of Palestine and picked the international team from the entire population on merit alone, or so they told FIFA. In practice they held strictly to a 'Jews only' policy which, aside from inflaming regional tension yet further, did not pay dividends on the pitch; the 1934 World Cup qualifiers against Egypt had been lost 11-2 on aggregate. The rival Arab Palestine Sports Federation was formed to represent those frozen out by the PFA but found that even FIFA's legendarily lax standards wouldn't permit two teams from the same territory to enter. As the establishment reluctantly started paying attention to football the issue was soon dragged into the ongoing row over the future of the Mandate. The international team became the last throw of the dice of the co-operation lobby, those who hoped that Jew and Arab could be persuaded to work together; if they couldn't work together in a football team, then there was no hope of joint government of the Mandate.

In passing it is interesting to note that the range of entrants to the World Cup very much reflected the polices of the various Great Powers. At one extreme there was France; in line with Paris' belief that most of her overseas holdings were in fact just parts of France, there was just a single French squad entered. In fairness this doctrine was also applied to team selection and several North African born players would line up along side their colleagues from Metropolitan France. Somewhere in the middle was the Dutch approach which would see both a Netherlands and a Dutch East Indies team attempting to qualify, the latter consisting entirely of players born and raised in that colony, though the various Dutch Caribbean holdings would continue to be represented by the entirely European based Netherlands team. The British approach marked the other extreme, all told there would be nine teams from the British Empire attempting to qualify and they would make up just under a quarter of all the entries. This was not an entirely straightforward procedure, not least due to a very unpleasant row between the Irish Football Association (based in Northern Ireland) and the Football Association of Ireland (based in the the Republic of Ireland), both claimed to represent the whole of Ireland and were picking players from both sides of the border. Eventually FIFA would be forced into making a decision, but in the short term they hoped (correctly) the problem would go away as neither team were going to face each other or be likely to qualify. More relevantly for our purposes the Hong Kong entry was one of more visible signs of increased British attention being paid to the region. As the 'Chinese' international team was entirely made up of the players from the South China league team, which played in the Hong Kong first division, the authorities wanted the population to have a 'national' team to rally behind instead of stoking pro-mainland sentiment.

To return to the question of air travel, the final part of the answer can be found in the seemingly unrelated field of postal delivery, or more accurately the complex interplay of Imperial intrigue, industrial policy and the Royal Mail that was the Empire Air Mail Scheme. As a scheme to transport large volumes of mail long distances around the Empire it naturally attracted the attention of Air Ministry civil servants scrabbling around for a way to transport teams of footballers across the Atlantic and into the heart of South America. Sadly for the civil servants in question they soon found themselves dragged into the massive ongoing row about quite how the mail scheme should be run and what aircraft it should use. The Air Minister, Winston Churchill, having noted the number of biplanes still in commercial air service encouraged this blurring of the lines between the two requirements, he sensed an opportunity to 'modernise' civil aviation by encouraging a new generation of modern and efficient monoplane designs to replace the existing aircraft; the Air Mail variant could be used for air freight, the 'World Cup' variant for general passenger service. As we shall see when we look at the Empire Air Mail Scheme in more detail, extra requirements was the very last thing the scheme needed.

--
Notes:
It's back! Hopefully some of the old readers are still here, but if not I will probably keep going regardless out of a sense of relentless and demented perversity. If any of you are left, if you have seen anybody do an AAR that goes off on such utterly unrelated tangents please let me know, I would probably love it.

Cricket bits are all true, the cricket world may well have had an 8 ball over if the war hadn't rudely interrupted, TTL it may still happen.

On the football the Dutch East Indies did indeed try to qualify for the 1938 world cup, aided by the fact absolutely everyone else in Asia (including Australia and New Zealand) pulled out. TTL football politics are different and Japan and China are different so it goes ahead. FIFA were that lax and Mandatory Palestine existed as a (rubbish) Jewish only international tea, expect that to change TTL. Hong Kong didn't get a team till post war, but the 'Chinese' national team was just a HK league team for many years so I thought they'd want to match that at least. The FAI/IFA row was pretty much OTL, they both claimed they were the only board for the whole country and kept picking each others players. It eventually got resolved in the obvious way, bar some squabbling over who got to inherit the historic records of the previous all Ireland team.

EAMS existed in OTL and it didn't go well, but now it's being 'improved' by Churchill and has a tight and unmissable deadlines. That'll help.

El Pip · Jan 27, 2017

Chapter CXXIV: The Letters that Bind the Family.

The Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) was an ambitious attempt to bring down an entire flock of birds with a single stone; it would bring the Empire closer together, support Imperial Airways, boost the civil aviation sector, keep up Imperial pride in the face of rival mail schemes, assist in keeping the vital aerospace industry healthy and provide extra employment to combat the depression. The deceptively simple method for achieving these grandiose aims was a subsidy for all first class post sent within the Empire, provided it was delivered by an approved carrier. This, it was hoped, would boost intra-Empire communications and provide a mechanism to bring British civil aviation 'back on terms' with the mail networks established by Air France and Pan Am. At this point it should be made clear that the entire scheme had, in true civil service fashion, a slightly misleading name that served to obscure it's more controversial objectives. Air Mail had been transported around the Empire long before EAMS was formally initiated and ,as mentioned, Imperial Airways had been heavily subsidised since birth, so most of the key elements were not new. We have also seen that the scheme was about much more than just air mail, indeed the postal side of the scheme was so routine it was barely discussed. The key features of EAMS that made it stand out from the previous air mail efforts were the scale, the cost and the technology proposed.

Conceptually EAMS aimed to chart a middle course between the fully nationalised Air France and the corporatist subsidy trough that was the US Air Mail Acts. Imperial Airways would remain notionally in the private sector, though utterly dependent on state subsidy to survive (much like the world's other major airlines), and the routes would be determined as much by the Foreign and Dominion Offices as any commercial considerations. To address the Air Ministry's concerns it was agreed that Imperial Airways would 'consult' before issuing any specification for new aircraft, ensuring that they co-operated with the Air Ministry's bigger plans for civil aviation. These plans were, at the time, mostly driven by one of the Ministry's regular panics that Britain was 'falling behind' overseas rivals and needed to make an effort to catch up. This brings us to the first of the key features, the scale of the scheme, that is best described by considering the pre-EAMS nature of the air mail network and comparing it to the future network envisaged by the scheme.

Sir Christopher Bullock, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Air and one of the driving forces behind British aerial re-armament. Something of a prodigy, his rapid rise to the lofty peaks of the Civil Service and promotion of re-armament had made him some powerful enemies, not least the doveish ex-Head of the Home Civil Service Warren Fisher. His efforts at re-armament vindicated by the Abyssinian War, and the civil service doves in full retreat, Bullock would devote the bulk of his efforts in the mid/late-1930s to civil aviation. Having cut his civil service teeth on the Imperial Airship Scheme and the Air Route to India in the 1920s, and with the full political support of fellow re-armament campaigner Air Minister Winston Churchill, Bullock was the ideal man to take over the struggling EAMS project. Bullock would take over a scheme spiralling out of control, Britain and her Dominions clashed over everything from aircraft choice and routing to the fundamentals of Imperial commercial and industrial policy.

The existing air mail routes were run by a mix of Imperial and Dominion airlines, using a range of aircraft and were as much about moving passengers and having a mail route available as shifting serious quantities of mail or cargo. For instance the recently opened London-Darwin route was operated by Qantas Empire Airways (the imaginative name for a Qantas/Imperial Airways joint venture) using De Havilland DH.86s between Darwin and Singapore, then Imperial Airways to Calcutta in Armstrong Whitworth Atalantas, from there to Karachi an Indian Trans-Continental Airways/Imperial joint venture took over, before Imperial Airways' Handley Page HP.42s took over for the section across the Gulf States and back to London. It hardly needs saying this was a very inefficient way to run a mail route, perhaps less obviously there was concern in Whitehall that this 'sectorisation' was a disruptive force, divisive to unity and encouraging those who wished to see the Dominions assert their independence. It was the objectives of EAMS to replace the mass of local airlines on the main trunk routes with a single Empire-wide carrier, Imperial, operating a single aircraft type, which would both rationalise the operation and serve as a visible sign of the bonds that bound the Empire together. Naturally this was not popular with the Dominions, their nascent 'flag carriers' were touchy subjects and the fact Imperial Airways was a creature of the British Air Ministry and not subject to any Dominion oversight only made matters worse.

A typical scene at an air mail interchange airport in the early 1930s. To the right a Handley Page HP.42 "Hadrian", it's distinctive two top mounted engines hidden by it's upper wing, on the left the far more modern looking Armstrong Whitworth Atalanta "Artemis". The aircraft in between is on the scores of unnamed De Havilland Dragons used by the miriad small airlines scattered across the Empire. As a sign of Imperial Airways priorities, the Atalanta and HP.42 were both airliners that happened to carry mail, the high cost of international air mail kept volumes low so there was always space amongst the baggage hold for a few mail bags. The pair also present a visible example of the speed of aircraft development, the Atalanta's first flight was barely 18months after the HP.42

The cost increase is easier explained; EAMS intended to vastly increase capacity, eventually it was hoped this would lead to economies of scale but in the short term running larger aircraft, more frequently, carrying subsidised mail, would incur additional costs and precious little extra revenue. This was a very deliberate choice, the specification for the future EAMS aircraft had used all the extra space and lifting power of the new design for cargo hold and kept the passenger capacity broadly similar. The effect of all this was a the requirement for a direct subsidy to Imperial of almost £300,000 a year (perhaps £20million in modern money), split between the various states on the route. However this figure did not include the ground organisation (airfields, connections, etc) and the expectation that all involved would charge no fees or taxes and provide subsidised fuel, efforts that could easily quadruple the bill. Despite all this it is neither the cost nor the scale that attracts the most attention in popular history, it is instead the debate over the aircraft. That is perhaps because the preferred technological choice of EAMS was the romantic, inspirational, and divisive seaplane.

--
Notes:
And it's back, with a discussion on British Air Mail policy of the 1920s and 30s. I am fairly confident no-one else on this board would even contemplate writing such a thing and trying to pass it off as after action report. That is probably a good thing if we're honest.

Onto the update, Sir Chris Bullock was one of the youngest civil servants to ever head a government department. Big supporter of re-armament and popular with the RAF and those in government and Whitehall who could see, or feared, what was coming. Naturally therefore the appeasement lobby forced him out of government mid-1936 by inventing a scandal, many years later it was confirmed it was a load of rubbish, but by then he had a career in private sector and all the guilty men had been promoted and honoured. Genuinely a depressing story. But TTL it is instead the appeaser who are forced out while Bullock is vindicated, given that even his enemies rated him as exceptionally able this should be a handy boost to the Air Ministry.

EAMS was that big and that pricey (originally) but by early 1936 had slightly fallen apart as Australia didn't want to pay for it unless massive changes were made. These were eventually fudged and the service started a couple of years later, had a horrific Christmas 1938 when it was over loaded by the Xmas cards/presents and was only saved from collapsing entirely in Christmas 1939 by the war breaking out. It is safe to assume that will not happen this time around.

As always the patience of my readers astounds me and I only hope this is an acceptable first step towards repaying your faithful waiting.

El Pip · Aug 5, 2017

Chapter CXXV: To Think and Act Imperially.

The start of 1936 had not found British commercial aviation at a crossroads, it had found it several miles past the crossroads but still bickering about the direction that had been chosen, with several participants vocally threatening to do a U-turn. The crossroads in question was the decision to use seaplanes for EAMS (the Empire Air Mail Scheme), a decision that had not been particularly controversial when it was made in 1934. The intervening years had not been kind, as is often the case the details of the decision had proved problematic and the consequences of the lax approach to consultation soon became apparent. The reasoning behind the decision had been somewhat involved but solid enough; Imperial Airlines believed larger aircraft would be more economical to run, as more passengers could be carried for the same number of ground and air crew. However, the existing generation of landplanes were about as large and heavy as could safely be operated off the dirt strips that made up much of the existing air routes, to say nothing of the operational problems caused by bad weather closing airports and washing away runways. The obvious solution, installing the deep foundations and tarmac toppings required for permanent runways to support heavier aircraft, was investigated but the cost was deemed 'excessive'. This line of reasoning led naturally to the flying boat, which required no expensive runways only a judicious choice of route so the craft could hop between harbours and lakes. Imperial also believed the flying boats would have another operational advantage, fuel at the coast, delivered straight off the tanker, tended to be far cheaper than the supplies available inland.

The first production Short S.8 'Calcutta' landed on the Thames in mid-1928. As the first flying boat procured by Imperial Airlines prior to entering commercial service it was shown off to the great and the good of the government and wider establishment. Publicity mission duly accomplished it departed for Southampton, there to begin service on the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern legs of the Imperial Airlines Indian Route. That the then brand new London to Delhi 'seaplane route' involved a train from London to Southampton Docks should have been a warning about the gap between the promise of the seaplane and the actual reality.

The key flaw in the thinking was, as is so often the case, a failure to consider logistics. Seaplanes did not need runways, but they still needed all the other facilities found at an airport, complicated by the need to move everything from the shore to a floating seaplane. It turned out that the launches, barges and various other craft required to get passengers, cargo and fuel from the seaplane to shore did not come cheap, neither did control rooms capable of both controlling the skies and serving as harbour master or the many other 'extra' costs associated with running an airport that was also a harbour. It is possible this came as a genuine surprise to the Air Ministry, but equally it may have been part of a somewhat Machiavellian scheme to get others (the Raj, the Dominions and anyone else who wasn't the British Treasury) to agree to 'fully fund' the new seaplanes bases without them properly understanding the costs. In any event, while there was a degree of grumbling in from the Dominion and Indian Offices about this, the main opposition came from Australia who, by January 1936, were threatening to quit EAMS entirely. There is a strong argument this was primarily just about the costs and a suitable renegotiation on the finances, perhaps along with QEA (Qantas Empire Airways, the Qantas/Imperial Airways joint venture) continuing to operate the seaplanes instead of it being an all Imperial Airways route, would have solved the matter. The exact Australian position is of only academic interest as the whole row was soon overtaken by wider events, when the Abyssinian War began all civil aviation discussions were paused, at least temporarily.

Taken purely from the perspective of EAMS and related matters, the outbreak of the Abyssinian War had left the British seaplane community feeling vindicated and ready to deploy that most satisfying of statements "I told you so, you fools." One of their main arguments in favour of the seaplane had been the vulnerability of the existing landplane routes to hostile action by a foreign power. Specifically all the African and Far Eastern Imperial Airline routes ran through France, Italy and Greece on their way to the main hub at Alexandria. This had not been take particularly seriously by anyone outside the Royal Air Force, and even then not by many on the Air Staff, so had not featured strongly in the debates around EAMS. This rapidly changed as the outbreak of war had seen those links severed as the Mediterranean became, at least initially, a no go area for commercial aircraft. Moreover it was apparent that there would be no quick return to the old routes post war; in blatant defiance of the Paris Convention on civil aviation the Italian government withdrew landing and over-flight rights for any and all British related airlines. While the Air Ministry and it's Imperial counterparts reciprocated and banned Italian airlines, this did have much of an impact; with it's overseas empire gone and the Rome's focus on Austria and Yugoslavia, her 'prestigious', and expensively subsidised, aviation efforts were much reduced. Ala Littoria (the Italian state airline) cut it's extensive African and Middle Eastern routes and was reduced to internal flights and a handful of international routes to various European capitals. In the short term Imperial cobbled together an alternative route via the Trans-African air, post-war the Libyan government was more than happy to make it's own airports available for a more permanent solution, but the point had been made. The existing air routes were vulnerable to foreign intervention and the flexibility of the seaplane offered a possible way to reduce that dependency.

It is unfortunate that such an incredible feat of navigation and logistics was burden with the name 'The U-Bend Route', but sadly the nickname stuck, despite the best efforts of Imperial to only refer to it as the 'Mediterranean By-Pass Route'. As the seaplane advocates were quick to point out, even this bypass route required stop-offs at Lisbon and crossing French Equatorial Africa, though as the Air Ministry observed, if international relations had reached the point where civilian aircraft were only allowed to fly in their own airspace, then the Empire probably had bigger problems. After peace was declared Imperial returned to the Med on a new Marseilles-Valletta-Alexandria route that bypassed Italy entirely. Interestingly they also used the existing Italian survey plans to add a new Valletta-Tripoli-Benghazi-Alexandria route to the network, integrating Libya into the wider Empire. Whether this was the airline living up to their unofficial motto 'To think and act Imperially in all things' or if it was pressure from the Foreign Office is less clear but perhaps irrelevant. Whatever the motivations it was clear that Imperial Airlines first duty, before any considerations of passengers, cargo or even profit, was to advance government policy.

Unfortunately for the seaplane advocates this was their highpoint, post-Abyssinia, and specifically post-Imperial Defence Conference, things once again turned against them. The Australian government had found new reasons to oppose the plan, firmly on a path to a domestic land based aircraft industry seaplanes were even less attractive. Instead the aviation strategists in Canberra sketched out a vision of QEA using a civilian version of the Vickers Wellington for 'their' leg of the route, the aircraft naturally being built in Australia by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factory. It should be noted that at this point the basic Wellington was still barely a prototype, no-one at Vickers had even looked at an Merlin engined model let alone an airliner version and the CAC factory and engine works were just some foundations, however no-one has ever accused the Australian aviation lobby of lacking ambition. In any event Canberra felt the time and effort of building up bases and operational experience in seaplane would be a waste, and so pushed for the Singapore-Australia leg of EAMS to remain land plane operated.

The opposition of one Dominion alone might have been manageable, particularly if the others stayed on side, however the RAF Air Staff shifting their support was another matter entirely. The Air Staff has been cautiously supportive of the scheme on essentially financial grounds, seaplanes were seen as a cheap way of meeting Imperial defence commitments and EAMS appeared to offer a way to get others to pay for further seaplane development and an expanded range of possible bases. Post Abyssinia the RAF was required to maintain a large standing force in Singapore and prepare plans for rapid deployment of an even larger force at short notice. Naturally the RAF wanted to do all this by air and not rely on aircrew and 'boxed' aircraft being shipped out by the Navy, which brought the runway issue into sharp focus. It was believed the current generation of medium bombers were fine on grass/dirt air strips (vulnerability to bad weather aside), but the upcoming Vickers Wellington would be marginal in all but perfect conditions. Far more seriously for the Air Staff the current heavy bomber, the Whitley would struggle on most of the strips between Singapore and Alexandria. The politicians faith may have wavered but the bomber boys remained convinced the heavy bomber could, and would, win any future war, therefore not being able to deploy their heavies to the Far East was unacceptable and a round of runway upgrade would be required, if EAMS could get others to help pay for it, all the better.

This change in direction would go on to change how EAMS, and indeed Imperial Airlines, developed it's future aircraft. Just as the Air Ministry had guided commercial seaplanes development to help develop Coastal Command on the cheap (the Short Calcutta above was just part of a line of alternating commercial/military variants that Short developed), the need of the Air Staff to shift a great deal of men and equipment between the UK and the Far East would drive their priorities in aircraft development. Such changes were too late for the aircraft already ordered and in production, so logically our next step is to look at the aircraft EAMS was going to get, even if by that point they were perhaps no longer what the participants all wanted.

---
It's Back! With many words on Imperial Civil Aviation policy in the 1930s. I was going to skim it, then I realised that quite a lot had changed so I thought I'd explore those changes. The British establishment having to take the Far East relatively seriously, certainly much more than in OTL, does have some interesting changes.

Game Note:
There is now a lev 4 airfield in Gibraltar and a few Lev 1s being scattered across the Empire. Yes, there is a genuine game hidden under all this, though I confess I'm tempted to move it across to HOI3. Having a more fine grained map, and being able to use the battle plan bit for the pictures, would make Spanish Civil War updates a bit easier.

Notes:
Australia did 'quit' EAMS in early 1936 but then rejoined in 1937. In practice this made sod all difference as she carried on building seaplane bases and the bulk of the new aircraft didn't enter service till that time anyway. As hinted at this was a negotiating tactic to get a better financial deal and to make sure Qantas remained involved in Singapore-Australia legs. There was also some local politics about mail planes in Australia being stopped short so mail trains would retain their monopoly but, while I know there are those who would find that diversion from a diversion from a diversion entertaining, I have to draw a line somewhere or I'll never get anywhere. I hope I haven't made the Australian's too madly ambitious about their aircraft, but it did seem to fit, the world of Butterfly Effect may well be blessed with an early Vickers Viking or similar approved.

There genuinely were people warning about the dangers of relying on landplane routes that had to cross foreign powers territory, along with a bit of standard-issue tub thumping about how as a 'maritime nation' should rely on the sea and so use seaplanes. These people were mainly found in RAF Coastal Area/Command being ignored. Mussolini temporarily made them seem wise fortune tellers. The "U-Bend" air route is genuine, as used in 1941 when Imperial was flying planes out to the Middle and Far East but had to avoid the Med. It was done in Short Empires, so entirely feasible for 1930s.

The RAF really did not take the Far East that seriously and so was relaxed about the difficulties of sending heavy bombers out to Singapore. This is no longer an option, well not if they want to keep their budget, so they have changed their views on the scheme. They may have been forced to form Strike Command but they are convinced Britain will need heavy bombers, maybe with air-to-air refuelling, to have any chance of victory. Also, as they are now taking it seriously and have a large force to support, the air route for crew and spares needs to be upgraded, it's that or facing the horror of having to rely on the Royal Navy. This is clearly unthinkable, that sort of slippery slope would lead to co-operation, co-ordination and the RAF being disbanded and split between the Army and RN.

El Pip · Oct 15, 2017

Chapter CXXVI: Seabirds, Schools and Streamlining

The object of all this concern was the famous Short Empire, one of the most popular aircraft Imperial Airways ever flew and certainly the most iconic of it's pre-jet aircraft. In an echo of Imperial's quasi-state/private existence it's birth had been a mixture of Air Ministry procedure with most a most un-Civil Service 'gamble'. The process began conventionally enough, going through the stages of requirements, specification and issuing a tender to industry, it was only once the responses to the tender were received that things began to change. While several firms could, in theory, have produced craft that met the specification they were mostly otherwise engaged on existing orders or other Air Ministry specifications, not least the then brand new RAF Expansion Scheme 'A'. This left Shorts submission as the only option for taking forward to prototyping, it was at this point that Imperial defied convention and ordered 28 of them, at that point the largest single order for a British commercial aircraft, straight off the drawing board. With the exception of low risk 'evolutionary' designs, skipping the prototype is generally a sign of either desperation or extreme confidence and it is generally the former, even when it is the latter it often turns out that the confidence has been misplaced. The track record of 'straight off the drawing board' designs was not good (and would only get worse as project complexity increased), which was why the Air Ministry generously considered it a 'bold experiment', many openly declared it a gamble or worse. Despite these poor precedents the Short Empire would be turn out to be one of the rare successes that justified the risk of ordering straight from the drawing board.

The Short S.23 Empire Flying Boat Mk I, 'Capella', undergoing routine inspection at the Imperial Airways facility near Southampton Docks. All of the Empire boats in Imperial Airways service were given names starting with 'C', hence their alternative name of the C-class. The instruction to proceed on the S.23 was issued to Shorts in January 1935 and the first Empire Air Mail flight was in October 1936, an impressively fast turn around by any non-war time standard. Such speed would never have been possible under the standard Air Ministry procedures, but is also a testament to the skills of Short's chief designer Arthur Gouge and his team. The airworthiness trials had shown the S.23 needed only very minor tweaks before type approval was granted, confirming that models produced during the tender process had accurately predict the performance and handling characteristics of the final craft, this was in marked contrast to the sometimes over-optimistic results other manufacturers achieved from their models.

Imperial's specification called for the Short Empire to be capable of carrying a little under 4 tonnes of payload to a range of 700 miles at a cruising speed of 170mph. While very impressive figures for the time, and not to minimise the scale of Short's achievements, careful observers will note that 700 miles is nowhere near enough to even think about crossing the Atlantic and furthermore that EAMS would not be much of an 'Empire wide' scheme if Canada was not included on the route map. These details had been noted at the time and so we come to the reason for Churchill's interest in the project, the Short S.23 Mk.III 'Atlantic'. With the logic and consistency for which the British aviation industry was rightly famed, the second S.23 Shorts produced was a Mk.III, the first Mk.II 'Bermuda' spec boat not being produced till much later on in the production run. The Mk.III was, as the full name suggests, designed for trans-Atlantic trials, essentially a standard Mk.I with some of the luxury removed and replaced with additional fuel tanks. After some long range test flights over the Mediterranean, the Mk.III Caledonia easily managed the 2100 miles of Southampton to Alexandria non-stop, by the summer of 1937 Imperial were ready for the Atlantic trials. The half dozen non-stop return flights demonstrated two things; firstly that the Mk.III was easily capable of safely and (reasonably) reliably crossing the Atlantic and secondly that they could only do so with a relatively pitiful payload of less than half a tonne.

This was unfortunate, but not unexpected, Imperial had spent several years prior to this investigating the upper atmosphere above the Atlantic, before their work it had been somewhat unknown. Therefore the Mk.III test flights had been as much about validating the work of the meteorological department as confirming Shorts work, both had been close enough that the original expectations of the boats capacity proved correct. This leads neatly to the biggest change made to the Empire Mk.III; it was equipped for in flight refuelling with a looped hose system from Flight Refuelling Limited (FRL). FRL, which had been founded by the aviation pioneer Sir Alan Cobham to support his long range exploration flights, had been the recipient of considerable support from the RAF. Officially committed to the euphemistic Far Eastern Strategic Operations (heavy bombing of the Japanese Home Islands) since the 1936 Imperial Defence Conference, and unofficially interested in the possibilities since the early 30s, the Air Staff's solution to the vast ranges involved in such missions was heavy support for in-flight refuelling until the next generation of aircraft was available. While much of the RAF's efforts were based on their own development and experimental squadrons, under prompting from the Ministry they had spread their bets and also supported FRL and Imperial's work.

An FRL Handley Page Harrow refuelling an Imperial Airways Short Empire over Northern Ireland. The flight test programme had suffered a slight delay as the original planned base of Foynes, on the Shannon river in the Republic of Ireland, had fallen foul of the Anglo-Irish trade war as Dublin withdrew the previously granted permits. The programme was hurriedly re-located to Lough Erne in Northern Ireland with a supporting land plane base at Castle Archdale, despite the enforced move the two Empire Mk.IIIs based there successfully completed a dozen trans-Atlantic return trips over the summer of 1937, with ever larger payloads each trip.

This was all well and good, but there remained several key concerns about the safety of in flight refuelling, while there had been no serious incidents affecting either the RAF or RFL, even the most optimistic Imperial Airways planner only intended to use refuelling for mail planes. For Churchill this was clearly a risk, while it was possible that a refuelled Empire would be cleared for passenger service by the June 1938 deadline, it was equally possible it would not. As was so often the case the Air Ministry's portfolio approach came to the rescue, Imperial may have gambled heavily on the Short Empire working but the Ministry had not, there were backups, the Air Ministry always had a backup. Most of these were inappropriate, for instance the ambitious but flawed Short-Mayo Composite (a plan to use a modified S.23 to carry a parasite aircraft up to high altitude, the parasite would then 'launch' with full fuel tanks and process to the destination) would never have the capacity, even if it could be rushed through testing, but there was one clear alternative - the De Havilland Albatross

Another project prompted by the Air Ministry's concerns over 'falling behind' in civil aviation, the Albatross had been explicitly designed as a trans-Atlantic mail plane. The Air Ministry specification had been essentially written around De Havilland's initial concept and so it took less than 18 months from the specification being issued to the first flight of the prototype in May 1937. While the mail planes had taken priority for construction the Albatross was available in two variants, the standard 3,500 mile ranged mail plane type and a 22 seat 1000 mile ranged passenger airliner. From the point of view of Churchill neither was appropriate for the World Cup flights, what he needed was the ability to carry about 25 people (a 22 man squad plus coach and a couple of others) for 2000 miles against typical Atlantic headwinds. From the Air Ministry's point of view the Albatross prototype was still in it's trials, there was no guarantee the standard Albatross mailplane would be actually capable of crossing the Atlantic, let alone a new variant. As an added complication De Havilland was distracted by several other ongoing projects for both the RAF and the civilian markets, lacking the resources of the industry giants Vickers-Supermarine or Hawkers Siddeley it was far from clear if they had the capacity to design, construct and test a new variant in time given their existing commitments.

The De Havilland DH.91 Albatross, unquestionably one of the most beautiful airliners of all time and something of a revolutionary design. It's very 'clean' streamlined appearance attracted all the attention and allowed it's incredible range and fuel efficiency, all the while hiding the ingenious engineering beneath. For all it's modern appearances the Albatross was actually an almost entirely wooden aircraft, it was the design on which De Havilland pioneered their ply-birch 'sandwich' construction technique, the same method it would use on the more famous Mosquito. Interestingly the cabin was designed for pressurisation, even though the final aircraft did not include such a system, indicating that even in the mid 1930s De Havilland had their eye on high speed, high altitude airliners.

With both aircraft promising but far from certain, the Air Ministry fell back on it's preferred approach of keeping options open - both aircraft would be bumped up the priority list. The RAF were told to co-operate with FRL on in flight refuelling to see if it could be made a safe, acceptable option for routine services, a matter both parties soon agreed was a question of practice and experimentation, not radical reinvention of the basic technology. De Havilland were given an instruction for a new Albatross variant that would meet Churchill's very specific specification, for good measure Churchill also ordered work on the De Havilland Don trainer aircraft cancelled, so the company could focus on this priority. As the Don prototype was struggling in acceptance trials, and with the Avro Anson and Miles Kestrel available to fill the gap as trainers, the Air Ministry begrudgingly went along with this, though De Havilland were obviously less than pleased with losing a large RAF order to prioritise a far smaller civilian one. As the designers, engineers and pilots went to work, all keenly aware that a decision would finally be made the following spring, the Air Ministry's civil servants could be forgiven for hoping for a quiet summer break, alas events in Spain, and the response of their always active Minister, would soon dash those hopes.

--
Notes:
And thus we bring the diversion to an end, sort of. In many updates time we will return to this once a decision had been made, but for now it's wrapped up and we can get back to Spain.

The in flight refuelling is OTL(ish). The S.23 Mk.III is OTL, it was indeed the second ever Empire produced and did spend it's time on long range and refuelling trials, the non-stop Mediterranean flight is OTL for instance. However the actual in flight refuelling trials started in January 1938 and at that point FRL were using AW.23 (the Whitley bomber prototype) as a tanker to refuel the Short Empires and that didn't work well as the AW.23 was too slow. The method was the same, just the aircraft was different, sadly no-one photographed those trials. The photo above was taken in 1939, once FRL got their hands on some modern, faster Handley Page Harrows.

Bonus video clip of those trials -

In Butterfly the RAF is much keener on in flight refuelling, OTL it was a bit of an air-show trick that was being developed more as a backup than in expectation it would be needed. TTL they have been told to plan on bombing Japan, which means either planning on capturing island bases (depending on other services, not acceptable), very long range bombers (being developed, but will take years) or refuelling. Hence the refuelling efforts are a higher priority, proper staff and modern aircraft have been made available earlier, that sort of thing.

De Havilland Albatross is an OTL plane, as are all the ranges and variants. It never actually did a trans-Atlantic flight, war was close and Imperial and De Havilland were distracted so development was slow, but in trials it had more than enough range and was suitably equipped. Hybrid long range passenger variant is new, but entirely plausible.

De Havilland Don was a rubbish trainer aircraft De Havilland were working on, it was originally equipped with a turret so train gunners, that was removed during acceptance trials to try and cure terrible instability and performance issues. That didn't help and the large (250 aircraft) order was cancelled and the few that had been produced ended up as ground training aircraft. With the Avro Anson being kicked out of Coastal Command earlier, and the Anson being a great trainer, killing the Don is an easy choice.

The Irish re-location is a big change, in OTL Foynes was the big base for Imperial and Pan Am in their trans-Atlantic flights. This prompted the construction of Shannon airport and, eventually, the city of Shannon itself, which existed mostly just to serve the airport. Now with the Anglo-Irish trade war still raging, Dublin have pulled the permits and so Imperial have relocated. I could go into quite what Pan Am are doing about that, but that leads to discussion on reciprocal air rights, the correct interpretation of the Paris Convention on air travel, the Bermuda route and other such rabbit holes, and frankly we do need to get on with the actual plot.

That slightly barking mad Short Mayo Composite may emerge in future updates, but first we must return to Spain!

El Pip · Jan 13, 2018

Chapter CXXVII: Heroes of the Dialectic.

The Spanish Civil War had never been an entirely Spanish affair, the country had been a hotbed for foreign intelligence operatives since long before the war had started, however it's internationalisation was still something of a drawn out affair. The summer of 1937 marked the next step in that process, the first official clash between explicitly foreign volunteers. Of course such clashes had already unofficially occurred, for instance in the battles around Almazan in the Spring many of the Republican T-26s had Soviet 'advisers' as crews, while the Boys rifles that kept them out of the town were fired by British 'trainers'. However, by unspoken agreement such clashes had been kept quiet - it served both sides to keep their foreign backers in the shadows. The Valencia Campaign would see that change, when the two sides 'official' foreign volunteer units finally clashed, it would be in a blaze of publicity.

First it is necessary to clear up a bit of terminology, like so many things in the war 'foreign volunteer' was an irregular phrase; I have brave international volunteers come to aid the cause, my allies have imported overseas mercenaries fighting for gold and the thrill of combat, the enemy have sold their soul to foreign invaders come to impose alien ways of life on the country. In truth the overseas troops had more in common than propagandists on either side wanted to admit, starting with the fact that neither set was particularly concerned by Spain in and of itself. The average 'politically' motivated volunteer (as opposed to the adventurers and the desperate) saw Spain as just one battle front in a wider ideological conflict, the actual reality of the conflict in Iberia being less important than the national politics of the volunteer's own country. The volunteers were also (mostly) united in their greenness, while there was a scattering of veterans who had fought in the Great War, or other conflicts, the majority had not and so had to substitute enthusiasm and ideological conviction for training and experience.

André Marty, pictured in his trademark ill-fitting beret, giving a speech to enthralled International Brigade volunteers in the Summer of 1937. A leading light of the French Communist Party (the PCF, Parti Communiste Français), member of the Secretariat and Praesidium of the Comintern and possessor of a suitably legendary commitment to Communism, he was Stalinist Communist aristocracy and as such had been picked by Moscow as controller of the International Brigades. Unfortunately for the volunteers of the Brigade, Marty was such a loyal Stalinist that he had adopted the paranoia and purging habits of Stalin and brought them with him to Spain. Before the end of the war he would order the execution of at least 500 Brigadiers for treason, cowardice or just a 'lack of doctrinal soundness', countless others being merely imprisoned. He was also responsible for the decision that the volunteer Brigadiers had 'volunteered' for the duration of the war, and so would not be getting their passport or identification documents back until the war was won. This decision was made very shortly after he had overseen many of those documents being packaged up and shipped to Moscow for use by the NKVD.

We begin with the Republicans and the celebrated International Brigades. While never quite as poet heavy as some would claim, at least 80% of the 'Brigadiers' were working class manual labourers, the Brigades did attract the bulk of the literary types who volunteered to fight on the Republican side and so have had more written about them than any other unit in the war. The idea of a Comintern volunteer force had been first suggested by the British and French Communist Parties in the immediate aftermath of the coup, once it became clear a civil war was inevitable. This had not fitted in with the Soviet's diplomatic plans, at that time Stalin still hoped for an alliance with France and Britain to contain Germany, so Soviet aid was kept low profile and government to government, this was felt to be less inflammatory to western political opinion. It was only after the Amsterdam Conference that Stalin abandoned any hope of getting Britain into an alliance and concentrated on France, at which point Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, finally managed to push through the plans for the International Brigades. Somewhat ironically the Comintern rubber stamped the order on their creation on the same day that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, was signing up to the League of Nations initiative on non-intervention in Spain. In fairness the initiative just committed the signatories to think about looking at ways to do something about the problem at some point in the future, so this was not quite as hypocritical as it may first seem. Given this background it is unsurprising the Brigades were almost the archetypal Stalinist project; there were quotas and targets for recruits, the subversion of expertise and experience to political diktat and the channelling of youthful energy and enthusiasm towards cynical ends.

Maxim Litvinov, People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, effectively the Soviet Foreign Secretary. Since Hitler's rise to power in Germany the Soviet's main foreign policy objective had been collective security in Europe, which in practice meant securing defensive agreements with the Western Powers. With Stalin distracted by internal matters Litvinov had been given a free hand to pursue this without the usual Politburo oversight, perhaps as a result of this he able to negotiate the 1935 Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the related Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. Initially these treaties had been hamstrung by France's insistence that the Locarno Pact Powers (essentially Italy and Britain) had veto over the mutual defence and military aid clauses being triggered. However after the Abyssinian War Paris had cooled on the idea of tying her foreign policy to either of those nations and was looking at her diplomatic options. The Spanish Civil War offered Moscow a chance to turn Franco-Soviet co-operation on the ground into a more traditional and solid defensive treaty.

Once the creation of the Brigades was agreed by the Comintern the Communist parties of Europe were given their quotas of required manpower and sent to work recruiting, the French PCF taking the lead both in numbers and organisation. The Comintern did not want the best and brightest, high profile leaders and those who had a possible future in Popular Front electoral efforts were to be kept out of the fighting, but equally it was not a complete barrel scrapping exercise. All recruits were interviewed by the local party hierarchy and non-party members were carefully vetted before being sent to Paris, despite these restrictions the Brigades would eventually field the equivalent of two light infantry divisions. The first men arrived at the tail end of 1936 and spent the winter training and equipping, as one of the key instruments of Soviet policy they had first call on the Soviet supply shipments and this, along with their sky high morale, was soon to mark them among the elite units on the Republican side. In the spring campaign they accompanied the PSOE/PCE (PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party / PCE, Partido Comunista de España, Communist Party of Spain) and their T-26s on the drive for Burgos in the spring. After the bloody clash at Almazan the T-26s withdrew to lick their wounds and re-equip, prompting the PSOE/PCE to call the Brigades forward to support their efforts to restart the stalled offensive and regain the initiative.

The formation of the Brigades had been delayed by high politics, or perhaps realpolitk, as Moscow calibrated it's involvement in Spain to match it's wider objectives. The other factions in Spain had not been so limited, the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista , Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) had issued a call for volunteers shortly after the war broke out, despite their limited numbers compared to the Stalinists they still rallied over a thousand volunteers, including a much higher proportion of Great War veterans, these experienced men ended up as the backbone of the elite Lenin Division. The POUM, shunned by the main Republican government and hated by the Soviet backed PSOE/PCE forces, had aligned themselves with the anarchists due to a lack of options, thus the Lenin Division would find itself tasked with clearing out Catalonia alongside the remaining Catalan militias and the anarchist forces. The anarchists themselves were, typically, more divided on the issue of foreign volunteers. The CNT-FAI (CNT, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Confederation of Labour - FAI, Federación Anarquista Ibérica, Iberian Anarchist Federation) leadership generally felt they had enough manpower and really wanted more weapons and supplies. However there was a strong theoretical argument that if someone wanted to fight in Spain, then as anarchists they shouldn't be stopping people from doing so. The issue was resolved on a column by column basis, some accepting foreign volunteers with open arms and others trying to send them back to rally support in their home countries. The shock of the casualties taken during the Catalonia campaign would prompt most columns to accept any half fit volunteer who turned up, if only to help replenish the ranks.

In the next chapter we will turn out attention to those who travelled to Spain to fight for the Monarchist cause, in the main these were not men motivated by a dream of Carlist restoration but by the chance to fight against the Republicans and their backers.

--
Notes:
This started as a quick check of how the international situation would change the International Brigades and then spiralled into this. From the top;

André Marty was that unpleasant, did order at least that many volunteers shot, did ship everyone's passports to Moscow and was a proper hard line Stalinist right till the end. His heroic communist background was his unclear involvement in the mutiny of a French dreadnought in the Black Sea that was supporting the Whites in the Russian Civil War. The mutiny had nothing to do with communist support and everything to do with pay, rations and the crew not being demobilised after WW1. It also wasn't clear how involved Marty actually was, but he ended up being imprisoned by the French government for mutiny so it worked out for him in the end. There is no start to his military talents but he loved to interfere with the operations of the Brigade, this didn't end well in OTL and won't end well in Butterfly.

The International Brigades are about two months late compared to OTL, the Comintern probably don't like being told to shut up and wait but will do it, because Moscow told them to. This will mean more 'leakage' of volunteers to other factions who are getting organised, but with France officially on-side with the Republicans it will be easier to organise so those two factors net out. Total number of Brigadiers is about OTL and with that they managed 20,000 volunteers active at once (hence ~2 divisions). In OTL the Comintern/Moscow agreed the International Brigades at the same time as Non-Intervention Committee was meeting, so it seemed apt to carry that over with the dates changed.

In a more character driven, or more Soviet, AAR Maxim Litvinov would be worth a chapter or two on his own. Soviet foreign policy was 'Collective Security for much of the 1930s as Litvinov was allowed to freelance policy while Stalin focused on the domestic. This allowed him to run a pro-League of Nations, collaborative and alliance focused foreign policy despite it being the exact opposite of the official Comintern line at the time (which was 'The revolution is imminent, no co-operation with anyone but the revolutionary vanguard, etc). Must have made for some fun meetings. That aside he was the son of a Jewish banking family, one of the organisers of the famous Tbilisi bank raid in 1907, annoyed Stalin several times but still somehow ended up dying of old age.

The Trotskyist 'Lenin Division' is OTL, didn't get quite that many volunteers but with the International Brigades being delayed it is picking up some extra. It did get much more experienced volunteers in OTL, they formed the shock troops of the Lenin Division, if they can get some proper equipment from Catalonia and avoid being purged they will make more of an impact than they did historically.

The CNT-FAI were a bit funny about volunteers in OTL, they wanted people to stay in France and agitate to get Paris to join on the Republican side but felt they had to make an effort to be true to their anarchist values. As France is already on side they've softened a bit TTL, particularly given the losses they are taking, but as with all things related to the anarchists in Spain it would vary between columns.

El Pip · Mar 30, 2018

Chapter CXXVIII: In the Name of the King.

The restoration of the Spanish monarchy and the elevation of the just and rightful Carlist claimant to the throne was not a cause to rally the youth of Europe, in truth it didn't even motivate all of the Spaniards who fought under the Monarchist banner. The far right also lacked a trans-national organisation comparable to the Comintern, the Montreux Fascist International conferences had conclusively proved that fascism was not amenable to international co-operation or even a common definitions of what Fascism was. Given this unpromising background the Monarchists should have struggled to attract international volunteers, certainly that was the expectation of many observers at the start of the war. In many respects this came to pass and most nations supplied barely a handful of volunteers at best, but there were exceptions, some countries who citizens did volunteer in significant numbers. Those exceptions meant that the Monarchists would end up attracting a little under twice as many foreign volunteers as the Republicans, unfortunately for them these large numbers were accompanied by equally large problems.

The single largest group were the Moroccans who served in the Regulares (the Fuerzas Regulares Indígenas, the Indigenous Regular Forces), the elite shock troops of the Army of Africa. Almost 80,000 'indigenous' troops would serve in the Regulares during the war, almost all of them recruited from somewhere in or around Morocco, the vagueness was important as the situation in Morocco was complicated. Technically and legally Morocco was an independent sovereign nation under Sultan Mohammed V, in reality it was a French protectorate from which small strips at the north and south had delegated to a Spanish sub-protectorate, along with the ongoing anomaly that was the International Tangiers Zone. While the full intricacies of Moroccan complicated governance need not detain us, they very much occupied the thoughts of those involved. More precisely they occupied the attentions of the Republicans and their backers, the Monarchists were somewhat less concerned; having established that trying to introduce conscription would be more trouble than it was worth they merely sent out the recruiting parties and kept up the pretence that all the volunteers came from Spanish Morocco. In stark contrast the Republicans found the entire issue to be just another source of division, as an example a plan for the Cortes to grant Morocco autonomy, or even full independence, to woo Moroccan Nationalists onto the Republics side was shot down by the French, who used their dominance of the Republics supplies to veto any plan that would weaken their hold over French Morocco. These divisions extended even to propaganda, the Republican's seemingly unable to decide if the Moroccans were mercenary animals to be demonised or an oppressed people, forced to savagery by evil masters, who should be pitied and converted to the Republican cause. The main effect of this mixed messaging was to make sure that everybody in Spain knew all about the fearsome Moroccans, further enhancing their reputation as shock troops.

Mohammed V, Sultan of Morocco and something of an enigma. He was the pious, polygamous traditional Sultan who also drove cars (and occasionally tractors), gave all of his children a modern education and allowed his daughters not to wear the veil. Despite being the third son of the previous ruler he had been chosen as Sultan by the French, under the cover of a 'selection' by the Ulemas (the college of senior imams and religious scholars), as he was thought to be the most compliant and least likely to object to ongoing French influence. The Spanish Civil War would be the first warning to the French that he did not intend to follow that path, instead he asserted Morocco's notional independence by allowing the Spanish to continue to recruit and dared the French to contradict him. While the initial crisis passed, or more precisely failed to even become a crisis, after the French Resident refused to rise to the bait and just casually dismissed it as an internal matter, Paris would be forced to pay more attention to Moroccan affairs for the rest of the Sultan's reign.

The position of the next largest contingent was simpler but perhaps even more controversial, certainly for their mother country. When the civil war broke out the Portuguese general staff began to organise for a formal intervention on the Monarchist side, unfortunately for the nation's stability large elements of the Portuguese navy began planning on how they would best work with the Republican fleet. These divisions were repeated across the country as, not for the first time, Spain's problems spilled over the border into Portuguese society. While the Republicans had little hope of Portugal intervening on their side, relations between the Spanish Second Republic and Portugal had been cool at best, they hoped that Prime Minister Salazar would should his usual preferences and opt for neutrality and 'stability' over any excess of ideology. Much to their surprise Salazar ignored the navy, the domestic opposition and the abortive Monarcho-Syndicalist coup of the previous year, and allowed the formation of the "Viriatos Legion" of volunteers to support the Monarchists. In the end just under 10,000 Portuguese would volunteer for service in the Monarchist cause, as Slazar's fear of communism and the re-assuring presence of the British convinced him to come off the fence. While the volunteers, who included a surprisingly large number of veterans and regulars on 'sabbatical' from the army, were warmly welcomed and wo, it was Salazar's decision to allow the Nationalists unrestricted usage of the port of Lisbon and the road and rail links to the border that was most appreciated. The volunteers woud trade off this logistical trump card, and regular reminders of the Portuguese-British Alliance, to help keep themselves higher up the supply priority list than they perhaps deserved. This generous supply, and the high proportion of regulars and veterans in their ranks, would help the Viriatos Legion establish itself as one of the premier Monarchist divisions, out performing most of the pre-war regular army Spanish divisions.

The NRP Dão, fifth ship in the Douro-class of destroyers and named after the river Dão that ran through Prime Minister Salazar's home town. Heavily based on the Royal Navy's Ambuscade destroyer, she had been built in the Lisbon Arsenal Shipyard and only commissioned into the fleet at the start of 1935. In the autumn of 1936 the crew of the Dão and the aviso (sloop) Afonso de Albuquerque mutinied and, depending on who you asked, either tried to start a coup or attempted to defect and join the Spanish Republican fleet in Bilbao. Whatever their intent, a loyal radio operator warned the rest of the fleet and the Lisbon harbour fortresses opened fire to prevent the rebels escaping. The mutiny provoked a round of 'loyalty oaths' and, when it emerged the leading mutineers were leading lights of the Portuguese Communist Party, a further strengthening of Salazar's resolve to support the Spanish Monarchists as they battled the "Communist Menace" in Spain.

We must now briefly consider one of the Monarchist's most unusual supporters, a nation which, while not contributing troops, arms or practical support of any kind, still formed a vital part of the informal international coalition. We are, of course, talking about the Vatican and in particular the then Pope, Pius XI. That the Republicans had managed to rouse Pius XI into taking any real position on the subject was in itself impressive, the church in Spain was not Roman Catholicism at it's finest and Pius XI was, in his early years at least, a great believer in diplomacy and agreement. In comparison to the compromises made in the Lateran Treaty that finally settled "The Roman Question" (the exact status of the Vatican City with respect to Rome and the Italian State) and the morally questionable Reichskonkordat signed with Germany, a Spanish concordat treaty would have been uncontroversial. An agreement to limit the temporal power of the church and reform it's role in education, while protecting it from the extremes excoriation and expulsion could have been negotiated. While such a deal would have frustrated the secularist wing of the Republicans, it would also have calmed the opposition and undermined the coalition the monarchists were able to assemble; a Republic that could call on the Catholic militias instead of having to fight against them could have ended the coup before it became a war. Instead the Spanish left stuck to it's ideological guns and made enemies with aplomb and a careless disregard for consequences, pushing on with an uncompromisingly anti-clerical programme. This prompted Pius XI to write a papal Encyclical on the subject, Dilectissima Nobis "On Oppression of the Church of Spain", castigating the Spanish government and urging Catholics to defend themselves against persecution. This Encyclical, along with the notable failure of the Pope to silence or contradict the Spanish bishops who declared the Civil War to be a holy war against godless communists, would prove to be a powerful motivator for many of the more religious monarchist volunteers.

White Russian volunteers attending Orthodox Mass in the foothills of the Cantabrian mountains in Northern Spain. While less than five hundred White Russians would serve with the Monarchists over the course of the war they would be significantly over-represented in the senior ranks, a representation of the émigré community which was itself very 'top heavy'. For the White Russians a chance to fight against the godless Communists while building a cadre of experienced fighters and, hopefully, earning some favours from the new government was motivation enough. As with most of the foreign volunteers they were spurned by the ex-Spanish army divisions and the Falangist militias, instead finding their home in the Foreign Legion and the Monarchists militias. The deeply religious Carlist militias in particular were the natural home of men who wished to fight communists in the name of "God and Czar" and so would attract the bulk of the White Russian volunteers.

The last major group of volunteers were by far the most divisive, causing diplomatic and political problems far in excess of their military contribution. The (mostly) Irish Brigade, inevitably known as the Wild Geese, were probably the nearest the Monarchists had to the Republican International Brigades: genuinely enthusiastic volunteers being cynical manipulated by opportunistic leaders. The Carlist leadership was keen to emphasise the religion vs communism aspect of the war, in this they were enthusiastically supported by the Catholic Church hierarchy and it was through these church links, specifically the Primate of All Ireland Cardinal MacRory, that contact was made between the Carlists and General Eoin O'Duffy. General O'Duffy was one of the worst fascist leaders in Europe, not in terms of his views or morality but in terms of not being very good at it; he had lost the leadership of one party (Fine Gael), seen his Blueshirt movement declared illegal and dissolved and embarrassed himself by declaring support for Mussolini in the Abyssinian War. He was, in short, desperate for a propaganda coup to re-launch his career and his latest political vehicle; the National Corporate Party, or Greenshirts. The Spanish Civil War was the ideal cause, the Irish government may have declared a strict neutrality but the majority of the populace were in favour of the 'Catholic' Monarchists against the anti-clerical and godless Republic. In this atmosphere O'Duffy had little problem rallying thousands of volunteers, his problem was how to equip them and get them to Spain. The Monarchist cause lacked weapons not men, shipping over some more untrained, inexperienced volunteers was not a priority for the Spanish fleet, while the British declined to get involved as they had no desire to further aggravate Dublin for no military benefit, particularly with the Anglo-Irish trade war was still raging. The Irish Brigade would have to make their own way to Spain and their efforts to do so would add the final twist to the Brigade's story.

While O'Duffy's search for funds was primarily domestic, tapping up the newly founded Irish Christian Front for funding and the usual anti-communist, pro-catholic donors, it also looked internationally, once again through the good offices of the Church. The American Catholic community was just as outraged by the Red Terror sweeping Spain (and just as skilled at ignoring the White Terror), however unlike in Ireland they were very much in the minority, the rest of the American population tended to sympathise with the Republican cause and 'defending democracy'. US Catholics were still reeling from the events of recent years, the election of Alfred Smith had finally seen a Catholic make it to the highest office in the land, for many a symbol that they had finally been accepted. His subsequent assassination had shattered that belief and left the community in shock, in that vulnerable state they needed little encouragement to feel that their faith was under attack and needed defending. The conduit between the American Catholics and the Irish Brigade would be former US Secretary of the Treasury Joseph P Kennedy Sr. An Irish-American Catholic he had made a fortune on Wall Street through ethically questionable but legal (at the time) means and used these funds to help bankroll Al Smith's election campaign, for these efforts he had been rewarded with the plum role as Secretary of the Treasury in Smith's cabinet. While Smith had carried the majority of the blame for the US' terrible economic performance, Kennedy's reputation had also suffered from his time at the Treasury and when Garner took office Kennedy was one of the first to be sacked in the reshuffle. Much like O'Duffy Kennedy was religious, ambitious and desperate, easily convinced to take a leading role in the new, high profile, Catholic Aid Committee, funds from which would pay to ship the Irish Brigade to Spain and equip it when it arrived. While Kennedy and the CAC were careful to toe the US government line about no volunteers, that did not stop some in the Irish-American community hearing the call. While the Irish-American "Meagher Battalion" (named after a famous Irish born US Civil War general) would never number more than a few hundred it would proudly serve as part of the Irish Brigade and, like it's parent unit, cause all involved no end of diplomatic and political problems.

With a better understanding of the forces on both sides we must now turn our attention to the war itself. Despite the lessons from earlier in the war both sides would struggle to co-ordinate their forces and would pay a heavy price for the lack of co-operation.

---
Not the top of the page, I hope @Hightemplar is happy with himself.
3,000 words, sorry about the length but this one sort of got away from me towards the end. That said the idea of the Kennedy funded Irish-American Battalion fighting on the Monarchist side was just irresistible to me so I had to include it, even if it took a bit of research.

Notes:
Starting at the top I had to get in the Portuguese monarcho-syndicalist coup of 1935, just because I find monarcho-syndicalism a genuinely fascinating ideology. Not a good ideology or one I would ever want to live under, but fascinating none the less.

The Viriatos Legion/Division and the Portuguese naval coup are OTL, Portuguese society was fairly divided but Salazar decided the Nationalists were the 'stable' horse to back compared to the Soviet backed republic so backed them. TTL with the British backing the Monarchists and the Republic's divisions even more obvious it's an even easier choice for him.

Morocco was an independent (ish) country and Mohammed V was very good at playing everyone off everyone else. With the French more involved in the Spanish Civil War it's got a bit more tense, but it's only a few years after the Rif War and Paris isn't going to start a crisis in North Africa when they are on fairly shaky ground. The differences in the French approach to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are both interesting and (probably) irrelevant to this AAR, though I must also note that the International Free City of Tangiers sounds barking mad and probably one of the most fun places to spend the 1920s/30s.

The Catholic Church, as you would expect, has come down massively in favour of the Monarchists, as they aren't the ones setting fire to nuns. Pius XI did like a good Concordat and was open to massive compromises to 'protect the church' diplomatically, Spain spurned that and prompted him to write the Encyclical which is OTL. While Pius XI never spoke out about Spain publicly, he also never reprimanded all those in the hierarchy who did say it was a holy war/crusade/whatever, so he probably at least leaned that way. I get the impression that he didn't much fancy either faction, but though the Nationalists were least bad for the church.

There were White Russians in OTL, but only a few dozen as Franco tried to stop every foreign volunteer bar the Germans, Italians, Moroccan and Portugese. With him dead and the Carlists in a stronger position, they are more welcome. The White Russian leadership did believe that the road to Moscow led through Spain, plus they wanted the chance to kill Soviet communists, here they get a chance to do so.

The Irish Brigade was also OTL but smaller as General O'Duffy was, as I hinted, really not very good at this sort of thing. The initial contact was as described, the Carlists wanted fellow Catholics to fight and Ireland really as pro-Nationalist OTL, however by the time they got organised Franco was secure and could stop indulging the Carlists, so the brigade turned up under-manned, un-supported and un-trained. It's main OTL contribution was being shot at in a friendly fire incident, refusing to attack a heavily defended position, being sent home in shame and killing off O'Duffy's political hopes. This will not happen here. US Catholics were equally pro-Nationalist in OTL but a bit more restrained, they did lobby hard to keep the US neutral (as they knew that an arms embargo hurt the Republicans more than the Nationalists) but that was about it. TTL I'm thinking seeing the first Catholic president assassinated has changed things somewhat. OTL Joseph Kennedy backed FDR and was made Chair of the SEC, where he worked hard stopping people doing all the stock scams/insider trading/etc that he had done to become rich. TTL he gets the job he wanted, Treasury Secretary, from his fellow Catholic Al Smith and then cocks it up so get sacked by Garner. Would he have gone this route, well he was ambitious and amoral so it's possible. The Irish-American Battalion is of course fictional, the only large US volunteer unit was the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the International Brigades.

El Pip · Apr 11, 2018

Chapter CXXIX: The Guns of a Spanish Summer Part I.

The Spring campaigns in Spain had been a mix of victory and defeat for both sides, the Republicans coming out slightly ahead. The destruction of the Salamanca pocket and the loss of Malaga being outweighed by the capture of Barcelona and the crushing superiority of the Soviet and French tanks over their British and German counterparts. Heading into the Summer the Ejército Magnífico de la República (Grand Army of the Republic) looked to push on and utilise it's armoured advantage to the maximum. The issue they would face was their fragmented command structure, the only faction to have particularly 'failed' was the hard left PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) / PCE (Communist Party of Spain), their grand drive to Burgos had ground to a halt at Almazán amongst the wrecks of their T-26s. Despite this they remained the preferred faction of Moscow and, with continued Soviet support they could continue to act as a quasi-independent faction, all the while demanding everyone else "co-operate". This is not to single out the hard left, most of the Republican factions understood the importance of establishing a single chain of command and co-ordinating their efforts, they just all thought they had the best claim to be at the top of the chain. Until this was settled the 'Grand Army' would continue to resemble a selection of grudging co-belligerents and not a united and unified fighting force.

We begin in the south of the country with the government faction where the Republican 1st Armoured Division and it's H35s remained the most potent force in Spain. While the Republican government was well aware that the British were supplying modern anti-tank weaponry to the Monarchists after the dramatic 'Battle of Marbella', they did not know the details. The communist members of the government who, after the experiences of the POSE / PCE T-26s at Almazán did know the details, neglected to pass this hard learned knowledge on, another example of how many on the Republican side saw rival factions as a bigger enemy than the Monarchists. That said it is likely that President Azaña and his military advisers would have made the same decision; to push on towards Cadiz while the Monarchist forces in the South of Spain were reeling and before they could be re-supplied. As in the spring the Assault Guards and the cream of the non-Soviet air force were detailed to support the tanks, the aim being to gain the Republicans a valuable Atlantic port while cutting Gibraltar off from Monarchist territory.

The Republican efforts in the Summer of 1937 were concentrated in the north and the south of the country as the factions attempted to build on the success of the Spring. Substantial forces remained deployed in the centre along the Tajo river facing Madrid and protecting Valencia, these include a large proportion of the militias who had 'decided' to join the government faction to get access to arms and supply, along with the strategic reserve (such as it was) and the 'prestige' units such as the US M2A2 light tanks .

In the north the Anarchist CNT-FAI (National Confederation of Labour - Iberian Anarchist Federation) along with the Catalan militias continued their drive to liberate all of Catalonia. After their success in liberating Barcelona, and the relative lack of resistance from the over-stretched Monarchist forces, the CNT-FAI decided to expand the scope of the offensive, targeting a line along the Ebro River as the end point. This would provide a solid base for a defensive line that could be held over the winter, it would also firmly re-attach the Basque pocket to Anarchist Catalonia, carving out a more viable 'separatist' territory if the two sides could co-operate and pool their resources. A more urgent question was whether the Catalan militias could be convinced to advance that far beyond Catalonia, something that would only become answered as the campaign wore on. As discussed above the PSOE / PCE forces had endured the worst spring of all the Republican factions, while their T-26s had decimated the Light tanks of the Monarchist 1st Armoured Division, they had short after been massacred themselves by the Boys rifles and massed Vickers defending Almazán. While new T-26s were coming from Russia they would not arrive until later in the year, until then it would be the infantry, including the famed International Brigades, who would be entrusted to lead the advance. As one would expect from a unit well stocked with political officers and commissars the objective had not changed, the primary target remained Burgos, however to 'avenge' the defeat of the T-26s a new attack would be launched to finally take Almazán. Wise officers soon learnt not to attract 'political' attention by questioning if the propaganda benefits of such an attack were worth diluting the main effort, finding it safer to keep such doubts to themselves.

The plans of the final faction demonstrate the 'one step forward, one step back' nature of co-ordination in the Grand Army. The escape of General Linares and his command group from the Salamanca pocket into the Basque pocket mean there was finally a line of communication between the main bulk of Republican territory and the Basque. This paid dividends as Linares convinced the Basque Army to launch an offensive outside of what their leadership in Bilbao considered proper Basque Country, he even got them to co-ordinate their offensive with the Anarchist CNT-FAI Ebro Offensive, the problem was how it was co-ordinated. The Basques decided to treat the anarchist's attack as a useful diversion, while they would make some small attacks along the frontline, their main plan was to wait until the Monarchists had committed their reserves to counter the Ebro Offensive and then launch a separate attack on La Coruna. Purely on it's own merits this was not a bad plan, but it was not one the CNT-FAI were aware of, nor was it one they were unlikely to have agreed to. The more conventional plan would have been for the Basque to attack around the Ebro river to seal the 'neck' of the Catalonia pocket and trap the Monarchist Army there before it could escape. The staff at the Grand Army HQ who had suggested this plan, and seen it ignored, had gloomily reached the conclusion that only a serious military setback would convince the factions to finally co-operate and agree a proper system of command and control. It would have provided little comfort, but perhaps some dark amusement, if they had known their Monarchist counter-parts were thinking along very similar lines.

--
Notes:
Top of the page and I couldn't resist posting an update there. Feedback below.

The Republicans remain bitterly divided (as do the Monarchists as we shall see in the next update) so at times appear to be fighting entirely different wars. This fits in quite neatly with how the AI fights the war in Spain so I'm going with it, after a few nudges to both sides to help things move along.

The French influence is keeping the President Azana and the centre-left bits of the Popular Front relevant and in power, this is stopping the Communist takeover of OTL. One of the sides effects is no enforced 'militarization' of the militias, though as noted in the update in practice the smaller militias are having to do so just to get weapons and supplies, however the Anarchist Columns are still OK for now and supplied out of Anarchist Catalonia. That is the other big side effect; the communists don't have the strength to break Anarchist Catalonia as they did in Spring 1937 in OTL, so it remains a viable unit for now. My understanding is that the moderate bits of the Popular Front were amenable to greater autonomy for Catalonia so would probably tolerate it for longer than the Communists, but a confrontation of some sort is coming over Catalonia and the Basque country.

I did consider doing one long update covering both factions plans, but several bite sized chunks seemed appropriate and means I can get an update out faster. Win - win. That said don't expect this crazy update pace to last.

El Pip · Jun 19, 2018

Chapter CXXX: The Guns of a Spanish Summer Part II.

The Monarchist forces, the grandly titled Ejército del Rey (Army of the King), had no real excuse for being as uncoordinated as they were. While there were plenty of disagreements about what should be done after the war, there were far fewer of the fundamental contradictions in belief and aim that undermined Republican efforts, everyone involved was certain Spain should remain as one country for instance. On a purely practical level they had avoided the indeterminable debates about the merits of anarchist militias versus an irregular people's army versus conscripted divisions that plagued Valencia - the key Monarchists factions had tacitly agreed to organise their forces as mostly regular divisions (if perhaps sometimes lacking in equipment) in a mostly conventional chain of command. There was even a mechanism to achieve co-ordination; a Military Council had been established to direct the war, well stocked with pre-war generals who knew (or should have known) the value of a unified chain of command. In the event the council became part of the problem, the initial compromise that had united the Spanish Army, Falange and Carlists had divided the membership of the council such that no one group had a majority. With no faction particularly in the mood for compromise this was a recipe for stalemate, which was what duly happened.

Philosophically the idea of a Caudillo (a strong man leader) to sort out Spain was popular with the parties that made up the Monarchist grassroots, there was certainly no shortage of ideologues to defend it. What there was a shortage of was acceptable candidates, or more accurately there was a shortage of candidates acceptable to all parties, no faction being strong enough to impose their will on the others. While there was plenty of blame to go around it is hard to escape the conclusion this was mostly the fault of the British, not because they were particularly intransigent (all of the factions were intransigent) but because of the system they had fought hard to put in place. The problem was that, exactly as the British had intended, a constitutional monarch is a bulwark against a strong man arising, if there had been no actual King then a Caudillo could have emerged and taken on a regent like role, but with Javier I very much in place in Madrid (against at the insistence of the British, to stop any such 'regent' gaining those powers but then refusing to give them up) there was no such vacancy. In theory the King could have stepped up and become a military leader, deciding grand strategy with the 'advice' of the Military Council, after all the factions were notionally united in fighting for the restoration of the Kingdom of Spain. In practice however almost nobody (bar a few of the more reactionary Carlists) wanted a return to absolute monarchy, so the compromise of a constitutional monarchy was far more acceptable. The problem with this is best illustrated by an example, there was a proposal for Javier I to break the deadlock by appointing a Capitán General (Field Marshall in British terms) who would out-rank the mere Generals of the Spanish Army and so break the deadlock. Leaving aside the thorny question of who, the idea floundered on the a number of issues; firstly, Did the King have the power to do so under Royal Prerogative and/or reserve powers, secondly, would the various factions accept his choice and finally what would he do if they just ignored him. The debates about the role of the King prompted one of the British advisors in Madrid to summarise the issue in one of his reports; "It has become apparent that for a constitutional monarchy to succeed it is, in fact, necessary for the country to have some form of constitution. Spain lacks the latter so the former is struggling."

General Alfredo Kindelán awarding the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand (the highest Spanish award for gallantry) to the Monarchist Ace Joaquín García Morato. Even by the standards of Civil War Spain Kindelán was a conflicted man, while he was a staunch Monarchist he was an Alphonsist, so he supported the restoration of King Alfonso XIII and not the Carlist candidate Javier I. To stir the plot he came from one of the leading Spanish-Irish families and was heavily involved in the return of the 'Wild Geese' to Ireland, even though the Irish Brigade would end up serving alongside the Carlist forces. He became a leading figure in the 'Spanish' faction, trying to reduce Carlist and German influence while keeping their material support, all the while involving himself in any and every Aphonist plot going. In stark contrast Morato had firmly attached himself to the British, not out of belief or politics, but simply to ensure the RAF contingent used their skills to maximise the performance of his Gloster Gauntlet and to position his squadron as the first to receive more modern planes when they arrived.

It was the 'Army' of Catalonia and the Monarchist position in the North East of Spain that would suffer most from the lack of a unified plan. The remnants of the Barcelona garrison had been grouped together with the rest of the Monarchist forces in the region, placed under the command of newly promoted General de Brigada (Brigadier General) Rey d'Harcourt and dubbed the Army of Catalonia. Rey d'Harcourt, promoted on the basis of his skilful escape during the Battle of Barcelona, soon established his 'Army' was effectively two battered divisions that had been tasked with holding a very vulnerable salient, a very long way from friendly supply depots. Unsurprisingly almost his first act after promotion was to call for reinforcements to secure his supply lines, specifically around the base of the salient; there weren't that many bridges across the Ebro and even a modest Republican attack could leave him trapped in a pocket. With none of the factions willing to abandon their own plans to provide the troops, or even agree to the release of the strategic reserve divisions around Madrid, Rey d'Harcourt was left with no choice; the first action of the Monarchist Army of Catalonia would be a 'tactical withdrawal' to the Ebro River and out of Catalonia.

While the German leaning faction and the Carlists could both legitimately claim to be unable to reinforce Catalonia, the Army of Africa were concentrated on the South coast and the Requetes were still recovering from capturing Salamanca, the Northern Army had no such excuse. As the force containing most of the pre-war mainland Spanish Army it didn't even have the excuse of 'foreign interference', they had the freedom to act but chose not to. Instead they maintaiend a firm refusal to disrupt their own plans, even it meant ceding a great deal of territory and allowing a connection between the Basques and the main Republican area. In fairness their plans were ambitious, a grand two-pronged offensive towards Valencia aiming to pocket and capture the Republican forces along the Tagus River front (in any other war 'ambitious' would have aimed to capture Valencia itself, but this was Spain) and any disruption would have effectively meant delaying the carefully prepared offensive till the following year. With the bulk of the Republican armoured forces seemingly committed or knocked out, the logic of striking before they could reinforce the Tagus was strong, almost as strong as the pressure that was applied to ensure that the sacrifice of so much of Catalonia was not in vain.

The Monarchist plans for the Summer of 1937, much like their Republican counterparts the complete lack of co-ordination is obvious. The ground the Army of Catalonia was holding was not especially well populated or rich in industry, but it would still be a psychological blow to lose it. Giving up a small salient to concentrate forces and reduce a vulnerability was a time honoured tactic, but Andorra to the Ebro River is 150miles, so this was no small salient. On the bigger picture there was an argument for a methodical destruction of the outlying Republican pockets, an argument for a bold drive towards the Republican capital and an argument for trying to destroy the Republican Army in the field. There was no possible argument for trying to do all three at the same time in different places, but in effect this was what the Monarchist forces ended up doing.

Staying in the north the Carlists had set their sights on the Bay of Biscay, after a pause to rest and re-equip after the battles around Salamanca the Requetes intended to launch an offensive to capture Santander. It's capture would split the Republican northern enclave in two, separating the Basque country from Gijon, making both easier to surround and reduce. It was believed that as the city was part of Cantabria, and not the Basque country, the Basque Army would be reluctant to intervene and so there would only be badly equipped local militias defending the city. Additionally Santander was a large port in it's own right and it's loss would deprive the Republican naval raiders of one of their bases, making the Monarchist supply convoys that much safer, a not unimportant concern for the British who were the main backers of the Carlists. It's succession of operational stages, the importance given to the coast and the sea and the multiple points of attack mark it out as a very "British" plan; it would not have looked out of place in the deserts of North Africa. It's execution would also, it was hoped, be quite "British", the campaign would be the baptism of fire for the first batch of officers from the new Carlist Royal Military Academy. Started the previous winter by the Carlist command to train the officers in their militia it had a smattering of pre-war Spanish Army instructors, supplied from the forces of General Mola, but was predominantly staffed by British 'volunteers'. Even before it's recruits had been tested it had attracted the most sincere accolade, imitation, the Falangist militias and the Germans scrabbling to set up a training academy of their own.

Turning to that faction we come to the South and the operations around Cordoba. Battered and bloodied after their encounters with the Hotchkiss H.35 the Falangist armoured unit, the 2nd Armoured Division 'Primo de Rivera', pulled back for repair and refit, or more accurately to completely rebuild once the Falange could get a new supply of replacement German tanks, ideally not Panzer Is. This left the Army of Africa in control and notionally tasked with holding the line and containing the advance of the Franco-Republican tanks. This passive defence posture did not sit well with their commander General Yagüe who, after seeing the power of the recently arrived Ordnance QF 2-pounder, realised he finally had an anti-tank weapon that could stop the H.35s. Declining to send his forces north, correctly reasoning that Catalonia would be lost long before his un-motorised infantry could force march up there, he instead ordered a return to Cordoba. This was not about revenge, though that factor undoubtedly helped to ensure the enthusiastic participation of the Falangist militias, but a calculated choice to attack somewhere the Republic would defend and where the terrain would favour his forces. Whether that calculation was correct was an entirely different question.

--
Notes:
The Monarchist Plans, such as they are. A bit of a struggle to try and turn the madness of the AI into something that made some sort of sense, but overall I think it works.

The Monarchist command structure remains a mess. It's ripe for someone to do a Franco and take over, but the generals can't agree on a candidate, and even if they could it would have to be one the Carlist/British agree with, which is tricky.

Joaquín García Morato was the leading Nationalist Ace, mostly in a Fiat CR.32, here he gets a Gloster Gauntlet but is still racking up the aerial victories. Kindelán apparently was that complicated and definitely an Alphonist rather than a Carlist. Would he have relented and accepted 'A' King of Spain over his preferred candidate? I've no idea and to be frank it's a bit of research too far (and probably ends in a wild guess anyway), but at the very least it would have made things even more complicated for him and the rest of the Spanish monarchist faction.

The Carlist Royal Military Academy was OTL. Then Franco shut it down after he found out it existed, instead promoting the rival Falangist Militia Academy. Which he then shut down as well once he had got the Falange under control. However General Mola did like it and so it survives.

The QF 2-pdr arrived in Spain back in Chapter CXIII (posted September 2011. Bloody hell.) and was sent to the South as that's where the H.35s are. Now the Army of Africa have got their paws on them they intend to make use of them, not just sit on the defensive.

El Pip · Aug 27, 2018

Chapter CXXXI: The Guns of a Spanish Summer Part III.

We begin in the South of the country, as the clashes there had something of the private war about them; while fiercely fought and not without strategic consequences on the wider conflict, their short-term impact on the fighting in the rest of Spain was limited. The decisive clashes were in the Guadalquivir valley on the road from Cordoba to Seville, this was where the Republican 1st Armoured Division's offensive met the 'counter-attacking' Army of Africa. The 1st Armoured, and their French advisors, had felt the valley was ideal for the H35 to operate in; a wide, flat valley it had few chokepoints or bridges where the Monarchists could ambush them to get in close with Flandin Cocktails (petrol bombs), there was even a decent road, which was important given the H35s less than stellar off-road capability. This was all true and had the campaign continued as before there is little doubt that the Republicans would have easily reached Seville, perhaps even continuing on into Cadiz. But things had changed, the Army of Africa was a far more formidable opponent than the mix of militia and hastily trained tankettes the Republicans had thrashed previously. Just as importantly these forces had something the Monarchists Panzer Is had dearly lacked - a weapon that could destroy a H35 at range, a task that the newly arrived QF 2-pounders excelled at. The tactical choices of the two sides would only make things worse for the Republican side.

A Republican H35 tank after an energetic encounter with several Monarchist 2-pdr anti-tank gun shells somewhere outside Palma del Rio in the Guadalquivir valley. On paper this could be mistaken for a close match, the main gun on the H35 was the venerable SA-18, a 37mm calibre weapon, while the QF 2-pounder was 40mm calibre. Sadly for the Republican tankers the 2-pounder had the benefit of being designed some two decades later and the armourers had not been idle in this time. The 2-pounder could fire a shell twice the size at well over twice the speed of it's Great War era rival, this made it both more dangerous and gave it a far longer effective range. The consequences of this for Republican 1st Armoured were unfortunate, if mercifully brief.

Naturally the 1st Armoured had embraced the French doctrine and tactics that went along with their tanks and trucks, at the time this meant 'Methodical Battle' with an emphasis on planning, plenty of pre-arranged artillery and a minimum of local initiative. This doctrine met the two key political requirements of French politics; minimise casualties, by substituting firepower for men, and avoid a large professional army in peace time. While the Republicans were not as concerned by the former, if anything they were forced to substitute manpower for a lack of firepower, a doctrine that required a minimal number of trained officers very much appealed given how few of the pre-war Spanish army had stayed loyal. The battles outside Cordoba were to brutally expose the weaknesses in this approach, not least the critical issue that if the enemy did not behave as you had expected, your ability to react could be extremely limited. General Yagüe, the Monarchist commander, was well aware of the Republican advantages after the massacre of the Monarchist Panzer Is and had planned accordingly. Instead of trying to hold the few chokepoints on the road his AT guns were dug into the sides of the valley, expertly camouflaged with help from the Regulares, with only token units along the road who had orders to flee before taking serious casualties. The trap was set and the 1st Armoured obligingly drove into it, the main body of the division getting itself trapped in a murderous long-ranged anti-tank cross-fire while artillery rained down upon them. Methodical Battle allowed for some flexibility and local initiative, but was inherently fragile to wholesale deviation, this was a problem as the Republican staff had planned on the basis of avoiding being dragged into close combat with the Monarchists, the idea of the enemy forcing a long ranged exchange had never been considered. This left the Republican response disjointed, individual battalions, sometimes individual tanks, reacting as best they could, which was generally to fall back on the default tactics of trying to charge the enemy gun line. When there is no cover and the enemy guns are dug in, supported by pre-zeroed artillery and out-range you, this is a well known tried-and-failed tactic, which duly did not work. The escorting "motor dragoons" in their Lorraine 28 cross country trucks had better success, overwhelming several AT guns, but a lack of supporting artillery (Methodical Battle focused on quickly shifting fire between pre-planned targets, not quick reaction fire in response to requests) and splitting their effort between both flanks doomed that effort. By the time the Republican commanders regained control their main contribution was to organise the retreat back towards Cordoba. Harried all the way back up the valley most of the remaining H35s succumbed to enemy fire or mechanical problems, once they arrived at the city the only thought was digging in and rallying the population for the inevitable siege.

The fall of Cordoba, and the wider Republican front, was saved from collapse by the other prong of the Republican offensive, the coastal drive from Almeria towards Malaga by the Assault Guards. General Yagüe had weakened his other fronts to gather strength at the 'decisive point' (how much of his approach was due to the influence of the German advisors is fiercely debated but not strictly relevant), so the Assault Guards were able to make good progress against the second line troops left on the coast and soon reached the outskirts of Malaga. Recognising the threat to one of their key ports, the very port in fact that had brought the vital British AT guns into Spain, the Monarchists were forced to divert forces from Cordoba back to the coast. Further diversions proved necessary to head off a Republican spoiling offensive in Extramunda, leaving the main Army of Africa force too weak to force the city, saving Cordoba and stabilising the front. On the map it appeared to be a minor Republican victory, they had captured more territory (even if it wasn't particularly valuable), straightened out their lines and held onto one of the key cities in Southern Spain. Yet it was the Monarchists who were more satisfied by the campaign come the autumn, in exchange for minimal troop losses and some unimportant territory they had destroyed the single most effective tank force in Spain and stopped it rolling up the entire southern front. The challenge was not so much which side could rebuild their shattered armoured force first, but which could learn the right lessons (and get the right equipment and doctrines) to build a truly effective armoured division.

Canfranc International Railway Station, for scale the platform in the centre of the shot (the building with the domed roof) is approximately 240m long. This vast complex, nicknamed the Titanic of the Mountains for it's opulent extravagance, sat at the Spanish end of the Somport Tunnel and it's size was not (just) an indulgent show of power. Spanish and French railway gauges were different sized, making it impossible to run direct rains between the two countries, therefore the station was fully equipped with large platforms, sheds and cranes to rapidly tranship people and goods between trains. While never a success in peacetime, it opened less than a year before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and was hit by a large fire in 1931, in wartime it offered a high capacity heavy rail link into France, provided of course that the French wished to supply the faction that controlled the station.

Compared to the this the Northern campaigns were far more one sided, yet significantly less intense. In essence the Monarchist Army of Catalonia wanted to retreat in good order and the Republican anarchist militias, after some early clashes, mostly let them. While battered, the Monarchists divisions were relatively well equipped, not least in light and medium machine guns, and managed an effective retreat, the two units 'leap frogging' over each other as they pulled back to the Ebro River line. In theory the anarchist militias, reinforced by the various Catalan forces that had not yet merged into larger units or been 'militarised', could have harried the retreating Monarchists and caused serious problems, after all there were very good reasons why Rey d'Harcourt was pulling his forces back. Unfortunately for the CNT-FAI the campaign soon demonstrated some new problems in applying anarchist principles to the art of war. On the defence a light infantry force with minimal supporting troops could work passably well, particularly when the units lacked heavy weapons and were defending urban areas that allowed easy 'informal' re-supply. However, when on the offensive the lack of firepower was far more serious and the lack of dedicated logistics troops became critical, to be blunt it was unclear how an anarchist logistic corps was supposed to work and so it mostly didn't. Thus, despite superior numbers, the CNT-FAI forces were unable to do more than stay in contact with the retreating Monarchists, at least until they reached the Ebro River, at which point the advanced slammed to a bloody halt as the Monarchists made a stand. Indeed Rey d'Harcourt purposely kept several bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the Ebro to make the future counter-attack easier, correct discerning that the pursuing anarchists would be unable to dislodge dug in troops once the front line was a manageable length and not a vast salient. While Rey d'Harcourt had snatched retreat from the jaws of annihilation, it was still a crushing Monarchist defeat that left Catalonia and North Eastern Spain in the hands of the Republic. Yet the CNT-FAI could not rest on their laurels, the industrial base of 'Anarchist Catalonia' provided a chance to re-equip their troops, as potentially did the captured Somport Tunnel to France, but a re-organisation was perhaps more urgent, the question was what that should organisation should be. Their ongoing fundamental, perhaps even existential, issue remained unsolved, were anarchist principles actually compatible with winning the war?

Finally we come to Central Spain, a theatre dominated by the Madrid-Valencia Axis. The two capitals exerted a constant influence on all military thinking in the region, even when not the notional objective of an operation the default tendency was still to interpret things from the perspective of how the threat/security of the two cities had changed. The first force to move were the communists, the International Brigades hurling themselves at the town of Almazán to 'avenge' the defeat of the T-26s earlier in the summer. These 'battles' sent a very highly motivated infantry force lacking in heavy weapons, artillery and training against a large number of well dug in Vickers machine guns, this went as well as you would expect and the attacks were only called off when the Brigadiers threatened to mutiny rather than risk another suicidal charge. This setback prompted the PSOE/PCE, and their Soviet political advisors, to order a change of plan, cancelling the planned push towards Burgos and sending overwhelming force to finally take the town. The PSOE/PCE militias had recently been "militarised" and were now divisions, far more importantly they had also been properly equipped and assigned supporting artillery and engineers. A liberal application of heavy artillery fire, and another very bloody infantry charge, finally got the Republicans over the river in numbers and forced the Monarchists out of Almazán, the Republican commander General Lister being feted as a hero for this 'incredible feat of arms'. The deliberations on what to do next were rudely interrupted by the Monarchist Northern Army who had re-routed their own 'Valencia Offensive' to deal with what they believed to be a terrible threat to Madrid. The initial clashes went well for the communists as they had the benefit of the urban conditions that had so hampered their efforts earlier, prompting ever more elaborate propaganda claims to be made, inflating the importance of the town further still. As both sides poured in reinforcements, the Monarchists to 'save Madrid' and the Republicans as a matter of pride to protect their propaganda victory, Almazán was slowly transformed from a town into a ruin. As the summer dragged on Monarchist numbers threatened to become decisive, almost the entire Northern Army and it's reserves had been committed to the attack, prompting the communists to appeal to the Republican government to attack elsewhere to relieve the pressure.

General Enrique Lister, committed PCE member, long time revolutionary and 'Hero of Almazán', seen here with his trademark jaunty had and leather jacket, along with the sartorially questionable choice of a tie. As the Republican militias 'Militarised', regularising their equipment and organisation and introducing proper ranks and a chain of command, the new divisions needed commanders. A graduate of the Soviet Frunze Academy and experienced revolutionary, Lister was chosen for the elite 11th Division and led them with distinction, and high casualties, during the summer campaign. However he was one of the exceptions, the communists preferring to shun the high profile front line roles and dominate the less showy yet vital jobs in the War Ministry controlling supply and discipline.

Give the lack of Republican co-ordination this appeal should have come to nothing, yet with effective control of the War Ministry the communists were able to convince the commanders along the Tagus river to launch a limited offensive towards Madrid. No-one expected Madrid to be taken, least of all the former Mancheguian militias of the 54th "La Mancha" Division that spearheaded the attack, but it was hoped it would distract the Monarchist. In this it exceeded beyond all expectations, convinced that the entire battle around Almazán had been a feint and that this was the real offensive towards Madrid, the Monarchist Military Council panicked. The Northern Army was responsible for protecting Madrid, yet had committed most of it's forces to Almazán, the few forces left on the river being pushed back by the Republican offensive. To stabilise the situation the Carlist Requetes and the Porto-Irish division cancelled their planned attack on Santander and rushed south to meet the threat and defend the capital. The Requetes lived up to their reputation and rapidly pushed the Republicans back to the river Tagus, before boldly pushing on across the river to capture Toledo, their British supplied equipment, not least in the air, providing a decisive edge. While the Toledo arsenal had long since been emptied it was still a psychologically significant blow to the Republic, though worse was to come as the Requetes fanned out across La Mancha, aiming to take the whole agriculturally rich province before the harvest. The fateful decision was made to pull back to the next defensive line, the River Guadiana and the strong point of Ciudad Real, while the Republican Grand Army command released the strategic reserve to reinforce those sections of the line that could not be anchored on a river. Theses reserves, including the propagandist's favourites the brigade of US M2A2 tanks, stabilised the front and stopped the advance, though the Monarchists reaching the limits of their logistics doubtless also helped. Unfortunately none of this had helped the communists, the Monarchist Northern Army had kept up the pressure and finally pushed them out of Almazán and back to the Ebro, the PSOE/PCE eventually managing to rally and hold Zaragoza.

The situation in Spain at the start of September 1937, with the various gains and losses of the two factions marked as indicated. Neither side was particularly happy with the overall progress, every triumph seemingly matched with a disaster, but at the faction level there had been significant changes. For the Republicans the Anarchists had secured the North East, gaining them prestige, a rail link to France and an industrial base, while the Communists had seen a high profile defeat and were widely blamed for the loss of La Mancha. On the Monarchist side the Carlists (and the British) continued to enhance their reputation, while the much vaunted Army of Africa and their Germans had very little to show for a lot of hard fighting and lost tanks.

By the end of August the summer campaigns spluttered to a halt, all supply lines exhausted, all reserves committed. All except one, the Basque forces having carefully preserved their forces, waiting for the Monarchists to commit, saw their opportunity to strike. The La Coruna Offensive was a formidable effort and, by the standards of the rest of the war at the time, relatively well equipped. In the skies the Basque Air Force was numerous if varied, the Basque cause had attracted some interesting supporters resulting in a somewhat motley collection of aircraft ranging from ex-Latvian Bristol Bulldogs to Mexican Vought V-99M Corsairs (the 1920s O2U biplane version, not the 1940s F4U monoplane). On land the shipyards and metal works of the Basque country had been busy, supplying a range of armoured vehicles of varying quality including such delights as the 'Bilbao Modelo 1932' armoured car and the Tanque Euskadi (Basque Tank). While far from the best equipment in Spain, experience had shown that any tank, or aircraft, was better than none and no-one expected the under-strength garrisons of La Coruna and Ferrol to be capable of putting up any significant resistance to the Eusko Gudarostea (Basque Army). In the event however, the initial surprise attack and subsequent advance would be the highpoint of their campaign, as we shall see in the next chapter the Basque would be stopped and thrown back by Cervantes, Castaños and Spanish Venom.

--
Notes:

Is this a cliff hanger? Sort of, I think we've all seen enough Spanish civil war battles and this seemed a good point to stop on. I am quite pleased with the new map with River names on it, I think it looks quite good. Due to the nature of the HOI2 map of Spain the rivers end up being quite important so I referred to them a lot, because all of this is very much based on what the AI actually did. Hopefully the map makes things a little bit clearer. You could argue either way on which side did better out of all that, I would lean towards Bloodily Inconclusive but other opinions are available.

Methodical Battle is a funny one, as stated driven by the French preference to minimise casualties and to work with a few well trained professionals directing a large army of mostly conscripts and under-trained officers. A big chunk of the reasons for avoiding a fully professional army was undoubtedly cost, while the Maginot Line did not eat up that much French defence expenditure (given how long it took to build and the fact concrete is fairly cheap, it wasn't that much in % of budget terms per year) the French inter-war state was not rich. I've also seen a lot of references to the left being afraid of a military coup and/or being ideologically committed to a 'citizens army', both of which sound plausible given the time period. I suspect it's probably a bit of all these reasons, most things are. Either way it gave the world Methodical Battle, which probably works quite well under the right circumstances and if you are properly equipped for it, sadly for 1st Armoured neither of those applied outside Cordoba. The French will learn from this, they have enough observers and 'volunteers' embedded, what they learn is a different question.

The Motor Dragoons in their Lorraine 4x6 trucks did well (as in survived) and this will not have gone un-noticed by the many observers. This in part because shooting Armour Piercing shells at advancing infantry tends not to go well, certainly compared to shooting High Explosives at them, or even better canister shot. Mark that as another chance for the British to learn that a HE shell for the 2-pounder (and all future tank/towed guns) is important, this will add to lessons from the Abyssinian War and Hobart shouting about it. I know the Ordnance Board was quite obstinate, but I am going to assume that by now this fact has got through to them.

Militarisation was a real process and it was heavily pushed by the communists as they did control the War Ministry. The militias probably did need some professionalising, but the way it was done does seem to be more about centralising political control and sidelining other factions than fighting effectiveness. With the French around the Soviet influence is reduced, so it's happening a bit slower than OTL, in particular the Anarchists are still resisting and have kept better control of Catalonia so can scrape up an industrial base of sorts.

The M2A2 tanks arrived in Spain back in Chapter LXXIX, the Latvian Bulldogs in Chapter CV and we briefly met the brave men of the Mancheguian militias in Chapter LXXI, so lots of long set up things starting to bubble up. I mention this because I'd be amazed if anyone would notice that without being prompted. The Mexican contribution to the Basque cause is new however and will be discussed in the next update, as well the unusual Basque armoured vehicles which were OTL but fairly rare, mostly because the Basque territory was far smaller and was captured by June '37. In Butterfly the Basque have more territory and have used the extra time and resources to churn out some more equipment, not least some unusual tank-like vehicles.

Up Next; Corsairs, Trubia, Cervantes, Castaños and Spanish Venom.

El Pip · Sep 30, 2018

Chapter CXXXII: The Value of Improvisation

The Basque armoured force that spearheaded the attack towards La Coruna could generously be called a composite battlegroup, a harsher description would be a hodgepodge of whatever vehicles could be scraped together, crudely armoured and fitted with a gun. Certainly there was a great variety of different vehicle types present in the column, a large proportion of which were indeed conversion of various lorries and large cars, but in Spain every faction was using 'improvised' armoured vehicles of some sort. The Basque efforts were amongst the best as they had the fortune to have captured the nearest thing pre-Civil War Spain had to a tank factory, the SECN (Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval, Spanish Society for Naval Construction) armoured car works outside Bilbao. The SECN works had designed and produced the 'Bilbao Modelo 1932' armoured car, essentially a US commercial truck chassis and engine with a machine gun turret placed on top, though the chassis had been carefully strengthened and actual armour was used instead of the crude steel sheet used on other factions vehicles. It was originally not a combat vehicle but for riot control, hence why the majority of the pre-war production had gone to the para-military Assault Guards and not the regular army, but if you were a scratch militia unit lacking heavy weapons it was still a formidable opponent or a wonderful boost to morale, depending on which way it was facing. The real strength of the column however was not the armoured cars however but the M36 tanks, or more technically the 'Carro de combate ligero Trubia naval modelo 1936' (Trubia Light Tank, Naval Model 1936) as per the utterly literal Spanish naming convention.

Although it looks nothing like it, the M36 was originally based on the Renault FT, a tank Spain had acquired from a reluctant France after the disastrous Battle of Annual. Despite only middling performance during the Rif War the Spanish Army decided it needed a domestic tank programme, both to fix the perceived 'faults' in the FT and for reasons of prestige. In the end they would have two programmes, both operating out of the Trubia Artillery factory, hence the names of the tanks, both aiming to increase the speed, range, firepower and desert reliability of the Renault FT. Sadly for the Basque the M36 was based off the less ambitious FIAT 3000 inspired project (the FIAT 3000 being the Italian copy of the Renault FT), so lacked the powerful engine, improved suspension and twin turret of the rival Trubia A4 project. That said the M36 was still much faster, longer ranged, comparably armoured and mounted twice the firepower of the Renault FT it was based on, though with no compartmentalisation and inadequate cooling it was hard on it's three man crew. The problem was that the FT was twenty years old and was no longer anything like an acceptable benchmark for armoured vehicle design.

Against this force the Monarchists could call upon the lightly equipped garrison forces of La Coruna and Ferrol, some hastily armed rear echelon troops and the battered remnants of the 1st Armoured Division, which has been sent to the area for re-equipping and re-building. In an interesting parallel to the Basque, SECN would play a key role in equipping the Monarchist forces, because SECN was not a typical Spanish company. Founded in 1909 to rebuild the Spanish fleet and restore Spanish shipbuilding, it was part owned by the Biscay Furnace Company (hence it's Basque occupied factory), the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company and crucially Vickers-Armstrong. The British connection through Vickers, and the other large British shipbuilder John Brown, remained strong, particularly in the shipbuilding and industrial complex at Ferrol, hence it was the obvious location to rebuild and refit a British equipped armoured division. That said the 1st Armoured would not be rebuilt exactly as before, after the massacre of the at the hands of the Republicans' T-26s the Monarchist Military Council had had made it clear that the division would not accept any more Light Tanks, not even the newest Mk.VI, but would have to receive 'proper' tanks. In this viewpoint they had allies in the recently changed British tank establishment, the new hierarchy had taken a turn against the entire concept of light tanks.

Fittingly for this chapter, given the Spanish obsession with it, the first light tank was probably the Renault FT, which remains a surprisingly good archetype for the breed. Faster, thinner armour and a less potent armament are the key light tank ingredients, along with the vital garnish of cheaper. Even allowing for all the advantages of speed, the light tank recipe was always more attractive to the Treasury than the men who had to fight them. The bloody experiences from Spain had confirmed the lessons from the RAC's regular training exercises; the most valuable parts of the Mk.VI were the binoculars and the radio, the machine guns being mostly a distraction from the reconnaissance role and certainly of questionable value against a modern opponent. While accepting that they may have a place in colonial policing duties, both the Director of Mechanisation, Giffard LeQuesne Martel, and the Head of the Royal Armoured Corps, Percy Hobart, agreed the current generation of light tanks had no place in an armoured or cavalry division. Unfortunately did not agree on what should take their place, but that is a subject for later chapters.

Vickers were well aware of these developments and did not intend to give up what had promised to be a valuable cash cow without a fight. While it was rapidly established that a 2pdr turret, even a 'French style' one man unit, would never fit (or technically it would fit, but it would buckle the turret ring after a few shots), there was still an option to up-gun the tank. A dive into Vicker's vast back catalogue of designs and prototypes yielded the 1" (25.4mm) autocannon, developed in response to an Ordnance Board request in 1931 it used proven technology and could easily be produced with existing tooling, making it ideal to rush into production. Vickers also included a raft of upgrades to the suspension and engine to improve performance, the resulting tank was technically the Mk.VI(S) Spanish Light Tank, but Vickers dubbed it the Castaños after the Spanish Peninsula War general, correctly believing naming it after a general from the last war when Spanish monarchists fought on the same side as the British would help it's chances. Such PR aside the Mk.VI(S) was a considerable improvement, while the armour remained relatively thin it was faster, less prone to over-heating in the Iberian heat and most importantly had the firepower to take on the T-26 at long range and even the vaunted H.35 at moderate distances. Vickers had offered the tank to the Monarchists in place of the already ordered standard Mk.VIs, this had cautiously been accepted and a squadron constructed and sent to Spain for trials. Their arrival would cause a minor panic amongst the Wehrmacht observers, they would report back to Germany about yet another new foreign tank with a bigger gun than the just entering production Panzer II and it's increasingly unimpressive 2cm KwK 30. As always the German military mission, and their bosses back in the Reich, worried that if their rival could send such 'good' tanks to Spain, they must have even better ones back at home.

The Mk.VI(S) was not the only surprise waiting for the Basque armoured unit, but the parenthood of the second development is more contested. As discussed it was not possible to fit a 2pdr turret to a standard Mk.VI chassis, but that did not mean it was impossible to fit a fixed 2pdr and create a SPG (self propelled gun). Given how successful the specific design was, and how important the wider idea became, both the informal tank repair yards of Ferrol, where the recovered Mk.VI wrecks were collecting, and Vickers main works in the UK claimed to be first to develop and build one. The required work was not particularly complex, that would prove to be one of the main attractions of the SPG type design, so the first prototype could have been assembled either location. Vickers UK would claim it was based on the Birch Gun produced for the Experimental Mechanised Force in the 20s, the Birch Gun being a QF 18pdr fitted to a Vickers Medium Mk.III chassis. The engineers at Ferrol would just say it was an obvious way to make use of the various damaged Mk.VI chassis they had and some 'spare' 2pdrs they had acquired. To try to bury the argument the 'compromise' name of "Cervantes" was assigned, a properly Spanish name that also fit the developing convention of 'C' names for Vickers tanks in Spain.

The Vickers Cervantes, nothing more or less than fixing a standard issue Ordnance QF 2-pounder onto a Light Tank Mk.VI hull and then putting a steel box around it with a canvas roof. While not as enthusiastic about the idea of SPG as theorists like Liddell Hart (but then who was) Hobart was more willing than his predecessors to investigate 'new' ideas, provided of course it did not distract from the main priority of getting the RAC's divisions properly equipped and above all trained. The British military mission in Spain was "encouraged" by Hobart to assist in developing tactics for the new vehicles and closely observing how the SPG equipped units performed.

As the best tank experts the Monarchists had, the veteran survivors from 1st Armoured had been gathered to serve as the trials units for these new vehicles, so when the Basque attack began they were sent to the front for an exceptionally realistic live fire exercise. Broadly speaking the plan was to use the Cervantes to stiffen the infantry units and blunt the Basque attack, initial trials having quickly demonstrated the SPG was more potent as a defensive weapon, while the Castaños squadron would be the mobile reserve and counter-attacking force. The plan depended upon knowing where the Basque were and whether they were sticking to the coastal route or trying to use the passes through the Galician mountains near the Portugese border. Despite the best efforts of the bulk of the Basque airforce, the scratch Monarchist fighter squadrons provided enough protection to the reconnaissance planes and the Basque column was located in the mountain passes. While the Mk.VI(S) Castaños performed well in the counter-attack, driving the shattered Basque almost back to their start lines, it was the Cervantes that shattered them in the first place, particularly the Spanish manufactured versions. Having been constructed using 'acquired' towed 2pdrs they had a generous supply of HE shells (the UK models had 2pdrs originally destined for tanks, so only got AP shells, as per doctrine) this made them far more versatile, able to support the infantry once they had knocked out the Basque armoured vehicles. These lessons were not missed by the British observers, though the value of all armoured vehicles having a supply of AP and HE shells was seemingly well known to everyone in the British Army bar the Ordnance Board.

The failure of their ex-Mexican Corsairs and ex-Latvian Bulldogs to control the skies was a particular surprise to the Basque, they had expected the Monarchist airforce to be fully committed to the larger battles in the rest of Spain. Of course no airforce, particularly not one with RAF advisors, would ever fully commit it's entire strength and leave areas defenceless, not unless matters had become catastrophically dire, but La Crouna should have had relatively weakened air defences. Numerically that was the case, squadrons and pilots had indeed been diverted down to the fighting fronts in Central Spain, but as the preferred arrival location for British convoys there was always a regular supply of new aircraft into La Coruna. As with the colleagues on land, the Monarchist air force commanders had made it clear after the previous campaigns that they were not going to accept any more second hand RAF biplanes, instead they wanted 'proper' modern aircraft. This put the British in something of a bind as there was something of a lack of modern aircraft available, or at least a lack of modern aircraft that the British were comfortable sending and that the Spanish would accept. The compromise was the Spanish Venom, quite what it was, how it got to Spain and the Air Ministry crisis it ended up involved in form the subject of the next chapter.

--
Notes:
All real vehicles except for the Mk.VI(S) Castaños which I've entirely invented. The Vickers 1" autocannon existed and would, best I can tell, fit into a turret on a standard Mk.VI chassis, the other upgrades are pretty much the OTL ones Vickers gave to the Mk.VI during it's production life. A 1" shell is big enough you can fit a decent sized warhead on it and rough penetration calcs say it probably could punch through a H35 Tank at a decent range. In OTL the Army were happy enough with the Mk.VI as a scout/recon vehicle, and for imperial policing, it seemed more 'Cavalry' being fast and lightly armed which was important. Hobart and Mansell are not impressed with it and correctly believe politicians will see it as a cheap way of increasing 'tank' numbers so are trying to kill it. The Mk.VI(S) complicates that, but more on this in later updates.

Cervantes as you can tell is a real prototype. Vickers put it forward but it didn't fit with British doctrine (Cruiser tanks are for anti-tank and heavy Infantry tanks support infantry), it was also deemed expensive. Compared to a standard Mk.VI it was, but obviously compared to a conventional 2pdr A.9/A.10 cruiser tank it was cheap. The Birch Guns of the EMF have come up before, Hobart asking people to dig out the blue prints as he wants artillery that can keep up with his tanks. Don't let anyone tell you this isn't all connected.

The quite ropey M36 is utterly OTL, as was having two separate projects to copy and improve the Renault FT. The Basque managed to build half a dozen (ish) before being conquered, but had dozens in various state of assembly, so with a few months extra they've managed to assemble a credible number.

I was going to carry on to the much trailed Spanish Venom, but decided to just get something out and carry that aircraft over to a full aero-porn update.

El Pip · Jan 1, 2019

Supporting Appendix A: Aero-Engine State of the Art Mid-1930s

The Air Ministry's struggle to supply a modern monoplane fighter to the Monarchist Air Force was, primarily, a problem of aero-engines, which is how the Spanish Venom became involved in the so-called Cooling Crisis that racked the Ministry and the wider aero-industry. It has been noted that the Spanish Venom and it's engine had no problems with cooling so, in theory, should have been isolated from the crisis. While true this misses the point; by the time it was finally over, the Cooling Crisis itself was only tangentially related to cooling, having expanded to cover much wider government concerns about engines and aeronautical-industrial policy in general. That being the case, a degree of background knowledge about aero-engines of the period will assist in understanding what follows, hence this appendix, though rest assured a high level summary will more than suffice. For our purposes a 1930s aero-engine designer had two key choices to make; how to arrange the cylinders and how the engine would be cooled, while there were obviously countless other design decisions that were vital in determining how the engine would perform, these were mostly peripheral to the unfolding crisis.

The arrangement choice came down to radial or inline; a radial engine had the cylinders 'radiate out' from a central crankshaft somewhat like a star, hence why the Germans referred to them as sternmotors (star engines), conversely in an inline engine the cylinders were aligned behind each other and formed into banks, the banks were then arranged in a wide variety of configurations from the familiar 'V' through to 'W', 'H' and even 'X' shaped engine blocks. Radials of the time were generally less efficient, for the same displacement capacity a radial engine would produce less power than the equivalent sized inline, the spread out cylinders also meant they had a larger frontal cross-sectional area. The combination of these two factors meant that, for a similar power output, a radial engine would be larger, cause more drag and so have a slower top speed, all while using more fuel. On the plus side a radial was mechanically simpler with fewer critical moving parts and typically less vibration, hence they generally had greater reliability and simpler, less frequent, maintenance. In contrast the choice around cooling was far simpler; air or liquid. Using the air passing over the engine for cooling did result in a cheaper, lighter and in theory more reliable engine, however liquid (anything from simple water through to pressurised water/ethylene glycol mixes) was far more effective at removing heat, though at the cost of weight and an increase in fragility, the radiators in particular were often sensitive to rough operation and battle damage. The complicating factor was that the simple hydraulics of a liquid cooling system were far easier to master than the black art that was high speed air flow around a running aero-engine.

A selection of mid-1930s aero-engines, showing the various configuration in operation or under consideration. Clockwise from top left: a Napier Dagger VIII H24; a Gnome-Rhône 14K radial; a Mikulin AM-34 V12 and a Rolls Royce Exe X24. The AM-34 was a fairly typical liquid-cooled V12 of the period, like most Soviet engines of the time it was 'inspired' (copied) from a Western design, in this case a Fiat 'A' series V-12. The French 14K represents the other typical type; an air-cooled radial, specifically a two-row radial engine. The '14 'referred to the total number of cylinders, these were then arranged in two 'rows' of 7 to form the heart of the engine. In contrast to the Soviet effort the 14K was very much a leading design, becoming the benchmark two-row radial against which similar engines were judged. If the AM-34 and the 14K were typical, then the Dagger was not, quite aside from it's unusual 'H' configuration it was an air-cooled inline, an unusual choice that would prove challenging to develop and one we will be looking at later in more detail. Finally the even more unusual Exe, representing both the inline 'X' configuration and, more importantly but less visibly, the revolutionary 'sleeve valve' type engine, like the Dagger the Exe was air-cooled.

Two binary choices produce four possible outcomes, however in the case of aero-engines the design process normally resulted in either an air-cooled radial or a liquid-cooled inline, though as we have seen the recherché choice of an air-cooled inline would occasionally emerge. The radial engine shape was a good match for air-cooling, plenty of surface area on the exposed cylinders and a low/zero maintenance cooling system dovetailed well the (generally) lower maintenance and simpler radial engine design. At the other end the more compact inline engines needed the more effective liquid cooling to dissipate the heat, the extra weight being easily offset by the higher power outputs. The air-cooled inline offered a weight saving and potential reliability/ruggedness so was perennially attractive, but was hard to make work, while the liquid-cooled radial combined the worst of both and so was the path (almost) never taken. The two dominant types gravitated towards certain roles, if you wanted absolute performance then you went liquid-cooled inline, if not the air-cooled radial was often the better option. Hence why commercial aviation mostly ran on air-cooled radials (cheaper, rugged, simple to maintain) while the Schneider Trophy and air-speed world records were dominated by liquid-cooled inlines (more power, less drag). This balance would change as technology advanced, not least improvements in fuel quality and aerodynamics becoming less of an art and more of a science, but it is a reasonable enough statement of the position in the mid to late 1930s.

The Bristol Hercules, shown in a period cutaway drawing, one of the new generation of radial engines that Bristol and the Air Ministry hoped would invalidate much of the above explanation. Like the Gnome-Rhône 14K the Hercules was a 14-cylinder twin row radial, unlike the French effort it used sleeve valves in place of the conventional poppet valves. Along with the distinctive sleeves themselves the two key consequences of this choice can also be seen; the five ports per cylinder (three inlet, two exhaust, labelled A,B,C and D &E respectively) that dramatically increased power and efficiency and the mass of gears (labelled X,Y and Z in the centre of the engine) required to operate the two rows of sleeve valves. Essentially Bristol had traded away a degree of the radial engines simplicity in exchange for extra power, but crucially the engine was still air cooled and could take a supercharger. In line with Air Ministry thinking the Hercules was intended for use in the next generation of bombers and large commercial aircraft, if it could live up to the promises of it's designer.

As it will become important later we should also discuss the new technology that threatened to disrupt this neat division. This is not the jet engine we discussed in Chapter XCIX, in the 1930s jets were too new to disrupt much of anything apart from research budgets, nor was it the jet's siblings the turo-prop and the thermojet, both under development across the Continent but no further advanced. We are talking about something far less visceral, and more evolutionary than revolutionary; the sleeve valved aero engine. Traditionally aero-engines had used poppet valves to control the flow of fuel and air into the cylinder and to allow exhaust gases to exit. However, there are limits on how large a standard poppet valve can be and still function at the high temperature and high revolutions per minute of an aero-engine and this limited the efficiency of a standard two valve cylinder. In an inline engine the solution was simple; just add more valves, this is why a typical inline V-12 aero-engine of the period would have four valves per cylinder, two inlet and two exhaust. A similar solution was possible for a single row radial but was fearsomely difficult for a two row design, not without causing larger problems elsewhere in the engine. This was unfortunate, as it was correctly realised by most manufacturers that future aircraft would need the extra power that only a two row design could give, hence why almost all of them continued to use two valves per cylinder and take the hit on efficiency. Bristol, with the enthusiastic support of the Air Ministry, had decided to take the road less travelled and pursue the third alternative; the sleeve valve. Broadly speaking a poppet valve moved up and down to open and close the valve (typically it was opened by a cam and then pulled closed by an integral spring), the sleeve valve instead rotated a metal sleeve inside the cylinder wall, when the holes in the sleeve aligned with those in the cylinder the valve was open. Despite being developed in the 1910s the idea had only come to the attention of aero-engine makers in the late 1920s after Sir Harry Ricardo had highlighted the many theoretical advantages of the sleeve valve over the poppet valve, not the least of which was the possibility of a two row radial engine with multiple valves per cylinder. While Bristol had taken the lead on the technology, spending several years, and several million pounds demonstrating just how hard it was to turn those theoretical advantages into physical items, they were not alone; Rolls Royce and Napier were both also working on sleeve valve engines. If the results obtained were worth all the time and effort was a matter of considerable debate within the Air Ministry and so, inevitably, the sleeve valve was dragged into the Cooling Crisis maelstrom.

---
Notes:
The next chapter was getting a bit monstrous, it was over 4,000 words and still not finished. I needed to split it somewhere, so I decided to try a new idea. I say new, I've just stolen it from @Wraith11B, so the promised bit on radial vs inline engines has been dumped into this 'Appendix' chapter, along with some nice pictures and more than you need to know about sleeve valves.

Hopefully this is acceptable, though I must make clear there is absolutely no plot progress at all in this update. So if nothing else I feel this is a new record even for me.

El Pip · Jan 6, 2019

Chapter CXXXIII: From the Ministry with Venom

The Monarchist Air Force's demand for a 'modern' monoplane fighter caused a degree of consternation in the Air Ministry, primarily because they were somewhat short on such things themselves. A fair minded observer would say that the Royal Air Force had a grand total of two types available that met such a description; the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane. The Supermarine factory had only just starting delivering Spitfires to the RAF over the summer of 1937, most of the pilots were still converting across from their previous biplanes and none of the squadrons had been 'stood up' for front line service. More seriously the 'shadow factory' that had been slated to support Supermarine in producing the Spitfire, the vast Castle Bromwich facility, was still a construction site. For as long as that was the case there was no possibility of the Air Staff allowing any Spitfire production to be diverted to Spain, which left the Hurricane as seemingly the only option. With Hawker's main factory working flat out, and having drafted in Westland Aircraft to boost output, there was in theory enough production to allow a modest number to be sent to Spain, however the reality was more complicated. While the government had no serious concerns about exporting the Hurricane airframe to Spain, indeed it's rugged and 'basic' nature made it a good fit for the expected conditions and ground crews to be found in Spain, the engine was a very different matter. The Rolls Royce Merlin was considered one of the Air Ministry's 'crown jewels' and so was up near the very top of the Restricted List. While Hawker were confident that they could re-design the Hurricane to take a new engine, a hurried check confirmed that there was no engine of similar enough size, weight and power available. The least bad option, the Napier Dagger (as used on the export versions of the Handley Page Hampden), had a broadly similar power output but was taller, narrower and, as we have seen, was air-cooled where the Merlin was liquid-cooled. Fitting the Dagger would require the entire front half of the Hurricane fuselage to be re-designed to channel airflow over the engine to keep it cooled, then the radiators would have to be removed and various related sundries removed or relocated. At which point the essentially 'new' design would need to go through flight testing and acceptance trials and, assuming it passed, a new production line setup and started, even rushed this was 6 months work if not nearer a year, an utterly unacceptable timescale for the impatient Monarchists.

A Hurricane of No.73 squadron having it's Merlin III engine removed for routine maintenance by the squadron ground crew at RAF Digby in Lincolnshire. The early marks of the Merlin were not the triumphs of power and reliability the later versions would become, but they were still very much world class engines, easily on a par with their German (Daimler Benz DB-601) and American (Allison V-1710) rivals and markedly superior to the inline efforts of France, Italy or the Soviet Union. This perhaps explains why the Air Ministry was as much concerned about engine design secrets leaking back to Hispano-Suiza in France as the potential for German espionage. It is also worth noting that, aside from the security concerns, there were practical problems with sending the Merlin to Spain, not least the lack of engineers to help train up the Monarchists in servicing and repairing the engine. Rolls Royce were exceptionally busy at this time, in addition to their aero-engine development work they were supporting their nascent Australian branch as it worked up for starting Merlin production in Melbourne and working with the Royal Armoured Corps on tank engines. The fight over which of those should be delayed, or even cancelled, to allow Merlins to be sent to Spain was not one any party relished, which was another persuasive reason to send (almost) any other aero-engine to Spain.

Under pressure to come up with something to send to Spain, if only to ensure the Monarchists didn't get any ideas about buying from someone else, the Air Ministry widened it's search. They soon honed in on the prototypes produced for an earlier design specification, F.5/34, which had called for a single seat, eight gunned fighter designed to catch and intercept fast, high flying bombers. Crucially the aircraft was not intended for use by the home based Metropolitan RAF but was intended for the euphemistic 'Empire service in hot, tropical climates', the government considering it a breach of diplomatic etiquette to blatantly state it was intended for use in the Far East against the Japanese. As a result the specification had called for the use of an air cooled radial engine, the improved reliability and easier maintenance were deemed important for aircraft that would be deployed at the end of a very long supply chain. The Air Ministry was attracted to this feature of the specification, it meant none of the designs used the Merlin so they hoped there would be no concerns about exporting advanced engine technology to Spain. Technically they were correct in this, but unfortunately instead of export concerns they instead found a whole new set of domestic engine related problems to complicate the issue.

The F.5/34 specification had been on the cusp of cancellation after the Abyssinian War and the subsequent Imperial Defence Conference. The success of the hastily 'desertified' Hurricanes in North Africa had convinced the Air Staff that a special 'hot climate' fighter was not required for technical reasons and the maintenance and logistics staff were becoming vocal in the keen desire to keep the number of types in service to a minimum. The subsequent decision to base Hurricanes to Singapore had removed the final raison d'être of the specification; building permanent RAF fighter bases, and their associated warehouses and workshops, meant complex engines could be supported in the Far East. In the medium term the situation would only improve as Australian production of both the Hurricane and the Merlin engine would provide a 'local' supply of replacement parts and aircraft to any Far Eastern squadrons. The RAF duly withdrew their interest in the specification and ordinarily that would have meant it was cancelled, but then the Admiralty intervened and the programme was saved by the Fleet Air Arm, the 5th Sea Lord and his staff being interested in the designs for their own reasons. As we have seen, the Royal Navy had two brand new but 'obsolete' biplane aircraft coming into service (the Gloster Sea Gladiator and the Fairey Swordfish) but only one aircraft development budget agreed with the Treasury (the funding from for the Blackburn Skua programme, which would be 'rolled over' once the Skua entered production). The F.5/34 prototypes offered a way to solve the dilemma of which replacement to fund first, if the FAA 'borrowed' the results of the RAF specification then they could get a monoplane fighter into service on the cheap and put the development funds towards the Swordfish replacement. What made the prototypes particularly attractive to the FAA were their air-cooled radial engines and emphasis on ease of maintenance, both features that the FAA had decided were vital in carrier aircraft. The small size of the prototypes, allowing them to fit on the lifts of the older carriers and be packed away in large numbers in the hangars, was just a bonus. There was a degree of irony in the newly independent FAA choosing to revert to the 'bad old days' practice of accepting the RAF's cast-offs, but such are the ways of defence procurement.

While four designs had been submitted under the F.5/34 specification, the FAA were quick to dispose of two of them as being too far from entering service; the Bristol Type 146 prototype wasn't scheduled to fly until early 1938, while Martin-Baker were even further behind and their MB-2 wasn't expected to emerge till the summer of that year. Interestingly the MB-2 would still manage to stagger on, the Air Ministry directly funding a prototype against a brand new, purpose written, specification. While the MB-2 had many clever features and details it was not exactly a cutting edge design, as an example the initial proposal drawings showed a fixed under-carriage, so it's survival was as much due to concerns in the Air Ministry about the lack of competition in fighter design as the potential of the aircraft. Bristol's Type 146 would not be so fortunate and the prototype would never be finished, in a sign of the return to more 'normal' priorities the team's designer and engineers would be split between working on the Type 153 cannon fighter and the Type 143 airliner project. The Air Ministry agreed with the FAAs judgement on those rejections (in private at least) and so concentrated on the two survivors the Vickers Venom and the Gloster F.5/34. The difference in designation should not be over-analysed, they reflected neither progress or preference but instead Gloster's habit of not naming an aircraft until it had actually been ordered and the Vickers' approach of giving their designs names early on to make them stand out.

The Bristol Type 143 'Blackpool', the civilian airliner version of the Blenheim bomber. After languishing during the Abyssinian War the Type 143 would become one of the post-war priorities for the Air Ministry and so for Bristol. A great deal of 'encouragement' was applied to the Bristol board by the government and they duly gave the Type 143 the same more powerful Perseus engines as the Blenheim (hammering another nail into the coffin of the Aquila engine), named it the Blackpool and launched it onto the civilian market. The design team were then further 'encouraged' to look at a stretched version that could take advantage of the extra power of the Perseus to add payload and range. Quite aside from the usual desire to keep work flowing to factories that had been busy with emergency war-orders, there was a bigger picture priority. The government was very keen to see Empire airlines flying Empire (British) aircraft not foreign imports, the Blackpool was one of the first tangible outputs of this policy.

The Gloster design was very much the FAA favourite, partly because Gloster was the more experienced carrier aircraft designer but mostly because the design had been at the perfect stage when the time of the FAA taking over the specification. While the Vickers prototype was flying and the rest were still drawings Gloster were just producing the full scale mockup. This made it relatively straightforward for the engineers to 'navalise' the design (adding a catapult point, arrestor hook, folding wings, naval radios, etc) with minimal interruption to the programme. These modifications added weight to an aircraft that had only been projected to have average performance to start with, however we now come to the trump card as far as the FAA were concerned. Originally designed around the Bristol Mercury engine, for the prototype this was swapped out for it's more powerful sleeve-valved twin the Perseus. Aside from adding ~100hp extra power, more than enough to over-come the extra weight of the naval aviation equipment, this change meant it shared an engine with the fleet's new dive bomber, the Blackburn Skua, a very real plus given the limited workshop space on most of the carriers and the desire to expand air groups as far as possible. The prototype first flew in the summer of 1937 and proved to have performance broadly equivalent to the RAF's new fighters; a ~320mph top speed, excellent climb performance and a gratifyingly short take off and landing requirement. This was enough to cement the Gloster as the favourite, while the Venom would go through navalisation the Fifth Sea Lord was clear this was only a backup against something catastrophic emerging during acceptance trials or deck landing testing of the Gloster design, provisionally named the Griffon. In contrast the Air Ministry soon became convinced that the Vickers Venom was the best option to send to Spain. The prototype had been flying since the previous summer and had been thoroughly tested at full war load, demonstrating comparable performance to the prototype Hurricane, giving away a shade in top speed and climb while being slightly more manoeuvrable. Certainly it had far less long term potential than the Hurricane, or even the Gloster Griffon, but for a fighter that would be in combat the moment it arrived in Spain that was not a serious issue, especially compared to it's main attraction; it was ready to go into production immediately.

Sadly for the civil servants at the Air Ministry two problems soon cropped up; the thorny question of who would build it and the perennial concern of engines. To deal with the latter, the Venom was designed around the Bristol Aquila, an engine the Ministry had spent the previous months diligently trying to kill off. To be blunt the Aquila was just too small, at 'only' 15.6 litre displacement it could never produce the 1000hp+ power levels the Air Ministry expected future aircraft required while being too complex (and expensive) for the trainer market. Sleeve valve radials were hard to make, requiring specialist machine tools and operatives that were constantly in short supply, so the Air Ministry had no intention of allowing Bristol to waste precious effort on an engine with no future. The production issue was similar, Vickers were heavily committed to delivering the ordered Wellesley bombers and developing the Wellington, with any spare effort supporting work on the Spitfire (Supermarine being a subsidiary of the vast Vickers-Armstrong group). None of those were considered cancellable or indeed delay-able, the Spitfire was deemed a very high priority for home defence and the Wellington was the lynchpin of the aero-industrial plans of the entire Empire, having been promised to the RAF, RCAF and RAAF with licence production planned for both Australia and Canada.

The Vickers Venom, it's squared off, constant chord wings and the sharp angles of it's polyhedral metal stressed-skinned body clearly visible. The Venom was the final evolution of the Vickers Jockey, a late 1920s 'interceptor fighter' design that had proved ahead of it's time when it lost out to a pair of biplanes; the Hawker Fury and Bristol Bulldog. Since then Vickers had refined the design, finally ditching the Wibault corrugated skin construction for a modern, all-metal, semi-monocoque fuselage, adding details like a retractable under-carriage and a proper canopy to the cockpit and crucially upgrading the engine to the latest sleeve-valve Bristol Aquila. This was connected to the Venom's most unique feature, the engine mounting was hinged at the end of the cowling, allowing it to swing sideways to provide quick access to the rear of the engine and all the ancillaries.

The solution the Ministry found was elegant, though had they been aware of the problems it would cause down the line they may have been less keen to embrace it. There was an alternate engine available and a manufacturer who had the capacity and was familiar with the engine and stressed-skin metal construction. The manufacturer was Airspeed Ltd, one of the smaller but up-and-coming manufacturers, who had established a solid reputation for airliners and trainers but had never cracked the military market. The engine was the Wolseley Libra, a nine cylinder radial like the Aquila, of similar weight and dimensions but lacking the sleeve valves and so marginally down on power. The Wolseley Aero Engine company was mostly notable for being the personal property of Lord Nuffield who, having acquired extensive War Office contracts through Morris and Nuffield Mechanizations, intended to expand and starting winning work from the Air Ministry. Airspeed and Wolsely had an established partnership and Airspeed already considered the Libra and the Aquila to be essentially interchangeable in their own designs. Vickers reluctantly bowed to pressure and sub-contracted the re-engine design work and manufacture of the 'Spanish Venom' to Airspeed, with a handful of the Venom's designers seconded across to assist the process. Airspeed's recently constructed Portsmouth factory made a maximum effort and managed to get the first production aircraft to Spain in time for the climax of the La Coruna offensive.

The Monarchists were initially somewhat nonplussed by the Venom, they had expected at least Hurricanes and the more dementedly optimistic had hoped for Spitfires. Receiving an aircraft they had never heard of and that the RAF wasn't using did not go down well, had the British not offered the first batch on free trial (and the situation above La Coruna not been so desperate) it is likely they would have been rejected out of hand. Once the Monarchists pilots got their hands on them however, the objections melted away as fast as the Basque airforce. While the Libra engine meant it could only achieve a shade over 300mph that was still over 120mph faster than the Basque's Bulldogs and Corsairs, this advantage along with the Venoms excellent manoeuvrability and heavy (for Spain) firepower of 8x 0.303' machine guns had predictably devastating results. The advantages over the Soviet supplied aircraft were not so pronounced but still decisive; the Venom was the first Monarchist aircraft that could reliably intercept the previously uncatchable Tupolev SB bombers and had a 20mph speed advantage over the Soviet I-16s, as well as four times the firepower and wings that could manage high-g turns without snapping off. It is far to say that the Spanish Venom was very much a hit with the Monarchists, to the relief of the British government in general and the Air Ministry in particular. This just left the minor issue of dealing with all the problems it's birth had created in the British aero-industry and the consequences of breaking 'The Ring'.

--
Notes:

First off, fans and members of the old UK Co-op AAR may recognise the Gloster Griffon, because it remains a good idea.

In Butterfly the land based Gladiator got cancelled during Churchill's cull of the biplanes so Gloster had more time, part of that they used to fit folding wings to the Sea Gladiator (which was FAA so not affected by the cull) and the rest they used to work on F.5/34 which, even after being navalised, is still 6months ahead of OTL and probably going to end up in the next generation of CAGs on RN carriers.

In OTL Hawker did produce plans to re-engine the Hurricane with a whole range of different engines, primarily because the Merlin was in such demand everywhere it was becoming a bottleneck to production. It came to nothing because the amount of design and testing work involved was considerable and the efforts better spent on the Hurricane replacements that Hawker were working on. On a related point in OTL Westland were building the entirely nondescript Hawker Hector, a biplane army co-operation aircraft that soon got phased out, as that also got killed by Churchill that freed up Westland to help with the Hurricane. Let no-one say these things aren't thought through.

Onto the meat of this, the F.5/34 specification. In OTL this lingered on for quite a while, certainly long enough to get all the prototypes flying, in part this is because in OTL the Spitfire and Hurricane weren't rushed into service so a 'backup' design was more justifiable. Here it gets killed by the RAF early, but saved by an FAA looking for a fighter. The Martin-Baker MB-2 was interesting if flawed, but would lead to some much better aircraft, not least the superlative MB-5, so as stated the Air Ministry are funding the designer as much as the aircraft.

For the avoidance of doubt, yes a Sea Hurricane would probably be a better choice for the FAA and was discussed in OTL as early as 1937. But where would things be without cockups and pointless institutional politics getting in the way? Besides the Gloster effort is not without it's advantages and I've had the FAA make the big leap to accept a single seat fighter, so they had to get a few things 'wrong'.

The Bristol Blackpool is new(ish). A Type 143 prototype civilian airliner was created and it flew around attracting admiring glances, but it never got the newest Bristol engines and Bristol and the Air Ministry were too focused on re-armament and bombers to push a civilian airliner. Here it is being re-engined with some Perseus', tided up a bit and pointed at the Empire and wider world airliner market. It will do well and not just because of government pressure for Empire airlines to buy it, it will beat the Lockheed Electra/Super-Electra to the market and is faster and more fuel efficient as well. It's no DC-3 (too small for starters) but so much of the DC-3's reputation and dominance rests on the thousands of ex-military models that were dumped on the civil market post-war, besides there are other designs aimed at that bit of the market, more of which later.

OTL Wolsley did make the Libra engine and it got bench tested and type approved at about the right sort of power but never flew. This is because Nuffield realised he was getting nowhere with the Air Ministry and so abandoned aero-engine making in late 1936 before selling the factory and plans to Scottish Engineering mid-37 (who appear to have mostly disappeared). Lord Nuffield is something of a bete noir of the British war effort, his main contribution was really cocking up running the Castle Bromwich Spitfire Factory and producing the Nuffield Liberty engine which cursed many an otherwise innocent tank. More on all this in the next chapter though.

El Pip · Jul 20, 2019

Chapter CXXXIV: The Tyranny of the Minority

There is an investing adage which holds that the best time to sell your shares in a large company is just after it has started work on it’s new and palatial headquarters. While perhaps not entirely serious there is a kernel of logic behind this; an organisation devoting large amounts of time, money and effort to making itself look more impressive risks neglecting it’s actual purpose. Prior to the Abyssinian War a similar argument could have be made about the League of Nations. After the initial blow of the United States declining to join, the early years had seen a steady growth in membership and some considerable successes; mediating countless territorial disputes, repatriating over 400,000 ex-POWs from Russia and starting influential and well supported commission on everything from working conditions to drug control. Buoyed by these successes, and increasing US involvement in League bodies such as the International Labour Organisation, League officials and supporters began talking about “The Spirit of Geneva”, convinced that a new era of international co-operation, collective security and negotiated solutions had dawned. Obviously the over-seers of this new age would need a suitable building and so it was decided in 1929 to build a new ‘Palace of the Nations’. This impressive new structure would replace the existing League headquarters, the unfortunately titled 'Palais Wilson' which had been named after the US President who had been a vocal support of the League, but had subsequently failed to convince his countrymen to join.

This optimistic vision of the power and status of the League, which had been somewhat questionable as early as the 1923 Corfu Crisis, was finally shattered by the Manchurian Incident in 1931. In summary Japan staged an attack on the Manchurian Railway, blamed China and then used that as a pretext to occupy Manchuria and install a puppet as "Emperor of Manchukuo". The mechanisms of the League worked thoroughly, if slowly; observers were sent and a report written (the damning Lytton Report) which clearly stated the attack was faked and that Japan had planned the entire incident. The League Council and Assembly accepted those findings and demanded Japan apologise, pay compensation and that Manchuria be returned to China. At this point the League's dream of collective security effectively collapsed when, instead of accepting the verdict and complying, Japan just quit the League and the League Council failed to impose any sanction or consequence beyond harsh words. This was followed up with another pair of serious blow later in the year when the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva collapsed, an event Germany used as justification to also quit the League.

A typically direct David Low cartoon on the subject of the Manchurian Incident. The gentleman applying the 'face-saving outfit' was Sir John Simon, the then British Foreign Secretary. Widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the worst inhabitants of the office he lived down to his reputation during the Incident and failed to even convincingly condemn the Japanese, let alone do anything to deter them. Of wider relevance the Incident also laid bare the inherent tension between the League's ongoing quest for it's members to disarm and it's requirements that they be militarily strong enough to enforce collective security. The failure of the League, or it's supporters, to ever really engage with this issue and propose a solution was a far more serious failing than any of the missteps or embarrassments that Simon committed while at the Foreign Office.

By 1936 the first sections of the 'Palace of the Nations' were being completed and the League was starting to move in, just in time for the Abyssinian Crisis to escalate into full blown war. The crisis had initially appeared to be 'just' another turn on the League's downward spiral; yet another ignored resolution and a further failure of collective security. The intervention of the British and the outbreak of the Abyssinian War was initially greeted with despair in Geneva, in attempting to stop a small war the League feared they had provoked a much larger one. This mood was lifted in the aftermath of the Treaty of Valletta as it became apparent that the affair had, as a side effect, propelled the League back into a degree of relevance. While few really believed that the British had been wholly or even substantially motivated by the League's resolutions, the British invocation of a council decision as one of her justifications for action had raised the profile of the pronouncements of the League. The League non-intervention agreement around Spain was also a minor triumph, not for it's limited impact on the ground in Spain but for getting most of the non-League powers (Germany, Italy, the US and, quixotically, Japan) to turn up to a conference and then sign the agreement. A further boost came when the British 'encouraged' the restored Abyssinian government to invite the League Slavery Commission into the country to ensure the vile practice was stamped out, a plan that coincidentally ensured that any anger from the Abyssinian elite about this attached itself to the League and not Britain. Buoyed by this the Commission re-invigorated it's anti-slavery efforts in Liberia, an effort which soon attracted further US engagement with the League on the many problems Liberia was facing.

For the League and it's officials the dark lining to this silver cloud soon became apparent; with relevance came demagogues and provocateurs. As the major, and not-so major, powers started paying more attention to the League it once again became an excellent platform for airing grievances, rabble rousing and generally expressing international hatred. The vast majority of these involved irredentism, a belief that some 'lost' territory should be restored or some never-actually-owned territory was clearly part of the 'Greater' version of an existing country and so should be transferred. This was nothing new for the League, indeed an entire machinery had been developed to deal with such complaints, what had changed was the approach of the complaining groups. Previously few had bothered to engage with the League, correctly suspecting their claims would either get bogged down or thrown out. The unfortunate experience of the Norwegian claim on Greenland (the so called Erik the Red's Land), which had been rejected by the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1933, was widely seen as a salutary warning; if you pressed a claim too hard it could be undermined forcing you to withdraw it. The problem for the League was the realisation that, for a grievance mongering leader, a rejection was in many ways better than success. A success 'merely' got some land back, but an international body or court ruling against the nation was an insult, a bunch of ignorant foreigners callously ignoring the suffering of fellow countrymen, the resulting anger and outrage could carry a skilful leader to power and help maintain them once there.

Eten Island, Truk Lagoon in the Japanese South Pacific Mandate. The large amount of (illegal) construction work done to build a large airstrip on the tiny island can clearly be seen. While the vast majority of issues that overwhelmed the League originated in Europe, there were some from further afield. The South Pacific Mandate had been granted to Japan in 1919, over the vociferous objections of the far closer Australians, as a Class C Mandate, which meant the islands were to remain demilitarised and subject to annual League scrutiny. By the late 1920s Japan was routinely obstructing any attempt at scrutiny and by the time of Japan's departure was widely (and correctly) suspected of starting to fortify the islands. The Australian delegation took the opportunity of the League's recovery in standing to restate their position; if Japan had left the League then it was no longer eligible to hold the mandate and it should be stripped from them. In the alternative, if Japan was still eligible, then the League should insist on the resumption of annual scrutiny. While the actual position of Geneva was well known, the League had no intention of making further demands of Japan that it knew would be ignored, putting this into an acceptable form of words proved challenging for the inhabitants of the Palace of Nations.

The aftermath of the Amsterdam Conference made the problems worse, the only reason the conference hadn't re-opened old wounds was that most of the wounds in question were far too raw to need re-opening. Over the winter of 1936 the machinery of the League, primarily the Minorities Commission, the Delimitation Commission and the Permanent Court of International Justice were overwhelmed with claims, allegations and demands for investigation. These ranged from well established problems (the mass of claims and counter-claims in the Balkans) to new issues (Turkey's effort to get the Court of International Justice to declare the Treaty of Lausanne illegal). For many in the League bureaucracy the final straw was the demand by the Irish Free State that the League instruct Britain to 'return' Northern Ireland to Dublin. While the claim was easy enough to dismiss, being essentially baseless and intended for domestic election purposes rather than a serious effort to convince anyone else of it's merits, it was dispiriting to find that even a previously model League member was engaging with such bad faith. The beleaguered League officials desperately asked the Council for additional staff and resources to cope with the avalanche of work, when that was rejected they responded by designating whole swathes of the claims as 'political' and kicking them up for the Council to deal with.

This decision by the League's officials was both correct and the one thing the Council wished to avoid. The members of the Council were well aware of the political machinations behind the cases and so were keen for them to be dealt with in the standard way; thoroughly, bureaucratically and above all grindingly, glacially, slowly. This allowed them to grandly pontificate about complainants needing to work through the League and avoid the complications and consequences of the Council making actual decisions. These delaying tactics should not be confused with the absence of a long term plan because there was one, it just wasn't a plan anyone wanted to discuss. Essentially the Council members were unofficially in favour of assimilation and integration, the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was seen as a warning sign about how well multi-ethnic European states worked, so integrating minorities into the dominant culture was seen as the least bad option. On this basis the Minorities Commission would turn a blind eye to almost any allegation if the defending state could plausibly claim their actions were to support the integration of the minority. In part this hit the irregular verb problem; I am promoting an integrated state, you are forcibly integrating unwilling minorities, they are implementing discriminatory policies. The larger problem was a failure to appreciate the scope of the problem, the League system was not set up to deal with the disputes were the minority in the country was receiving extensive support from their notional motherland. It was perhaps an appreciation of this flaw that prompted the Council's solution; ruling out any claim from a minority where their claimed motherland was not a league member. While this was, at best, legally dubious there was enough in it to convince the Permanent Court to back it and naturally the other League bodies were happy for the Council to impose consequence on non-members. While in practice this measure only impacted German and Italian claims, that was still enough to significantly reduce the workload and unclog the system, in as much as a system designed to run slowly could ever be unclogged.

German irredentist propaganda from the 1920s, showing the 'lost' lands in Red under the banner "Lost - but not forgotten country". The poster shows the scale of the problem, not only is Austria already assumed to be part of Greater Germany (as Deutschösterreich) the map maker has adopted several 'Austrian' irredentist views and claimed areas of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Italy. Similarly ambitious maps could also be found in Italy, asserting Rome as the rightful owner of the Dalmatian coast, Corsica, several other part of France and Switzerland and enthusiastically supporting Austria's right to be a proud, free, not-German country (as long as Austria freely chose to be part of Italy's sphere of influence). It should be clear that the people behind such claims were not the type to let a bureaucratic slight of hand by the League of Nations stop them from advancing their cause.

For the aggrieved minority groups, and their foreign backers, there was a short pause while the leaders and propagandist worked out how to respond to this judgement. While the actual significance was small, the claims were always more emotional than practical and so were not vulnerable to mere legality, it was still another blow for causes that were struggling. Both Italy and Germany had suffered humiliating setbacks in the previous year and, while they had retained their facades of economic strength, they were not the respected powers they had been. It is one thing to agitate to join a more successful and prestigious neighbour, quite another to convince people to join a recently defeated one. That said the underlying issues had not been resolved, indeed many nations saw this as a justification to accelerate their 'integration' efforts, so the movements did not disappear or become irrelevant, merely weakened and forced to look for alternative routes. As the poem by German irredentist Paul Warncke put it on the poster above "You must carve in your heart these words, as in stone: What we have lost, Will be regained!" The challenge for the Great Powers and the League was to prevent this emotional cry from becoming a prophecy.

--
Notes:

There are so many good David Low and Bernard Partridge cartoons to chose from about the League of Nations being rubbish, but 'The Doormat' is a classic. Sir John Simon was legendarily useless as Foreign Secretary, though apparently not that bad in other jobs, and was criticised by absolutely everyone for his comprehensive failures while in that office.

As a reminder there is no Condor Legion or Italian volunteer army. Certainly there are hordes of foreign advisors and trainers, some of whom end up on the front line, but nothing like OTL. As mentioned the US signed up to the non-intervention agreement for domestic reasons ('Proof' that Moral Neutrality didn't mean getting involved), which met a mixed domestic reception. I have Japan signing up just because everyone else did, their status was very important to them and if every other 'Great Power' signed up they had to either also sign or grandly announce they weren't. If they didn't sign then there would be pressure to follow that defiance up with action and, fun as the idea of a Japanese expeditionary force to Monarchist Spain would be, that didn't seem likely.

In OTL Japan started flattening Eten Island in 1934, the collected rubble being pushed into the sea to reclaim more land. Work on the airstrip officially started in 1937 after the Naval Treaties, which also limited fortifications in the Pacific Islands, had expired. Because of the logistical problem getting there, and the need to reclaim so much land from the sea and wait for it to dry out, it wasn't until 1943 that "Takeshima Air Base" on Eten island finally opened as fully equipped military airbase. This was just in time for it to get brutally flattened by the Americans as the Pacific Campaign hit high gear.

I am probably being a bit unfair on de Valera here, Ireland really did engage with the League and successive Irish leaders did take it all very seriously, probably because they realised Collective Security was a less hypocritical plan than their 'Sneak away from the Empire while still relying on the UK to defend us' scheme. However I keep getting spammed by 'Ireland demands you return Belfast and Portadown' messages in game, so my thinking is that as the trade war is going far, far worse than OTL. Due to this, and a few other butterflies we shall look at in the elections update, de Valera's is not doing well so he is resorting to tried and tested Brit-poking to drum up support before the upcoming vote.

German claims on everyone nearby predate Hitler, though he certainly did his part in raising their profile. I was hitherto unaware that Belgium had acquired a bit of Germany after the war, Eupen and Malmedy being transferred after a deeply dodgy process (you had to send your full name and address to the Belgian Military governor and ask for the area to be transferred back to Germany. If you didn't write a letter that counted as being in favour of becoming part of Belgium). That said Belgium was never keen on the place and tried to sell it back to Weimar Germany for 200 million gold marks, until the French vetoed the plan as they thought it set a bad precedent (French inter-war Foreign Policy mistake #413). Got annexed by the Nazis after the invasion, most of the men conscripted and sent to the Eastern Front, transferred back to Belgium and the surviving population interrogated by the Belgian police as collaborators. Not a happy place to be honest.

El Pip · Sep 8, 2019

Chapter CXXXV: All That Glitters.

Broadly speaking there are three ways to support a currency: back it with a precious metal; back it with someone else's currency; or back it with a central bank. The unspoken fourth option is just not to support the currency at all and let it float, but no 1930s Central Banker would dream of suggesting this option, particularly given the British experience after leaving the Gold Standard in 1931. Of the three acceptable options, the second is something of a fudge and doesn't really solve the problem, only reduce it in scope. An example would be the Sterling Area, the countries in that group left it up to Britain to control and support the international value of Sterling against the Dollar, Franc, Mark and so on, but they still had to maintain the 'peg' between their currencies and Sterling. Admittedly as the Sterling Area mostly consisted of the countries of the Empire and those with close economic links to Britain this was a relatively easy task, their economic fates were already heavily intertwined with Britain. For the unofficial members of the Sterling Area, such as Japan which had decided in 1932 to 'peg' the Yen to Sterling, they received no such support but still contributed to a virtuous circle that support the currency: more countries joined the Sterling Area; trade increased; economies rebounded; there was more confidence in the Pound; and so more countries saw it as the key currency and wished to join the Sterling Area. Beneficial as this undoubtedly was it did pile pressure upon London to maintain the value of the currency, which leads us onto the third option. After leaving the Gold Standard the British financial authorities had had no wish to burn further reserves defending a new level (and in any case were somewhat short of said reserves, hence the devaluation) so determined to let Sterling float. This did not go particularly well. While the Bank of England continued to intervene to 'smooth' daily fluctuations there were still massive gyrations, in dollars terms the pound crashed from it's 'Gold Standard' value of $4.86 down to barely over $3, then rocketed back up to $4.5 dollars, all in less than six months. The City, and the wider business community, made it clear this was causing havoc to the economy and so the Exchange Equalisation Account was introduced, a fund controlled by the Treasury but operated by the Bank of England. The EEA had far larger resources than the Bank alone and a target band to work with, so by late 1932 had stabilised Sterling, though by then it found it's main job was to prevent further rises in the currency rather than stopping it falling. Indeed in 'defending' the upper limit of their target band the Bank found itself accumulating ever larger quantities of Gold and foreign exchange as it sold Sterling into the market to weaken it, rebuilding the reserves that had been lost scant years earlier trying to stop the pound falling.

A contemporary one pound note from the Bank of England. The 'Promise to pay the Bearer on Demand the sum of' had never actually been true as the UK had returned to the Gold Bullion Standard rather than the classic Gold Standard. The difference was that under the Bullion Standard no gold coinage circulated and the Bank had no duty to redeem notes for gold, so declined to do so. Instead that Bank was required to sell 400 oz gold bars ('Bullion') on demand for 77s 10½d per ounce. That made a single bar cost in the region of £500,000 in today's money (relative to average earnings), so in practice almost no-one outside of banks and merchants were doing much trade with the Bank. That limited group still generated enough demand for Bullion to force the National Government off the gold standard.

We now come to the first option on the list, piling up large amounts of precious metals in a vault and declaring your currency was exchangeable for a fixed amount of said metal. The summer of 1937 saw several countries that had chosen this route grappling with the problems it brought and applying radically different solutions. We begin in Switzerland where the Gold Bloc was having another conference, the previous one having gone so well. Gathered in Geneva were the French, American, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, Luxembourgish and Swiss finance and foreign ministers, the last major (and not so major) economies that were clinging to the Gold Standard. The location was considered auspicious, the offices of the League of Nations 'Economic and Finance Organisation', a body who's Gold Delegation could almost be considered an extra member of the Bloc given their strong position on the stability of gold and the foolishness of abandoning it. With the conference duly opened, and given a veneer of academic respectability by a speech from the League's chief economist, the Bloc were faced with the question of Italy. Officially Italy was on the Gold Standard and so had asked to attend, however Rome had abandoned two of the key tenets of the Standard (convertibility between the currency and gold and a minimum of 40% of the circulating currency backed with Gold reserves, in 1934 and 1935 respectively). Despite this the Lira had maintained it's value and not been devalued, though this was a much due to the personal prestige Il Duce had poured into the 'Battle of the Lira' as any coherent economic policy. The Bloc thus faced a choice, if the main concerns were economic and preventing further devaluations, then bringing Italy into the group would both bolster their credibility and encourage Mussolini to carry on supporting the Lira. In the end however, Italy's request to join was declined, Rome was deemed as de facto not on the gold standard due to it's earlier actions and the purity of the Bloc's commitment to gold was maintained. With this vital decision over, the group turned to other matters, not least tariffs and the co-ordination of central bank and finance ministries. As before a few minor tariffs were mutually lowered, though not in any area a country deemed sensitive or strategic (descriptions which turned out to cover most of the economy) and a effort to instead raise tariffs on non-Gold Bloc countries soon faltered as the group contemplated the inevitable reaction from the rest of the world. The co-ordination efforts however went well, the Banque de France and Federal Reserve Bank of New York had been co-operating for years with short notice currency loans, gold swaps and the various other tools needed by Central Banks fending off speculators, the conference agreed to expand this to include the entire Gold Bloc. Further co-ordination however was hampered by the ambitions of the two main powers in the Bloc, both New York and Paris dreamed of replacing London as the pre-eminent financial centre and knew the other was their main rival in this. Fundamentally however the group agreed to stay the course, confident that in the end the sacrifices required to remain on Gold would be vindicated. The extent to which this confidence was shared by their electorates, still suffering under the effects of the Depression, is a different matter.

On the other side of the world the Chinese government was also contemplating it's currency's relationship with precious metals, though in contrast to Geneva the metal in question was Silver and China was very much not staying the course. For historic reasons Silver had always had more resonance in China than Gold and so was the natural choice for a precious metal to back the currency. The Silver Standard, which went back to at least the first introduction of the Yuan in the 19th century, had served China well during the Great Depression, though ironically it did this by collapsing in value. As the Silver price plummeted so did the Yuan, devaluing the currency and giving the country's exports an edge. This, along with the large Chinese internal market, allowed the country to almost avoid the Depression entirely. Sadly for China this advantageous situation would be destroyed by one of the more unusual pieces of law to emerge from the US Congress; the Silver Purchase Act of 1934. To the outsider it seems strange that an industry that employed fewer than 3,000 people and was, at best, a rounding error in the national economy could hold the US Federal government to ransom. However those handful of mines were scattered across seven sparsely populated States and gave the silver mining industry a solid, and bi-partisan, caucus of 14 senators and a large number of congressmen. Thus an industry valued at barely $30 million a year (where peanut farming alone produced more than $50million) was able to ram the Act through Congress with a combination of wild promises, favours to the agriculture lobby and legislative blackmail. It was variously promised it would rebuild the mining industry, re-vitalise the mid-West economy, expand the money supply and restore confidence in the dollar. The Act of course failed to do all of those things, what it actually did was require the Federal government to purchase Silver until the price rose five fold or the national Silver reserves were equal to a third that of the Gold reserves. To aid in achieving these wildly ambitious targets the Act also nationalised the entire American Silver stock, but this yielded nowhere near enough metal to meet the objectives and so large scale purchasing began. These efforts soon drained all the Silver out of the US economy and, as domestic Silver mining did not recover (the mines had been in decline for reasons beyond just the Silver price) the purchases began sucking Silver in from abroad, particularly from the last major country on the Silver standard; China. Traders hastened to buy Chinese silver and sell it to the US government and this served as a deflationary shock (less Silver meant less currency could be in circulation, assuming the minimum reserve requirements were kept) which was enough to push the Chinese economy into a severe recession. While the US government was aware of this problem, the China Lobby had made sure of that, US Secretary of the Treasury Joseph P Kennedy made it clear that domestic concerns were more important and the purchases would continue.

A typical small scale Mexican Silver mine in the early 1930s. As one of the leading producers of Silver Mexico should have benefited from the massive US purchases, unfortunately they had also chosen to use the Silver Standard to back the Peso. The government was soon forced to abandon the standard, float the Peso and reduce the silver content in their coins, which had ben worth more melted down than as currency. The mining issues were, if anything, worse. The mines mostly foreign owners, looking nervously at the railroads that had been nationalised at below market rates a few years earlier and at mining law 'reforms' which promoted workers co-operatives taking over mines, reacted as one would expect; they used the boom to pay larger dividends rather than invest in mines they might soon lose.

Into this bleak scene entered the unassuming figure of Frederick Leith-Ross, chief economic advisor to His Majesty's Treasury. British interests in China were considerable, some £200million of direct investment in Shanghai and the wider Yangtze Delta and River, ownership of 40% of all shipping to and from China and finance, insurance and chartering for much of the rest. To protect these interests Britain offered to assist in putting China's finances back in order and share their experience of floating a currency, this offer was gratefully accepted and prompted the despatch of the Leith-Ross Mission in late 1935. That such a senior figure was sent indicates the importance of this to London, or at least it's importance to those in the City and the Bank of England who had connections in the Treasury. While notionally an economic mission the wider strategic implications were obvious and, as was traditional for the time, the Foreign Office remained the proverbial 'Hotbed of Cold Feet'. Well aware of Japanese designs on China, the Foreign Office were concerned the Leith-Ross mission would be successful and that Britain being seen to aid China would anger Japan. In line with their preferred policy of appeasement the Foreign Office staunchly opposed the mission and tried it's best to bureaucratically undermine it in London. These efforts were interrupted as the Abyssinian Crisis blossomed into war, so attention naturally left the Far East and focused on the Mediterranean. By the time interest could be spared for China there was a new Prime Minister and a sea-change in government policy which was against appeasement and less narrowly focused on European affairs. Leith-Ross had not been idle while war was raging, he had successfully prepared the Chinese institutions for leaving the Silver standard and helped setup a new 'Currency Board' to support the Yuan in the future. In these efforts he had made liberal use of the carrot and the stick, though it should be noted the stick was mainly used on the local offices of the British banks in China. It had taken a King's Regulation to make it clear to the leading British bank in the region, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), that they were going to accept the new, non-Silver backed, Yuan at par. But once they had fallen in line the rest of the British banks and traders followed as did the rest of the international banking community in China.

While Leith-Ross had achieved all that on his own authority, he could not authorise the vital next step before China officially could float the currency; a very large hard currency loan. No longer required to hold Silver the Chinese authorities could liquidate those reserves on the open market and use the proceeds to form new hard currency reserves to support the Yuan. However with a change of US president the Americans were no longer buying Silver quite as frantically and so China selling its substantial reserves on the market all at once risked crashing the price. Thus China was requesting a large loan, in the region of £20 million (to quote our typical comparison HMS Ark Royal cost £3million, so this was not a small sum) to help establish the board until the sales could be made at a slower rate. Naturally there were doubts as to whether the money would actually be used for those purposes, what would happen to the Silver sale proceeds and if the loan would be repaid; some 80% of the Chinese budget in 1935/36 went on the armed forces, existing loan repayments and the cost of tax collection, not a set of figures which inspired confidence. Leith-Ross, who by now had developed strong connections to the Nationalist government, was aware of the concerns and had agreed various mitigations with the Chinese; there would be permanent British advisors on both the Currency Board and on the board of the Central Bank of China, the inspector-General of Customs would be re-organised by the British (customs being the bulk of Chinese government revenue) and the Treasury would provide advice on restructuring existing debts and training on tax reform. Aside from strengthening the Chinese economy, these measures would effectively bring the nation into the Sterling Area, a considerable prize. Freed of currency and exchange concerns, and with the assurance that Customs would be applied according to the law not 'local interpretation', a boom in Anglo-Sino trade could be expected to follow.

The Imperial Airways RMA Dorado at Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong, the first scheduled international flight to land at the airport. While the de Havilland D.H.86 could notionally carry a dozen passengers, the RMA (Royal Mail Aircraft) designation clearly shows that Imperial's prime concern was carrying Air Mail, the route from Penang to Hong Kong having been surveyed and developed as part of the Empire Air Mail Scheme discussed in Chapter CXXIV. However as the British began re-establishing their presence in China passenger numbers would climb and Hong Kong would become the regional hub airport, linking China to French Indochina, the American trans-Pacific route via Manila and the wider Imperial Airways network. Initially the 10 day journey from London was seen as a vast improvement over the month long sea voyage, but soon the Chinese/Hong Kong business community would be joining Australia and New Zealand in demanding a passenger only 'direct' flight, one that cut out all the mail stops and got the journey time down to a week or less.

This optimistic vision from Leith-Ross was not uniformly accepted in London, not all of his Treasury colleagues were as confident as him about the ability of China to manage a currency or repay the loan. In King Charles Street the Foreign Office, while grudgingly resigned to the end of appeasement, was still seething at what they saw as the Treasury getting involved in Far Eastern Policy, so naturally opposed the loan. The threat from Japan was once again highlighted along with the precarious nature of the British defences in the Far East; the Eastern Fleet may have been safely in Singapore but the 'Gin Drinkers Line' fortifications in Hong Kong were incomplete, the Far Eastern Air Force under-strength and the new Territorial forces in Hong Kong and Malaya untrained. The service ministries broadly agreed with that, also taking the opportunity to say the increased Japanese threat clearly justified an increase in spending, but also made clear that the they would have those measures complete by 1937 as had been agreed at the Imperial Defence Conference. Domestically the big intervention came when the Chancellor Leo Amery over-ruled the Governor of the Bank of England and confirmed that the loan didn't actually require any additional spending. It could be classified as a Sterling line of credit between the Bank of England and the Chinese Central Bank, so while the Treasury had to guarantee the loan the government didn't actually have to put any money up (as long as the Chinese paid up of course). This had the happy side effect of making it harder for any funds to be embezzled, as the credit could only be drawn down if the Currency Board needed to intervene to defend the Yuan and there would be British officials on both the Board and the Chinese Central Bank to confirm this actually happened. Overall then the loan was never in doubt, for the Imperially minded Prime Minister Austen Chamberlain it was a small price to pay to strengthen British interests in China and the wider Far East.

So in the early Summer of 1937, while the Gold Bloc were desperately convincing each other that precious metals were the one true way to support a currency, the Chinese finance ministry was celebrating the final large Silver sale. The Bank of England's line of credit, which had been heavily drawn down in the early months to support the currency, had been paid back; with the sales complete China now had it's own hard currency reserves. Guest of honour at the celebration was of course Frederick Leith-Ross himself who made the journey on the now regular London to Shanghai air route. As a sign of Anglo-Sino co-operation, and a gesture to Chinese sensibilities, the final Hong Kong to Shanghai leg was flown by the Chinese National Air Corporation in their brand new Bristol Blackpool airliners. As the celebrations continued the Chinese government hoped to put it's economic concerns behind it and looked to the second half of the decade with confidence and hope.

--
Notes:
3,500 words on inter-war economic policy and grand financial strategy. I will wager you will not see the like of this in any other update anywhere on this forum. Some might consider that a good thing. From the top;

Lots of countries still on gold in Butterfly, the Gold Bloc OTL died in 1936 but here it staggers on. The Swiss and (Sort of) the US were the only survivors and even they had devalued by this point (i.e. you could still convert your currency to gold, just far less gold. And of course normal people couldn't actually exchange gold only banks). Italy did indeed do all that mucking about but had devalued by late 1936. Here Mussolini is even less keen on losing face by admitting defeat in the Battle of the Lira (genuine OTL phrase he used) so has not devalued. I am sure this decision will not cause any sort of problems at all.

The Sterling Area was very much a thing with members from Argentina to Norway as was Japan's choice to peg to Sterling, all that and the exciting movements of the pound are OTL. The Exchange Equalisation Account was also a very busy body keeping the Pound within it's band. All this influence and power dragged on post-war, even as late as 1950s the BIS reckoned 55% of global currency reserves were in Sterling, followed by Gold and only then Dollars. Random minor Butterfly - No Fort Knox in Butterfly. OTL the US piled up Gold Reserves in the late 1930s as people shipped it out of a risky looking Europe and swapped it for dollars at the artificially low rate the US had fixed after devaluation. This gold needed storing, and as per policy that store had to be in-land, hence Fort Knox. With the US still fixed at the high level, and the US economy doing badly, none of that is happening.

The Silver Act is OTL, because I wouldn't have the audacity to make something like that up, because it is ridiculous. Interestingly Abyssinia and Persia both on the Silver standard at that point so suffered as well, arguably this weakened Abyssinia prior to the Italian invasion, though they were probably doomed regardless.

On the subject of China, the Leith-Ross mission did happen and Britain did help the Yuan move to a currency board system. However OTL the loan didn't happen for a lot of reasons; The FO was much more concerned about Japan, appeasement was still policy, the US was more interested in the region and concerned about British influence in China, etc. So OTL there was joint Anglo-US support for the currency and some co-ordination around Silver sales/purchases, etc. That said some of the mitigation measures are OTL, particularly around British involvement in customs. Treasury training is new but with Britain taking more risk they would want more reassurance over the loan.

Leith-Ross did become something of a Sinophile, but in a very old school, slightly condescending way. For instance he thought the Chinese could run a Currency Board ‘as well as, say, the average Eastern European country’, which was quite the radical statement to make at the time but still manages to condescend to everyone involved.

Imperial Airways did run mail (and very few passengers) to Hong Kong and the Dorado is OTL, but the proper EAMS seaplanes never made it that far, though they did have posters printed showing Imperial running to Shanghai so there were plans.CNAC existed but was part owned by PanAm so used DC2s and similar, that's been butterflied due to stronger British interest/pressure, so now it's part British owned and flying proper British planes.

El Pip · Oct 28, 2019

Chapter CXXXVI: Dreams of a Dark Blue Sky - Part I.

The 1937/38 Naval Estimates should have been a relatively pleasant experience for the Admiralty, for the first time in years the political and economic conditions were favourable for a serious expansion of the Fleet. The Navy had a politically well connected First Sea Lord, a re-armament friendly chancellor and there was a strong majority in the Cabinet and both Houses of Parliament for continued ship building. It was therefore somewhat unfortunate that such large disagreements broke out within the Admiralty about what exactly should go into the new estimate. While the fight was notionally around the design of the aircraft carriers, that was just the culmination of the broader debate around air power. This debate could be characterised as exercise vs experience, defence vs attack, board vs fleet or, to make it personal, Henderson vs Fisher.

By the start of the 1930s the Admiralty felt it had a solid understanding of carrier warfare, exercises with the existing carriers had shown that, for simple carrier vs carrier battles, the ship which got the first strike off would win. They had also shown that maintaining a constant fighter patrol large enough to completely fight off an aerial attack was impractical and that even with a dangerously distant picket you would never get enough warning to launch fighters to intercept incoming high altitude bombers. Carrier tactics had developed in light of this; an emphasis on scouting and long range operations, night strikes as a standard part of doctrine to help get the first strike in and the decision to keep the carriers within the main fleet to maximise the number of escorts and so volume of supporting anti-aircraft fire. The Ark Royal class of carriers was based on the outcome of this thinking; more aircraft allowed more scouting and more chance of getting a full size strike off first, thus aircraft capacity should be maximised. The tonnage limits in the naval treaties, and making sure the ships could fit into existing docks, meant the design had to be broadly the same dimensions and tonnage as the preceding Courageous class, but advances in technology (not least modern machinery and the substantial use of welding), and being a dedicated design rather than a conversion, gave them capacity to work with. The naval architects used this tonnage to boost the AA weapon fit and dramatically increase aircraft capacity, the Ark Royal class being notionally capable of carrying and supporting almost twice as many aircraft as her predecessors. The general feeling in the Admiralty was that future designs would follow this pattern, refining the concept rather than reinventing it.

The remote controlled target ship HMS Centurion during a live fire exercise. During her time as a target ship Centurion was regularly shot at by the fleet, shot at by coastal defence guns and, relevant for our purposes, bombed by the Royal Air Force. The 1929 exercises were particularly influential in shaping the thinking of the Admirals and Air Marshalls. Attacking from a medium altitude (5,000ft) the bombers managed an 18% hit rate against a slowly moving target that held a straight course and wasn't shooting back, the pilots had also been allowed multiple runs before finally dropping their practice bombs. While the Air Staff ignored these issues and declared the trials proved the bomber could do any role asked of it, in this case coastal defence, the Admiralty considered the results as validating their own relative lack of concern about high level bombing attacks.

This view was being challenged just a few years later by the influential figure of Admiral Reginald Henderson, the Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy. A former captain of HMS Furious he was subsequently appointed the first Rear-Admiral commanding Aircraft Carriers, making him one of the most 'air minded' figures at the Admiralty. As Third Sea Lord he was responsible for procurement and design, leaving him well placed to champion his views on carrier design and fleet composition. It is something of an irony that a man so keen on naval air power would end up pushing for the next generation of carriers to carry fewer aircraft than even the Courageous class, but there was method to this seeming madness. Henderson agreed with much of the carrier doctrine that had been developed, the difference was his view of where the fleet could expect to fight. In short he expected the Royal Navy to do most of it's fighting well within range of hostile land-based aircraft, whether it was the North Sea, Central Mediterranean or even advancing up the South China Sea to relieve Hong Kong and threaten Taiwan. There were exceptions, for instance the trade protection squadrons could expect to be deployed deep into the Atlantic and Indian oceans, covering convoys and hunting raiders, but the main battle squadrons would not. This presented an issue, for Henderson firmly believed that land based air would be both superior to carrier aircraft and more numerous. The superiority was not just a function of the poor deal the Fleet Air Arm got from the Air Ministry, though that doubtless played a part, but was a matter of physics. Given similar performance engines a naval aircraft would always be heavier than it's land based rival, due to the added weight from folding wings, naval radios and being stressed for catapult launch/arrestor wire landings, so would be slower. Moreover the preference was to use the reliable and durable (but lower powered for the same size) radial engines for FAA designs, putting them at a power disadvantage as well. On the matter of numbers we have already seen in Chapter LXXVII that the defence plans for Singapore called for 400 operational aircraft to be deployed, not counting the additional airframes available as attrition reserves; merely to match that force would require 6 Ark Royal sized carriers. Henderson believed it would be foolish to assume future enemies would not have similar, or larger, air forces deployed at their own key ports and fortresses.

There were a number of possible solutions to this, tactically the Royal Navy could have decided to deploy their carriers separately from the fleet in individual squadrons. This would make them harder to find and, once located, only the single carrier in that squadron was in danger not the entire fleet. In a world where the fighters on a carrier could not be expected to respond to a raid, being more about mopping up after an attack and shooting down spotters, scouts and fleet shadowers, this made a degree of sense. This was in fact the approach adopted by the United States Navy, any carrier not assigned to support the battlefleet would be dispersed into it's own separate carrier task force, which would operate independently from both the main fleet and any other carrier task forces. Henderson rejected this approach as it did not solve the problem, merely mitigated it, instead he determined the best solution was to tackle the core of the issue; the vulnerability of the aircraft carrier. Like the rest of the Admiralty, and indeed his US and Japanese counterparts, Henderson was relaxed about level bombers, he also shared the common Admiralty belief that bulkheads and bulges could provide a degree of protection against torpedoes, so it was the dive bomber threat that concerned him. Thus was born the concept of the armoured box carrier, as the name suggests the basic idea was to include a large amount of armour on the design to protect it against enemy attack. While sometimes referred to as an armoured flight deck, the concept only put the heavy 3" thick armour over the hangar and magazines (which was approximately 2/3rds of the flight deck length), the rest of the flight deck received 'only' 1.5" thick armour. It's also of note that it was an armoured box and the sides of the box would receive 4.5" thick armour plate, sufficient to provide protection against 6" shells at reasonable ranges and destroyer calibre weapons at all ranges. Henderson and his designers believed this would allow carriers to move outside the battlefleet screen (when turning into the wind to launch or recover aircraft for instance) without the risk of being vulnerable to ambush by enemy cruisers or destroyers.

A prototype Aichi D3A dive bomber undergoing diving trials in early 1938, after some major re-design and a new much more powerful engine was installed the D3A would eventually become the main diver bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy. One of the more controversial aspects of the armoured carrier design was the thickness of the armour, the 3" thick plate was designed to resist a 500lb SAP (Semi-Armour Piercing) bomb dropped from any reasonable altitude. The controversy comes from the choice of a 500lb bomb as the reference weapon, because it was not the FAA or the Admiralty that picked it but the RAF. The specific advice given in 1934 was that Royal Navy would not have to face an enemy with carrier launched dive bombers carrying greater than 500lb bombs within the next decade. Arguably this was almost correct, lack of a high powered engine would limit the D3A to using 250kg/550lb bombs and it's successor would not enter squadron service with the IJN till 1943. But in reality the Germans would field a Stuka capable of hauling a 1,000lb bomb by 1938, the USN would order the 1,000lb capable SBC-4 variant of the Curtiss Helldiver the same year and even the FAA would get a 1,000lb capable dive bomber in service before the end of the decade.

The armoured carrier concept was certainly revolutionary but it was not universally acclaimed within the fleet, as Henderson would be the first to admit it came with several drawbacks. The most obvious was the reduction to a single hangar deck, halving the hangar area and so air group size, with a proportional reduction in aviation fuel, magazine and aircraft maintenance areas. The hull itself also had to changed and would be shorter and beamier than Ark Royal, as the design would have the same boilers and turbines as her predecessors the naval architects warned this less efficient configuration would cost 1 to 2 knots of top speed and reduce range. On the air group Henderson believed that 36 aircraft capacity would be sufficient for most missions, particularly as he was one of the strongest proponents of multi-role aircraft. With FAA squadrons being nominally 12 strong there would be capacity for three squadrons, these were pencilled in as two TSR squadrons (Torpedo-Spotter-Reconnaissance, this would become the Swordfish) and one fighter-dive bomber squadron (the original Skua spec was issued at the same time the armoured carrier concept was being developed). This was a smaller air wing than Courageous or Glorious but, by stripping out the dedicated reconnaissance and fighter aircraft and replacing them with multi-role designs, the effective striking power was tripled. In recognition of the importance of winning the reconnaissance battle and striking first, every aircraft on the armoured carrier would also be capable of scouting in some capacity. An additional bonus of the proposed air group was that the carrier would only be operating two types, which would simplify maintenance and operations and, it was hoped, offset the reduce stores and support areas. Taking all those points together Henderson felt confident that even though the air group would be smaller, it would be considerably more effective. As regards speed the design should still hit 30knots, which would be sufficient to more than outpace most of the battleline and so allow the carrier to conduct air operations and then 'catch up' with the fleet. It should also be noted that despite concentrating so much weight of armour up high, the loss of the hangar depth reduced the metacentric height considerably, meaning the armoured carrier would be more stable and have a tighter turning radius than Ark Royal.

The three 'Outrageous'-class carriers, HMS Courageous, HMS Glorious and HMS Furious, in the Grand Harbour Valletta during the 1934 Combined Fleet exercises in the Mediterranean. While the fleet clashes of 'Red' (the Royal Navy) vs 'Atlantis' (the un-named enemy) had shaped views on the effectiveness, or otherwise, of fighters it was the strikes at the end of the exercise that had been more divisive. The 'Red' force had had carried out a co-ordinated strike with aircraft from all three fleet carriers simultaneously attacking against the 'enemy' battlefleet. While demonstrating the concept of multi-carrier operations and massed strikes the results were disappointing, ironically due to a lack of 'mass' in the strike. With only one torpedo squadron per carrier, the rest being fighters or dedicated reconnaissance aircraft, barely 30 aircraft had been launched in the 'mass' strike, this had allowed the defending fleet to concentrate it's AA firepower and not be overwhelmed trying to deal with multiple threats. All involved agreed that the fleet needed a way to generate larger strikes in future, however they disagreed fundamentally on the best way to achieve this.

Overall the entire concept was solid enough, provided you believed the initial assumptions and were prepared to prioritise defence against land-based air over striking power and fighter cover. Henderson had the air experience to convince his fellow Sea Lords, the bureaucratic skills to push his design through the Admiralty system and the rank to over-rule everyone else in London. Had it not been for the Abyssinian War it is likely that his armoured box carrier design would have been ordered instead of Ark Royal's half-sister HMS Bulwark. But the war did intervene and events moved quickly, certainly far faster than the Admiralty's administrators; the ship building committee still had not finished planning it's 'Emergency' wartime shipbuilding programme when the war ended, a fact the Admiralty did it's best to keep quiet about. As peace returned Henderson discovered that the new First Sea Lord, Baron Keyes, was not as easy to bulldoze as his predecessor had been and insisted that the officers who had fought the Abyssinian War be consulted on the design. This was unfortunate for Henderson as it pulled the former Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir William Fisher, into the debate.

Admiral Fisher (no relation to the former First Sea Lord 'Jackie' Fisher) was the only figure who could challenges Henderson's claims of pre-eminence in carrier experience; the majority of the Fleet's pre-war exercises had been carried out by the Mediterranean Fleet under Fisher's command, as had the many wartime strikes carried out by the Fleet Air Arm during the Abyssinian War. Since that conclusion of that conflict and the signing of the Valletta Treaty he had been assigned to Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, an assignment that would take on a surprising degree of relevance in the ongoing debate. While Fisher agreed with the problem, his proposed solution was wildly different and informed as much by ethos and doctrine as technology. Like much of his generation Fisher had been determined to learn the lessons of the Great War, one of which had been the importance of initiative and taking the fight to the enemy, not waiting to be told to attack. This was something the Royal Navy's officer corps had once instinctively understood, but which the late Victorian Admiralty had smothered with protocol, it had taken some nasty shocks during the Great War to show the folly of suppressing initiative. It is therefore unsurprising that Fisher instinctively took a dim view of carriers being designed on the basis of a passive strategy, this perhaps explains his very different reaction to the pre-Abyssinian War exercises. Where Henderson had seen ineffective fighters and 'the bomber always getting through', Fisher had seen compromised multi-role aircraft achieving significant, if incomplete, success and needing time, training but above all dedicated aircraft. The crash programme to get the Sea Gladiator into service for the Abyssinian war can be in large part credited to the efforts of Fisher and his indefatigable then deputy Vice-Admiral Forbes, both of whom successfully argued 'proper' fighters were desperately required.

A Hawker Hart starting a dive during the 1935 dive bombing trials. Arguably it was the Royal Naval Air Service that carried out the first dive bombing attacks during their raids on German Zeppelin hangars in the Great War. Their successors in the Fleet Air Arm remained supporters of the concept, but while the FAA's Nimrods (the naval version on the Hart) regularly practiced vertical dive bombing, the Nimrods were limited to a tiny load of 4 x 20lb bombs. Unfortunately the RAF was not as keen and so, while trials would continue throughout the 1920s and 30s and tactics were developed and refined, the Air Staff consistently refused to specify a dedicated dive bomber or supply one to the FAA. Officially this was due to concern that the very high casualties the tactic incurred (over 30% losses on a single mission in some cases during the Great War) were not worth the results. Unofficially strategy and physics played a role, the Air Staff remained convinced strategic bombers were the war winning weapons and it was very hard to produce an effective level bomber that could manage a steep dive, as the Germans would repeatedly discover to their considerable cost throughout the 1930s and 40s.

The Abyssinian War had not conclusively proven the issue one way or the other, the lack of any Italian carriers, dive bombers or even aircraft capable of carrying a torpedo meant the Fleet had not faced any real aerial threat. As a result much of the 'evidence' either way was still derived from war games and exercises which, as we have seen, were far from decisive and could support varied conclusions. Fisher however had a trump card, as C-in-C Portsmouth he was responsible for the Royal Navy Signal School and so was well aware of the work that department was undertaking. A fuller account of the Royal Navy's work on RDF (Radio Direction Finding) and it's co-operation, and competition, with their air force and civilian colleagues can be found in a later chapter, for now it is sufficient to say that Fisher was convinced of the potential of RDF to allow enough warning to make fighter interception a realistic and effective defence. This is hardly surprising, Fisher had spent the latter part of the Great War heading up the Admiralty's Anti-Submarine Division working on ASDIC (amongst other things) and tactics for hunting submarines. It was therefore natural for him to argue that, just as ASDIC had 'tamed' the underwater menace so RDF would do the same for aerial threats. This was not an argument that stood up to rigorous scrutiny, if nothing else the Abyssinian War had left much of the Admiralty unsure if ASDIC worked quite as well as they had thought, but it appealed to those in the Admiralty who prized action and initiative, terms that very well described the First Sea Lord Baron Keyes. Fisher conceded it could take a few years for the experimental radar sets to be fit to go to sea and fighter interception tactics fully worked up, but he pointed out it would also take at least three years to build and fit out the new carriers, so by the time they had finished the technology would be ready for operations. The obvious counter-argument was what if the technology didn't live up to the initial promise or wasn't ready on time? This would leave the fleet with 'vulnerable' carriers, whereas with the armoured box design the Admiralty could be 'sure' the resulting ships would have a degree of protection.

The compromise solution, which was soon suggested, was 'do both'; design a carrier with the capacity of Ark Royal but with an armoured box. With the Naval Treaties gone there was no reason to artificially limit the size of a carrier to 23,000 tonnes, so this appeared to offer a way out of the impasse. There were however serious issues with this approach, starting with the implications for the design. As has been pointed out Ark Royal was already near the limit of stability, adding a great deal of heavy armour up high would make that worse unless measures were taken. Unable to significantly deepen the draught, not if the carrier wanted to fit through the Suez canal and into most harbours, the only option was to substantially increase the beam. As most of the Empire's dry docks were width limited this would severely limit where the future carriers could be maintained and repaired, unless a programme of upgrades and extensions was carried out. The Admiralty was sympathetic to this problem, the limitations of the dry dock fleet being well known and had been identified as a potential issue for the next generation of battleships as well, the work would be expensive. While work to upgrade the docks around Rosyth and Tyneside had been sneaked into the 1936 Estimates, using money siphoned off from the Special Areas Act fund, the key south coast docks of Devonport, Plymouth and Chatham had not been eligible as those areas had not been hit as hard by the depression, while the overseas docks were another problem entirely. The problems with the compromise solution did not stop there, being substantially larger the ships would be more expensive, cost was not directly proportionate to aircraft capacity but it was linked, initial predictions were around £6 million a ship, 50% more than the armoured box design and twice that of Ark Royal. As the Sea Lords were quick to point out the current political good will did not extend as far as a blank cheque and the Fleet could not expect to get all eight new fleet carriers if they cost that much. The procurement division added their woes by pointing out that given the heavy demands on armour plate from the King George V and Swiftsure construction programmes, and the limited armour production capacity that had been mothballed during the Depression, some tough choices would have to be made on priorities if a large amount of armour was required for the carrier programme as well. Almost as an after-thought there was a severe bottleneck around capital ship machinery, quite aside from the boilermakers strike there was a shortage of turbine manufacturing capacity and as a larger carrier would require more power for the same speed, this would also be an issue. The deadlock was finally broken when the Fleet's other carrier requirements was brought up; trade protection.

--
Notes:
I was merrily working along on this and suddenly realised I had hit 5,500 words and not actually finished the chapter. So I backed up a bit and decided this would be a two parter, hence the slightly cliff-hangar ending. That said I doubt it will be much of a cliff-hangar as I suspect people will guess what is coming next in general terms, though I hope I can keep it interesting despite that. It is such a beast as there is quite a lot to fit into British carrier thinking, but overall I think I've done the topic justice under the circumstances.

OTL Illustrious class ended up a bit smaller (only 33 aircraft) but the plan was 36. FAA doctrine was OTL, go after the carriers at all costs to knock out the enemies scouting and spotting capability. The grand strategy was that as the fleets closed on each other the carriers on both sides would clash and you wanted to win that fight (it would give you a recon and spotting advantage later) but it was just a prelude to the decisive fight between the battlelines. USN, IJN and RN all agreed on this at the time and, given the capability of early/mid 1930s aircraft and the lack of radar, it was a perfectly rational doctrine. It just didn't age well.

Early 1930s RN carrier groups were very much 'one type for one job' - 1 squadron Nimrod/Osprey fighter, 1 squadron Ripon/Baffin torpedo bomber, 1 squadron Fairey III recon. Maybe a couple of half squadrons of extras f they were avaiable, but as has been mentioned the FAA was always short of aircraft and pilots so that was normally just for major fleet exercises (and typically involved stripping Hermes/Eagle/Argus of any aircraft). Exercises are of course OTL, the RN would have liked to do more multi-carrier strikes but never got the change or really had the aircraft strength till late in the war. As has been mentioned the perpetual shortage of aircraft was a driver for multi-role aircraft even before the armoured carriers, but it became vital once the Admiralty committed to the OTL Illustrious-class.

Admiral Fisher is a real person, described one of the outstanding Admirals of his generation (and as "The tall Agrippa", because it's the Royal Navy in the Med in the 1930s, so Latin/Roman examples are basically compulsory). He was being lined up to be First Sea Lord after Chatfield had he not died in 1937 in an accident, which has obviously not happened here. He did indeed serve on the anti-sub committee in WW1 and did huge work on tactics, training, night fighting and naval aviation while he was Mediterranean Fleet C-in-C. As Butterfly Redux slowly catches up he will start replacing Cunningham in the Abyssinian War chapters, because Cunningham was just too junior at that point. His reaction to the exercises and championing of fighters is OTL, though it wasn't until Admiral Forbes (who was Fisher's deputy in the Med) became C-in-C Home Fleet that the Sea Gladiator came into service and worked started on a 'proper' fighter. I say proper fighter but it was the Fulmar, which while unfairly maligned, was still not a full-fat, no multi-role, single seater fighter. He did end up C-in-C Portsmouth in 1937 for a good few months before the accident and was involved in the RDF work ongoing at the signal school there, more of which later.

Bottlenecks are real, both on armour and turbines. OTL there was the Admiralty version of the Air Ministries 'Ring', the companies the Navy would keep in business to maintain capacity. The problem was the Treasury limited the funds available to match the planned building programme, so with everything notionally based on rearming by 1942 the capacity was sized accordingly. When it came time to accelerate there was no slack, particularly when the army started snaffling around trying to steal armour plate for it's tanks. Partial solution came from importing a few thousand tonnes from the Czechs, but as we shall see that is not an option in Butterfly so the Admiralty will just have to wait till the new capacity comes on-line and cut their cloth accordingly until then.

El Pip · Dec 15, 2019

Chapter CXXXVII: Dreams of a Dark Blue Sky - Part II.

While the clash of fleets and grand battles may have dominated the public's attention, the Royal Navy were equally concerned with the prosaic requirements of trade protection; the business of ensuring that even in wartime Britain would receive it's imports and, almost as importantly, could despatch it's exports to the Empire and beyond. The main concern for Admiralty was not any individual enemy, deadly as they could be, but a co-ordinated 'knock out blow' against the British merchant marine and economic system. If the Germans surged their entire surface fleet out and operated them independently rather than as a single strong fleet, then the Royal Navy would not be able to put together enough fast task forces to hunt them all down in a reasonable period of time. If this surge was co-ordinated with an unrestricted U-boat warfare campaign, German light forces contesting the North Sea and coastal routes and concentrated aerial mining of the East Coast ports and the Thames Estuary, then the convoy system could collapse and force Britain to seek terms. The losses from this endeavour would be a crippling for the Germans, their light forces massacred and their capital units and raiders hunted down one-by-one, but fundamentally British planners assumed the Germans had a similar attitude to them; ships were for using and, if necessary, losing if the reward was worth it. From an Admiralty perspective if the sacrifice of a large chunk of the fleet would win the next war at (relatively) low cost in a few months then surely that was a price worth paying, particularly compared to the butcher's bill from the Great War. While there was a strong (and correct) suspicion in the Admiralty that this wasn't the case, that the German Navy was actually cautious and loss adverse, no-one was prepared to bet the future of the Empire on it. Therefore, in parallel to their work on ASDIC, minesweeping and fighting the RAF about what exactly Coastal Command was supposed to do, the Admiralty looked into how to counter the surface raiding threat.

HMS Wellington serving with the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy (the precursor to the Royal New Zealand Navy) sailing into Milford Sound, the fleet's preferred anchorage at the lower end of New Zealand's South Island. A Grimsby class sloop-of-war she was typical of the Royal Navy's post Great War escort fleet. Her seemingly archaic title, sloop-of-war, was necessary to distinguish her wartime role as a small warship intended for convoy escort, as opposed to the minesweeping sloops the Royal Navy was also building. The pair of 4.7" main guns were as much about impressing people in her peacetime 'colonial gunboat' role as any wartime utility, her main contribution to any convoy would be her Type 124 ASDIC set, depth charge launchers and, if one was feeling generous, the 3" AA gun could at least threaten any aerial reconnaissance that got too close. What none of the Fleet's sloops-of-war or other escorts could do was fight off a determined surface raider, at best they could hope to buy time for the convoy to scatter while dying as slowly as possible.

The initial ship of choice for this role had been the County class cruiser, explicitly designed for the trade protection role they emphasised endurance, fire-power and efficient cruising speed at the expense of armour. After the brief dalliance with the 'Class B' Country cruisers of the York class (which proved that going from eight to six 8" guns did not save enough money or tonnage to be worth the effort) the Admiralty had reverted to it's historic belief that quantity had a quality all of it's own. Therefore in the 1930 London Naval Treaty negotiations, Britain traded away the rest of it's heavy cruiser allowance in exchange for an increase in her light cruiser tonnage, paving the way for the Leander and Arethusa class of 6" cruisers. Where a County could expect to defeat most commerce raiders it encountered, the light cruisers were intended to sink auxiliary cruisers but merely deter (or damage) any proper cruisers attempting to raid. It must be remembered that for a lone ship operating far from home even moderate damage could leave it a sitting duck for the hunting groups, so for a wise raider discretion was always the better part of valour. Of course one counter would be for raiders to operate in groups and pool their firepower, but from the Admiralty perspective forcing the enemy to operate in fewer, if more dangerous, raiding groups was in itself a strategic win. Ironically it was shortly after the 1930 naval treaty was signed that the Deutschland 'pocket-battleships' started taking shape on the slipway, with their long range and large 11" guns they threatened to ruin this careful analysis. As British naval intelligence began to fill in the gaps the ships became less fearsome, particularly given their relatively slow speed, but it was still felt a three ship squadron of the new light cruisers would be required to hunt one down. Concentrating the hunters meant less ocean could be covered and so the problem became finding the enemy, the seaplanes on the cruisers were not going to do the job (being slow and short ranged) and so the idea of the trade protection carrier was born.

The trade protection carrier concept took the Fleet Air Arm mission of 'Find, Fix and Strike' and applied it to the problem of surface raiders. As was typical of Admiralty thinking around naval air power, the carrier was the support vessel and not the main 'ship sinking' unit, so the focus was the 'Find and Fix' part of the mission. This meant it was intended for the carriers to locate and slow the enemy surface raiders so the hunting groups could catch and destroy them, additional strikes could further damage the raider so even a squadron of light Arethusa class cruisers would be able to despatch an 11" armed Deutschland. Intended for deep ocean work in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans there was no need for fighters, so the designs aimed for a relatively small air group, just enough aircraft for the required search pattern and for a strike capable of severely damaging a cruiser sized warship. With a mission to operate alongside the cruiser hunting groups, the Admiralty had identified the need for five such carriers; one each for the four main Stations (China, East Indies, North America & West Indies and South Atlantic) and one as spare to cover refits, this was rounded up to six, the extra ship earmarked to serve as the training carrier and allow Furious to be paid off. As was typical there were multiple sketch designs produced, ranging from very light sub-10,000tonne designs through to Ark Royal sized carriers, each with their own problems and supporters. The assessment process was still underway when the Abyssinian War rudely interrupted the deliberations.

The Japanese carrier Ryūjō on manoeuvres with the Japanese Combined Fleet. At a original declared displacement of just 8,000 tonnes she was the IJN's attempt to exploit a loophole of the Washington Naval Treaty; carriers were defined as having a minimum displacement of 10,000 tonnes, in theory allowing the signatories to build an unlimited number of 9,999 tonne aircraft carrying ships. Unsurprisingly the London Treaty closed this loophole, leaving the IJN with a flush-decked, top heavy and very unstable ship that would need two major rebuilds in less than two years of service. Finally ending up as a 10,500 tonne ship she could operate 36 aircraft from her double hangar deck and, when acting as a transport, squeeze in 48, a comparable air wing to that of the 22,000 armoured box carrier Admiral Henderson had been promoting. While few in the Admiralty wanted something as badly compromised as the Ryūjō, the general concept of a light carrier that still carried a worthwhile air group remained of interest.

When the post-war Admiralty returned to look at trade protection much had changed, there was a great deal more practical carrier warfare experience, a changed strategic situation and some concerning new threats. Chief among the latter, at least from the perspective of the trade protection carrier, was the 'battlecruiser building battle', or more precisely Germany's new Scharnhorst-class of battlecruisers. These were a concern not because of their fighting power per se, formidable though they would prove to be, but due to their speed and the number of them being built. Given their expected 30knot+ speed it would take another battlecruiser to chase and trap one and, while there was a degree of confidence that a Swiftsure would prevail in a one-on-one battle, it would be a tough fight. As the Royal Navy had not achieved it's position of pre-eminence by fighting fairly, this was not an attractive proposition and so the option of sending out a pair of battlecruisers was considered. While tactically this worked it merely moved the problem to the issue of numbers; with four Scharnhorsts on the slips not enough Swiftsures were being built and of the existing battlecruisers only the rebuilt Hood would be suitable; the partially-modernised Repulse was too slow and Renown's refit had been cancelled. While this could be solved by a combination of extra Swiftsures and refits to Repulse and Renown, this would take funds and shipbuilding capacity away from the King George V battleship programme, as those ships were deemed vital to deal with the threat from the Japanese Navy this was not an option. The breakthrough was the idea of the battlecruiser-carrier hunting squadron, an initial airstrike from the carrier would weaken the enemy, allowing a single Swiftsure to fight at an advantage. It was soon realised that offloading all scouting and spotting duties onto the carrier's airwing would allow the removal of the seaplanes from the Swiftsure and putting the tonnage and space to better use, making the Swiftsures more formidable fighters while also benefiting from the longer scout radius of a carrier aircraft over a catapult launched floatplane. It is interesting to note that even at this stage the Admiralty Board and Naval Staff could not, or perhaps would not, consider the possibility of the carrier sinking a Scharnhorst on its own.

This new mission was added to the requirements for the trade protection carrier design, at a stroke the minimum air group shot up to three squadrons; two torpedo-strike-reconnaissance (Swordfish) and one of dive-bombers (Skua), this being the minimum felt capable of threatening a capital ship. This ruled out many of the smaller concept designs, a decision which dovetailed with the lessons from the Abyssinian War; amongst other things that conflict had shown that air group attrition was far higher than the RAF had been assuming, not so much from losses as the need for repairs, maintenance and general fettling to keep up a high operational tempo. While the air wing was the same size as the proposed armoured box carriers and both designs would share a single hangar deck, the trade protection carrier would be significantly lighter; stripping off the deck and side armour both saved tonnage directly and allowed a much more lightly built hull structure. Removing such a large amount of top weight also improved stability and allowed a more efficient hull form, so the design could devote less space to machinery while still achieving better endurance and a 32knot top speed. While an unarmed design that relied on her escorts for self defence was briefly discussed, this was deemed a step too far and a respectable (for the time) AA fit of eight twin 4"/45 guns would be installed, back up by four octuple 2-pdr 'pom-poms'. While nominally dual-purpose the 4"/45 was very much an anti-aircraft gun that could also fire at surface targets, the opposite of the more surface focused 4.5" calibre guns that had been fitted on the Ark Royal class. This change reflected another lesson learned; it was actually quite hard for a surface ship to sneak up on an alert aircraft carrier that was running search patterns, so the belt armour and surface optimised gunnery of previous carriers armament could afford to focus on the aerial threat. Perhaps the only really controversial design choice on the ship was the space and tonnage provision made for extensive 'additional radio and telegraphic masts and aerials' to be mounted high up on the ship. This was of course a deliberately obtuse reference to the possible future fitting of RDF on the ship, the actual sets still being under experimental development with the Royal Navy Signal School at the time. With hindsight this was a wise precaution, but at the time the entire armoured vs large carrier debate essentially hinged on whether RDF would work at sea and provide enough warning, so this decision was seen by some as the Admiralty pre-judging the issue. The resulting design came out at just under 15,000 tonnes standard with a projected cost of around £1.8million and was christened the Unicorn-class, the Admiralty aimed to build two a year in the each of the next three naval estimates until the target strength was reached.

Two of the new Unicorn-class light fleet carriers, HMS Unicorn and HMS Raven, under construction at Harland and Wolff's Musgrave shipyard in Belfast. The decision to give two carrier contracts to Harland and Wolff was not an entirely commercial decision, as the economic crisis south of the border grew ever worse it was felt that the Northern Irish economy was in need of a boost to make up for the declining cross-border trade. Several thousand ship-building jobs fit the bill quite nicely, so the government indicated that a Naval Estimate which met this requirement would have an easier passage through Parliament. H&W themselves were informed that if they committed to moving over to welded construction, a requirement as the Unicorns were to be mostly welded, then they would be eligible for government assistance with the training and transition costs. These discussions produced the desired result and the orders were duly made, to avoid overloading the yard the orders were staggered, Unicorn being paid for from the 1937 Estimate and Raven appearing in the 1938 budget.

Fisher and the large carrier group were happy enough with the 'half-pint Arks' as the ships were soon dubbed, once the raiders were hunted down a Unicorn-class would easily slot into their conception of fleet carrier warfare. More surprisingly Henderson's armoured carrier faction also made minimal complaint, while they were certain such an un-armoured ship should never be let near a fleet battle, they believed it could still serve a role in the vision of carrier operations. The armoured carriers were going to be short on hangar space, a necessary sacrifice to achieve the desired armour protection on the tonnage, but extended carrier operations required a regular resupply of aircraft and extensive repair facilities. Hence the idea of the maintenance carrier, an aircraft depot ship to store spare aircraft and provide the maintenance and overhaul space needed to keep a carrier air wing operational. Ideally Henderson would have had them armoured like the fleet carriers, so they could serve as spare decks in a crisis, but that aside the Unicorn class met his requirements. Designed for extended operations in the deep ocean, the class had extensive maintenance and repair areas, deep magazines and aviation fuel tanks and storage space allocated for a large number of 'boxed up' spare aircraft. With the two carrier factions within the Navy at least reconciled to the decision and a popular political box ticked ('trade protection' always played well in Parliament) the additional estimate allowing for their procurement was achieved and the Admiralty felt it had earned it's summer break. Unfortunately this was not to be the case as a previously neglected issue, one acknowledged as important but not urgent, had been shoved back into the limelight during the estimate debate. It was the vexed question of what was to be done with the Italian cruisers that had been acquired after the Abyssinian War. The issue was not the ships themselves, but what had been found inside them. But before we delve into those particular depths we must turn our attention away from weapons of war to the far grubbier world of politics, voters and elections.

--
Notes:
A relatively svelte carrier update done. Now I confess it did spend quite a while talking about British and German trade warfare doctrine, but if you didn't know about that how would the idea of trade protection carrier make sense? The British concern about the 'Knock out blow' is OTL, it was how the Admiralty would have fought the Battle of the Atlantic from the German side so they planned just in case it happened. But it was always too much of a gamble for the German navy, certainly for Raeder, and would have required co-operation and co-ordination with the Luftwaffe, so luckily it never happened.

OTL there were British plans for some fairly tiny trade protection carriers (15 / 18 aircraft) , but with tonnage limits no-one really wanted to 'waste' tonnage on them. Several did survive into various Royal Navy rearmament plans, but hit the problem of 3rd Sea Lord Henderson wanting them to be armoured decked so they could act as a backup fleet carriers. That left the 2/3rds the size of an Illustrious, 3/4 the cost but only 1/2 the airgroup. Unsurprisingly they were soon killed off. Here no treaties, no need to armour everything so different result.

The thinking behind the maintenance carrier to support the armoured carrier is real and resulted in the OTL HMS Unicorn, which due to the demands of war (and too much worry about the naval treaties) wasn't finished till 1943 and never got a chance to actually serve in the intended role. OTL Unicorn was double hangared, armoured deck, a bit rough and ready as an actual carrier, so not much like the Butterfly version. Working out the tonnage and cost for the alt-Unicorn class is a bit finger in the air, but it's that sort of magnitude. Half of an Ark Royal is a bit of a simplification but take the top hangar off, remove the belt armour, change the guns and you'd be close.

Photo is of two Majestic class carriers under construction at H&W, Magnificient and Powerful. Coincidentally both ships ended up serving with the Royal Canadian Navy post-war, back when Canada had carriers. They are about the right tonnage and dimensions so good enough as an indication.

El Pip · Feb 8, 2020

Chapter CXXXVIII: When Irish Ayes Weren't Smiling.

For General Eoin O'Duffy and his green-shirted National Corporate Party (NCP) involvement in the Spanish Civil War had been a last roll of the die and, from a certain perspective, it came up a six. The Irish Brigade accredited itself well in it's first proper campaign, but the real prize for O'Duffy and the leadership had always been to revive the electoral fortunes of the NCP and on that front they certainly succeeded. In this they were aided by the Irish media who found the involvement of several thousand Irish volunteers in an active war to be the perfect distraction from the grinding tedium of the trade dispute with Britain. Even those papers who opposed O'Duffy, preferring to highlight those Irishmen fighting for the Spanish Republic in the International Brigades, indirectly aided the cause, their reports kept the conflict and Irish involvement in the public eye. In the run up to the combined election/referendum campaign of the Summer of 1937 O'Duffy would make the decisive contribution that would propel the NCP into the very front ranks of politics, it was just a shame from his perspective that this contribution was his death.

The exact details of his death are arguably somewhat irrelevant compared to the story, or more accurately legend, that was established around it. The generally accepted version was that General O'Duffy had been leading the Irish Brigade during the Battle of Toledo, after the Brigade had pushed the Republican forces back across the River Tagus, O'Duffy was killed leading the final assault on the Alcazar. Parts of this were undoubtedly true, though missing out key details such as the presence of the rest of the Porto-Irish division (O'Duffy only commanded the Irish brigade, the division itself was led by a Portuguese general) and two other Carlist Requete divisions, while others parts are clearly (at best) embellishments of the true story, most notably there was no dramatic assault on the Alcazar. Crucially the Monarchists in Spain were prepared to back up the 'official' NCP line about O'Duffy's heroic death, as opposed to giving credence to some of the less noble versions, such as the one in which O'Duffy fell off a bridge and drowned in the Tagus while overseeing the baggage train moving into town. This unified propaganda was not out of any great respect for O'Duffy himself or the fighting qualities of his Brigade, but a recognition that the Irish were an excellent conduit for US money and equipment and so required careful handling. A senior foreign volunteer dying in a dramatic, but victorious, battle also helped feed the wider 'Crusade against Communism' propaganda narrative that the Carlists were developing to counter the Comintern's agitprop. This explains why the version of the story circulated to the American Catholic bishops had a brave Irish-American soldier from the "Meagher Battalion" dying alongside O'Duffy; proper Catholics have always understood the value of a martyr for the cause, especially if the cause was an (undeclared) holy war against the godless red hordes.

Major General Hugo MacNeill, former commandant of Irish Army's Curragh Military College and in the summer of 1937 the new commander of the Irish Brigade in Spain. Approached to be commander of the original force he had reluctantly declined, like many he doubted O'Duffy's wild promises of foreign support and funds. The initial successes of the Irish Brigade were enough to tempt him to think again and the NCP soon convinced him that the route to Dublin, and then onto the Six Counties, lay through Spain and establishing the NCP as a strong political force with a battle hardened and professional military wing. His arrival in Spain, along with the surge of new volunteers and the latest equipment from America, would transform the Irish Brigade as he brought much needed professionalism and training to supplement their raw enthusiasm and hard won battle experience. The reaction in the De Valera government to one of the most senior officers in the Army taking a 'leave of absence' to fight in a conflict can be imagined.

In Ireland the NCP national executive soon rallied, while O'Duffy's death was a shock they soon realised it was also an opportunity. As has been discussed in Chapter CXXVIII O'Duffy was not actually very good at at the basic nuts and bolts of politics, as an example, despite the ongoing problems caused by the Economic War and the widespread hardship in the countryside, the party had managed to lose support in rural areas. Instead of vocally championing the NCP's policies, which were actually relatively popular, the party had taken the high line and demanded that the Economic War be made a 'national issue' above party politics to stop 'The English' playing the different parties off one another. While very statesman like, this approach had stopped them from attacking the government's mishandling of the issue or pushing their own solution too hard, a symptom perhaps of O'Duffy's failure to realise that the NCP was not a major party who had to be serious and considered, but a minor faction that needed to fight hard and dirty for attention. His replacement, another former Blue Shirt and Irish Army officer Ned Cronin, would not make that mistake. Despite Irish elections operating on the minority party friendly Single Transferable Vote system, Cronin was astute enough to realise the NCP would struggle to win more than a handful of seats and, being widely disliked by the other parties, was not going to be a key player in any post-election coalition building. Instead the NCP would focus it's efforts on the other large electoral event of the summer; the plebiscite on the new constitution.

The Irish constitution was, in the words of De Valera, "a tattered and torn affair" a statement which, while true, failed to mention that it had been De Valera and his Fianna Fáil party that had done a great deal of the tearing. As a simple example, when the Senate repeatedly delayed his government's attempts to ram through constitutional changes, he had the lower house vote to abolish the Senate. As the constitution could be amended by a simple majority vote of the lower house (as the document was still in it's 'transition' period when referenda were not required) this passed and a vital check and balance on the government was lost. Thus to many De Valera was in the position of the glazier imploring the homeowner to repair a window which he had just himself smashed, a charge he could never convincingly deny. Broadly speaking the NCP approved of the "Gaelicification" inherent in the new constitution, stripping out the last few constitutional and legal links to Britain and promoting the Gaelic language, and of the deeply reactionary clauses around the place of women being in the home and not at work. However they also recognised that the route to power for a fascist party rarely ran through entirely legitimate means, so a tattered and 'flexible' constitution was very much in their long term interests. In the short term the constitution was very much associated with De Valera and Fianna Fáil and, despite widespread opposition to it, was expected to pass. If the NCP could tip the balance against it, and be seen to do so, that would be a far more significant political coup than getting half a dozen TDs elected. Thus the NCP very publicly joined the opposition to the constitution and, as in Spain, it was not it's limited membership that would make an impact but it's mere presence. The opposition had struggled with the nationalist atmosphere around the referendum, a fully Irish document replacing one that had been written (at least in part) by the British had a visceral popular appeal, even if the actual contents were less attractive. While the NCP could be accused of a great many things O'Duffy's death had given them rock-solid populist patriotic credentials, helping to support the anti-constitutionalists position that a vote against the constitution was not a vote in favour of Britain. It should also be noted that, while the Church remained very carefully neutral, it was widely rumoured that many a pious American Catholic's donation to 'fight communism in Spain' ended up diverted to fund political adverts to stop the Irish constitution.

Cork Harbour during the Great War, a Majestic-class pre-dreadnought in the foreground serving as harbour guard ship. One of the so called 'Treaty Ports' Britain retained ownership of some of the facilities after the Anglo-Irish treaty, in the case of Cork this amounted to; the harbour fortress of Spike Island (rear left), fuel stocks and refuelling rights at Haulbowline (the enclosed facility behind the pre-dreadnought) and various mooring buoys permanently reserved for His Majesty's Ships. To the confusion of the British, the Irish government had added the return of these ports to their list of demands to end the trade war. While the motivation for the Irish government to want tear up the treaty was obvious, what confused the British was why it was being linked to the wider trade war. The issue had nothing to do with trade or even economic matters and, from the British perspective, Dublin had no leverage as it was losing the trade war. While the Irish government would dispute that there was certainly no clamour in Westminster for Britain to make concessions to end the conflict, if anything positions were hardening.

The general election campaign proceeded in parallel but provided no relief for the embattled Fianna Fáil government. Their policy had been to push the costs of the economic war onto large farms and landowners, who were never going to vote for them anyway, and try to protect agricultural workers, small farmers and the urban population. Strenuous efforts had been made to encourage domestic industry to manufacture imported products the hope being to provide employment, bypass British tariffs and generally make the country more independent. This had worked to an extent, new factories had opened making everything from light bulbs to glass bottles and a combination of price guarantees and minimum wages had kept food prices tolerable and the rural economy going for the first few years of the dispute. The problem was that by early 1937 Dublin had run out of money, as the economy declined all of these measures became more expensive to fund even as tax revenues continued to decline despite regular rises in the headline rate. The breaking point had been the annual purchase of the herds of cattle that should have been exported to Britain, originally a temporary measure it had become a pillar of the emergency economy and was vital in stopping the livestock industry collapsing and prolonging the 'free beef' scheme that was keeping food relatively cheap. A second attempt at a Coal-Cattle Pact with Britain was made at the start of the year but had been bluntly rebuffed, London was in no mood to make concessions when there was little domestic pressure from the coal industry and a general annoyance at Dublin's continuing efforts to link unrelated matters to a final resolution of the problem. Funding was eventually found, but only by raiding almost every other item in the budget, leaving De Valera going into the election having had to slash guaranteed purchase rates for every other agricultural product, reduce unemployment relief and raise taxes. Fine Gael, who had long criticised the conduct of the Economic War, leapt on the opportunity and fully committed to ending the trade war as a priority, promising no end of benefits when 'the greatest market for our products' was re-opened. Worse for Fianna Fáil their left flank soon proved to be vulnerable as well, the urban areas they had taken for granted were under pressure from the Labour Party which was highlighting the lack of a minimum wage for industrial work compared to the guarantees and minimum rates showered on the countryside. Ironically the new factories that Fianna Fáil had worked so hard to establish had proved popular recruiting grounds for the trade unions and this was translating into support for the Labour Party in Dublin, Cork and Galway.

The referendum results were the first to be announce, being a simple yes-no ballot the counting was faster. The proposed constitution change had been rejected 54% to 46% on an 80% turnout, broadly speaking the Fianna Fáil heartlands along the west coast had backed it and everywhere else had rejected it. Given the coalition arrayed against it (all the opposition parties, the independents, almost all the trade unions and every women's group and league in the country) this was a surprisingly good result, it was however still a defeat. The result did not reflect a deep seated support for the current arrangements but a dislike of the new document, the process used to produce it and the people proposing it. As was often the case the people wanted change, just not the particular change being proposed and so had stuck with the status quo. The election result would eventually produce a similar result, while Fine Gael, Labour and even the NCP all gained seats, Fianna Fáil still just hung on as the largest party. In theory a 'rainbow' opposition of anyone who wasn't Fianna Fáil had the numbers, but as predicted no-one would work with the NCP and so a Green-Red Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition was assembled. De Valera remained as President of the Executive Council, giving the Labour leader William Norton the poisoned chalice of Minister of Finance. Still committed to fighting the economic war, the new coalition was also committed to raising industrial wages, protecting small farmers, keeping livestock and food prices stable and continuing to invest in new industries, the desperate efforts to square those often contradictory demands would define much of the domestic agenda of the government. Internationally the new government remained committed to neutrality, but the coalition fatally weakened De Valera's efforts to outlaw volunteering in Spain; it proved impossible to come up with a form of words that suppressed the pro-Monarchist Irish Brigade without also covering the many trade union and left wing volunteers in the International Brigades. An outlawing of the latest paramilitary arm of the NCP and another crackdown on marches in uniform followed, but the NCP itself was established enough to survive and continue to reap the benefits of it's 'martyrs' in Spain. The question remained, what would happen to Ireland when those 'heroes' returned home, especially if the economy had still not recovered.

--
Much has happened in Ireland, not all of it good. To begin with the over-arching issue, the more I look at the Anglo-Irish trade war, and the deals that were done, the less respect I have for Neville Chamberlain. I know the stereotypes about him being a foreign policy idiot who only ever appeased aren't really true, but his dealings with the Free State do not help his case. Technically of course the Coal-Cattle Pact was Baldwin's fault, but Nev was Chancellor and pushed heavily for it. Here with a different end to 1935 it gets delayed while everyone looks at Abyssinia, then none of the subsequent leaders would be quite that spineless. And as mentioned having the Irish beef quota to reallocate across South America and the Empire is fairly handy and is papering over some serious questions, so the status quo probably suits wider Imperial interests quite well.

Ned Cronin, real chap not very nice (as you probably could have guessed) did fall out with the NCP over the Spain adventure in OTL but still moved in the same circles and the whole far right was a bit of an overlapping mess, as it so often was. Which brings us to Hugh MacNeill who turns up in various reports as the notional leader of the Irish Brigade, it appears he was interested but correctly doubted the NCP capable of organising it. Aside from his ultra hardline views on Irish unification (to the point of openly advocating war with Britain) he was also pro-German, in favour of 'motivating' Irish youth and educating them to have the 'correct' views, that sort of thing. It didn't seem a huge leap for him to go full on Green Shirt if they proved a bit more competent.

The Constitution was of course passed in OTL but it was not a nice document, the 'Woman's place is in the home' clause in particular jars on modern eyes and shockingly is still in place to this day. But then De Valera was not a fan of women doing much of anything and had introduced the 'marriage bar' a couple of years earlier banning a married woman from any government job and heavily pressuring the private sector to do the same. The Gaelic language clauses were also, surprisingly, not popular as barely anyone spoke it day to day and couldn't see the reason for spending so much money on a minority interest. See also the Gaelic League repeatedly getting people appointed to the Senate who the public then voted out the first chance they got.

OTL constitution vote had 10% spoilt/blank ballots, it was not popular but many felt they couldn't vote for the 'British' status quo. Here Fianna Fáil are a lot less popular so the party line split favours 'No' and there is less stigma around No in general as the hyper-nationalist NCP are backing it, so those spoiled ballots become Nos as well. Those two factors, plus the Church being a bit less neutral and leaning a bit more No (well anti-Fianna Fáil, which amounts to the same thing) push the result the other way.

Election result has Fianna Fáil doing worse, Fine Gale doing a bit better and Labour doing a lot better, which I think makes sense. Fianna Fáil lost seats in OTL and lost their majority, but Labour had been backing them and the government limped along until new elections under the new constitution. Here it's a formal coalition so Labour has got something more tangible out of it, something they may come to regret.

Up Next: Japan and the Far East, where there are also elections and matters of economics and grand strategy to discuss.

The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time

Lord of Slower-than-real-time