After a visit to France in early January
1940, Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff,
summed up his impressions of the French Army like this: “I must say that
I saw nothing amiss with it on the surface. The Generals are all tired
men, if a bit old from our view-point. None of them showed any lack of
confidence…Will the Blitzkrieg, when it comes, allow us to rectify
things if they are the same? I must say I don’t know. But I say to
myself that we must have confidence in the French Army. It’s the only
thing in which we can have confidence…All depends on the French Army and
we can do nothing about it”. Those were telling words from the top
British commander before the start of the Second World War.
Unfortunately for the Allies, his fears proved to be right. When Germany
finally attacked the West on May 13th 1940 they did it with
such a force that caught the Allies by surprise. Fifteen days after the
initial attack wave, Belgium capitulated and the combined might of the
French Army and British force were defeated time and time again.
Maginot Line
Between May 26th and June 4th,
the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and some remaining
elements of the French Army were successfully evacuated from the French
Channel port city of Dunkirk. On June 10th, the French
government relocated its seat of power from Paris. Four days later, the
Germans marched victorious into the Parisian streets. On June 22nd,
the new French government caved in and signed an humiliating Armistice,
ending one of the most lopsided military campaigns in modern times. The
immediate aftermath of the defeat saw the emerging of the “search for
scapegoats” syndrome. A syndrome that is still with us today. The
questions regarding the fall of France have resonated since the tragic
events of May-June 1940. There are many factors why France was mauled so
effortlessly by a numerically inferior adversary. Did the French
rearmament investment came too late? Was the Army’s combat doctrine too
rigid? Did the French and, to an extend, the BEF; lack innovating and
refreshing combat ideas; and so on? In the end, the fall of France is
viewed as an example of a what disastrous planning and even more poorly
execution can lead to.
Since the mid 1930s, France main effort to
gear up for a possible German attack was rearmament. Since the mid
1920s, because of the country’s misplaced belief that its newly
developed Maginot Line (a series of reinforced structures/forts along
the common German/French border) would contain the expected German
columns, not much effort was put on rearming the French armed forces.
This is all that changed during the emerging of Hitler’s Germany in the
early 1930s and only by the middle of the decade, did French rearmament
be finally given top budgetary priority. But the sad state of all three
services (army, navy and the air force) made progression towards
rearmament painstaking slow at best. The worst problem was experienced
by the air force.
The French air force began rearmament in
1934 as part of Plan I, which called for the production of 1,343 new
aircraft. Nevertheless, the assembly of such a force was doomed from the
beginning. In the mid 1930s, the French aircraft industry was more one
of scattered complexes rather than a cohesion structure. One in which up
to forty organizations had input in nearly all aspects of aircraft
design, development and production. While at the same time competing for
those precious newly designated funds. As they originally were setup,
France’s aircraft industry was not structured to handle such big orders,
thus the structure needed to be altered which would cause further delays
in production. Those delays had an adverse effect on the air force’s
rearmament effort. Because of them, most of France’s developed aircraft
from the late 1930s came through a narrow technological window. One
which prevented the newly developed aircraft from achieving its top
technological capability thus making them obsolete before they reached
operational status.
The problem was compounded by the type of
airplanes the French government began to order. Plan I called for the
construction of multirole air platforms capable of performing as
bombers, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft. Instead of building
dedicated platforms, the French government invested on various single
type planes. Such aircraft were indeed able to carry out, on a
pedestrian basis, each of the various types of missions they were called
for, but they could not to distinguish themselves in any single one of
them. The decision to develop such platforms was a painful compromise
between the Army, the newly formed Air Force and the government. Many
inside the air force believed, with passion, in Giulio Douhet’s
strategic theory which called for the destruction of the enemy’s
economic strength by destroying its infrastructure. While on the other
hand, the Army’s top brass desired that the new air force serve as a
supporting package rather than an independent unit.
In September 1936, France developed a new
strategic plan, Plan II. Plan II was different from its predecessor in
one major area. The new Plan called for the production of up to 1,339
dedicated bombers with a complement of 756 fighters of all types. This
shifting in priority towards the bomber had its roots on new Air
Minister Pierre Cot’s passion for Douhet’s strategic vision.
Unfortunately for France, Plan II had the no more chance of success than
its predecessor. Chaos ruled in nearly all French aircraft factories.
The problem was accentuated by the Popular Front’s nationalization
effort of the mid to late 1930s. As a result of those two factors,
France’s aircraft production actually fell during these years. Between
the spring of 1937 and the first three months of 1938, French factories
were producing an average of forty units per month. Five less than in
1936, the year the Germans overtook France in sheer number of available
airframes.
The fact that Germany overtook France as
Europe’s top air force should had not surprised anyone. On a conference
visit to London later that year, Joseph Vuillemin, France’s Chief of Air
Staff, plainly put the situation of the French air force as this: “In a
war, our air force would be destroyed in a matter of a few days”. That
blunt statement shocked all British commanders. They were well aware of
the German advances in quantity but they held the belief that once
fighting erupted, the French could hold their own with Germany in the
air and that the aircraft the Royal Air Force (RAF), which had just
began to deploy in northern France, would tip the balance towards the
Allies. Unfortunately for British commanders, their French counterparts
not only held the belief that Germany was superior in all air-related
aspects, but in fact reinforced it early in 1938. Again, the culprit was
Vuillemin. In the spring of 1938, he went to Germany to evaluate for
himself the much talked about Luftwaffe. When he came back, the fate of
France’s air force was sealed. Later that year, Vuillemin sent a private
letter to Prime Minister Edouard Daladier stating once again that in the
event of war, Germany would destroy the country’s air force in less than
a week. This was the same letter Daladier carried with him to Munich.
The by-product of Vuillemin’s obsession
with a German air wipeout was Plan V. In March 1938, the French
government decided to make the air force the main recipient of budgetary
disbursements, forty two percent of the entire budget went to air
rearmament. The new Plan called for doubling the country’s fighter
capacity (41% of all funds were allocated to new fighter development)
and somewhat relegated Plan II’s emphasize on bomber construction (34%
for bombers).
The shifting in position was attributed to
two main elements. On the one hand, the French decided to rely on the
more advanced and better prepared RAF’s Bomber Command to carry out its
missions. In effect, outsourcing its tactical and strategic bomber
capability to a second party. The other factor was the gradual change in
the air force’s air doctrine. In France, Nazi Germany role in the
Spanish Civil War was a topic of heated discussions, especially its air
component. In Spain, elements of the Luftwaffe provided constant close
air support to Franco’s ground troops, paving the way for Franco to
assume control of the country. This fact was not lost on French
commanders, many of whom began to move the air force from an strategic
bomber force to a more robust air-ground combat arrangement. Close air
support was now France main air doctrine. Although a change in doctrine
was made, the air force was painfully slow to match doctrine with
hardware. A clear example of this “operational deficiency” was the fact
that France never developed a top flight dive bomber aircraft, a
platform that proved highly successful over the Spanish countryside.
The newly developed Plan V was twice scaled
up between the painful Munich conference and the German invasion of the
low countries. Nearly four billion francs were invested in the air force
from January 1938 through to the end of combat activities in June 1940.
In charge of Plan V was a brilliant engineer named Albert Caquot. Beside
having impeccable engineering credentials, Caquot had one other trait,
coveted by many, superb managerial skills. Skills France sorely needed
at the time. Caquot immersed himself in the task at hand and by late
1938 he had the French aircraft industry producing new airframes at a
rate of 41 units per month, peaking at 298 planes per month in September
1939.
What Caquot and his team did was nothing
less than remarkable. Almost overnight, France had consolidated its
scattered aircraft industry and developed an integrated skilled
workforce. On August 23rd the French high command met to
discuss the state of the air rearmament. The ultra conservative General
Maurice Gamelin, France’s top military commander, spoke eloquently about
the country’s ability to match Germany step by step on all dimensions of
combat. Guy La Chambre, the Air Minister, was more sober, but
nevertheless, expressed high confidence in his unit. “There will be a
shortage of bombers until the winter of 1940, but they could be
supplemented by the RAF’s bomber force stationed in the north”. Chambre
finished his presentation with one of the most memorable lines in French
history: “the situation of our air force no longer needs to wait on
government decisions as it did in 1938”. Vuillemin was more cautious,
stating that France’s bomber situation had not improved much since the
disgrace of Munich. But as cautious as Vuillemin sounded that day, he
did express optimism for the future. “There’s a good chance that within
six months, the combined French and British air forces will match that
of the Germans”. Not a ringing endorsement for war but more optimistic
than some of his previous statements.
Table I. France’s Aircraft Industry
Workforce
Date
Workers
11/1934
21500
12/1936
35200
5/1938
48000
1/1940
171000
5/1940
250000
Everything seemed to be moving upwards.
Plan V was to be revised two times before the declaration of war and the
factories were turning out airframes at a record pace, but hidden behind
the numbers was tragic situation. Mobilization had an adverse effect on
rearmament, specially, the air component. Because a high percentage of
the skilled workforce was activated, the factories were deprived of
their expertise as well as sheer manpower needed to keep up the
rearmament pace.
By late 1939, aircraft production had
actually fallen prompting Caquot’s resignation in January 1940. Also by
that time, the aircraft industry was producing planes at such a high
rate that spare parts manufactures just could not keep up with demands.
The situation was so grave that after the disaster of Munich, Daladier
send his trusted adviser Jean Monnet to the United States with a simple
order to buy as many airframes as he could get “his hands on”. Monnet
responded with a large gesture. By February 1939, the prominent French
banker had placed orders for 550 aircraft. Later that spring, Daladier
made Monnet the head of the powerful Anglo-French Purchasing Committee.
Vested with new powers and an even bigger cache of funds, Monnet
arranged for the acquisition of 4500 new airframes. Unfortunately for
France, the delivery of all these newly purchased aircraft was painfully
slow. When the Germans finally attacked, only 200 of these units were
actually deployed and ready for combat.
Table II. Aircraft Production Numbers From
October 1939 through May 1940
Month
Planned Figure
Actual Figure
October
422 254
November
615 296
December
640 314
January
805 358
February
1066 279
March
1185 364
April
1375
330
May
1678
434
French dreams of achieving parity with the
Luftwaffe by February 1940 were beginning to fade by November 1939.
Beside the numbers, French aircraft lacked quality in comparison to the
Germans. One clear example of this was the world’s first “bomber gap”.
French bombers were mostly obsolete with the newest of them just
arriving at the front when war broke. On the fighter front the situation
was almost as bad.
The best French fighter at the time, the
Dewoitine D-520 was as good as any German airplane but they were only
arriving in limited quantity when the hostilities started. Only eighty
D-520s were deployed when Germany attacked on May 1940. More telling was
the fact even adding up the 416 RAF’s aircraft deployed in France, the
Germans possessed a two-to-one aircraft advantage over the Allies (1711
to 3530) at the time of the attack. Add all those factors together and
is easy to see why France fell in such a dramatic way. Better combat
planning and tactics could had prolonged the fight, but the French air
force’s inadequacies in equipment and its poorly maintained industry
base would had cracked under the stress of attrition.
Air
Power: The Men, Machines and Ideas that Revolutionized War;
Stephen Budiansky, Penguin Group 2004
Dirty Little Secrets of World War II;
James F. Dunnigan & Albert A. Nofi, HarperCollins 1996
Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France;
Ernest R. May, Hill And Wang 2001
The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive against Nazi Germany,
Robin Neillands, Overlook Press 2001
The Second World War; Edited Sir John
Hammerton, Trident Press 2001
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