At ten past six on the evening of 24 June 1940, east of Valence, Adjudant Jean Marchelidon spotted a lone aircraft flying up the Rhône. It fired at him, he saw black crosses, and after four passes a Henschel Hs 126 went down. France’s war in the air was hours from its end, and that Henschel was the last victory of the 1939-40 campaign. Marchelidon was flying a Morane-Saulnier MS.406.

It was a fitting last word. The MS.406 was the first truly modern fighter of the Armée de l’Air, and more than 1,000 were delivered before the armistice, which made the Morane the most numerous French fighter of that disastrous year. It was also outclassed by the time the real shooting started. Yet the story does not end in the burning French spring. In Finland the old Morane was reborn with a captured Soviet engine, and in Switzerland it was built under licence and flown until 1959.

This is the story of a fighter that arrived in numbers, fought bravely, lost badly, and then found a second life in two small countries that could not afford to be choosy.

A Monoplane for a Biplane Air Force

The story begins with a 1934 requirement for a modern single-seat fighter. Morane-Saulnier, a famous name from the First World War that had spent the inter-war years building parasol monoplanes, answered with the MS.405: a low-wing monoplane with an enclosed cockpit, a retractable undercarriage, flaps and a variable-pitch propeller. To some of the old guard these were mere gadgets.

The prototype flew on 8 August 1935, in the hands of the celebrated aerobatic pilot Michel Détroyat. It was easy to fly, forgiving and wonderfully manoeuvrable. At Brussels in 1937 it was presented, with more pride than prudence, as the best fighter in the world.

Under the modern lines sat an old-fashioned structure, a tubular framework clothed in a mix of fabric and metal-and-wood panels. Power came from a Hispano-Suiza 12Y-31 V-12 of 860 hp, giving a top speed of roughly 490 km/h. The armament was very French: a 20 mm cannon nestled between the cylinder banks and firing through the propeller hub, plus two drum-fed 7.5 mm MAC 1934 machine guns in the wings.

The weaknesses were baked in from the start. The semi-retractable radiator under the belly caused drag when lowered and overheating when raised, the wing guns had no heating and froze at altitude, and there was no armour and no self-sealing fuel tank. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Hawker Hurricane both had engines with roughly a fifth more power.

Building a Fighter Force in a Hurry

France was rearming late, and in 1938 it ordered more than 1,000 Moranes in a matter of weeks. Production was spread across the newly nationalised industry, with final assembly at Morane-Saulnier’s Puteaux works and at SNCAO in western France. According to the historians Christian-Jacques Ehrengardt and Kari Stenman, the simple-looking MS.406 still took about twice as many man-hours to build as a Bf 109.

How many were built? The answer depends on whom you ask. Ehrengardt and Stenman count 1,077 MS.406s taken on charge by the Armée de l’Air before the armistice and admit the figure is still debated; other references give slightly lower totals. Every serious count is above 1,000, and no other French fighter of 1940 reached that number.

By the outbreak of war in September 1939 the Morane equipped ten frontline groupes de chasse in metropolitan France. It was the backbone of French fighter defence, and the Dewoitine D.520 that was meant to replace it was still months away.

The Drôle de Guerre

The French called the quiet months after September 1939 the drôle de guerre, the Phoney War. For Morane pilots strung out along the frontier it was anything but funny. They escorted reconnaissance aircraft, chased high-flying intruders they could rarely catch, and every so often tangled with Bf 109s.

Between September 1939 and April 1940, according to Ehrengardt and Stenman, Morane pilots claimed 27 German aircraft, 25 of them confirmed, for 18 Moranes destroyed by the enemy and six pilots killed. In a turning fight the Morane could hold its own, and morale was still high.

The flaws were already showing, though. Guns jammed or froze above 4,000 m, and engines overheated when pilots pushed them to catch fast German bombers.

May 1940: Courage Against Arithmetic

When the German offensive broke on 10 May 1940, the Moranes did better than many feared on the first day, claiming 21 confirmed victories for eight aircraft lost in combat. Then the Bf 109Es arrived in strength, flying higher, diving faster and refusing to turn. As one French pilot put it, turning does not win a dogfight.

Against the Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 bombers, two rifle-calibre guns and a 60-round cannon were simply too little. Small French patrols met large German formations, and retreating units burned aircraft they could not move.

Losses are hard to pin down because the post-armistice census was unreliable. Estimates range from about 300 to roughly 400 Moranes lost to all causes, many of them on the ground or abandoned. The tally on the other side of the ledger, by the French count, is around 190 confirmed victories for MS.406 units between September 1939 and the armistice, though published totals vary.

There were aces all the same. According to Ehrengardt and Stenman, Sergent Édouard Le Nigen of GC III/3 was credited with 12 victories in the Morane, and future stars such as Pierre Le Gloan shared kills in it before moving on to faster machines. Marchelidon’s Henschel on 24 June, the day before the armistice took effect, closed the account.

Vichy, the Colonies and the Long Afterlife

After the armistice the Morane was withdrawn from front-line service in France itself, but it soldiered on in the colonies under the Vichy flag. It fought Thai and Japanese aircraft over Indochina, Commonwealth fighters over Syria and Lebanon in 1941, and the Fleet Air Arm over Madagascar in 1942.

The Germans captured large numbers but had little use for them except as currency, passing them on to allies such as Croatia and, above all, Finland.

Finland and the Mörkö-Morane

Finland needed fighters desperately when the Soviet Union attacked in November 1939. France sent 30 MS.406s, and they reached Lentolaivue 28 in February 1940, too late to change the Winter War but not too late to fight in it. By Kari Stenman’s count the squadron flew 288 sorties and claimed 14 victories for the loss of one aircraft.

In the Continuation War from 1941 the Finns gathered more Moranes from German war booty and, in July 1942, bought 30 directly from Vichy France. Against Soviet aircraft they did far better than they ever had against the Luftwaffe. Urho Lehtovaara became the top Morane ace of any air force, with 14 or 15 of his victories in the type depending on the count.

Then came the clever part. Finland had captured stocks of the Soviet Klimov M-105P, itself a descendant of the Hispano-Suiza 12Y that powered the Morane. It fitted the same space but gave about 1,100 hp instead of 860. The first converted aircraft, MS-631, flew in early 1943, and the conversions carried a German 20 mm MG 151 cannon or, when those ran short, a captured Soviet 12.7 mm gun.

The Finns called it the Mörkö-Morane, the bogeyman Morane. It was faster, climbed better and reached the front only in July 1944. Only three victories were ever credited to the Mörkö, all to Staff Sergeant Lars Hattinen, who by Stenman’s account became the last Finnish pilot to make ace in the wars with the Soviet Union.

All 41 remaining Finnish Moranes were eventually converted. They served as advanced trainers until 1948 and the last were scrapped in 1952.

The Swiss Moranes: D-3800 and D-3801

Switzerland saw the Morane early and liked what it saw. In September 1938 the first of two pattern aircraft flew from Villacoublay to Switzerland, and licence production followed. The Swiss did not simply copy it. They fitted locally built belt-fed machine guns in place of the drum-fed French weapons, which removed the wing bulges and the freezing problem.

According to the Swiss Armed Forces, 82 D-3800s were built, the first batch by the federal construction works at Thun and the rest by the federal aircraft factory at Emmen. They joined the Bf 109Es of the Swiss Fliegertruppe in the tense neutrality patrols of 1940, when German aircraft repeatedly crossed into Swiss airspace.

When France fell, the Swiss carried on alone. The D-3801 took the MS.412 development, with a more powerful Hispano-Suiza 12Y-51 of roughly 1,000 hp, and pushed the top speed to around 530 km/h. The prototype flew in October 1940, and 207 were built during the war at Emmen, Doflug Altenrhein and SWS in Schlieren, with more assembled from spares afterwards.

Counting the two pattern aircraft, the Swiss Air Force lists 291 Moranes in its records. The type served from 1939 until 1959, latterly as a trainer and target tug, two full decades of Morane flying in Swiss skies.

One still flies. D-3801 c/n 194, built in 1942 and serving as J-143, was rebuilt from the remains of several airframes and today wears the registration HB-RCF, operated by the Association Morane Charlie Fox. It is one of the rare chances anywhere to hear a Hispano-Suiza V-12 in a Morane airframe.

A Fighter of Its Time

Against the Bf 109E in May 1940 the MS.406 was plainly outmatched, but that judgement misses most of its story. It gave the Armée de l’Air a modern fighter force in numbers when it had almost none, and its pilots made the Luftwaffe pay for its victory.

In Finnish hands it became a bomber killer and then a bogeyman. In Swiss hands it guarded a neutral sky until the jet age. Not bad, mes amis, for an airframe of fabric, tubes and plywood that was already outdated on the day it went to war.

Sources: Christian-Jacques Ehrengardt and Kari Stenman, Morane-Saulnier MS.406 Aces (Osprey Aircraft of the Aces 121), Swiss Armed Forces (history of retired Swiss Air Force equipment), History of War, European Airshows, Verkehrshaus der Schweiz, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-kuva).

Header photo: Sot.virk. H. Roivainen / SA-kuva (Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive), CC BY 4.0, cropped