I think you have that backwards, it was fascists, not communists, that were sabotaging aircraft.
No, it was Communists, not Fascists.
An excerpt from
State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry
(Part three, Chapter seven)
"As if all this were not enough to weaken the spirit of national unity, the last week of August 1939 brought one more blow—the Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact. Its announcement stunned public opinion in France, as it did everywhere, and bewildered the French Communist Party. By the end of September Communist militants found themselves having to accept an almost incomprehensible change in political line—defending the pact, condemning the Daladier regime, and calling for peace in a war they were suddenly required by the Comintern to portray as a rivalry between imperialist powers. After years of serving as the staunchest advocates of antifascism, the PCF had to become a pro-peace party. This shift created havoc in the CGT, compromised militants, and gave the Daladier government an excuse to ban the party, close down Communist newspapers, dismiss more than twenty-seven hundred Communist municipal councillors, deprive PCF senators and deputies of their seats, dissolve hundreds of Communist-led CGT locals, and arrest about thirty-four hundred militants.
...
Of course, the Nazi-Soviet Pact greatly compounded their troubles. The full scope of the catastrophe took a while to comprehend, partly because it took several weeks for the PCF to adopt the Stalinist line of opposing the war and partly because some militants did not face up to the brutal reality of the pact until the Soviet army invaded Poland on 17 September. Once the party fell into line with the Comintern, Communist militants at the plant level faced agonizing choices—to abandon the party altogether, to stick with the party but ignore as much as possible the call to oppose the war effort, or to adhere to the party strategy of opposing the "Imperialist war." Some militants, though dismayed by the pact, nevertheless felt compelled to close ranks behind the party at a time when the PCF was under such brutal governmental attack. A few militants may have had the ironic good fortune of a Henri Jourdain, who after eluding the police in Paris went to Marseille for naval duty, where he remained isolated from the party leadership, unable to get underground copies of
L'Humanité and ignorant of the pro-peace position of the party during the phoney war. Most militants, however, were put in an untenable position politically and forced into either internment, clandestine activities, or a quiet withdrawal from trade union politics. Their influence in the factories diminished accordingly.
But their influence did not disappear entirely. Militants met secretly, distributed tracts anonymously, and supported workers in efforts to protest working conditions through slowdowns and a few rare work stoppages. Many militants followed the pragmatic tactic of remaining silent on political issues while encouraging workers to defend their immediate interests. Military officials in the Paris region reported brief slowdown strikes at the Renault-Caudron plant in Issy-les-Moulineaux as well as at Bréguet in Aubervillier and SNCM in Argenteuil. Police officials believed Communist agitators lay behind a discernible decline in output at SNCASE in Villacoublay, as in several other armament factories. But it is hard to say how much moral authority Communist militants really wielded during the phoney war in the company of the skilled workers who had followed their lead since 1936. The police and the military have left only a sporadic record of political activity in the factories, and their reports are undoubtedly colored by the anti-Communist hyperbole that was characteristic of these months. It is certainly safe to say that many Communist militants contributed to the atmosphere of disaffection, distrust, and resentment that the government's tough labor policies produced throughout the defense sector. As one police official reported, "Up to now [revolutionary propaganda] does not seem to reach the mass of the working population. . . . However, it finds a sympathetic hearing among factory workers, especially in aircraft construction." It is not surprising to find government officials concerned with the continuing presence of the PCF in the most strategically sensitive of defense industries, the one in which the party had done so well before the general strike of 1938. Nevertheless, repression and the Nazi-Soviet Pact kept Communists in the shadows, limiting what militants could accomplish as agitators on the shop floor.
However torn many Communists may have felt between their responsibility to defend the new pro-peace position and their Popular Frontist commitments to national defense—and many of them must have felt conflicted indeed—few militants went so far as to engage in sabotage in the aircraft industry. To be sure, there were plenty of rumors about sabotage to keep the military police busy, and on rare occasions such rumors had something to them. In May 1940 six young workers at SNCAC were arrested for allegedly placing brass wires in twenty Gnôme-et-Rhône engines. In Bordeaux rolled-up copies of the left-wing newspaper
Populaire bordelaiswere discovered hidden within a wing to disrupt flap motion. Prosecutors at Riom turned up about a half-dozen cases of this sort. One air force official reported graffiti on factories walls reminding readers "that one hour delay at work is an hour won for the victory of the proletariat." Police surveillance undoubtedly had some effect. Moreover, subtle slowdowns by stealthy militants could have escaped the attention of policemen and supervisors; right-wing critics of the government asserted that they were common. But in fact PCF leaders were not inclined to promote sabotage, and on two occasions clandestine issues of
L'Humanité condemned rumors of desertion and sabotage as "provocations." The errors of new workers who were inexperienced, overworked, and poorly trained posed a much more serious problem than did the efforts of a few saboteurs.
If the PCF's stance toward war production turned out in practice to be ambiguous—condemning the war but repudiating sabotage—employers and government officials tried hard to isolate militants. Repression ranged from dismissal of Communist militants from the administrative councils of the national companies to mass firings and reassignments to the army. In his defense at the Riom trial La Chambre went so far as to contend that Daladier's decision to dissolve the Communist Party "had its origins" in La Chambre's warnings about the strength of the PCF in the aircraft industry. From September through June military police rooted out workers suspected of slowing down production. And nonCommunist personnel were by no means immune. In a major purge at SNCM, the nationalized engine-building firm, only 51 of the 102 employees fired or reassigned to the army were so treated "for Communist propaganda." Socialist militants, in fact, also complained of the reprisals they endured. Spanish refugees suffered especially cruel treatment since many of them had taken jobs in the aircraft plants of southwestern France and, as anarchists and Communists, were then thrown into internment camps after the outbreak of war. But for the most part the Air Ministry directed its efforts against French Communists; as late as June 1940 two hundred "Communist leaders considered the most dangerous" to the industry were arrested.
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