The Alpha Nazi: The Killer of Tanks

Hans-Ulrich Rudel was born in 1916 in Konradswaldau, Prussia. The third child of a Lutheran minister, Rudel did poorly in school. However, he was a skilled woodsman. 

At age eight, young Hans-Ulrich broke his leg jumping off a roof with an umbrella. Rudel joined the Hitler Youth in 1933 at age 17 and liked what he heard. As soon as he was able Rudel signed up for the Luftwaffe.

During the 1939 invasion of Poland, Rudel served as an aerial observer, flying his first combat missions on long-range reconnaissance flights over Polish military installations. Following the successful invasion, he served in a training regiment based in Vienna. In 1941 Rudel completed training as a Ju87 Stuka pilot.

In June of 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union with some 3.8 million troops. This marked the largest military invasion in human history. One of those 3.8 million men was Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Rudel found that he had a gift behind the controls of the Stuka dive bomber.

On the morning of September 21, 1941, the Soviet battleship Marat sat moored at Kronstadt after having provided naval gunfire support for Soviet troops defending Leningrad. Rudel piloted his Stuka dive bomber as part of a flight tasked with taking out this hulking Soviet dreadnaught. Several Stukas drove home the attack, but Rudel’s scored. He struck the massive Soviet vessel with a 1,000kg (2,200lb) bomb vicinity of the forward superstructure. 

The resulting explosion detonated the forward ammunition magazine, blowing the bow off the ship. The vessel sank into 11 meters of water. 326 Russian sailors were killed. With a whopping six months’ experience as a Stuka pilot, Hans-Ulrich Rudel had bagged himself a battleship.

For the next two and one half years Rudel flew with the same gunner/observer, Erwin Henschel. Both men were awarded the Knight’s Cross for their heroism in fighting the Russian hordes in the East. Hentschel eventually flew 1,400 sorties seated behind Rudel as he hunted tanks across the Eastern Front. 

On March 21, 1944, Rudel and Hentschel landed behind enemy lines in an attempt to rescue a downed German aircrew. However, their Stuka bogged down in the Russian mud. As they evaded back towards friendly forces on foot they were forced to cross a swollen river. Erwin Hentschel drowned in the attempt.

The Plane

Stuka is short for Sturzkampfflugzeug or “dive bomber.” The Germans always had a gift for breathtakingly complex words of that sort. Design efforts began in 1933, and the Ju 87 Stuka was declared operational four years later. An unusually sturdy, robust design, the Ju87’s landing gear was fixed and faired. The Stuka was one of the world’s earliest all-metal cantilevered combat monoplanes. It featured a crew of two who entered through separate sliding canopies. The plane was designed from the outset to be readily maintainable in austere environments.

Most Stukas featured an inverted-Vee Junkers Jumo 211 water-cooled 12-cylinder engine that put out up to 1,400 horsepower. Large airframe segments were designed to be exchangeable in the field. Offensive armament on most early Stukas consisted of a pair of MG17 7.92mm machineguns fitted in each wing outboard of the landing gear to fire clear of the propellor arc. The observer had a single 7.92mm MG15 facing rearward for defensive use.

Dive bombing put a simply terrific strain on both the Stuka and its crew. Realizing that the g-forces involved could render a pilot unconscious, the Ju87 incorporated a novel automatic pull-out system into the flight controls. Upon release of the bomb, the plane initiated an automatic pull-out and climb maneuver. The pilot could override this function, but this kept the crew flying if they were incapacitated during their attack run.

The Stuka’s most obvious anatomical feature was its enormous gull wing structure. This inverted gull or “cranked” design facilitated shorter, stronger landing gear and afforded better visibility for the crew. A trapeze-like mechanism pivoted the bomb underneath the propellor arc upon release. On the receiving end, the most compelling aspect of the design was the propellor-driven “Jericho trumpet” siren. These psychological weapons struck terror in troops subjected to the marauding Stukas.

The Tank Buster

As the war in the East ground on it became clear that the primary threat was the swarming mass of Russian armor. Mass-produced T34 tanks soon began to overwhelm the Wehrmacht. In response, German designers produced the Ju87G, a dedicated tank-buster variant of the Stuka. The Germans called this heavily-armored plane the “Kanonenvogel” or “Cannon Bird.” Ground troops called it the “Panzerknacker” or “Tank Cracker.”

The Ju87G carried a pair of forward-firing 30mm cannons along with a 1,000kg bomb load. Defensive armament was upgraded to the two-barrel 7.92mm MG81Z machinegun system firing rearward. The most remarkable addition, however, arose from a suggestion by Rudel himself.

German engineers mounted two Flak 18 37mm autoloading cannons underneath the wings in faired gondolas. Each gun fed from a pair of integral 6-round, clip-fed magazines and fired Armor-Piercing Composite Rigid (APCR) rounds sporting hardened tungsten carbide cores. The official title of this weapon was the Bordkanon 3,7. This literally translates to “On-Board Cannon 37mm.”

Each Bordkanon 3,7 weighed 650 pounds and was 11 feet 11 inches long. These fully automatic weapons operated via a short recoil action but cycled at a remarkably sedate 160 rounds per minute. The maximum effective range of these guns was considered to be around 500 meters.

The goal of the Ju87G armed with the Bordkanon 3,7 was to produce a cost-effective method for killing Soviet tanks in large quantities. German tanks were expensive as was the large-caliber armor-piercing ammunition they fired. Most importantly, however, was that in tank-versus-tank engagements, enemy tanks were presenting their most resilient aspects.

By contrast, in the hands of an experienced ground-attack pilot like Rudel, the Ju87G allowed a top-attack profile wherein an armored vehicle might be hit through the roof where it was most vulnerable by these relatively inexpensive 37mm rounds. However, the system suffered from relatively poor accuracy. The bulbous external pods also seriously degraded the Stuka’s performance, leaving it vulnerable to attack by Soviet fighters.

The Final Score

During the course of his four-year career, Rudel flew 2,530 combat missions. 430 of those were undertaken in the ground attack variants of the Fw190 fighter. The rest were at the controls of a Stuka.

Rudel ultimately destroyed 519 tanks, four armored trains, and more than 800 military vehicles. He took out 150 artillery emplacements along with numerous bridges and supply installations. In addition to the Soviet battleship Marat, he also destroyed a cruiser, a destroyer, and seventy landing craft. Along the way, he was credited with 51 aerial victories, 42 of which were fighter types along with 7 Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik ground-attack machines.

Rudel was shot down 30 times and personally rescued six stranded German aircrews from the enemy-held territory. He was wounded five times. On February 8, 1945, just three months before the end of the war, Rudel was badly hit in his right foot. He successfully coaxed his plane back to friendly lines with the help of his observer, but his leg was amputated below the knee. Six weeks later Rudel was back flying combat missions with a prosthesis.

On December 29, 1944, Rudel was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Rudel was the only German soldier of the war to be so decorated.

The Rest of the Story

At the end of the war, Rudel hopped a plane and flew to American-held territory to surrender. Despite official requests, the Americans refused to hand him over to the Soviets. In 1948 he immigrated to Argentina covertly.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s feats of arms during World War 2 will never be bested. Major Richard Bong, the leading American ace of the war, rotated home with forty aerial victories. In the US military, successful pilots were taken out of combat roles and sent home to sell war bonds or train future generations of pilots. By contrast, German pilots flew until the war ended or they were killed. This is what allowed Luftwaffe aces to run up such astronomical kill counts.

Rudel remained an unrepentant Nazi until his death. While in Argentina he supported and befriended escaped Nazi war criminals through a close relationship with Argentinian President Juan Peron and the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner. He founded Kameradenwerk or “Comrades Act,” a relief organization for German war criminals.

Rudel assisted notorious death camp physician, Dr. Josef Mengele, to resettle and wrote several books that were overtly sympathetic to the Nazi cause. He made a good living as a military advisor and arms dealer in Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile. Rudel even served as a technical advisor during the development of the American A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft. Later in his life, Rudel became a pariah at public events due to his vocal National Socialist views.

Rudel was married three times, in each case to a woman named Ursula, and fathered three sons. In 1970 he suffered a stroke. Twelve years later he had a second embolic event that was fatal. 

A pair of West German Phantom jets flew low over his grave during Rudel’s funeral. An outcry erupted later over Bundeswehr tactical aircraft paying tribute to an unrepentant Nazi. However, German Air Force officers claimed that the cemetery was underneath a popular military training route and that the timing of the flyby was random.

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