Fieseler Fi 156 Storch

In 1935 the German Air Ministry issued a requirement for a Heeresflugzeug — an army-cooperation aircraft for liaison, observation and casualty evacuation — able to work from the smallest, roughest strips near the front line. Three designs competed: the Messerschmitt Bf 163, the Siebel Si 201 and the entry from Gerhard Fieseler Werke of Kassel. Fieseler's design, led by engineers Reinhold Mewes and Erich Bachem, chased not speed but the ability to fly impossibly slow — and won convincingly.

The prototype first flew in 1936, and the aircraft entered service in 1937 as the Fieseler Fi 156. Its tall, spindly, outward-angled undercarriage legs gave it the look of a wading bird, and the name followed: Storch — “Stork.” Behind the ungainly appearance was one of the most remarkable short-field aircraft ever built, and it would still be defeating runways decades after the war that made it famous.

The Storch's magic was in its wing. A long, high-mounted wing of about 26 m² carried fixed leading-edge slats along its entire span, with slotted flaps and drooping ailerons that worked together to generate enormous lift at very low speed. The aircraft stayed in controlled flight at barely 50 km/h, and into a stiff headwind it could hang almost motionless over the ground, or even drift backwards relative to it.

The numbers were astonishing. The Storch needed only about 45–60 m to take off and could stop in roughly 18–20 m — less than its own length in a strong wind. Long-stroke oleo legs with some 40 cm of travel soaked up landings on ploughed fields, roads and mountain meadows that no conventional aircraft could touch, and the wings could be folded back along the fuselage so the machine could be towed behind a car or hidden under trees. It was, in effect, a fixed-wing aircraft with much of the utility later expected of a helicopter.

Power came from a single Argus As 10C air-cooled inverted V8 of about 240 hp — modest, reliable and economical. It gave a top speed of only about 175 km/h and a range near 380 km, but speed was beside the point. A pilot and up to two passengers sat under an extensively glazed, framed “greenhouse” canopy, its panels bulged outward so the observer could look straight down past the wing at the ground below.

In service the Storch did every job an army asked of a light aircraft: liaison between headquarters, artillery observation, battlefield reconnaissance and casualty evacuation — a single stretcher could be slid in through the hinged rear of the cabin. From the invasion of the West in 1940 to the last battles of 1945 it flew on every front the Wehrmacht fought, from Norway to the Western Desert to the Russian steppe, and became the indispensable runabout of the German command — the aircraft a general reached for when he needed to see the battle for himself.

No one used it more famously than Erwin Rommel. In North Africa he ran his fast-moving battles from a Storch, flying low over his own columns to read the ground and appear, unannounced, wherever the fighting was hottest — at Gazala and El Alamein his headquarters was as often in the air as on it. More than once his aircraft was chased or shot up by prowling Allied fighters, and more than once it carried him out of a closing trap.

Generals on every side coveted the type. Captured Storchs became prized personal transports for senior Allied officers — Field Marshal Montgomery flew one taken in the desert, and several American commanders acquired their own — all of them valuing the same short-field magic that let them drop in beside a forward command post. Few aircraft of the war were so widely admired by the men who had to fight against it, and fewer still were so eagerly stolen.

The Storch's single most famous flight came on 12 September 1943. After Mussolini's fall, the new Italian government held him prisoner in a mountain-top hotel on the Gran Sasso, at some 2,100 m and reachable only by cable car — until German commandos struck. Around ninety men landed by DFS 230 gliders under Otto Skorzeny, with a ground column coming up the funicular, and seized the hotel and freed the Duce without a shot being fired.

Getting Mussolini off the mountain fell to a single Storch, flown by Hauptmann Heinrich Gerlach. Gerlach protested that the little aircraft could never lift three men from a rocky slope at that altitude; ordered to try regardless, and overloaded with the burly Skorzeny insisting on climbing aboard as well, he had the Storch manhandled to the lip of the slope, bounced it down the rock-strewn incline and dropped clean off the mountainside before clawing into the air — a takeoff no other aircraft of the war could have survived. It carried Mussolini safely to Rome, and sealed the Storch's legend.

The Storch flew to the very end. On 26 April 1945, with the Red Army closing on the centre of Berlin, the test pilot Hanna Reitsch flew Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim into the burning city in a Storch; with Greim wounded in the foot by flak on the approach, Reitsch took the controls and put the aircraft down on an improvised strip near the Brandenburg Gate so that Hitler could name Greim to succeed Göring — one of the last aircraft to reach the Reich capital.

Production ran to roughly 2,900 aircraft — about 2,550 from German plants, the rest built under licence in occupied France and Czechoslovakia. The design was so sound that it long outlived the Reich: France went on building it after 1945 as the Morane-Saulnier MS.500 Criquet (some 925 made), Czechoslovakia as the Mráz K-65 Čáp, and Storchs flew on with civil and military operators around the world into the 1960s.

The Fieseler Fi 156 Storch was the definitive liaison and short-field aircraft of the Second World War — slow, ungainly and all but unarmed, yet able to go where no other fixed-wing machine could follow. It asked almost nothing of an airfield and gave an army eyes, a courier and an ambulance in a single frame.

Its fame rests less on any one mission than on a capability: the Storch could land almost anywhere and leave again, and it did so on every front for eight years. That it could pluck a deposed dictator off a mountaintop was only the most spectacular proof of a design built, from the first sketch, to defeat the runway.

• William Green, Warplanes of the Third Reich (Macdonald).
• J. Richard Smith & Antony Kay, German Aircraft of the Second World War (Putnam).
• Otto Skorzeny, Skorzeny’s Special Missions — the raider’s account of the Gran Sasso rescue.