While not the best quality photograph, it does present what some today call the “French Stuka”. The aircraft, almost certainly, is the Loire-Nieuport LN.401. If accurate, then the most likely unit for this aircraft would have been Escadrille AB2. This picture was one of many in a collection of a soldier’s personal photographs but who the soldier was and from what unit he was in isn’t known.
The LN.401 was the continued evolution of the earlier LN.40 whose development began in 1936 for a single-seat naval dive bomber. The most notable feature of the LN.40 was its use of inverted gull wings, something the much more well known German Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bomber used as well and so accounts for the modern nickname for the LN.40 series. As a naval aircraft, the inverted gull wing offered several advantages. One, it allowed for better propeller clearance and this was a factor if using a large diameter propeller with a powerful engine but it also provided a buffer zone between the propeller and the carrier deck during landings in rough seas. Related to the need to accommodate landings in adverse conditions, using a inverted gull wing meant that the landing gear did not have to be tall in order to provide propeller clearance. By consequence, the landing gear could be made stronger to absorb rough landings. Another advantage was the ability to carry a large external bomb beneath the fuselage and finally, the overall wing design provided for drag reduction, easier wing folding, and more economical internal wing space. Like many dive bombers of the time, the center-line bomb was connected to a swing arm that ensured the bomb cleared the propeller upon release. The monocoque fuselage was derived from the LN.161, a fighter project that first flew in 1935, and for dive brakes, the LN.40 had a interesting split lower rudder in which the two halves opened up into the slipstream. The landing gear was not fully retractable and instead, was partially nestled into shallow, faired wheel wells. The first LN.40 was completed and flown for the first time on July 6, 1938 and by the close of the month, another four pre-production LN.40 aircraft were delivered for testing. The aircraft successfully conducted carrier trials on the French carrier Béarn but continued flight testing showed that the rudder dive brakes were ineffective and so when the aircraft entered production in 1939 as the LN.401, the dive brakes were eliminated and instead, the expedient method was to simply extend the landing gear doors as a makeshift air brake. Another obvious change in the LN.401 was the addition of vertical fins on the ends of the horizontal stabilizers to boost the surface area of the vertical tail surfaces. The French Aéronavale (French Naval Aviation) ordered an initial thirty-six LN.401 aircraft while the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force) ordered thirty-six of the LN.411. The LN.411 was the LN.401 without the naval additions such as the folding wings, arrestor hook, and emergency raft. As it happened, the Armée de l’Air decided that the LN.411 lacked the performance it desired in a dive bomber and so the LN.411 order was shifted to the Aéronavale.
The LN.401 was powered by a single Type 76 Hispano-Suiza 12Xcrs 12-cylinder, water-cooled Vee engine that developed 690 horsepower at 13,000 feet. This provided a maximum speed at that same altitude of 240mph. The LN.401’s cruise speed was 186mph. All of the fuel was carried in the wing center section and this gave the aircraft an operational range of 750 miles. The maximum service ceiling was 31,200 feet. For armament, a single 20mm Hispano-Suiza HS.404 cannon was fitted between the engine’s cylinder banks and fired through the propeller hub while in each wing was a single 7.5mm Darne machine-gun. The center-line bomb capacity was either one 496 pound BEA M1938 bomb or a single 330 pound Type 12 bomb. Empty, the LN.401 weighed 4,945 pounds with a combat weight of 6,250 pounds.
Aéronavale Escadrille AB2 and Escadrille AB4 were initially equipped with the LN.401 starting in November 1939 but in April 1940, Escadrille AB4 changed over to the LN.411 with AB2 receiving their some of their LN.401 aircraft. By May 10, 1940, AB2 was based at Berck while AB4 was at Cherbourg-Querqueville though AB4 very soon joined AB2 at Berck by mid-May. On May 19, 1940, both units combined put a total of 20 aircraft in the air to attack targets near Berlaimont, some 118 miles west of their Berck airfield. It was a disaster. The flight ran headlong into German flak (anti-aircraft fire) that riddled each and every aircraft. Flak crews claimed ten confirmed kills with the remaining ten aircraft limping back to Berck. So severe was the damage to the surviving aircraft that only three were operational. By May 21, 1940, only a single aircraft was left between the two units. A trickle of new aircraft and successful repairs of the existing planes raised the total to ten aircraft operational by the following day. However, both units moved to the southern coast of France, arriving in Hyères on June 4. From here, the units conducted reconnaissance operations and provided air cover for French Marine Nationale ships shelling Genoa, Italy during Operation Vado from June 13 to June 14, 1940. On June 23, 1940, both units (with a total of eight LN.411 aircraft) left Hyères and arrived in Bône (today Annaba), Algiers where both AB2 and AB4 traded the five LN.411 aircraft that survived the trip and converted to the twin-engine Martin 167 light bomber.
The photograph shows a derelict LN.401 being examined by German soldiers. The likely location was either Berck or Hyères. Souvenir hunters have already cut away the Aéronavale roundel on the fuselage as well as the French state-owned manufacturer (SNCAO;Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques de l’Ouest) and aircraft model stencil that would have been on the rudder. It is missing the landing gear doors and the bent propeller blades suggest it made a hard landing which damaged it and thus was abandoned after some parts were possibly cannibalized to service other aircraft. Both of the wings have been removed and lay on the ground on either side of the aircraft.
As a side note, under German supervision, SNCAO completed twenty-four aircraft, a mixture of LN.401 and LN.411 using a combination of existing components as well as scavenged parts from aircraft that remained in France. All of them were flown to Hyères in March 1942 but were not incorporated into the Armée de l’Air de Vichy. Even so, some modern art pieces and models sometimes show the aircraft in Vichy colors. Twelve of the aircraft were seized by the Germans following Fall Anton (Case Anton) which was the German and Italian occupation of the French Zone Libre (Free Zone) that commenced on November 10, 1942. These aircraft, while put into German markings, were deployed only as airfield decoys and as such, a handful survived the war and saw a very brief service period in the post-war Armée de l’Air.
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