The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

The British 1936 re-armament plan is not a particularly useful guide to how Britain subsequently re-armed. This is not a good thing in a re-armament plan, however it was arguably not the fault of the plan itself; the fallout from the second London naval disarmament conference could hardly be predicted, while events in Abyssinia would prove far more disruptive to the land and aerial portions. Given that it would be overtaken by events so soon after being produced it is tempting to dismiss it as being of purely academic interest. It is however worthy of our attention as it provides a valuable insight into British defence thinking at the time. More practically it will be easier to understand how later events changed defence priorities if we understand what those priorities originally were.

The naval element of the plan was centred around HMS Ark Royal which had been ordered under the 1934 naval estimates and only laid down at Cammell Laird's shipyard in the autumn of 1935. It is a telling commentary on the state of the Royal Navy's at that point that 22,000t of brand new aircraft carrier could be added to the fleet and Britain would still not breach her commitments under the naval treaties - the fleet was so far under the tonnage limits for carriers that the Ark could easily be accommodated. In fairness to the Admiralty it must be said that out of the five signatories only Japan had fully utilised their carrier tonnage, but when those signatories includes the Italian Regia Marina (0 in service carriers, 0 planned) and the French Marine National (1 in service carrier, the heavily compromised and experimental Béarn and 'design studies' ongoing) it is clear the field was not exactly strong.

If one assumes that the 'experimental' carriers Argus, Hermes and Eagle could be scrapped and replacements built at will, as was explicitly allowed in the treaty, that left the Furious and her half sisters which used only ~66,000t out of an allowance of 136,000t for carriers. Given that the treaty limit on an individual carrier was 27,000t, and that the Royal Navy hadn't taken advantage of the clause allowing any signatory two 33,000t carriers if they wished, the obvious question about the Ark is why she came in at 'only' 22,000t. It was not due to optimisation, an earlier plan had called for four 17,500t ships that would have neatly used every tonne of the allowance. Instead we must look at the British government's hopes for the upcoming London naval conference, at which it was hoped an extension to the naval treaties would be agreed. After much deliberation and argument the plan envisaged the British delegation working for lower limits on both individual and total carrier tonnage. The Ark Royal was designed with that objective in mind, and so had the lowest tonnage the Admiralty thought they could get away with and still have a viable fleet carrier. Similar thinking was behind the design studies for the next generation of battleships, designers asked to look at future ships as small as 12" armed 25,000 'light' battleships in the wildly optimistic hope that such limits could be agreed in the next treaty. If nothing else this demonstrates that economic consideration had been one of the key drivers behind British defence thinking under the Baldwin government.


Of greater long term significance, and a move that would survive all the upheavals that would disrupt the rest of the plan, was the return of carrier aviation to the Admiralty. Full implementation of that simple sounding decision would take many years, not just establishing new training and maintenance facilities, but developing the Admiralty's capacity to specify, assess and procure new aircraft, areas the Royal Air Force had kept very much to themselves. This process would be complicated by Treasury opposition to the entire effort, many senior civil servants viewing it as little more than a wasteful duplication of effort and an undoing of the successful 'reforms' that had killed the Royal Naval Air Service in the first place. The first practical sign of the change would be the re-establishment of the post of Fifth Sea Lord as Chief of the Naval Air Services, the Admiralty Board selecting the experienced carrier officer Admiral Alexander Ramsay. While much of Ramsay's work would be organisational, concerned with getting the relevant Admiralty departments ready for the transfer of control, his office would also be the conduit for the new research efforts as the Admiralty began to pursue it's own vision of naval aviation instead of the one it inherited from the RAF. While some of his efforts would come to naught, the name Fleet Air Arm would stick despite official preference for the title of Naval Air Service, on the important matters his time in office would be a success and he, along with the First Sea Lord, would set the tone for British carrier policy.

Outside of naval aviation two new destroyer flotillas to 'replace' old tonnage, was the limit of the Royal Navy's gains under the plan. The problem for those advocating expansion was that the strength of the British fleet in comparison to it's rivals did not present the picture of a force in desperate need of more tonnage. While the Admiralty made an effort to talk up the expansion of the Japanese fleet, and it was duly noted in the plan as a potential cause for future concern, that alone was not concerning enough to justify greater expenditure. Political wisdom in London held that the naval treaties had been broadly adhered to and that the resulting status quo, while not completely ideal, did serve British interests well enough to be worth maintaining. To be blunt Diplomats were cheaper than Dreadnoughts, so if the naval treaties could be renewed, or even extended to further lower tonnage limits, this would free up valuable resources that could be spent elsewhere. The Churchill administration was pro-rearmament and would oversee a sharp increase in defence spending, but there would be no blank cheques. Taking the broad view the Royal Navy was in fairly solid shape while the other services were not, as long as that remained the case the priority for spending had to lie elsewhere.


In contrast the British Army stood to gain the most under the plan, three new division were to be raised from existing cadres and territorial units, with additional brigades to be added later as funding allowed. This was expected to be a slow but steady process, the Army's territorial units had borne the brunt of government spending cuts and the General Staff did not want to further deplete the reserves by transferring their personnel en masse to the new front line units. The plan also declared that the much discussed mechanisation of the cavalry, which had technically been ongoing since the late 1920s, was to be accelerated and finally completed, though it was somewhat hazy on how this would be accomplished. While attitudes in the War Office, and indeed Parliament, and a shortage of funds from the Treasury had all delayed mechanisation, there was also the problem of technology and concerns that the available vehicles were not up to the job. To address this issue the plan made funding for additional Army research and development available, though as we shall see this merely moved the problem from Whitehall to the General Staff, removing the last excuse the Army had been using to avoid defining quite what mechanised cavalry looked like and what it was supposed to do on the battlefield.

The finalisation of the plan coincided with changes at the top of the army, Field Marshall Montgomery-Massingberd had completed his three year tour as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and, having not been invited to stay on for another tour, had retired at the start of the year. His replacement Sir Cyril Deverell, a choice which has generally been portrayed as significant; the reforming Deverell contrasted with the reactionary Montgomery-Massingberd, a somewhat unfair contrast as both had reforming instincts but would work under very different political circumstances. Certainly Montgomery-Massingberd was much more sympathetic to the cavalry, he had regularly expressed grave concerns about the effects on their morale of having to trade in their horses, but he had still kept the mechanisation agenda alive, even if he had failed to convince the government to provide the funds to implement it. Conversely while much was made of Deverell being the first CIGS not to have served in the Boer Wars, this was not some grand 'passing of the torch' moment, he had fought in the Anglo-Ashanti wars and had entered the service while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. While Deverell would leave his mark on the service, not least in the areas of training and staffing, his views on mechanisation were not fundamentally different from his predecessors, the difference would be that he had the resources and support to implement the plans, whereas they had not.


We come now to the Royal Air Force where we see the plan at it's most radical, or at least at it's most dramatic. The RAF would be radically restructured, not only would it lose the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) to the Admiralty, and only just retain control of the flying boat squadrons, the remaining force would be broken up and recreated as four Commands; Fighter, Bomber, Training and Coastal. These two developments, the loss of the FAA and the creation of the new Commands, are mistakenly seen as related due to the fact they occurred at the same time, in reality the timing was mostly coincidental. The re-organisation was very much the Air Staff's plan and the culmination of considerable lobbying and planning, the loss of the FAA was however imposed upon them and resisted till the end. Starting with the loss of the FAA, this was not resisted because the RAF particularly wanted to be involved in naval aviation, indeed their neglect of the subject was one of the main arguments for transferring it to the Admiralty, but because they did very strongly believe anything that flew should be their responsibility alone. This was not a view driven by noble principles on the division of duties, when the Air Ministry was made responsible for home air defence in 1925 the RAF had been more than happy to take operational control of the Army's heavy AA guns and searchlights, it was a view driven by fear. Since it's birth the RAF had viewed itself as fighting for it's existence as an independent service, this had driven it view co-operation with suspicion and to promote 'independent' missions, such as strategic bombing, that only the RAF could carry out. Given that several Great Powers, notably the US and Japan, were persevering with keeping aerial units under the control of the army and navy, the advantages of an independent air force were clearly not obvious or clear cut. Worse, from an RAF perspective, was the Treasury's habit of pointing out the large savings that could be possible by shutting down the military portion of the Air Ministry. This explained, but did not excuse, some of the attitudes of the RAF in the 20s and 30s.

Looking at the 'Command Decision', this was the arguably overdue re-organisation of the air force into several mission focused commands instead of broadly geographically based areas. The driver for this was an large expansion programme, prosaically called 'Scheme F', it should indicate how much the aerial plans were in flux that 'Scheme A' had only been adopted in 1934 yet had already been revised so many times the planners had reached the letter 'F'. Being Air Staff schemes these naturally focused on bombers, and given the view of the British government from Prime Minister Baldwin down had been 'The bomber will always get through' this had full political support. The area based organisation had struggled with the pre-expansion RAF, for instance the bomber squadrons were notionally part of 'Wessex Bombing Area' despite being scattered across airfields nationwide, so change was clearly required. The new Commands were planned with expansion in mind, to levels much beyond 'Scheme F', a sign of the Air Staff's certain (and correct) belief that Scheme F would be revised upwards again before too long.

The loss of the FAA did have one significant impact, unwilling to see their force shrink the Air Staff redirected the money that would have gone to expanding the FAA squadrons into strengthening the fighter squadrons. This did not go down well with the Admiralty, though the Air Staff were quick to point out that if the navy wanted to keep those new planes then all they had to do was pay for them out of the Naval Estimates, as the RAF was not inclined to spend the Air Estimates on someone else's planes. This seemingly reasonable point does much to demonstrate that combined arms thinking and defence co-ordination were at times very alien terms to the British defence establishment. The use of the funds for fighters would have been a surprising choice, had their been a choice. In truth the Air Ministry's assessment was that British industry couldn't take a larger order for bombers or similar large aircraft and still deliver on any sensible timescale, so if the Air Staff wanted more aircraft it was simple single engine aircraft or nothing. Painfully aware that the Treasury would reclaim anything they didn't spend, the RAF reluctantly included a significant increase in fighter strength in the final drafts of the Plan.


This choice very much reflected the priorities of the Air Staff, at the top was Bomber Command, then Training Command (because it trained the bomber crews and ground crews), then came the mess that was Fighter Command (along with the fighter squadrons this was the dumping ground for the light bombers, army co-operation squadrons, some of the trainers and various other squadrons that didn't fit anywhere else), and at the very bottom Coastal Command. This was not a reaction to the loss of the FAA, though that didn't help, just a reflection of the Air Staff's utter indifference to all matters of naval aviation. Indeed the first job of the new commander of Coastal Command, Air Marshal Philip Joubert de la Ferté, was to determine what exactly the mission of his new command was. At various points it had been naval reconnaissance, 'supporting' the fleet, trade protection and anti-submarine patrols and in trying to do everything it was effective at nothing. Solving this question would be the first step towards rehabilitating the land based naval aviation, though given the state it had fallen into there would be many, many more steps needed after that.

It is tempting therefore to say that de la Ferté had the worst senior job in the RAF, however the new head of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, would perhaps disagree. In an atmosphere where the ability of the bomber to 'always get through' was an article of faith, it was his job to try and defend against this unstoppable threat. While the fall of Baldwin and the rise of Churchill meant the political establishment was coming around to the view that aerial defences were not only possible, but vital, the Air Staff was less sure. Despite this difference of opinion the plan called for Fighter Command to update the existing air defence organisation and investigate the potential for new early warning technologies. While we will look at these new organisations and technologies in more detail later, it is important to note the increased priority given to aerial defence. While the Air Staff are caricatured as obsessive 'bomber boys', the promotion of the decidedly non-bomber boy Dowding and the willingness to look into new fighter technologies shows they were not as closed minded as they are portrayed.

Outside of organisational changes, in terms of equipment the aerial portion of the plan was relatively straightforward. The heavy bomber force was to receive the bulk of the spending and aimed to bring the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber into service as a replacement for the biplane bombers then in service. Training Command would receive new aircraft as well, tenders were sent out to Avro and Airspeed for new "multi-crew" trainers to provide the air crew for the new bombers. As discussed Fighter Command would be expanded and re-equipped with new monoplane fighters along with overseeing the overhaul of the air defence organisation. Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, Coastal Command was slated to receive a new generation of land based reconnaissance aircraft. However in accordance with Air Staff practice the new aircraft would have to be either a variant of an existing design or one that could rapidly be converted to bombing or crew training use.


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Butterfly Redux Notes: This freshly re-mastered chapter is about 3,500 words and just under 5 times longer than the original, yet I still think some extra notes will be educational and edifying.

Ark Royal is OTL as is the Japanese approach to carriers (half a dozen light carriers, two of the fleet carriers and all the escort carriers started life as something else). The USN approach to carriers was impressively sneaky, they pushed for the 33kt limit for 2 carriers (so they could reuse the Lexingtons) then found that wasn't enough. So they pushed for allowing 'existing' ships to be allowed 3kt of extra armour and underwater protection BUT not have that count towards tonnage limits (so a 33kt ship with 3kt of extra armour would displace 35kt but only count as a 33kt ship). Amazingly the Lexingtons came out at 36kt. Cunning, but did mean the US could never criticise anyone else for playing games with the treaties.

The French carrier design studies in OTL led to the slightly odd Joffre class that got laid down in 1938 and so ended up broken up on the slipway. Something similar may or may not emerge as France's view on the naval threat will be very different.

On the Army I think Massingberd gets a bit of a rough deal, he probably wasn't the best choice for CIGS but his hands were tied and as a proper professional solider he went along with what the politicians wanted, which was cuts and defence on the cheap. Deverell had a torrid time as CIGS in OTL, being forced out of office by the then Secretary of State for War Hore-Belisha in 1937 for objecting to government policy on tanks (the Treasury decided not to buy any and preparing the British Expeditionary Force for fighting on the continent (policy was not to do that and instead hope the issue went away). We can be sure he will not suffer that fate this time round.

The Command Decision is OTL, as is the lack of any mission for Coastal Command and treating Fighter Command as dumping ground for odd squadrons. The FAA was only moved back to the Admiralty in May 1939, but Admiral Keyes has the Prime Minister's ear and so has pushed it through early, it will undoubtedly help but will also make the RAF even more edgy and uncooperative in the short term. I was going to do a section on Air Defence of Great Britain and how that developed into the Dowding System, but frankly this was long enough and I'm still not sure who (if anyone ) will be reading this Redux Version.

The Second London Naval Disarmament Conference was, by most diplomatic standards, something of a disaster; not only was no new treaty agreed but the existing naval treaties were declared null and void a year early. The problem with most diplomatic standards, particularly the ones used by the Foreign Office for much of the 1920s and early 1930s, is that they assume that an agreement is always possible and that any deal is better than no deal at all. As we will see both of these assumptions were at best questionable when it came to naval arms control.

The conference itself was merely the climax of months of meetings, memos and unofficial discussion. The first preliminary talks had started in autumn 1934 and even at that stage the signs were not good. The issue was Japan, or more exactly the ratio allowed between the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and it's US counterpart, which had been set by the Washington Naval Treaty at 10:6. The IJN leadership had never been keen on this ratio, having argued that a fleet 70% of the size of the USN was the bare minimum required to ensure a Japanese victory in any future US-Japanese war. While the Japanese government had eventually over-ruled them and signed up to the 10:6 ratio the cost had been splitting the IJN into two warring factions; Treaty and Fleet. The Fleet faction believed that parity with the western powers was the absolute minimum Japan should aim for, while the Treaty faction feared that Japan could never win a naval arms race and argued the treaty limits worked in Japan's advantage. In the years that followed the Fleet faction gained ascendancy and had soon convinced itself that not only was parity a strategic necessity, but a moral one and that the 'crushing' effect of not being allowed an equal fleet was destroying the fighting spirit of the entire armed forces.


How much of this was actually believed by the Japanese leadership is open to debate, certainly there were still large pockets of the IJN who could see the value in a treaty that shackled US and British shipbuilding and saved Japan from a naval race she could neither win nor afford. However years of pressure and arguing by the naval staff had made 'naval parity' first an IJN priority and then Japanese government policy. It should be noted that the Japanese leadership were not totally naive about the reception this policy would receive, they were aware it would be unacceptable to the other treaty powers, but considered this reaction and any resulting lapsing of the treaties to be merely 'unfortunate'. With this background it should be clear that the treaty was doomed from the first preliminary talks, as Japan had expected the US delegation making it clear that while the exact ratio could, perhaps, be discussed, parity would be unacceptable. Officially this was due to the US needing to maintain a presence in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, while Japan had only the Pacific to worry about. While this was true, both sides were well aware that a second, more important, reason was the desire of the US to keep enough of a naval advantage to support the Open Door policy in China and project power and influence in the region. Internal matters had distracted US politicians and the fleet had been somewhat neglected, but the commercial and religious interests that drove US policy towards China had not changed and they would not accept such a naked challenge to US interests. Thus by December 1934, long before the conference officially started, Japan had officially denounced the naval treaties. While the Japanese delegation still attended the conference, that was purely to restate the demand for parity and then dramatically leave once that was denied, a move more for domestic consumption than anything else.

The Japanese were shortly followed our of the conference by the Italians, who stated that their policy to 'Bring the Mediterranean completely into the Italian sphere of influence' would require a larger fleet than the treaty limits. It is interesting to note that the two Italian battleships under construction at that time, the Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, would both be launched at tonnages well in excess of Italy's treaty limits, this is perhaps indicative that Italy had been expecting to leave the Treaty system for many years, though it is also possible the Regia Marina had planned to 'massage' the official figures and pretend the ships were treaty compliant, as they had with the cruiser tonnage. With two of the five powers having left the conference, that should have been the end of the matter, all a new treaty could achieve would be to shackle the signatories while leaving their rivals free of restrictions. That the possibility was even discussed is a testament to the second of the diplomatic assumptions mentioned earlier; any deal is better than no deal. It should by now be clear that this was very much not the case for the naval treaties, and so it proved. The French, having no particular fleet building plans, beyond perhaps finally using their carrier tonnage, were happy to extend the treaties but weren't going to expend any political capital on what was, at best, a secondary priority. The initial enthusiasm of the US State Department for a second treaty, to support the their long standing preference for collective systems and treaties, faded as it became clear that Washington was not prepared to exert any effort lobbying for it. This left only Britain and here we do see the effect of the change in government, where the Baldwin government would have been happy to sign a new treaty, if only to provide some cover for not funding the fleet as much as the Admiralty was demanding, the Churchill administration took a different view and indicated Britain would not sign a new treaty, not even a limited one full of escalator clauses and get outs.

Somewhat ironically the last act of the naval disarmament conference was to confirm that the existing treaties, due to run until 1937, could be torn up and the powers free to return to unrestricted naval construction. This can be seen as one of the turning points in British re-armament; by not even paying lip service to the treaties the British sent a strong message about their intentions to face up to foreign threats. Previously re-armament had been a furtive activity, done begrudgingly and with little fanfare, after the conference a different message was sent out - it was not in Britain's interests to shackle her own re-armament while her main rivals were free to act, so Britain had not signed and did not consider herself restricted. This would have ramifications far beyond naval policy.

It is convenient at this point to cover the announcement of Il Duce Dottrina, which was issued by the Italian government shortly after the Italian delegation had left the conference. While not technically connected, the Italian departure had been as much a complaint about the League of Nation's sanctions as anything grander, stylistically it was of a piece with the announcements made their and certainly reflected a common policy. The Il Duce Dottrina or, as it more commonly known, the Mussolini Doctrine boiled down to claiming the Mediterranean as an Italian Lake and a statement that Italian shipping would be free to travel wheresoever it wished in the region without hindrance. While this was little more than a combination of ideas expressed earlier in a more bombastic fashion, it was given extra emphasis by Italy's dramatic departure from the conference and the on-going tension in the region around the Abyssinian War. It also served as a clear reply to Churchill's telegram, the Italian government would not accept any foreign interference in it's sphere of influence. And Il Duce Dottrina had just extended that sphere to the whole Mediterranean, including the Suez canal.

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Butterfly Redux Notes:

Japanese policy details are all OTL, plans are a bit hazier. It's always hard to be sure what the IJN actually believed versus what it said. The Chief of the Naval Staff in 1932 was sacked as his defence plans were 'inadequate' (i.e. he didn't believe that Japan couldn't defeat America and Britain combined in a prolonged war) which didn't encourage intellectual honesty. The fact he was Treaty Faction didn't help, but I'm increasingly coming round to believe the main difference between the two factions was an ability to count and engage with reality, if you couldn't do either you were Fleet Faction.

Despite the stereotype of isolationism the Open Door to China policy was important to 1920s/30s US and the USN did believe that it would be the trigger for any future war with Japan. They were also surprisingly keen on the Treaty system, they liked the idea of international affairs having 'frameworks' and general principles, hence the big push for the Second London Treaty to be signed in OTL despite Japan and Italy walking out. Because they weren't stupid they also demanded the 'escalator' clause to allow bigger guns and larger tonnages if (when) the non-treaty powers ignored the treaty limits.

The British Government's response to the Il Duce Dottrina was a matter of considerable debate at the highest level. While Churchill believed he had a mandate to decisively intervene in Abyssinia in order to end the horrors and depravation taking place the cabinet and the wider party were far from united in this view. The opposition was broad, spanning those who were opposed to almost any form of action to the moderates who maintained that affairs in East Africa were not worth risking a conflict with Italy. This group began to rally around Lord Halifax, while his own personal support was small he was one of the first Cabinet Minister to make out the anti-war case. While President of the Education Board was not the most prestigious of posts, it was not insignificantly junior either, and with the rest of the cabinet either backing Churchill or keeping a watching silent, Halifax became the figure head of the anti-war elements in the Conservative and National Liberal parties.


It should be bourne in mind that while the election had shown that appeasement was not popular in the country, that did not mean there wasn't a substantial peace lobby. The 'Peace with honour' movement had significant support for their vague platform, indeed it must be said the lack of precision was one of it's greatest strength. 'With honour' could be taken to mean pretty much anything, and often was, and allowed people with even wildly differing view to unite under a single banner to resist Churchill. This failure to divide and conqueror the opposition, perhaps by forcing key members to explain exactly what they mean by 'with honour' and so expose the fault lines in the group, is a reminder that Churchill often neglected basic political skills while he focused on those matters that truly interested him, a flaw that would dog his Premiership.

That said despite Halifax's opposition the decision was never in doubt, Churchill was going to re-state his earlier private telegram publicly. While he may perhaps privately have agreed that Addis Ababa wasn't worth the bones of a single British grenadier, Churchill believed the the wider strategic picture, the security concerns over the Red Sea and the need to face down Mussolini all justified escalation. In this he was bolstered by cautious support in the bulk of the party and press, the Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain cleverly avoiding the more strategic and abstract arguments in favour of an appeal to more grounded values. The popular case held that having declared a blockade Britain's honour and reputation demanded it be enforced, a view that struck a chord with the public view of how Britain should behave.

There was no keen rush to war, it was widely hoped that Italy would back down, but there was enough support to keep the waverers on side and allow Churchill to issue his statement. The final document declared that unless hostilities in East Africa ceased within the week the Suez Canal would be shut to all Italian flagged shipping. While Halifax and his supporters had not stopped it being sent, they had achieved a delay in it's announcement, a delay that would be extended by events elsewhere.


It was during the final cabinet debate on the night of the 19th that news reached Churchill that the King was gravely ill at Sandringham House. This unfortunate development was made worse by the news that his personal doctor, Baron Dawson, had been delayed and would not reach the king until the following day. The implication was clear, the King's chances of surviving the night were not good.

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Butterfly Redux Notes:

This one could have gone on for pages, inter-war British public opinion is a complex beast. No-one wanted another war, but there was still imperial pride and a sense Britain should be doing things 'at the top table'. So international conferences and 'peace with honour' were the order of the day. But on the flip side when war came the country did rouse itself and the recruiting officers were busy, hence I think the Churchill position 'Peace with honour is impossible, so we chose honour' would not be wildly unpopular, particularly with the country still upset about Italian actions. It certainly helps this is being ratcheted up, a straight jump to declaring war to protect Abyssinia would not be popular.

A bit of foreshadowing on future problems for Churchill, amongst his many flaws was a tendency to neglect the grubbier but vital political arts. This was and will be a big problem for him.

Baron Dawson was indeed King George V's doctor, we'll have more on him in a couple of chapters time. The King's bronchitis attack is pretty much OTL.

Alongside the many more important consequences, the Abyssinian Crisis would give the world the phrase 'Carrier Diplomacy', a concept somewhat ahead of it's time. As one might expect it is credited to Sir Roger Keyes, a testament to the two reactionary and the forward looking sides of the First Sea Lord's personality. A man appreciative of the Victorian 'Gunboat Diplomacy' approach to foreign policy, but perceptive enough to realise that it was in need of updating and that the aircraft carrier, the still unproved cutting edge of naval warfare, was perhaps the mechanism to do it. This application of new technology and ideas to proven theories that would be the hallmark of Keyes' time at the Admiralty, for both good and ill.

Classic gunboat diplomacy would have sent a line of battleships to cruise along the Italian coast near a large and symbolic coastal city, flaunting the strength of the Royal Navy and demonstrating Britain's resolve. The issue was that classic gunboat diplomacy worked best against those who were ideally unable to shoot back or at worst were massively out-gunned, and the Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) was neither of those things. Aside from the Italian's own battle line there were the numerous light forces, not least the Motoscafo Armato Silurante (MAS, torpedo armed motorboat) that had claimed several Austro-Hungarian warships in the Great War. Thus it was not a total rejection of gunboat diplomacy, as we will see in Spain the Foreign Office and Admiralty both agreed it had a role to play, but an acknowledgement that Italy was a serious maritime power with a powerful fleet.


Thus we come to Carrier Diplomacy, or as it was inevitably dubbed by some 'Literally flying the flag'. By bringing forward some rotations and making a few short term deployments the Admiralty could get five fleet carriers in or around the Central Mediterranean at the same time. Once there a series of exercises were arranged with the carriers working in concert, a large war game exercise that would range across most of the Central Mediterranean, under much pressure from Churchill the RAF was prevailed upon to join and RAF elements in Malta and Egypt would take part as well. A carrier heavy exercise had the advantage that it was not something the Regia Marina could duplicate as it lacked even a single carrier and had to depend entirely upon the Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) for the few float planes it possessed. More seriously Italy entirely lacked torpedo bombers of any type, so naturally the Fleet Air Arm torpedo squadrons were especially busy highlighting British capability in that domain as well.

At the heart of the plan were the units based out of Alexandria, the two Courageous class carriers and the five Queen Elizabeth battleships. These were split into two separate forces, the battleship remained as the core Mediterranean Fleet while the carriers formed the semi-independent Force B that would, as per then Royal Navy doctrine, support the battleships by scouting for the enemy and softening them up before the 'proper' decisive gunnery battle.

At Gibraltar the Admiralty formed up the fleet's battle cruisers Hood, Renown and Repulse into Force H, while Malta was the home port of the County class heavy cruisers of Force K. To temporarily bolster the number of carriers the rotation of the Far East carrier force was brought forward with Eagle returning to the British Isles from the east while HMS Argus and Hermes transited from the west. In all five fleet carriers, six battleships, three battle cruisers and innumerable cruisers and destroyers would be in or around the Mediterranean as the crisis unfolded.


Despite the preponderance of force assembled and deployed, it must be said that the effort was in vain and the Italian government not deterred from it's course of action. On one level this is not surprising, while not a true world power Italy was a major force in Europe and the fifth largest fleet in the world. Yet the gap between the Regia Marine and Royal Navy was such that the British force assembled in the Mediterranean out-numbered it's Italian counterpart 3 to 1 in terms of capital ships and the Admiralty had still managed to keep a healthy force of battleships in Home Waters, not least the 16" armed Nelson andRodney, before even allowing for the gap in terms of naval aviation.

At the time much of the explanation, in imperial circles at least, revolved around the French government and their refusal to support the British stand against Italian aggression. Indeed the French government had raised question about Britain's right to close the canal as it was still owned and operated by a majority owned French company. Had France backed up Britain then the already fearsome naval advantage would become crushing and Italy would be forced to concentrate forces on her land border with France and to defend two borders in North Africa, instead Italy was free to focus everything on Eygpt.

In truth though, while the French failure to support Britain would have fatal consequences for the Entente Cordiale, the blame for the failure of deterrent must sit with Britain alone. British foreign policy had created the impression that Britain no longer had the resolve and nerve for confrontation and would limit herself to diplomatic responses to aggression. The infamous Oxford Union debate of 1933 "This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country" had attracted the attention of many of Britain's enemies who cited it as proof that the Imperial Lion had lost her teeth and that the sun was finally setting on the British Empire.

One of those foreign observers was a certain Benito Mussolini who particularly taken with and thought it was a true reflection of British public opinion. He therefore quickly convinced himself, and his government, that the show of force was little more than a bluff and that the British would back down under pressure. Il Duce would persist with this mistaken, if understandable, assumption right up until the Royal Navy taught the Regia Marina a comprehensive, but expensive, lesson about the actual state of the British Empire.

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Butterfly Redux Notes:
A bit of a funny one this. Keyes was a big supporter of aircraft carriers and would have pushed for them to have more of a role, but even he didn't think they were enough on their own and given the state of 1930s technology he would be right. Hence the redux version tones it down, but there are still a lot of carriers buzzing around so the phrase gets invented.

Italy did lack any torpedo bombers at all in the mid 1930s, bar a couple of experimental aircraft, they would cobble something together by 1940 and have some success with it, but it was something of a blind spot. Very similar to the RAF not bothering about Coastal Command, so the Italian Air Force neglected it's naval aviation.

Britain's universities did spend the early 1930s being pacifist, the Oxford Union debate is OTL and there was a similar Cambridge Union debate where they agreed 'Upmost Pacifism' was the correct course of action for England. Mussolini's interest in the debates is OTL and it fuelled his belief that Britain was bluffing about the Abyssinian Crisis. The difference is of course in OTL he was correct and Baldwin was bluffing, Churchill most definitely is not.

It is a truism that domestic politics continue even when foreign affairs are distracting the government, just because it is a tired old cliché does not mean it isn't true. Of course it is generally the case that a country can manage, indeed often thrive, when subject to governmental indifference, but most politicians and almost all civil servants were, and are, reluctant to contemplate the implications of that particular observation, hence the requirement for action or at least the appearance of it. With the Abyssinian Crisis distracting the senior membership of the government it was left to the unlikely double act of Chancellor Hore-Belisha and the newly minted Ministry of Production and Development Lord Beaverbrook to deal with the dominant domestic issue of the day, the lingering effects of the great depression.

While a recovery had been technically underway since 1934, it was not the most robust and unemployment, and wages, remained low in large areas of the country. The argument that Britain had actually suffered a relatively mild depression compared to Germany or the USA was supported by the data, entirely correct and political suicide to try and explain. To be blunt the British public didn't particularly care if others were suffering worse, they wanted something done and for things to return to how they had been. This was a particular problem as many of the trends afflicting certain sectors of the economy were structural and had nothing to do with the depression, even if the political and social will to make radical changes could be summoned and maintained some industries could never go back to how they had been in the 1920s.


The default approach for many on the government benches was to think that the issue was relatively straightforward, the depression had hit the industrial north of the country the hardest and it would be those same heavy industries that would be needed for re-armament, thus the problem would solve itself. This over-simplification hid the key issue, conventional economists would hold that either taxes should rise or other spending be cut to fund this re-armament. The counter-argument, masterly summarised by Keynes, was that the economy was short on demand and that massive deficit spending by the government would, almost regardless of what it was spent on, help to boost the economy. As an added complication for those attempting to formulate policy matters a bitter debate was raging over whether the adoption of Imperial Preference had been the catalyst for the slow recovery or was in fact the reason it was so anaemic, trade policy was a political and ideological minefield at the best of times and the recent bitter splits in the Liberal Party over the subject only made things worse. Given this background it was brave, in the Civil Service sense of the word, for Hore-Belisha and Beaverbrook to look beyond the short term requirements of rearmament and attempt more ambitious solutions. That said they had the advantage of a crisis and were determined not to waste it.


Outside of politics the public mood was lifted by the news that the King had survived a series of bronchitis attacks and was being nursed back to health by his beloved wife, Queen Mary. King George's personal doctor, Baron Dawson, is said to have been astonished that he made it through such severe attacks, attributing it to the King's sense of duty and his unwillingness to 'abandon' the Empire during a crisis. Whether it was the effect of this brush with death or a long planned moved delayed by his illness, the King would leave Sandringham and embark on one of his exceptionally rare forays into constitutional politics.

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Butterfly Redux Notes:

Quite a serious re-write this one, my views have somewhat evolved in the last decade or so and I now firmly subscribe to the "It depends" school of economic thinking. As I hope you'd expect the quotes about Keynes are indeed OTL, a complex man even by the standards of economists.

The King's amazing survival, now he was badly ill with a bronchitis attack on the 19th/20th January and didn't make it through the night in OTL. This may have been inevitable, but his personal doctor, Baron Dawson, made it certain by injecting him with a fatal overdose of morphine and cocaine. Would the King have survived and rallied somewhat if Dawson had been delayed, as he was TTL? Hard to say, but I've gone with 'Yes' as I'm not convinced Dawson actually had the King's best interests at heart, he was far too keen on 'preserving the King's dignity', euthanasia in general and he was alarmingly close to King Edward VIII - he was decidedly dodgy during the OTL Abdication Crisis and tried to force Baldwin out on basically fictional medical grounds. The fact he carried it out in secret, without telling any colleague or member of the King's family, but felt fine putting it in his diaries and then publishing them is, to my mind at least, also a strike against his character.

Up next, Il Duce decides if Italy will back down or act over Abyssinia and the Suez Canal.