• From Peace to War - Royal Air Force Rearmament Programme, 1934-1940 (Part 1). The first part of the story describing the chronology and turns of the rearmament of the Royal Air Force in the years prior to World War II. I plan for three parts into the series, of which the today's addition covers the years preceding the rearmament race, i.e. 1930-1935.

In a way this article is also a diversion from the main work on the book but, to all means and purposes, I intend to have a wide variety of material on this site (for which you can contribute, too!). The story behind the current article is as follows. In the course of my research into reasons for initial delays in Spitfire production, i stumbled upon the volume by M.M. Postam: British War Production, HMSO, London 1952 (available on the web here). Even if this work deals with a sum total of all armament production during the years of 1934-1945, I found it valuable to collect a series of excerpts regarding the rearmament of the RAF, which in any way was a priority area for most of the described period. Considering the fact that Postam's book has been issued under Crown Copyright in 1952, I decided to save much of this material for later use and gradually began to edit, clean up and add to it with the purpose of making the text more accessible to the casual reader. A few more charts and tables and the article was born.

I also decided to post it online this early to set the level of ambition for the consecutive material in the History section.

Also, I have decided to close the Technology section for now, moving the sole article about the development of the Merlin to Articles. The sole reason for this is that it doesn't seem right to create this many sections without yet having much content; the Technology sections will return when I will have time to post reference articles in volume.

Labels: history, site updates