- PREPARATION -

Fairey Battle In Winter Conditions

Early in 1939 agreement was reached with the French Government to send a number of Royal Air Force formations to France in the event of hostilities. The first of these was the Air Component of the Field Force consisted of Blenheim medium bombers, Gladiator and Hurricane fighters and Lysander army cooperation aircraft. The main function of this force would be to provide reconnaissance and protection for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the ground in northern France. The second air element was the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF) which would be drawn from Bomber Command and would conduct interdiction missions into the enemy's rear areas. Forward basing being necessary in both cases due to the limited range of most of the aircraft involved.

In May 1939 a number of rudimentary French landing grounds were identified for use by the Royal Air Force and 1000 tons of bombs and a supply of ammunition were pre-positioned at a suitably located French munitions storage area.

On the 24 of August, the AASF was given instructions in secret to prepare to deploy to nd France and on the 2 of September servicing personnel were deployed to the continent by air. The first echelon of the AASF in the form of 10 Fairey Battle squadrons each of 16 aircraft drawn from No 1 Group of Bomber Command were then despatched to 5 French Airfields in the Reims area, north-east of Paris. No 2 Group was to have provided the second echelon of eight squadrons, but in the event its aircraft were retained in England. During this early period French support to the AASF was indifferent, but some limited motor transport and rudimentary rations were made available to the British.

Bristol Blenheim

Headquarters No 1 Group also moved to France and became Headquarters AASF. After some early command and control difficulties, both the Air Component and the AASF were merged into a single command structure under Air Marshal Barratt, C-in-C British Air Forces in France. At his disposal were some 328 aircraft and held in reserve in Britain were the RAF's heavy bombers and Fighter Command's air defence assets. Even so, the Anglo-French air forces were effectively outnumbered 6 to 1 by faster and more modern German aircraft.

A series of so-called Western Air Plans (WA) emerged of which the French favoured WA4 an attack on communications targets such as railway marshalling yards, while the British preferred WA 5 an attack on the enemy's industrial centres particularly the Ruhr. However the provision of Target Materials maps, target locations, intelligence on defences and air photographs was problematic, put simply they were virtually nonexistent. The solution was to be found in a clandestine activity funded jointly by the Air desk of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the French Deuxieme Bureau de l'air. These organisations had commenced collecting information on Germany and Italy in late 1938 and through 1939 conducted a programme of covert photographic reconnaissance. Initially they used the America Lockheed 12 aircraft, the forerunner of the U2 spy plane, and then in late 1939 specially modified British Spitfires operating out of secret bases in France. The French with attached RAF personnel then generated the target folders and passed them back to the RAF and the AASF.

- BLITZKRIEG -

Fairey Battles On A French Airstrip

When the “phoney” war turned into a fighting war in May 1940 and the German Blitzkrieg rolled forward into France, Belgium and Holland, the AASF was launched in a desperate effort to curtail the advance. However, despite the dogged determination of the RAF crews, the Fairey Battle was soon found lacking in almost every respect. Loss rates peaked on the 14th of May when 40 out of 71 aircraft failed to return. In the ten days running up to the 20th of May, the RAF lost 195 Hurricanes, 25% of its total fighter inventory.

If things were not going well in the air, events certainly were not much better on the ground and by the end of May a significant proportion of the air effort was directed towards the protection of the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. Operating from bases in France and England, the RAF lost some 120 fighter pilots over the period of the successful Operation Dynamo evacuation.

Dunkirk was not the end of the Battle of France for the RAF and its squadrons progressively fought a fighting retreat across France and into the Brittany Penninsula. As the Germans turned their attention south, the RAF had some 176 aircraft still deployed to France, but was now out numbered by some 20 to 1. Nevertheless, during this period the AASF gave good account of itself particularly during the evacuation of the 51st Division from Le Havre.

On the night of the 11/12 June the RAF conducted its first attack on Italy and a third air element, Force “Haddock”, was deployed with its Wellington bombers to southern France. Initially, the French were reluctant for the force to attack Italy, but after the Italians bombed southern France, the RAF were cleared to engage the enemy.

On the afternoon of the 16th of June the Air Ministry secretly instructed the Air Officer Commanding the RAF in France to evacuate his force and the last operational sortie from French soil was then mounted on the 18th of June. The day before, the Force “Haddock” medium bombers were similarly ordered to evacuate through Marseilles. On the 16th, the Troopship Lancastria was sunk by the Luftwaffe off of St Nazaire and over a thousand RAF personnel perished. Others were more fortunate and were evacuated by air, but it was another month before the bulk of the RAF's personnel and some key equipment had been recovered from a variety of ports such as Brest and La Rochelle.

At the end of the Battle of France, the RAF had lost half its front line strength including 477 fighters, principally Hurricanes. The Spitfire having been husbanded ready for the Battle of Britain. In operations from the 10th of May onwards, the AASF had dropped some 317 tons of bombs in 996 sorties for the loss of 105 aircraft. The total campaign loss being 174 bombers. Over the same period Fighter operations claimed some 185 enemy aircraft destroyed in air combat to which the AASF claimed another 10 enemy aircraft kills. However, more worrying for the RAF was its loss of trained personnel, 680 aircrew and 277 ground crew killed, 235 aircrew taken prisoner. Although the Battle of France had cost the RAF just under 1000 aircraft, the RAF remained confident that armed with RADAR, an integrated air defence system and increasing numbers of Spitfires it could successfully prosecute the Battle of Britain that would undoubtedly follow.

Aasf Operations 1939