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Originally Posted by Glider
Kurfurst
Thanks for that (and I do mean it) the problem is that the last paper is dated December 1939 and the others are pre war.
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You are welcome. Now, normal conversation is much more enjoyable, isn't it.. I hope we can keep it that way. I did add a couple of others in the meantime.
As far as I go, I see no problem. In March 1939 they decided that 100 octane will be issued to 16+2 Sqns, ie. a portion of FC and BC. They said the process shall start in the end of 1939, and indeed it did.
In short I do not see a single point that would show that they were doing anything else then (rather slowly) executing the plan according to the March 1939 plan.
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We are of course talking about decisions taken in 1940 so whilst they are interesting in a historical way, they are out of date. No long term plan of any kind in any nation goes unchanged once the bullets start flying, as priorities change.
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That would be a perfectly logical conclusion, a clausula rebus sic stantibus. However you can't simply
assume this must have, and did happened. If they revised the pre-war plans, there should be documentation of it. Find it, present it, and I will believe your thesis immidiately.
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I take it you agree that Pips posting doesn't count as a source.
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No, I don't agree. It isn't a source in a way that we do not have scans of the original papers, on the other hand I have absolutely no reason to believe Pips would misreport his findings, and also his comments agree completely with what we found so far. I see no reason to doubt it.
If the pre-war plans were revised, I tend to believe this happened after May 1940. The 7th meeting etc. is clear that they supplied 100 octane to a number of FC/BC Stations/Squadrons, but not all.
That's why it would be interesting to look at the complete file, esp. the post May 1940 happenings to see when the original limited introduction of 100 octane was revised. The consumption figures between May - November 1940 do not lie: the 100 octane issues were practically the same in mid-May and mid-August, the height of activity, as long until the end of September indiciating that there was no expansion in the scale of use until late September, also shown by the sudden drop of 87 octane issues.
