http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/23.htm
October 23rd, 1940
UNITED KINGDOM:
Battle of Britain: By night Glasgow and London are bombed.
Losses: Luftwaffe, 3; RAF, 1.
London: MPs protested today at critical comments by the author H G Wells, now lecturing in America, about British politicians and generals, whom he has also criticised in the Sunday Pictorial magazine. The government was asked why he was allowed to go abroad to denigrate his country at its hour of peril. Emanuel (Manny) Shinwell, a Labour MP, deplored Wells’s speech but said that we were fighting for the right of free expression. Mr Peake, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office, said that Britain needed all the dollars it could earn; an American senator has said that Wells is harming Britain’s cause.
Destroyer HMS Avon Vale launched. (Dave Shirlaw)
FRANCE: Hendaye: Hitler fails to persuade Spain’s General Franco to join the Axis or to let Germany attack Gibraltar through Spain.
CANADA: Minesweepers HMS Kelowna and Courtenay ordered from Prince Rupert Dry Dock and Shipyards Co, Prince Rupert, British Columbia.
U.S.A.: Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox makes a public statement that it was now US policy to fully defend the Philippine Islands against any and all attack. (Marc Small)
USS Conner (DD-72), commissioned as HMS Leeds (G-27), USS McCalla (DD-253), commissioned as HMS Stanley (I-73), USS Philip (DD-76), commissioned as HMS Lancaster (G-05), USS Rodgers (DD-254), commissioned as HMS Sherwood (I-80), USS Stockton (DD-73), commissioned as HMS Ludlow (G-57), USS Twiggs (DD-127), commissioned as HMS Leamington (G-19), and USS Evans (DD-78), commissioned as HMS Mansfield (G-76), and USS Yarnell (DD-143), commissioned as HMS Lincoln (G-42), as part of the destroyers-for-bases deal. (Ron Babuka)
USS Conway (DD-70), commissioned as HMS Lewes (G-68), part of the destroyers-for-bases deal. Lewes outlives all of her sisters in British service; stripped of valuable scrap and scuttled off Sydney, Australia 25 May 1946. (Ron Babuka)
http://worldwar2daybyday.blogspot.com/
Day 419 October 23, 1940
Battle of Britain Day 106. The weather deteriorates further with poor visibility due to low cloud and drizzle. Luftwaffe mounts only reconnaissance flights and sporadic raids of single bomb-carrying fighters. No fighters are shot down by either side. There is relatively light night bombing of London and Glasgow and minelaying off the Yorkshire coast in Northeast England.
In an attempt to bring Fascist Spain into the war on the side of Germany, Hitler travels to Hendaye, Southern France, to meet General Franco. Over 9 hours of negotiations, Hitler offers Gibraltar and territory in North Africa to Spain but Franco demands French Catalonia (North of the Pyrenees), almost all of Morocco and a large chunk of Algeria. Hitler later confides (to Mussolini) that he would rather have 3 or 4 teeth pulled out than continue the discussions.
10 more WWI-era US Navy destroyers are transferred to Royal Navy at Halifax, Nova Scotia, for escort duty as part of the “destroyers for bases” deal between Churchill and Roosevelt.