Dewoitine D.520

When Germany came west in May 1940, the Armée de l’Air went up in aircraft that were, for the most part, a generation behind. Its fighter squadrons flew types that could not live with the Messerschmitt Bf 109E, and the collapse that followed has been blamed on French aviation ever since. It is a verdict the D.520 complicates.

Because there was one French fighter that could fight — sleek, small, cannon-armed and genuinely dangerous. The problem was never that France could not design a modern fighter. The problem was when: the D.520 was declared combat-ready in April 1940, roughly one month before the panzers crossed the Meuse.

The aircraft came from Émile Dewoitine’s team and first flew on 2 October 1938. It was compact and light — a wing of just 15.87 m², an empty weight of 2,123 kg — built around a Hispano-Suiza 12Y-49 of about 950 hp. That engine was the design’s ceiling and its gift at the same time: modest power, but a V12 with a hollow crankshaft.

Through that hollow shaft fired the D.520’s real argument: a 20 mm Hispano-Suiza HS.404 cannon, mounted in the engine and firing through the propeller hub, backed by four 7.5 mm MAC 1934 machine guns in the wings. A single hub-mounted cannon needs no convergence and no deflection allowance — it shoots exactly where the nose points. It gave a 950 hp fighter a punch out of all proportion to its size.

The numbers tell the story better than any narrative. By the armistice of June 1940 just 437 D.520s had been built and only 351 delivered — and the type had been cleared for combat barely a month earlier. Groupe de Chasse I/3, the first unit, received thirty-six of them and flew its first engagement on 13 May 1940, three days after the German offensive opened.

Four groupes in all took the D.520 into the Battle of France — GC I/3, II/7, II/6 and the naval escadrille AC 1. Four units, against the whole Luftwaffe, in a battle already being lost on the ground. Whatever the aircraft could do, there were never enough of them, and there was never enough time.

France did not have to guess how the two compared: on 21 April 1940 a captured Bf 109E was flown against a D.520 in direct trials. The verdict was precise. The German fighter was 32 km/h faster, on the strength of its more powerful engine — and the French fighter turned better. It was the same trade the Spitfire and the Emil made over England, on a smaller engine and a shorter timescale.

In the six weeks that followed, the D.520 units claimed 114 air victories plus 39 probables, for 85 D.520s lost. In a campaign that was, by any measure, a catastrophe, a handful of squadrons on an aircraft they had barely learned to fly came out roughly even against the best fighter force in the world. It is the strongest evidence there is that the French defeat in the air was not a defeat of French design.

No aircraft carries the strangeness of France’s war like the D.520, and no pilot carries it like Pierre Le Gloan. He ended the war the fourth-highest French ace, with 18 victories — and almost all of them scored in a D.520. The breakdown is what stops you: four Germans, seven Italians, and seven British.

The same man, in the same type of aircraft, shot down three different air forces — not because he changed his mind, but because the war changed sides around him. He fought the Germans in 1940; then the armistice made Italy an adversary in the south and Britain an enemy of Vichy; and so he fought the Italians, and then the British over Syria. The D.520’s combat record is not a national record at all. It is a record of a country coming apart.

The armistice did not end the D.520 — it multiplied it. 165 were flown out to North Africa; under the 1941 agreement Vichy was permitted to build 180 more, bringing total production to about 905. They fought the RAF over Syria in 1941, and the Americans during Operation Torch in November 1942 — French fighters shooting at the Allies they had been designed to help.

Then Germany took them. When the Wehrmacht occupied the southern zone in November 1942 it seized 246 D.520s and completed 62 more, using them mostly as fighter trainers; about 60 went to Italy’s Regia Aeronautica and roughly a hundred to Bulgaria. France’s best fighter spent more of its life in the hands of its enemies than of its makers — and flew on so long afterwards that the last operational flight came on 3 September 1953.

The D.520 is the answer to a question that is usually asked rhetorically: could French industry build a fighter to match the Bf 109? It could, and it did, and the aircraft went into service one month before the country it was built to defend ceased to exist. Slower than the Emil by 32 km/h, better in a turn, armed with a cannon that fired through the propeller — it was a real fighter, in a war that gave it six weeks.

What it lacked was everything around it: numbers, time, doctrine, and a front that held. Judged as a machine it was among the good fighters of 1940. Judged by what happened to it — flown against Germans, Italians, British and Americans in turn, then handed to the Luftwaffe as a trainer — it is something rarer: the clearest artefact there is of what the fall of France actually meant.

• William Green, Warplanes of the Second World War (Macdonald).
• Christopher Shores, Brian Cull & Nicola Malizia, Fledgling Eagles: Air Operations during the Phoney War and the Battle of France, 1940 (Grub Street).
• Barry Ketley, French Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• Bill Gunston, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Combat Aircraft of World War II (Salamander Books).