allied air forces detroyed on the ground...

allied airforces destroyed on the ground ...why is it that so many allied af.s were rubbed out on the ground....hickam ,clark feild 1941...java ,singapore...the french af 1940 ...red af barbarossa ...were all these comanders asleep ...how come this kinda thing never seemed to happen to the bad guys...?

 

In most cases it was down to lack of radar and a too low state of alert.

 

The French Air Force wasn't destroyed on the ground in 1940 AFAIK.

As for why, well the Good Guys weren't the ones launching the surprise attacks...

(Not wishing to be controversial, but this only occured after I typed that, the same happened to the Iraqi Air Force didn't it? )

 

Polish AF was not destroyed on the ground. They tranferred entire AF on small auxiliary airfields. Becouse of that the lacked adequate facilities and supplies. They managed to inflict huge losses to the germans.

Royal Yugoslav AF (1941) was also mostly transfered on the auxiliary airfields one day before the attack. Most of the AF thus escaped first strike, but suffered considerable losses becouse of inadequate tactics used (figter formations too small, unescorted bombers used on medium hights...). Even so they managed to couse considerable damage to the Germans in few brief days weather allowed flying.

French AF was far from being destroyed on the ground. At the end of the campaign FrAF had more modern planes than at the beggining of the capaign.

 

Yes, but I seem to recall that due to beaurocratic incompetence very few had actually been deployed to operational units.

 

Acctualy it was not beaurocraty but rather the fact that FrAF was cought up in the war in the middle of modernisation. If you remember first units equped with ultramoden D-520 and Bloch 151 series fighters were just declared combat ready on 10 of may 1940, same was with few attack units that recived Breguet Br-690AB series or bomber units that just started to recive new bombers (Amiot 350 series, LeO-45 series) and were mustering old planes ( Bloch 210, Amiot-143) from the units in the middle of the battle.

German were luck in this respect same happened in SSSR. Regimets reciving new generation of planes (Yak-1, MiG-3, LaGG-3, Il-2, Pe-2...) just started retraining on new eqipment or just got the planes. So first strike had to be stopped by older planes stationed in western military districts.

 

According to one source, the RAF lost only 20 serviceable fighters on the ground during the whole of the Battle of Britain

 

Don't know the exact figures on that but, going back to my previous point, the RAF had both radar + a high state of alert.

 

tiso ..the french had more modern ac at the end of the battle of france than at the beginning ? it must have greatly warmed the hearts of the british people to see the many tens of hundreds of brave french airman landing their modern warplanes at biggun hill and kent in the spring of 1940...where ever did they find ramp space and billets for all of them?

 

No - most of them remained in the French Air Force after France signed a Peace Treaty.

Some later had a few dogfights with Allied fighters during Operation Torch - but by then they were no longer 'Modern'.

 

IIRC quite a few Japanese planes were destroyed on the ground at Truk and Rabaul on different occasions.

 

I think that later in the war the same applied to the Luftwaffe - when the American escort fighters got the go-ahead to strafe airfields etc.

 

D-520 for example were confiscated in large numbers by Germans and Italians. Germans used them as fighter trainers and sold some of them to Bulgaria (where they flew against B-24's). Some D-520's were later confiscated back (after Normandy) and flew against Germans as part of Grupe Doret. Same was with H-75A's they were sold to Finland (Suomi ). Some MS-406 were sold to Croatia and Finland.
Fate of new generation of French bombers was different. They were used exclusevly by Germans. Also according to armistice which alloved limited aircraft production some types were prohibited (Amiot 350 series, LeO-45 series)

Basicly French Aircraft industry was in retooling phase during sietzkrieg and started large mass production of new planes in late 1939/early 1940. If Germans would wait for about 6 onths (or even less) FrAF would be more modern than Luftwaffe.

As i said units were reequping on new planes during the battle. Best example were GB's (Gruppe de Bombardement). At the beggining of the campaign they were mostly equiped with old bombers (Amiot 143M and MB-210) and had one or two new planes for training purposes. Loses during the campaign were replaced with new types (LeO-45 series and Amiot 350 series). This created problem as crews were not trained on these types and that led to small number of missions flown by these new types. Other consequence of this was that number of new planes were not even taken on the strenght by FrAF since they lacked trained crews (similar to Germany in late 1944/early 1945 period). With other word French were producing new planes in greater rate than they were capable to use/crew them.

Another AF that was in middle of reorganisation and reequipment was small Polish AF. PAF was just reorganising and centralising. For example battle of Bzura was only possible by the fact that one army commanders did not yet turned over his light bombers to bomber brigade and was able to use them as recce planes montoring movement of Germans. Poles also had numer of new types of planes that were in the phase of getting into production (PZL P-46Sum, P-43 Jazstreb...) but were slow in getting production going. Also their production of P-37Los bombers (probably The best bomber in 1939) was incredibly slow.