Junkers Ju 87 Stuka

The idea behind the Ju 87 was older than the aircraft itself. Through the 1920s and early 1930s a handful of airmen — among them the American naval pioneers and, in Germany, the First World War ace Ernst Udet — became convinced that a bomber which plunged almost vertically onto its target could place its bombs with a precision no level bomber could match. Udet, smitten after watching American Curtiss dive-bombers, became the idea's most powerful champion within the rebuilding Luftwaffe, and the Sturzkampfflugzeug — "dive battle aircraft", contracted to Stuka — was written into German doctrine.

Junkers' answer, designed by a team under Hermann Pohlmann, first flew in 1935. It was deliberately unlovely: an angular, slab-sided machine with a distinctive inverted-gull wing and massive, fixed, trousered undercarriage. Speed and elegance were sacrificed for the one quality that mattered — the strength and stability to be flung at the ground in a 70-degree dive and pulled out again, again and again, without tearing itself apart.

What made the Stuka deadly was not raw performance but a suite of clever details that turned dive-bombing from a daredevil stunt into a repeatable act of precision. An automatic dive-recovery system pulled the aircraft out of its plunge even if the g-loads blacked the pilot out; contact-fused crutch arms swung the bomb clear of the propeller arc before release; and red tabs on the wing helped the pilot judge his dive angle. The result was bombing accuracy of a kind no other aircraft of 1939 could approach.

To shatter the nerve of those below, many Ju 87s were fitted with the propeller-driven Jericho-Trompete ("Jericho Trumpet") sirens, whose rising shriek as the aircraft dived became one of the most infamous sounds of the war — a psychological weapon as much as an aerodynamic one. Against troops, ships, bridges and strongpoints the Stuka was a scalpel where level bombers were a blunt instrument.

Yet the Ju 87's virtues were inseparable from a fatal weakness. It was slow, poorly armed and clumsy in level flight, and at the bottom of its dive — heavy, low and committed — it was desperately vulnerable. So long as the Luftwaffe owned the sky the Stuka was devastating; the moment it met determined modern fighters on equal terms, it was butchered.

The early Ju 87 A gave way to the definitive early-war B series, the version that screamed over Poland and France. The R added range for anti-shipping work, and the D ("Dora") of 1941 was a cleaned-up, more powerful and better-protected model that carried a far heavier bomb load and became the backbone of operations on the Eastern Front.

The most specialised offspring was the Ju 87 G, a dedicated tank-buster that hung a pair of 37mm Bordkanone cannon beneath its wings. In the hands of the legendary Hans-Ulrich Rudel — credited with the destruction of more than 500 Soviet tanks — the cannon-armed Stuka enjoyed a lethal Indian summer over Russia long after the type was obsolete everywhere else. A final night ground-attack role kept the old airframe in service to the very end of the war.

The Stuka was the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg. In Poland, the Low Countries and France in 1939–40 it acted as flying artillery for the fast-moving Panzer columns, smashing fortifications, choking roads with wrecked vehicles and breaking the morale of soldiers and refugees alike. Its accuracy and the terror of its siren made it the very symbol of German victory in those opening campaigns.

Terror was part of the design. Fitted with wind-driven sirens — the shrieking “Jericho-Trompete” — the Stuka announced its near-vertical dive with a scream that broke the nerve of troops and civilians alike, and its bombs fell with an accuracy no level bomber could match. For the first year of the war it was less an aircraft than a weapon of psychological shock.

Then came the reckoning. Over Britain in the summer of 1940 the Stuka met Hurricanes and Spitfires and was slaughtered so badly that it had to be withdrawn from the battle. Thereafter it found its longest and bloodiest service in the Mediterranean and on the Eastern Front, where it crippled Allied shipping off Malta and Crete, supported the German drive deep into Russia, and — in the cannon-armed G — became a feared tank-killer at Kursk and beyond.

By 1943–44, with Allied and Soviet fighters everywhere, the Ju 87 could only operate where the skies were briefly clear or under cover of darkness. The aircraft that had begun the war as the terror of Europe ended it as an obsolescent survivor, flown by brave crews into a sky that no longer belonged to them.

Around 6,000 Ju 87s were built, and few aircraft of the war left so deep a mark on the popular imagination. For three years it was the most accurate striking weapon in the world, the airborne hammer that made Blitzkrieg possible, and its shrieking dive became a sound that an entire continent learned to dread.

But the Stuka was also the perfect illustration of a weapon utterly dependent on air superiority. Precise, terrifying and effective when unopposed, it was hopelessly vulnerable the moment that condition failed. The Ju 87 is remembered as one of the iconic aircraft of the Second World War — a machine that was both a symbol of early German triumph and, in its long obsolescence, a measure of how completely the tide had turned.

• Peter C. Smith, Junkers Ju 87 Stuka (Crécy Publishing).
• Manfred Griehl, Junkers Ju 87 Stuka (Airlife).
• John Weal, Junkers Ju 87 Stukageschwader 1937–41 (Osprey, Combat Aircraft).
• Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Stuka Pilot — the memoir of the war’s most-decorated Stuka flier.