CCXCII
On
Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the French Aéronautique Militaire had
some 3,222 front-line combat aircraft in Europe alone, making it the world's
largest air force. When the Great War ended the French government was in the
process of expanding the air force to 300 squadrons, more than enough to defend
France’s far-flung colonial empire in Africa and Asia, and to overpower the
Germans in Europe.
The
end of the war brought plans for this massive expansion to a halt. France nevertheless
maintained its huge air armada and continued to order up new aircraft, though
in far fewer numbers than once anticipated.
French
aircraft production was in the hands of dozens of small companies, the most
famous of which were Latécoère, Morane-Saulnier, Nieuport-Delage
and Amiot, each only producing small numbers of aircraft. Due to their limited
production capacity and fractionalized production budgets, by 1936 French
aircraft production was absurdly behind schedule. The government’s 1936 nationalization
of the aircraft industry into six larger companies did little to increase
production since much energy was expended in the consolidation itself.
And despite the vast number of French aircraft most
were of World War I vintage. Even the newer aircraft were generally built as
biplanes or strut-and-wire monoplanes. None had the sleekness of the British Spitfire
or the later German Focke-Wulf 190. Even
the most modern French all-metal monoplane fighters had open cockpits in 1939.
Over in the U.K. Hugh Dowding predicted that the
French air force would be all but destroyed on the ground if it had to face modern
German fighters and bombers. He was deeply critical of the primitive strategy
and tactics with which the French planned to conduct any coming air war ---
essentially random combat air patrols which might (or might not) intercept
German fighters and bombers at any given time.
Dowding argued to his fellow members of the Air Council that Britain simply couldn’t spare the resources to follow the French example. There was a shortage of fuel, a dearth of pilots, and limited numbers of planes.*
Instead,
Dowding argued for a centralized command center where all the data from all the
Chain Home and Chain Home Low stations could be compiled, quickly evaluated, and
where coordinated steps could be taken to go to battle with enemy aircraft.
One of the most important elements in this system
was one of the most mundane: Stuffy fought the General Post Office (GPO), which
controlled not only the mails but the telegraph and telephone lines, tooth and
nail to have all the telephone lines
from the CH and CHL stations, the airbases, and the scores upon scores of
observer stations installed underground where they could not be knocked out in
the event of enemy attack. It was an immense undertaking, irritating to even
members of the British Cabinet, and it may have well been one of the
least-lauded but most crucial arguments that Hugh Dowding ever won in his life.
Dowding’s Chain
Home radar system had its limitations --- it could detect groupings of inbound enemy
planes and provide their general direction, but the number of planes and their
types still had to be determined by ground-based observers. In order to provide
this data, the Royal Observer Corps, a civilian paramilitary founded in 1925,
was reorganized into 40 “centres” (exchanges) controlling more than 1500 observer
posts. Observers were trained to identify aircraft, plot their trajectories
(note the numbers around the perimeter of the post) and telephone in the
information. In general, ROC posts gave the RAF 25 minutes of lead time to
scramble to the proper quadrant in order to engage the enemy
*Dowding’s bitter
criticisms of the French air defense system were proven correct during the
Battle of France in 1940. Roving French squadrons often ran out of fuel and had
to disengage from combat with German adversaries or face almost certain death
in dry tank forced crashes. Since there was no effective observation system on French
ground German fighters could raid French airfields almost at will, destroying
aircraft and infrastructure with little risk of loss. Even the (later)
highly-effective Hawker Hurricanes that fought in the Battle of France were
decimated. Stuffy was furious; the destruction and / or capture of the British
aircraft only served to weaken his fighter squadrons at just about the time he
was trying to bring them to maximum capacity.
