Lubyanka prison, Moscow, June 3rd, 1937
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, was shot to the back of the head and his body thrown to an unmarked grave. The previous day he had been condemned by the Soviet supreme court, for supposed treason, Trotskyism and collusion with foreign secret agents, accusations to which he had supposedly confessed, the oddity when dealing with NKVD
torturers interrogators would had been not confessing to anything they might have wanted. It was just the beginning of the purges launched by Stalin to secure his absolute control of the Soviet Union against any challenge fictional or real. By the end of 1938 nearly 700,000 people would be executed. Yet more would be imprisoned, with many of them dying there, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam would become the best remember victims of the gulags but the death toll within the prison system would reach close to 200,000.
Swan Hunter shipyards, July 1937
HMS Anson the first battleship of its class was laid down. Back in January Britain had laid their first two battleships of the King George V class to be armed with 9 15in guns each. Then with international tensions keeping to increase a supplementary budget to lay down three more battleships in 1937 had been approved. That had put the admiralty into something of a conundrum as Italy, France and the United States had all laid down ships armed with 16in guns and so was also expected of Japan although preciously little detail was coming out of it. An evolution of the King George V with 9 16in guns had been actually designed and by happy coincidence a suitable gun and mount was also available thanks to the pair of mounts built for the Greek battleship Salamis a couple of years earlier. Thus while the first of the additional ships would be built as a King George V increasing the total number of ships to three, the last two battleships laid in 1937 would be instead the 16in evolutionary design. Thought was already being given into the ships of the 1938 program...
China, July 1937
On and off skirmishing between China and Japan was ongoing since the Japanese had conquered Manchuria in the fall of 1931. But Manchuria was apparently not enough for Japan as it now launched a new invasion of China. But this time the Chinese fought back. What begun as one more land grab on the Japanese part soon escalated into all out invasion of China...
Brunete, August 17th, 1937
80,000 Republican troops supported by 100 tanks and 200 aircraft attacked in hoped of relieving Madrid only to be beaten back by the Nationalists after two weeks of fighting. But Madrid still fought on.
France, August 1937
An order for 80 more
Loire-Nieuport LN-161 fightesr was placed increasing total orders to 130. But while LN-161 appeared to be very promising, even more so its
LN-165 evolution which was competing with Dewoitine's D.520 for France's follow up fighter French aircraft industry was still lagging behind. LN-161 was not yet into series production, while the German Bf-109B and the Soviet I-16 were already in action in Spain and the British Hawker Hurricane expected to enter service by the enf of the year. And if anything the French bomber situation was even worse...
Madrid, September 10th, 1937
Madrid fell, as the last of the 45,000 Republican soldiers defending it were forced to surrender. They had held for more than three months, far more than anyone had expected when the Nationalists had launched their second assault on the city in the aftermath of the Republican defeat in Brunete. But with the relief attempt at the second battle of Brunete failing any last hope of saving the capital had gone. The defenders had still fought on for ten more days before finally the their last remnants finally gave up. Madrid had proved a meat-grinder costing the Nationalists 44,000 casualties. It would take several months for the Nationalists to be able to resume the offensive. But Madrid was now in their hands.
Asturias, October 7th, 1937
The war in the north of Spain came to an end in full Nationalist victory. Bilbao had already fallen from June but the Republicans had still managed to hold on for four more months before the final Nationalist offensive in August had managed to finish them off.
Yugoslavia, October, 1937
Since his accession to power in December 1935 Milan Stojadinovic had followed a set of policies decidedly alarming to Yugoslavia's allies. In December 1936 he had refused the proposals initiated by France to extend the little Entente, with Romania and Czechoslovakia to foreign power instead of solely Hungary openly telling French envoys that Yugoslavia was too dependent on German trade to contemplate conflict with Germany, while at the same time continuing to increase his country's economic dependence upon Germany. Then in January he had signed a treaty of friendship with Bulgaria, threatening Greece and Romania that his country would outright leave the Balkan Entente if they failed to agree to the treaty. And while the treaty itself might sound innocuous, information had soon reached the Greek army's 2nd Bureau from contacts within the Yugoslav army that Stojadinovic had actually offered the Bulgarians splitting Greek Macedonia between the two countries, with Thessaloniki going to Yugoslavia. Then in April 1937 Stokadinovic had received count Ciano in Belgrade and signed a treaty of friendship with Italy weakening Yugoslavia's ties with her existing allies further yet. Then pursuant to the new treaty with Italy he had begun pursuing a concordat with the Vatican. But when that had been brought before parliament it had nearly caused an outright revolt among its Serb members and the Serb Orthodox church. Stojadinovic had then withdrawn it in hopes of not losing his popularity in Serbia only to lose support in both Serbia and Croatia as a result.
By now prince Paul was starting to fear about his own position in the country both from Stojadinovic himself who was giving clear signs of hoping to emulate Mussolini and from the most radical of his opponents as there had been movements within the Serb dominated army for a coup during the concordat crisis, while the tilt of Yugoslav policy towards the axis was also highly questionable to the regent who was generally pro British and pro Greek. Yet Paul was not a decisive man personally. Pressured both from within the country and from Venizelos and the British and French governments outside he avoided a direct confrontation with his prime minister. But now on his advice
Aca Stanojevic brought the entirety of the Serb Radical party in the anti-government coalition being formed by the new leader of the Croatian peasant part
Vladko Macek. Stojadinovic undeterred start preparing an official visit to Rome for December. After all the next election was not due till December 1939.
Agioi Saranda, Greece, November 13th, 1937
The first train of the Epirote line of the Hellenic State railways reached the little port city. Starting from Athens the train, carrying prime minister Eleutherios Venizelos for the inauguration of the line had taken nearly a day going from Athens to Larisa from there to Kalambaka, throught the Metsovon pass to Ioannina and from there the Agioi Saranda without even counting the necessary stops for speeches in Metsovo and Ioannina. For a 73 year old like Venizelos is was certainly an exhaustive ordeal but the prime minister appeared to be in good spirits throughout it.
Poland, November 1937
The prototype PZL P.53 took to the air for the first time powered by a 860hp Hispano-Suiza 12Y-31 engine. An inline engined variant of the P.50 fighter of Zygmunt Pulawski that had first flown back in August, the aircraft was the result of Pulawski's insistence on using inline engines despite the air force's preference for radials. Even though P.53 would reach 537 km/h to P.50s 500 km/h the P.50 had already been selected for production with an order for 300 aircraft, but Pulawski had enough pull to be allowed to continue developing P.53 in parallel, after all both the Greeks who were producing the earlier P.24 under licence and the Yugoslavs who were discussing the purchase of 20 PZL.37 bombers and a licence for more had already shown interest. At least P.50 had come at an opportunate moment. Unlike Dabrowski's PZL.37 which had first flown in January 1936 and had done very well, the two engined PZL.38 fighter that was originally expected to replace older fighters had been a near complete failure so far.
Teruel, December 1st, 1937
The Republican army took to the offensive in hopes of reducing the Teruel pocket and regaining the initiative in the war. There had been strong pressure within the Republican government to instead launch the attack against Madrid but in the end military necessities had prevailed as reduction of the Teruel pocket would remove the threat of cutting the remaining territory in two and significantly shorten the front. Given that by now the Nationalist side held by now numerical superiority with 553,000 men facing 395,000 this was no small consideration for the Republican side.
Soviet Union, December 11th, 1937
The
Greek operation of the NKVD was set in motion. Within days over 10,000 Greeks would be arrested and either sent to the gulags or outright executed over their supposed contacts with Greek intelligence and nationalist agitators. The arrests included general
Vladimir Triandafillov, who would be imprisoned but survive and
Konstantin Chelpan the designer of T-34s engine who would not. The former general secretary of the Greek communist party Andronikos Haitas who had escaped to the Soviet Union to avoid charges of sedition by the Stratos government in 1931 would also disappear along several other members of the party in the Soviet Union his fate never to be determined again...
Romania December 20th, 1937
Romanian electoral politics since the end of the Great war had been at the very least convoluted and made all the worst by royal interference in them and scandals within the royal family. After the May 1920 elections fresh elections had followed in March 1922 won by
Ion Bratianu's National Liberal party. The 1926 elections had been won by
Alexandru Averescu's People's party only for fresh elections to follow in June 1927 won again by Bratianu only for fresh elections to follow in December 1928 won this time by Iuliu Maniu of the National Peasants party who for a change managed to form a stable government for the next four years to no small extend due to the new king
Nicolae I being rather more pliable than king Ferdinard who had died back in 1927. Nicolae, normally second in the line of succession had come to the throne only due to his brother Carol having a scandal too many when in 1925 he had been forced to resign his position after he had left his wife princess Helena of Greece, the sister of the late king Alexander for his mistress Elena Lupescu. With their single daughter, born in 1921, excluded from the succession per the Romanian constitution the throne had thus passed to Nicolae who was conveniently more interested in racing cars and the navy in which he served before being forced on the throne, than intervening in politics. Nicolae had caused a scandal of his own when he had married a commoner Ioana Dumitrescu in 1931 but this had ended increasing his popularity with the common Romanian securing his position on the throne despite machinations by his brother to depose him. Maniu had won the new elections in July 1932 but his second government what survived only to December 1933 before the ongoing economic crisis had forced him to fresh elections in December 1933 which had been won by the 69 year old Bratianu.
Now the ninth election since 1918 made things if anything worse. The National Liberals had avoided electoral disaster by an extremely thin margin winning 40.4% of the vote, Romanian electoral law gave half the seats to any party winning over 40% of the vote with proportional representation used for the rest thus giving the NLP 278 seats, when at 40% they would had won 155. Maniu had won 43 seats. But the third party in the chamber had been the fascist Iron Guard of
Corneliu Codreanu with 33 seats and fourth the equally fascist National Christian Party with 19 seats. If the rise of the fascists to a quarter of the overall vote was not enough, powerful forces within the NLP, most notably Bratianu's own son
Gheorghe were also supportive of an alliance with Germany...
