Just wanted to say
a) sorry for the rants and if I discouraged the OP
b) I have no axe to grind, neither political or something else
c) I'm really not pessimistic by nature, on the contrary
All this carefully considered, I swear the situation of the French aircraft industry, pre-WWII, was an hopeless mess.
Don't be fooled by the cute prototypes or combat aircraft (there were some very good ones, admittedly: D-520, Breguets)- it was a few trees masking an amazonian-size forrest of miseries.
I'm not even sure they could have saved the May 1940 situation even with tactical nukes. They would have been unable to drop them on Rommel panzers... because they didn't knew where on Earth where they !
"Somewhere between Sedan (May 13) and Abbeville (May 19)"... but that's 250 km across northern France !
I kid you not: nobody in Paris, May 16, 1940, knew where was Rommel and the other 7 panzer divisions - and where did they intended to strike - Paris or elsewhere.
It was a complete mess. No surprise you British saw PM Reynaud and Gamelin deputy Alphonse Georges crying like kids.
