Armee de´l Air after the WWII: Colonial Conflicts

[gekho]

The French colonial empire began to fall apart during the Second World War, when various parts of their empire were occupied by foreign powers (Japan in Indochina, Britain in Syria, Lebanon, and Madagascar, the US and Britain in Morocco and Algeria, and Germany and Italy in Tunisia). However, control was gradually reestablished by Charles de Gaulle. The French Union, included in the 1946 Constitution, replaced the former colonial Empire. However, France was immediately confronted with the beginnings of the decolonization movement. Paul Ramadier's (SFIO) cabinet repressed the Malagasy Uprising in 1947. In Asia, Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh declared Vietnam's independence, starting the Franco-Vietnamese War. In Cameroun, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon's insurrection, started in 1955 and headed by Ruben Um Nyobé, was violently repressed.

When this ended with French defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, the French almost immediately became involved in a new, and even harsher conflict in their oldest major colony, Algeria. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj's movements had marked the period between the two wars, but both sides radicalized after the Second World War. In 1945, the Sétif massacre was carried out by the French army. The Algerian War started in 1954. Algeria was particularly problematic for the French, due to the large number of European settlers (or pieds-noirs) who had settled there in the 125 years of French rule. Charles de Gaulle's accession to power in 1958 in the middle of the crisis ultimately led to independence for Algeria with the 1962 Evian Accords. The Suez Canal incident in '56 also displayed the limitations of French power, as its attempt to retake the canal along with the British was stymied when the United States did not back the plan.

The French Union was replaced in the new 1958 Constitution by the French Community. Only Guinea refused by referendum to take part to the new colonial organization. However, the French Community dissolved itself in the midsts of the Algerian War; almost all of the other African colonies were granted independence in 1960, following local referendums. Some few colonies chose instead to remain part of France, under the statuses of overseas départements (territories). Critics of neocolonialism claimed that the Françafrique had replaced formal direct rule. They argued that while de Gaulle was granting independence on one hand, he was creating new ties through Jacques Foccart's help, his counsellor for African matters. Foccart supported in particular the Nigerian Civil War during the late 1960s.

 

[gekho]

When France was free by the Allies, many Ju-52 were captured and used against their own owners.Many others were destroyed after the war, but 585 were manufactured after 1945. In France, the machine had been manufactured during the war by the Junkers-controlled Amiot company, and production continued afterwards as the Amiot AAC 1 Toucan. These aircrafts were widely used in not only in France, but also in Algeria, Vietnam and Thailand, being employed as a parachuters platform, transport aircraft and bombers. They were finally replaced by the american C-47 Dakota.

 

[gekho]

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[gekho]

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[gekho]

The British transferred 246 Squadron's Spitfire Mk. VIIIs to Indochina in 1946, when the squadron left Tan Son Nhut to return to England, and these were supplemented by Spitfire LF.IXc and Mosquito FB.VI fighter-bombers hurriedly ferried in from Europe. These airplanes performed poorly in the colonial close-support role. The Spitfire had too short a range and too small a warload. Both types proved too fragile for long service in the tropics. The Spitfire's narrow-track undercarriages proved ill-suited to the short, uneven, PSP (Pierced Steel-Plank) runways common in Indochina. Ground-loops and undercarriage failure were common. The Mosquito had a robust undercarriage and a large disposable load, but, as the British and the Australians had already discovered during the war, its wooden structure suffered severely from heat, damp, and insects. Availability was generally low.

 

[gekho]

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[gekho]

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[tomo pauk]

Thanks for the info pics.
Any good info about Ju-88/188 usage by L'Armee de l'Air?

 

[gekho]

The post-war French Air Force initially operated a miscellany of second-hand Allied and German types, often with paint schemes partially carried over from their pervious owners. The Junkers Ju-88 was also produced by the French under the name AAB.1, with 67 planes produced. The Ju 188 was used by the French naval air arm (the Aéronavale) in the immediate post war era.

Sorry, I dont have more information about the Ju-88/188 in french service

 

[Gnomey]

Good stuff!

 

[FalkeEins]

Thanks for the info pics.
Any good info about Ju-88/188 usage by L'Armee de l'Air?

I'm just putting together some info for my blog which I'll put up some time soon.. postwar French Ju 88 and 188s were principally used for flight trials and testing of new equipment, torpedoes, guided missiles etc. The French used a lot of German airframes, engines, spares etc post-war as they had no foreign currency to buy anything from their war-time Allies -a Jumo 213 cost nothing compared to a British Griffon. Not forgetting of course that the French Vichy wartime government had sought to preserve French manufacturing by offering to build, repair and maintain a lot of German types in France. Along with other types (Ju 52 and Fw 190 of course) Ju 88 and BMW 801 production was re-started in France at the end of the war and the French Navy took delivery of A-17 torpedo bombers and A-14 cable -cutters as early as May 1945. The first torpedo launching trials were flown from the airfield at Luc, which is about 20 miles from St. Tropez on the Med coast..

 

[gekho]

The French Air Force ordered 64 aircraft postwar from the SNCA aircraft company. The Fw 190 A-5/A-6 model that was chosen carried the designation NC 900. The aircraft were used operationally for a short period and withdrawn due to problems with the BMW 801 engine.

Thanks for the info FalkeEins

 

[gekho]

In 1948 and '49, the rapid collapse of the Kuomintang regime in China and the apparently cordial relations between the Viet Minh and Mao's Communist party caused the US to relent and allow France to deploy some of its American equipment in Southeast Asia. Fifty Bell P-63C Kingcobras were hurriedly despatched from Europe. They proved well suited to the climate and the prevailing type of operations. Their range was better than the Spitfires, and were highly resistant to the ever increasing volume of groundfire that French pilots faced over Viet Minh-dominated areas. The lifting of the ban on US warplanes also let the French Aéronavale take a more active role in the conflict. The light carrier Arromanches took up station in the gulf of Tonkin and used its SB2C Helldivers, F6F-5 Hellcats, and, eventually, F4U-7 Corsairs to good effect during the remainder of the campaign. Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bombers and Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateers operated from shore bases. The Long time on station and heavy bombloads made the Privateers particularly useful. They were often pressed into service as flareships during night assaults on French positions.

 

[gekho]

The French trainers (particularly the SIPAs, French-made Arado 396s powered by French-made Argus As 410 engines) were, however, too light and too fragile to make efficent warplanes in the long term. As the war dragged on and as the sophistication of the enemy increased, the French had to look for more powerful substitutes. Happily, one of the hastily adapted trainers had proved well-suited to its new tasks. Surplus, American and British T-6 Texans, SNJs, and Harvards turned out to be rugged, easily maintained, and efficient attack aircraft when equipped with a pair of pods housing twin, 7.5-mm machine guns and racks for fragmentation bombs, rockets, and napalm canisters. The Tomcats, as they bevcame known, stood up well in the face of ground fire, had a good endurance, and were still available in quantity. Four escadrilles were formed on the T-6 in 1955. By 1958, the total had risen to more than 30. (The French were perhaps the first to use the T6 in this way, since operations preceded the USAF FT-6 program by some years. Many of the French airplanes were subsequently passed on to third-world clients, including Katanga).

 

[gekho]

More pics

 

[gekho]

With the end of the Korean War in early 1954, the United States greatly stepped up its involvement in French Indochina. But, to maintain the "plausible deniability" that rendered so many poorly thought-out Southeast-Asian schemes palatable to American administrations, the intervention was placed in the hands of the CIA and its proprietary airline, Air America. To meet France's need for airlift capacity and long-range, high-endurance strike aircraft, B-26s were flown from Korea to Taiwan and the Philippines for overhaul. They were "sanitized" (rendered anonymous and hopefully untraceable), then transferred to the CIA for use in Indochina. USAF volunteers were "sheep-dipped"—stripped of the most obvious signs of their ongoing service connections—and transferred to Air America as C-119 pilots and loadmasters. 200 active-duty USAF B-26 mechanics were quietly seconded to the Armée de l'Air to maintain the CIA's bomber force, on the condition that they serve only in secure areas, where they could not be captured or spotted by reporters.

 

[gekho]

Given the relative success of the B-26 Invader in Indochina, the French were anxious to obtain the aircraft for use in Algeria (the Indochina aircraft were CIA-owned and, at the conclusion of hostilities, were returned to secret Agency depots on Taiwan and at Clark Field in the Philippines). In 1956, France requested B-26s under MDAP, the US Mutual Defense Aid Program. The aircraft were ostensibly stopgap equipment for France's European bomber squadrons, pending availability of the Vautour twin-jet bomber. They were overhauled by Fleetways in California and Fairey in the UK, then ferried to France. The aircraft equipped two groups, GB.1/91 Gascogne and GB.2/91 Guyenne, both based at Oran. A photoreconaissance squadron, ERP.1/32 Armagnac, received RB-26Cs.

 

[gekho]

While, in Indochina, B-26s were flown both in bare metal and black, with USAF serials, and with French cockades in the four positions used by the USAF, French B-26s in Algeria were without exception black and marked in French fashion (French serials and six-position national insignia). The top half of the fuselage was usually painted gloss white in order to reduce the heat inside the fuselage. While both 6- and 8-gun B-26Bs were common, most B-26s lacked the the six, built-in wing guns of the late-model aircraft. Consequently, both B-26Bs and B-26Cs carried two or four of the early type twin gun pods under the wings. Turrets were now generally unarmed and were often removed altogether. Most (but not all) received the late-model blown canopy during refurbishment.

 

[gekho]

The Heinkel He 274 was a four-engine bomber designed during World War II as a high altitude variant of the Heinkel He 177 for the German Luftwaffe. Normally a major new version would be numbered by adding 100 to the original model number, but the He 277 was yet another different version of the He 177, which was itself being developed as early as September 1943 into the He 177B four engined bomber, four prototypes of which were converted from He 177A airframes with all-new wings, over the 1943-44 winter season at Heinkel's southern factories near Vienna. The main differences between the He 274 and the He 177 was the abandoning of the twin coupled engine arrangement in favor of four independent turbocharged units, an extended fuselage with a modified wingspan, a twin tail empennage tail surface unit, and a more conventional set of twin-wheel main gear units, abandoning the cumbersome four-strut main gear system of the He 177A.

Originally designated He 177H on October 11, 1941, the He 274 was a high-altitude development of the He 177 A-3. The He 274 dispensed with coupled engines in order to provide room for the installation of DVL exhaust driven TK 11B turbo-superchargers. The He 274 featured a pressurized compartment for a crew of four, this employing double walls of heavy-gauge alloy, hollow sandwich-type glazing and inflatable rubber seals, a pressure equivalent to that at 2,500 m (8,200 ft) being maintained at high altitude. Defensive armament was restricted to a single forward-firing 13 mm (.51 in) MG 131 machine gun and remotely-controlled dorsal and ventral gun turrets each containing a pair of 13 mm (.51 in) MG 131s and directed from a slightly offset plexiglass dome in the roof of the flight deck or the rear of the ventral Bola gondola. First envisioned as being fully in the He 177's eventual line of development as the He 177H ("H" likely an abbreviation for "Höhe", meaning high-altitude in German), the growing incompatibility of parts led to the redesignation to He 274. By 1941, Heinkel was engrossed by other urgent projects that left the company seriously short of detail design capacity. The He 274 project was therefore reassigned to SAUF at Suresnes, France.

Construction of the two prototypes, the He 274 V1 and V2 did not commence until 1943. They were to have been built in France by SAUF at Suresnes, France, but the prototypes were never completed in time. The He 274 V1 was being readied for flight testing at Suresnes in July 1944 when the approach of Allied forces necessitated the evacuation of Heinkel personnel working on the project. Minor difficulties had delayed the flight testing and transfer of the aircraft to Germany, and orders were therefore given to destroy the virtually completed prototype. Only minor damage was actually done to the airframe of the He 274 V1, and repairs were begun after the Allied occupation. The He 274 V1 was repaired by Ateliers Aéronautiques de Suresnes and used by the Armée de l'Air (French Air Force) for several years as a high-altitude research plane. It was renamed the AAS 01A. The He 274 V2 was eventually completed as the AAS 01B, complete with the TK 11 turbochargers, and eventually flew exactly two years (on December 27, 1947) after the AAS 01A. By this time, the AAS organization had been absorbed into the French SNCASO aviation conglomerate. Both of the AAS 01 completed and airworthy versions of the He 274 were eventually broken up in late 1953, after serving as "mother ships" for aerial launching of a number of early French advanced jet and rocket test aircraft.

 

[syscom3]

You have some great stuff there gekho. Thanks for posting!