The Rise and Fall of the French Air Force: French Air Operations and Strategy 1900-1940 by Greg Baughen

Author:Greg Baughen [Baughen, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781556443
Publisher: Fonthill Media
Published: 2018-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

10

From Confidence to Panic

On 1 September, German forces invaded Poland and two days later, France honoured her commitment to her eastern ally by declaring war on Germany. The moment for which the French had been planning for the past two decades had finally arrived. For the French nation, the days that followed were anxious times. The air assault, which the experts had proclaimed would herald a new world war, could not be long delayed. Parisians felt particularly vulnerable. Women and children were evacuated. Companies prepared to move their premises outside the capital. Those that remained braced themselves for the carnage the public had been led to believe was inevitable. The emergency services, including special gas squads, stood ready to assist those that remained. The French fighter force prepared to repulse the German bombers. The huge French stockpiles of mustard gas and phosgene bombs were readied for use as French bombers prepared to retaliate as best they could.

The assault, however, never came. Days, then weeks, passed with no sign whatsoever of the Luftwaffe. Even when Poland had been defeated, and the Luftwaffe was in a position to concentrate its might against France, no attempt was made to strike at any target, military or civilian. In Poland, towns had been bombed, but even these appeared to have been legitimate attacks on communication targets rather than deliberate attempts to terrorise the Polish people. The reports reaching France made it very clear that the campaign in Poland did not follow the Douhetian pattern.1 The Luftwaffe appeared to have focused on supporting the German Army, and no attempt had been made to force victory by air power alone. Poland had been defeated because her army had been overrun, not because the morale of her people had been broken.2 It seemed that the French Army had been right all along; wars would continue to be decided on the battlefield and not by independent air operations.

The French government was not so sure. It still seemed highly likely that German bombers would eventually launch either terror raids on French cities or attacks on industrial targets. Now that France was at war, it was the latter the government and military feared more. Plans to re-equip the Air Force would be shattered if factories producing the planes were reduced to rubble. Much of French industry was still concentrated in the Paris and Lyon regions and both these areas were well defended; factories elsewhere were less fortunate. On the day war broke out, Vuillemin was ordered to strengthen defences in the rear and the Air Ministry told the fighter factories at Nantes, Toulouse, Châteauroux, and Bourges to organise their own defences with the fighters they were building and ferry pilots.3

The reports emerging from Poland, however, were emphasising the tactical use made of air power, not strategic bombing. There was much else to ponder. One striking feature was the intensity of Luftwaffe operations; German pilots were apparently flying up to five sorties a day.4 French Air Force observers were impressed by the way the Poles had used their own bomber squadrons in low-level air strikes.

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