Airpower over the Rhine is a critical new perspective on the air battle between the French Air Force (FAF) and the Luftwaffe in the skies over France during May and June 1940. Why were the French overpowered in the air? What factors led to their defeat? Author James F. Slaughter III examines how each country’s leadership created the circumstances that enabled the Luftwaffe’s victory over the FAF and Germany’s ultimate defeat of France.

Conventional wisdom—especially in the English-speaking world—purports that the FAF was a nonentity whose loss was all but guaranteed. But the FAF did, in fact, show up to fight. With virtually every disadvantage and under impossible conditions, FAF pilots nevertheless managed to land significant blows against the Luftwaffe—far more than they are given credit for today. Slaughter traces this misconception to a largely collaborationist cover-up beginning with the Rion Trials in Vichy France that was then perpetuated by Cold War politics and popular mythology.

Rather than absence or incompetence, the FAF lost due to a series of complex internal conflicts within French leadership, both political and military, that set them up to fail. This work compares and examines six fundamental areas that affected the development of the FAF and the Luftwaffe: aircraft and equipment, the aircraft industries, intelligence, the experiences of the Spanish Civil War, doctrine and training, and politics and air power. It also offers new details about and insights into Pierre Cot, a controversial French politician largely unknown outside France. Airpower over the Rhine explains Cot’s internal and external impact on the development of the French Air Force and details what is known about his apparent efforts to spy for the Soviet Union. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in World War II.