...and as I've said before the thing was about numbers. Having the Defiant there doing what it did was considered better than not having it at all. What I'd really like to find out was the documentation that covers the decision to put 264 and 141 Sqn onto night duties only by the higher ups. It'd make interesting reading considering the Defiant's issues were known from early on. I'd also like to get hold of 264 Sqn ORB for the time.
Another thing we also forget about the thinking in between the wars is that 20 years earlier from the beginning of WW2 the worst war in history had just been waged and for many families a generation had been lost. The pain that everyone had felt over the Great War still lingered and manifested itself in defence thinking in every country. Lessons had been learned, but above all there would have been the consideration of how to reduce the scale of human loss. The maintenance of peace was the priority in Britain. Peace at any cost - no one wanted to go through the hell on earth that WW1 was again. Chamberlain was very keen for peace and he sincerely believed he had secured it, but when he had to declare war on 3 September it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. Was there anyone who really wanted to go to war in 1939?
Just imagine, there must have been so many people in Europe who were flabbergasted by the Nazis and their invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland so soon after the Great War and its horrors. People who were youngsters during the war and who had survvived it had to contemplate sending their children off to fight? The impact of the Great War also explains the disarray in France after invasion by Germany to a certain degree.
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