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.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
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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.
Obviously having fighters and the like assigned to army control is quite clearly a terrible approach.
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
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.
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).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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Since Allied response to attack had to be noticed, reported, verified, mused over, pondered and determined