H75 "HAWK"

Although the P-36 saw very little combat in American hands, the Curtiss fighter was to see quite a bit of combat in foreign hands. In fact, it is one of the few military aircraft actually to see combat on BOTH sides during the Second World War.

The largest foreign operator of the Hawk was the Armee de l'Air, the French Air Force. Next to the Morane-Saulnier M.S.406, the Curtiss Hawk was numerically the most important fighter in French service during the German onslaught into Western Europe in May of 1940.

In February 1938, two months before the first P-36A had rolled off the Buffalo assembly lines for the USAAC, the French government entered into negotiations with the Curtiss company for the supply of 300 fighters of the Hawk 75A type which Curtiss had offered to the Armee de l'Air. The Hawk 75A was an export version of the P-36A, and was being offered for sale with either the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp or the Wright Cyclone engine.

However, the unit price asked by Curtiss was considered exorbitant by the French--almost twice as high as that of the Morane-Saulnier M.S.406. In addition, the proposed delivery schedule commencing in March of 1939 with 20 planes and continuing at a rate of 30 planes per month was considered totally unacceptable. Furthermore, the USAAC was itself unhappy with the Curtiss company's inability to meet delivery schedules for its P-36As, and felt that the French sale would only slow things up still more. Consequently, the USAAC opposed the French sale.

Nevertheless, the rapidity of German rearmament made the modernization of the Armee de l'Air's equipment a matter of the utmost urgency, so the French persisted with the negotiations. As a result of the direct intervention of President Roosevelt, a leading French test pilot, Michel Detroyat was permitted to fly a Y1P-36 service test prototype at Wright Field in March of 1938. He submitted a thoroughly enthusiastic report. In addition, Curtiss suggested that more acceptable delivery schedules could be offered if the French government would finance the construction and equipping of supplementary assembly facilities.

The French still felt that the unit price was too high, and on April 28, 1938 they decided to delay their decision until the completion of the test trials of the Bloch MB-150, the quoted price of which was scarcely half that of the Curtiss fighter. However, the MB-150 was suffering an extensive series of teething troubles (the first prototype couldn't even fly!) and had been subjected to a succession of modifications for nearly two years. By mid-1938, it was felt that the Bloch fighter's main problems had been overcome. However, it was soon realized that in order to adapt the design for mass production, a complete structural redesign would have to take place.

The rework of the Bloch MB-150 would obviously be a costly and time- consuming process, and time was something the Armee de l'Air did not have. Consequently, on May 17, 1938 the Minister for Air announced that the French would acquire the Curtiss Hawk, and that a French purchasing commission was instructed to order 100 Hawk airframes and 173 Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engines. The contract stipulated that the first Hawk should be flown at Buffalo by November 25, 1938 and that the 100-th plane should be delivered by April 10, 1939.