Junkers Ju 52/3m

The Ju 52 belongs to an older idea than the war it fought. Hugo Junkers had built all-metal aircraft since 1915, and his firm’s signature was the skin: corrugated duralumin, folded into ridges so that the covering carried load instead of merely enclosing the structure. It was heavy and it was draggy, and it made the aeroplane almost impossible to break.

The first Ju 52 of 1930 had a single engine and was not much wanted. Adding two more on the wings produced the Ju 52/3m in April 1932, and that aircraft found its market at once: an airliner that could carry seventeen passengers, take off from a grass field, be maintained by a mechanic with ordinary tools and keep flying on two engines. Lufthansa built its network on it, and by the mid-1930s it was flying in a dozen countries.

In July 1936 the Spanish army in Morocco rose against the Republic and found itself on the wrong side of the Strait of Gibraltar, with the fleet largely loyal to the government. Germany answered a request for help with aircraft: twenty Ju 52/3m and six He 51 fighters reached Morocco on 28 July, and the first loads flew the following day.

What followed had never been done. By 11 October 1936 the aircraft had flown 868 sorties and carried 13,900 men of the Army of Africa — Legion and Regulares, the best troops Franco had — together with 270 tonnes of equipment, across a sea they could not cross by ship. It is generally recognised as the first airlift in history, and it decided the opening phase of the Spanish Civil War before the war had properly begun.

In Spain the Ju 52 also did a job it was never designed for. The Luftwaffe of 1936 had no modern bomber in service, so the transports were fitted with bomb racks and a dorsal gun position and sent out as bombers with the Condor Legion. Ju 52s of K/88 flew alongside He 111s and Do 17s in the raid that destroyed Guernica on 26 April 1937.

The expedient ended as soon as real bombers arrived, and the type went back to carrying. But the episode explains the shape of the Luftwaffe that went to war three years later: an air force that had bought transports in quantity before it had bombers, and that would build its entire airborne arm on an aeroplane designed to fly businessmen between European capitals.

The Ju 52 opened the war in the West on 10 May 1940, and it did it twice in one morning. Eleven of them towed eleven DFS 230 assault gliders to 8,500 feet over Aachen and released them; the gliders sailed some 30 km in silence and landed 78 men on the roof of Fort Eben-Emael, the strongest position in Belgium. The assault party lost six killed and twenty wounded, neutralised the fort’s artillery and opened the Albert Canal crossings — a garrison of about a thousand taken by a company that arrived without engines.

The other half of the morning went differently. Over the Netherlands the transports flew paratroops and air-landing troops against The Hague and the Rotterdam bridges, into airfields the Dutch had prepared and defended. Dutch anti-aircraft and fighters shot them down over the runways and more were wrecked landing on ground already cratered: 37 were lost at Ypenburg alone, and of the 430 Ju 52s committed to the Dutch operation 224 did not come back. The airborne arm had taken the Netherlands in five days and destroyed more than half the aircraft that carried it.

On 20 May 1941 the Ju 52 carried out the largest airborne operation attempted to that date. Operation Merkur put German paratroops onto Crete in a single day, without a port, against an island garrison that knew they were coming. The transports flew in low, straight and slow over defended ground, dropped, and came back for the next wave from airfields choked with dust.

They were slaughtered. Of roughly 530 Ju 52s committed, some 270 were destroyed or seriously damaged. Germany took Crete and Hitler never authorised a large-scale airborne operation again — the losses among the paratroops and among the aircraft that delivered them were judged not worth repeating. It was the second such bill in twelve months, after the Netherlands, and it fell on the same fleet that would be asked eighteen months later to supply an entire army from the air.

When the 6th Army was encircled at Stalingrad in November 1942, Göring undertook to supply it by air. The army needed 700 tonnes a day to fight and about 500 to survive, and that was the figure promised. The aircraft available to deliver it were mostly Ju 52s, flying in winter, from fields that were themselves being overrun, into two airstrips inside the pocket, through Soviet fighters and an anti-aircraft belt that thickened weekly.

Between 24 November 1942 and 3 February 1943 the airlift flew 4,487 transport sorties and delivered just over 8,300 tonnes — an average of about 117 tonnes a day, roughly a fifth of what had been guaranteed. The 6th Army surrendered on 2 February. The Luftwaffe lost more than 500 aircraft and some 1,000 aircrew in the attempt, and the promise made on the strength of the Ju 52 is the clearest case in the war of an air force being asked to do arithmetic it could not do.

The last of the three killings came over the Mediterranean. With Tunisia cut off, the Ju 52s flew a shuttle from Sicily across open water in daylight, and the Allies set out to close it in Operation Flax. On 18 April 1943 — Palm Sunday — American and British fighters caught a formation off Cape Bon.

The Germans lost 24 Ju 52s and ten escorting fighters shot down, with a further 35 Ju 52s damaged and crash-landing along the Sicilian coast. Between Stalingrad and the Tunisian air bridge the German transport fleet was worn past recovery: for the rest of the war the Luftwaffe never again had enough aircraft to move an army, and the shortage shaped every German operation that depended on supply from the air.

Its crews called it Tante Ju — Auntie Ju — and the Allied airmen who shot it down called it Iron Annie. Both names describe the same quality: an aeroplane that was slow, ugly, unarmoured and almost impossible to destroy by accident. Three BMW 132 radials of about 715 hp gave it roughly 265 km/h, which in 1932 was respectable and in 1943 meant that anything in the sky could catch it.

About 4,800 were built, and the design outlived the regime that used it. Spain built it as the CASA 352 into the 1950s, France as the AAC.1 Toucan, and the Swiss Air Force flew three of them until 1981 — forty-nine years after the first three-engined Ju 52 left the ground.

• Gerhard Wagner, Junkers Ju 52 (Schiffer Military History).
• Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (Viking) — for the airlift figures and the promise.
• Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (John Murray).
• Christopher Shores, Hans Ring & William N. Hess, Fighters over Tunisia (Neville Spearman).