France invested more in their air force instead of army and navy?

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Driftless

Donor
As others have pointed out: the more pressing questions probably are:
* What should the overall Air Force structure have been 1920-1940 (20/20 hindsight works here)
* Did there need to be political/cultural changes in France to make that structure possible?
* What should the doctrine have been based on the above ideas?
* Now we can spend appropriately..
 

Deleted member 1487

I'm not quite sure what point you are making? The army airforce in France was more interested in dive bombers. The airforce airforce was less interested in them.

fasquardon
You said France should have had a ground attack aircraft....they did, just not enough of them because funding issues and delayed investment meant they were ready in serious numbers at the start of the war and the lack of fighter support left them fresh meat for Luftwaffe fighters when they did fight.
 
It isn't really a problem of money, although that does play a role. The French air force could have been a lot larger and given the problems of command and organization it would still have been unable to concentrate the forces needed to defend against the German attack in the Ardennes. More damage inflicted sure, but they need a way to concentrate large numbers of fighters to defend against the German assault, and preferably to have a large number of bombers which can bomb the German troops snarled in traffic jams in the Ardennes. And of course, they need better sortie rates, communication, and the ability to act on what they find - reconnaissance located the German attack after all, but it was not believed. As it stands, with the French air force in a tug-of-war with the army which leaves much of the air force unable to be directed in a centralized fashion, simply providing more aircraft won't help much.

So what could be done to fix this?

Well of course, there's the above problems. The French need to have an air force that is sufficiently independent and strong to be able to avoid getting parceled out to the army, while not sabotaging itself by focusing excessively on bombers. Then it needs to actually act to take advantage of that. I don't know how to achieve that, maybe they'll do a better job if they feel like they're not constantly under siege. Of course, having more aircraft would help too, and those little inconsequential things like spare parts, plus pilot training. Pilot training is actually one of the most vital aspects of it - at one point the air force was offered something like 500? (don't remember the exact figure, but my ratios should be roughly correct) planes per month, and it turned it down because it said it only had sufficient pilots for 50. There needs to be more pilots and training, and there needs to be the command to be able to send these planes into action.

French policy should have encouraged consolidation of aviation firms earlier. The prototype policy was a mistake. A rationalization of the aircraft industry while avoiding the necessity to nationalize it could have been much better for achieving French production goals. Stop spreading orders out to so many builders, and bid competitively, try ruthlessly to try to find the lowest costs from the producers and concentrate orders into a few to reward those who can achieve these prices, and throttle those who can't, to try to achieve an economy of scale. The bigger companies will be able to do more research.

The French need to have had an aviation industry that had constant orders, so that it didn't shrink in the 1920s and early 1930s and then have to be frantically rebuilt from scratch with vast buying from the Americans with money that could have been used at home. Of course, this is easier to say than to achieve, as French military orders seem rather hard to come by in the 1920s and early 1930s, on the scale needed - and to an extent, too many orders is a bad thing, as the weaker French firms should be killed off and consolidation occur. So too, having a vast fleet of obsolescent aircraft is not really good for the military either. I think that having increased civil aviation and trying to leverage the French aircraft industry's temporary post WW1 strength to try to gain a commanding lead in that field would have been the best way to ensure that there was continual orders. The French didn't develop Air France until relatively late, 1933, so a merger of all of the big French airlines earlier to try to achieve the economies of scale and dominance needed for a single big air line could have helped. I imagine that better infrastructure would be useful too, both in peace-time and in war, from my recollection the Germans had numerical concrete runways while all the French had was Paris. If Air France was founded earlier - maybe when Lufthansa gets founded in 1926 the French decide to respond by founding Air France, something something national prestige - then the French can be better in competition. The sooner the better, if it could get established immediately post-war and hugely subsidized and developed to give it a decisive lead in the European aviation industry it would be best.

Of course, the French air ministry tended to be aware of this too. They knew that they needed to try to achieve economy of scales, to increase civilian purchases, to rationalize. But they failed of course. France in the 1920s and 1930s, by virtue of economics, society, and politics, was naturally going to experience some problems in such an endeavor. It hasn't been appellated the stalemate society for nothing. It is very easy to discuss what "should" have been done and not so easy to fit it into the political realities of the time...

Some problems of not managing to have economy of scale came because the French tried to decentralize the aviation industry away from Paris. I'm not really sure if this is necessary; the reasoning behind it was because the French wanted to reduce the vulnerability to enemy bombing. In the light of the era, when strategic bombing was thought to be akin to nuclear war, that might have made sense, but if the Germans are able to stage bombing raids on Paris of a sufficient size as to wipe out the French aviation industry, its pretty clear that France has lost the air war as it stands. Instead the French should have focused on producing aircraft to stop such a raid from happening, rather than sacrificing that for mitigating the damage that does occur. Of course, expanding into the provinces takes advantage of additional labor, but simply going to the provinces for the sake of going to the provinces doesn't seem necessary if French air defense can be shaped up.

As far as French aircraft;

The French aircraft park seems generally fine by the end of the decade, the problem is the same problem as the rest of the French military; the new equipment is just arriving and the old equipment is just being phased out. The main problem is that they need to be in service earlier. It seems that the French could do with having a medium bomber arriving in the 1935/1936 period that is "good enough". Ditching the BCR idea early and getting some specialist bomber aircraft is a good idea, focus on speed instead of defensive armament, just like later in the decade.

The Potez 630 series seems pretty bad though, they should have had a different aircraft for battlefield reconnaissance, go with something really fast to get in and get out or something cheap and slow to spot continuously, not something big and modestly slow that's expensive enough to hurt if it gets shot down and without the armament to do anything on the battlefield.

Also don't bother with the Farman F.220 series, France doesn't need strategic bombers. The German industrial centers are literally just on the other side of the border, tactical bombers can hit them reasonably well. Bombers should be for interdiction and hitting emergency targets, the French artillery arm and doctrine means that having excessive amounts of close air support flying at low level into German flak units is wasteful. Its fighters which France needs, as many fighters as she can get, with some medium bombers to complement. Leo 45s/Amiot 354s (the 354s seem to have been more practical than the Leo 45 due to turbulence with the 45) and some MB.175s for reconnaissance and semi-strategic bombing once it gets upgraded to the version capable of carrying a bigger bomb-load can be the bombers.

Henri Vuillemin was head of the French Air Force from 1938 and 1940. He was a good man but lacked authority and self-confidence.
Also: the freakkin' French Army did not wanted to relinquish combat aircrafts to the Air Force (that had been created in 1933). They had an enormous fleet of mostly obsolete cooperation / reconnaissance aircrafts, thing Les Mureaux 117.
Too many French squadrons had dual commanders, one from the Air force, the other from the Army. For example, fighters groups of Curtiss H-75 were under authority of the Army. Hence they were thinly squattered all over the Western front, from the Channel to the Switzerland border.

In short, a major clusterfuck at every level. That 400 German aircrafts were shot down in seven weeks was a tribute to French fighter pilots courage.

Is the army cooperation aircraft being assigned to the army that bad of an idea? After all, for things like artillery spotting and battlefield reconnaissance for their formations it seems like attaching them to ground commanders who they're going to be spotting for anyway makes sense, and it isn't like I imagine the air force necessarily would have need to try to achieve a concentration of 117s at any particular point...

Obviously having fighters and the like assigned to army control is quite clearly a terrible approach.

Just a couple of factoids regarding how bad the the aircraft industry was organised.

200 different prototypes were paid for by the French aircraft ministry between 1929 and 1932.

There's an incident in 1935 where 65 planes of one type were ordered from 17 different factories rather than setting up a production line.
That was purposeful policy, the French wanted to encourage prototype production and didn't have the need for mass production. The focus was to be on research - in 1928 the French spent 40 million francs on aircraft research while the Germans spent 118 million. I'm not really even sure if the idea behind it - focus above all on research - is necessarily a bad one, given the dearth of need for aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Certainly however, the effects of it, in encouraging the proliferation of small companies that just built prototypes, incentivizing prototypes while paying no attention to serial production, and the fact that a lot of the research that was encouraged was useless, with small and inconsequential firms that were just playing at hobbies, was rather bad.

After Munich France started spending 40% of their military budget on the airforce.

There was 250,000 workers in the aircraft industry in 1940 and they couldn't consistently produce above 300 planes a month. Something was rotten in the aircraft industry. They need a beaverbrook type running all over the civilian industry to fix things. I don't think that would have been tolerated in peace time.
There were 250,000 workers in the aircraft industry in June 1940. In the beginning of 1940 it was only 171,000. In 1939 it was only 82,000. Yeah, the French aviation industry failed to meet targets, but it was also coping with a tremendous expansion, and a huge restructuring as it shifted from being based on skilled laborers to unskilled laborers (with large numbers of women coming into the air force production in particular). Production would probably have risen as efficiency increased and the challenges of dealing with that incredible spurt of growth was dealt with, but of course the battle of France was over before that happened.
 
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You said France should have had a ground attack aircraft....they did, just not enough of them because funding issues and delayed investment meant they were ready in serious numbers at the start of the war and the lack of fighter support left them fresh meat for Luftwaffe fighters when they did fight.

More funding might have helped, but I think the political problems of the French air force were far more limiting and would mean any extra funds were inefficiently spent.

My thinking is mainly informed by this source:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1985/sep-oct/kirkland.html

fasquardon
 

Archibald

Banned
Obviously having fighters and the like assigned to army control is quite clearly a terrible approach.

You get it. Small groups of fighters were attached to Armies. For example, on May 12 when the Germans prepared their breakthrough in the Ardennes, there was only a handful of Curtiss H-75. They were completely overwhelmed by the massive bombing raids there.
 

Archibald

Banned
You said France should have had a ground attack aircraft....they did, just not enough of them because funding issues and delayed investment meant they were ready in serious numbers at the start of the war and the lack of fighter support left them fresh meat for Luftwaffe fighters when they did fight.

There was actually a French Stuka, the LN-406. His history is interesting. The French air force got interested in dive bombers circa 1937, so Loire nieuport got the contract, but after a handful of aircraft rolled out of the production line these aircrafts were abandonned to the French Navy as the Armée de l'Air changed its bombing strategy: instead of LN-406 dive bombers they picked up Br 690 for low level attacks. Quite ironically after the initial chock of the Stuka attacks and the slauthering of the Breguet the Navy LN-406 were called to the rescue and attempted to dive bomb the Panzers (with the V-156F) and were all salughtered within three days.

Ideology was also involved. You won't believe it, but bombers were seen as offensive weapons, unlike fighters (and the maginot line) which corresponded to a defensive strategy (!)
French doctrine was to not provoque Germany before 1941-42. As such (and also, per lack of money) by 1938 the French government decided to put all the money into fighters rather than bombers (!!!) This explain why there was so little bombers and particularly so little Breguet 690. According to le Fana de l'aviation (1998) as of May 10, 1940 the Armée had 450 modern bombers in its inventory, but only 27 (twenty seven !) were close from the Belgium / German borders.

I'd say that the French Air Force should have given up LeO-451 and Amiot 354 medium-range high altitude bombers and focused instead on a mixed fleet of LN-406 and Br.693 (the latter attacking from 500 ft and not lower) perhaps with MB-175 fast bombers (the MB-174 weapon bay was ill-suited to large bombs). Drop the DB-7 and keep the Martin 167F which was better.
Yeah, that would be my choice. A three tier attack fleet - fast bombers, low level attack, plus a touch of dive bombing.
Both Amiot and LeO were very good bombers, but pretty unuseful in daylight against panzer columns. That was not what they had been build for.
 
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Deleted member 1487

To be fair there weren't really many modern fighters and they didn't do much of consequence in 1940. My entire point was resourcing the ALA so that it had enough functional equipment and trained fighters to try and match the LW on even ground. I though the LeO 451 was very good though. A Potez 670 used as a fighter-bomber/light bomber would have probably been the best option, forget the Bre 693 and dive bomber.
 
How do casualty rates to ground fire generally compare between dive bombers and low level attack aircraft?

It seems that a lot of the dive bombers suffered terrible casualties to ground fire, but the Germans with their dive bombers seem mostly inconvenienced by enemy fighters rather than ground fire, so maybe it was just ill luck, coincidence, and design problems.
 
You need to start the modernization about two years earlier. The French Air Force OTL was caught at the bottom of its modernization cycle. One or two years later and they would have been in a much better position.
 

Deleted member 1487

How do casualty rates to ground fire generally compare between dive bombers and low level attack aircraft?

It seems that a lot of the dive bombers suffered terrible casualties to ground fire, but the Germans with their dive bombers seem mostly inconvenienced by enemy fighters rather than ground fire, so maybe it was just ill luck, coincidence, and design problems.
Depends how they are used and in what threat environment. The limited data from the French in somewhat different war situations was total wipe out of the dive bombers according to Archibald and half of the Bre 693's lost. You can also compare the losses of fighter-bombers to dive bombers and CAS aircraft (Bf110s/Fw190s vs. Ju87s vs. Hs129s/123s/IL-2 Sturmoviks).

You need to start the modernization about two years earlier. The French Air Force OTL was caught at the bottom of its modernization cycle. One or two years later and they would have been in a much better position.
That's what I'm thinking and why increased relative funding would go further in the early 1930s with the air force rather than navy or even parts of the army.
 
The glaring hole in the French Air Force was aircrew training. It doesn't matter how you rearrange the deck chairs your cheapest and most important resource is aircrew to go and sit on them. Otherwise you just get better empty deckchairs.

Fully manned and at RAF sortie rates the OTL French BoF Air Force would have given the Luftwaffe a very hard time. There was enough room in the budget to ditch a few unnecessary types in exchange for a boost to an organised training system.
 

Archibald

Banned
Breguet 693 was a good machine but thier crews attacked too low. Once the first shock passed, the survivors attacked some hundred feet higher and losses diminished.

As for glaring holes, they were everywhere. Pilot training was clearly deficient.
 

Driftless

Donor
Breguet 693 was a good machine but thier crews attacked too low. Once the first shock passed, the survivors attacked some hundred feet higher and losses diminished.

As for glaring holes, they were everywhere. Pilot training was clearly deficient.

At first, wasn't it near tree top level?
 

Archibald

Banned
Absolutely. That was French pre-war doctrine "petit paquets" of assault aircrafts attacking using the surprise factor. To be honest, no one expected such a concentration of light / medium / heavy AA marching along the panzers. That was a devastating surprise. Of course the small number of Breguets (less than 200 of them) made recovery impossible.
Don't forget that Breguet 691s had very shitty engines and could not be used in combat. Early Potez 630s had similar engines and were equally unuseful.
 
Absolutely. That was French pre-war doctrine "petit paquets" of assault aircrafts attacking using the surprise factor. To be honest, no one expected such a concentration of light / medium / heavy AA marching along the panzers. That was a devastating surprise. Of course the small number of Breguets (less than 200 of them) made recovery impossible.
Don't forget that Breguet 691s had very shitty engines and could not be used in combat. Early Potez 630s had similar engines and were equally unuseful.

My understanding of operations isn't very concise due to conflicting reports, but I got the impression that glide-bombing attacks suffered from additional fighter attacks and suffered heavily as well. Panzer spearpoints weren't heavily defended by AA, but the AA followed behind. When the column was attacked behind the spearpoints, it was, by events, quite heavily defended. By the time the bridgehead was attacked, the following AA had plenty of time to plan and emplace the defensive AA, a matter of timing. Since Allied response to attack had to be noticed, reported, verified, mused over, pondered and determined, that response coincided with German reaction and defensive deployment. Wrong place, wrong time.
 
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