Figure 1.--After World War I there was a lot of attention to seaplanes. That may seem strange because except for alaska and remote locations there os today lottle interes in seaplanes. The reason for this is that in the 1920s there were only limited numbers of airports. Even in the 1930s, once you got outside of Western Europe and the United States there were very few airports. But coastal areas and lakes were virtually everywear. This seaplanes could land and take off in the most remote corners of the world. Here we see a seplane in 1931. We are unable to identify it, but it had landed at Châtelaillon-Plage, a beach pn the Bay of Biscay in southwestern France, soth of La Rochelle.
There were several important French aviation companies, but the industry was dominated by several small companies emphazsizing cradtmanship rather than industrial methods. The companies included Latécoère, Morane-Saulnier Amiot, several smaller concerns. The most imprtant was the Société des Avions Marcel Bloch, founded by Marcel Bloch who had invented a type of aircraft propeller used by the French Army during World War I. Bloch with the rise of Hitler began to see the coming crisis. He joined with Henry Potez to purchase the Société Aérienne Bordelaise (SAB), subsequently renamed Société Aéronautique du Sud-Ouest (1935). ThevFrench Popular Front gained sweeping electoral victories (1936). The French Government nationalized the arms industry, including the aviation industry, before World War II (1936). Pierre Cot, Secretary of the French Air Force, decided that national security was too important for the production of war planes to be left in the hands of private companies. (This argument is often used by those critical of socialism and not just in national security circumstances, but compare the history of Government controlled French avaiation to privtely operated American or German aviation from 1936-40). The Government was authorized to seize any firm they thought important. France's nationalized aviation industry became the Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du Sud Ouest (SNCASO). The Government asked Marcel Bloch serve as the Minister for Air. The nationalization did not significantly improve production and some observers suggest it actually set back production schedules. French unions got much of what they wanted as part of the Popular Front Government. Sit-down strikes and the 5-day work week, a major demand of French unions, adversely affected production. The major problem, however, was the failure to adopt mass-production tecniques. Llachmann, p. 471.] The Government set up six large state-owned aircraft manufacturing companies. Budgets were, however, no where near what Hitler was pouring into the Luftwaffe. One limitation was the huge amounts of funds devoted to the Maginot Line. In addition France was a democratic Government with its financing open to public scrutiny. Hitler with his brilliant financeer, Hjalmar Schacht, managed to hide the huge sums being borowed and spent for rearmament.
sources
Lachmann, Kurt. "War and Peace Economics of Aviation," Social Research Vol. 7, No. 4 (Novenber 1940), pp. 468-79.
