Название: The Rise and Fall of the French Air Force: French Air Operations and Strategy 1900-1940 Автор: Greg Baughen
Издательство: Fonthill Media
ISBN: 178155644X
Год: 2018
Страниц: 320
Язык: английский
Формат: epub, pdf (conv)
Размер: 13.9 MB
On 10 May 1940, the French possessed one of the largest air forces in the world. On paper, it was nearly as strong as the RAF. Six weeks later, France had been defeated. For a struggling French Army desperately looking for air support, the skies seemed empty of friendly planes. In the decades that followed, the debate raged. Were there unused stockpiles of planes? Were French aircraft really so inferior? Baughen examines the myths that surround the French defeat. He explains how at the end of the First World War, the French had possessed the most effective air force in the world, only for the lessons learned to be forgotten. Instead, air policy was guided by radical theories that predicted air power alone would decide future wars.
Baughen traces some of the problems back to the very earliest days of French aviation. He describes the mistakes and bad luck that dogged the French efforts to modernize their air force in the twenties and thirties. He examines how decisions made just months before the German attack further weakened the air force. Yet defeat was not inevitable. If better use had been made of the planes that were available, the result might have been different.
The Germans were astonished by how easy it had been. An enemy with more men, tanks, and artillery had been comprehensively defeated. Perhaps most surprising of all was the absence of any effective opposition in the skies. Reconnaissance planes were scarcely ever encountered and Allied bombers seemed mysteriously reluctant to strike the all too vulnerable German columns. The baffled Germans even began to suspect the Allies must be deliberately holding them back for some reason.
The surprise was no less great among Allied ground forces. The skies appeared to be full of German and empty of Allied planes - what had gone wrong? The French and British air forces each possessed front line strengths close to 2,000 planes. The Dutch and Belgian air forces brought the total number available to around 4,000. The French Air Force should have been able to put around 800 fighters, 400 bombers, and 600 reconnaissance planes into the air. Yet nothing like this number appeared in the skies above the struggling French Army.
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