REICH TO BUILD SUBMARINES UP TO PARITY WITH BRITAIN (12/31/38)

many has advanced to motivate an increase in submarine tonnage are not yet known. But in that connection it is recalled that in his speech at the Berlin Sportpalast Sept. 26 during the Czecho-Slovak crisis Chancellor Adolf Hitler said relative to the Anglo-German naval pact, amid loud exclamations of “Pfui!” from the audience:

“It does not go that one party should say, ‘I will never again wage war and for that purpose I offer you voluntary limitation of my weapons to 35 per cent,’ while the other party declares, ‘When it suits me I too will wage war from time to time.’

Such an agreement is morally justified only if both countries pledge themselves never to wage war against each other. Germany has that will. Let us hope that among the English people those will get the upper hand who have the same will.

The speech was succeeded by the no war pledges exchanged between Herr Hitler and Prime Minister Chamberlain but these pledges were immediately followed by a German onslaught led by Herr Hitler himself against what is termed here the British war party, to which recently has been added the so-called American war party.

In fact the American “war party” has been much more to the forefront of German propagandistic effort lately than the British, and the United States armament program especially has been both ridiculed as a product of American “war hysteria” and denounced as a menace obviously directed against the authoritarian States.

For that reason the simultaneousness of the naval revision communiqué with a new and this time official blast against the United States Government is considered in diplomatic quarters to be more than an accident.

The middle section of the lead story is a transcription because of a poor copy on the original.

We have updates from all three of the authors I have been excerpting during the year. Here is a factoid from Shirer.

By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered 7,728,259.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 254

Then this interesting bit from Tuchman.

On the last day of 1938 [Joe Stilwell] left Chungking by air for Kunming in Yunnan, now the main air base of Free China and the starting point of the Burma Road. At the Hotel du Lac he spent the evening in dinner and long talk with [Claire] Chennault with no foreshadowing of the conflict between them that was to come.

Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45, p. 198

So in December Stilwell spent his first quality time with Chiang Kai-shek and Claire Chennault, who will provide him with numerous headaches over the next seven years.

Finally, here is Churchill on the progress of one of the most important technological developments of the time.

By March 1936 [radar] stations were being erected and equipped along the south coast, and it was hoped to carry out experimental exercises in the autumn. During the summer there were considerable delays in construction, and the problem of hostile jamming appeared. In July 1937 plans were brought forward by the Air Ministry, and approved by the Air Defence Research Committee, to create a chain of twenty stations from the Isle of Wight to the Tees by the end of 1939 at the cost of over a million pounds. Experiments were now tried for finding hostile aircraft after they had come inland. By the end of the year we could track them up to a distance of thirty-five miles at ten thousand feet. Progress was also being made about ships. It had been proved possible to fix vessels from the air at a range of nine miles. Two ships of the Home Fleet were already equipped with apparatus for aircraft detection, and experiments were taking place for range-finding on aircraft, for fire control of anti-aircraft guns, and for the direction of searchlights. Work proceeded. By December 1938 fourteen of the twenty new stations planned were operating with temporary equipment. Location of ships from the air was now possible at thirty miles.

Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm

Once again, we have Hitler’s incompetence as a military commander to thank for the eventual Allied victory over Germany. At the outbreak of WWII, Hitler would only allow 5 U-Boats to be sent to the U.S. east coast. These 5 boats wreaked havoc up and down the coast and caused a staggering amount of damage to U.S. shipping.

During the war Hitler insisted that a significant number of U-boats be used to monitor weather in the North Atlantic, and many of the larger U-boats were assigned to the Mediterrean, where they were ill suited to operate in the relatively shallow waters. If Hitler had allowed the military to concentrate most of the available U-boats in the N. Atlantic between Britain and the U.S. early in the war, the outcome would have almost certainly been different. Even so, it was a very close call.

Operation Drumbeat (by Gannon)is a very good account of German submarine warfare off the U.S. coast. The book is very readable, hard to put down in fact. Well worth a buy.

Is the cabinet official Ickes mentioned in the article any relation to the Clinton Ickes? Never mind, I just looked it up:

Harold McEwen Ickes (pronounced Ick-ees) (born September 4, 1939) was deputy White House Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton. He is the son of Harold L. Ickes, who was Secretary of the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It's amazing that Washington is like some kind of welfare system for certain families. Generations of people who make a living working and working for the government. No wonder they don't have a clue about the business world.

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