A Reign of Bombs – Ju 87 Stuka: King of the Dive-bombers

Reviews of Two Books:

Hitler’s Stuka Squadrons – The Ju 87 at War 1936-1945
John Ward – Motorbooks International (MBI)

Stuka Volume 1
Luftwaffe Ju 87 Dive-Bomber Units 1939-1941
Peter Smith – Luftwaffe Colours/Classic Colours (an Ian Allen Imprint) – Specialty Press

Review by Ned Barnett
Review copy of Hitler's Stuka Squadrons from Reviewer
Review Copy of Luftwaffe Ju 87 Dive-Bomber Units 1939-1941 courtesy Specialty Press


The Ju 87 Stuka is the ultimate “transitional-era” aircraft – though it replaced a single-seat biplane ground attack aircraft (the Hs 123, which itself was called back into combat service in 1941 by a desperate Luftwaffe and used until 1944), it was barely “modern” in and of itself. Yet it kept soldiering on because there was nothing better to replace it. Like the American DC-3 airliner/transport (which served the military as the C-47 from World War II through Vietnam – where it fought as an armed gunship more than 30 years after it first went into production), the only replacement for a Ju 87 was another Ju 87.

Ground attack versions of the exceptional Focke Wulf Fw 190 “Butcher Bird” were remarkable aircraft in their own right – and might have replaced the Ju 87 in the ground attack role (but never the dive-bomber role – they had no dive brakes and couldn’t fairly be considered dive bombers – except that the Ju 87 was re-armed with a pair of 37 mm anti-tank flak cannons that were too large for the sleek, diminutive Focke Wulf fighter.

The dive bomber itself is a largely American Naval invention, refined and tested by the US Marines during “gunboat” wars against Central American “banana republics” such as Nicaragua. The type was quickly adopted by the equally naval-minded Japanese and became a “hit” at an early-30s depression-era air shows, where Germany’s top-scoring surviving WW-I Ace Ernst Udet saw it demonstrated at the Cleveland National Air Races airshow. Using his political muscle, he arranged for the German government two buy two Helldivers from Curtiss – these were shipped to Germany and Udet demonstrated them himself. One he crashed (not uncommon for the headstrong but hardly meticulous 62-kill ace); the other he kept as his personal plane until the war broke out, when it was donated to a museum – but the impression he made ensured that Germany added “Stuka” to it’s growing list of must-have aircraft types for it’s still-clandestine air force.

The Ju 87 Stuka (the name “Stuka” is a slang abbreviation for a long run-on German word meaning diving bombing aircraft – and generic to all dive bombers, but always associated with the Junkers Ju 87) was born in the mid-30s, in a Germany starved of good aircraft engines. It was therefore initially developed a clumsy-looking single-engined dive-bomber with enormous “trouser” landing-gear fairings and a 600-class horsepower engine that made a lightly loaded Ju 87 barely capable of taking off – at full weight, the air gunner had to be left on the ground if the Stuka was to take off at all.

Three copies of this very much “interim” type – the A (Anton) model – was tested in Spain during the Spanish Civil War – and despite the aircraft’s limited bomb capacity (about 500 lbs) and biplane-level cruise speed, the Stuka proved its worth as a pinpoint bomber of discrete targets. In combat tests, these early Stukas routinely put their bombs within a half-dozen yards of their target – acceptable accuracy for today’s laser-guided bombs, and unheard-of in the 1930s.

Like all visionary designs, the Ju 87 had inherent growth potential – it was quickly upgraded in the B (Bertha) model to feature a 1,000-plus horsepower Junkers inline engine – later further upgraded to 1500 horsepower in late D (Dora) and G (Gustav) models of the dive bomber. Unlike the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which experienced similar power upgrades, the Ju 87 did not become faster – it never cruised at much over 200 miles per hour when loaded, even in it’s most advanced version – but instead the bomb load rose from 500 pounds to upward of 2,000 pounds – and in a few rare cases (seldom used) to 4,000 pounds.

Alternatively, the three puny rifle-caliber machine guns soon grew to a pair of them covering the rear quadrant (the Mg 81Z twin-barrel machine gun) and heavier 20mm or 37mm guns facing forward to rain cannon shells on tanks and other ground vehicles. In addition, as the Ju 87 evolved, it doubled its combat radius and enhanced protective armor features to enable it to survive in the ground attack role.

A quick look-see comparison suggests that the Ju 87 was in the same performance class as the RAF’s Fairey Battle – a rightly-despised death-trap and one of the more ill-conceived combat aircraft of all times – but in fact, the Ju 87 was a better combat aircraft. Although it had archaic-looking fixed landing gear (the Battle had retractable gear) the Ju 87 could carry a single large bomb – the Battle was cursed with carrying a gaggle of ineffectual small bombs. The Stuka was remarkably maneuverable – by any standards, a fact that often surprised and sometimes endangered attacking fighter aircraft – and it was remarkably sturdy as well, capable of absorbing significant battle damage. The RAF’s Battle could be shot down by the proverbial “dirty look” and it flew like an out-of-tune furniture-moving truck (“mobelwagen” in German).

The misnamed Battle fulfilled its best destiny by providing harmless anti-aircraft target practice for front-line German Flak units – but the Ju 87 actually continued to viably destroy enemy targets through 1944. Just as The Battle of France proved that the Fairey Battle could not survive without escort fighters (though it remained extremely vulnerable to Flak), The Battle of Britain proved that the Ju 87 couldn’t stand against fully modern fighters such as the Spitfire without heavy fighter escort. However, Germany could provide that fighter escort – and that made the Stuka viable over Soviet Russia at least through the end of 1943, when growing Soviet Air Force strength forced the Luftwaffe to shift most ground-attack duties to Fw 190s and to operate the Stuka either as a night-attack aircraft of as a high-risk ground-hugging tank-buster.

In fact, operations in Russia proved that the Stuka was really more contemporary with the Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik, another dedicated two-seat ground attack aircraft. On the Allied side, the closest we came was the ungainly Fleet Air Arm Skua and the world-famous ship-killer, the US Navy’s Douglas-built SBD (Slow-But-Deadly) Dauntless. However, while the SBD continued to soldier on until 1945 (though the replacement Curtiss-built SB2C Helldiver was available beginning in 1943), it never took on ground targets in fighter-contested skies, and after Midway, it seldom if ever flew anti-shipping strikes without heavy USN fighter escort.

The SBD – considered obsolescent and due for replacement in 1941 when the war broke out for America – was at least one generation ahead of the Ju 87 in terms of design features. It was faster, more heavily armed (until the Ju 87s started carrying tank-buster 37mm Flak cannons) and could always carry a 1,000 pound war-load as standard (and could, in a pinch, on very close-range missions, carry a one-ton bomb). Like the Stuka, the Dauntless was surprisingly maneuverable, and with twin rear-facing machine guns (and two forward-firing heavy .50 caliber Browning machine guns) more heavily armed. During Coral Gables and Midway – until the USN woke up and started carrying more fighters onboard their carriers – SBDs were routinely used as low-altitude anti-torpedo-plane fighters, and in the right hands, these dive-bombers had some success (even a few surprising successes against the rightly-feared Japanese Zero). But of the dive bomber and ground attack planes of its mid-30s generation, the Ju 87 stood out alone as the best-of-breed.

Early European combat in the Ju 87 proved it to be a fearsomely-accurate weapon – a fact the Germans enhanced and capitalized on by adding a pair of permanently-mounted sirens (Jericho Trumpets) as well as noisemakers affixed to the fins of the Ju 87’s main bombs. The noise was petrifying and demoralizing – until you got used to it (at which time the Germans removed the sirens as added drag without added benefit) – and over Poland, France and the Low Countries (and again over the Soviet Union) the Stuka was both deadly and unstoppable.

Only when faced with RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes over Southeastern England did the Stuka “meet its match” – and author John Ward contends persuasively that the Germans might have won that pivotal battle if Goering had been willing to either provide more protection from escorting Messerschmitts or suck it up and take the losses – the Stukas were about two days away from knocking out the Chain Home radar picket line and the RAF’s most critical front-line fighter airfields. However, the Germans withdrew the Stuka – and changed their tactics from knocking out the RAF to “punishing” London – and found too late that London could take more punishment than Ventnor Island’s radar station or Biggen Hill airfield.

Over Russia in the early days, the Stuka reasserted it’s primacy as a dive bomber – and bombing aces such as Hans-Ulrich Rudel (ultimately the most decorated single individual in Hitler’s Germany). Rudel was an “iron man” who flew more than 2,500 missions and destroyed more than 500 tanks, along with sinking a Russian battleship and creating havoc beyond measure in the ranks of the Red Army. He finished the war flying ground-attack Fw 190s with one foot amputated (and not yet healed) and the other in a cast. A defiant and unrepentant Nazi to the end, Rudel was nonetheless the epitome of combat pilot, and long after everyone else had given up on the Stuka, he still found it a viable and effective tank-killer. His book, “Stuka Pilot,” cannot be too strongly recommended for those who want to see what combat flying for Hitler against Russia was really like.

Which brings us to the two new books on Stukas which I’m reviewing here.

The Classic Colours book (Ian Allen/Specialty Press) is an excellent example of what this series delivers best – lots of photos which illustrate (with the help of extremely useful captions) the color schemes and color variations to be found in the aircraft in question – in this case, the Stuka. The text is useful but hardly world-beating – except for the sidebars on individual Stuka pilots, which I found very informative – for me, worth the price of the book, as they gave an operational insight most other 100-page one-aircraft books tend to lack.

The Classic Colours Stuka (Vol.1) book has 96 pages with probably 200 photos and a useful narrative text that makes it more than a picture book. If you’re going to model an early version of the Stuka (Anton, Bertha, the carrier-capable Caesar or the extended-range Richard), you’ll want this book at your side to help you identify features missed by the kit manufacturers and to accurately mark your finished model.

The last Stuka I modeled (not counting a 1/144 scale Stuka used as a “gate guardian” on an N-Gauge model railroad “empire”) was the old Revell 1/32nd Bertha – converted to a carrier-capable Caesar (C-0, used in Poland in combat) with catapult spools and an arrestor hook, then back-dated with older exhaust ports and other refinements to make it the carrier-version of the pre-production B-0 and early-production B-1 Stukas. If I’d had this book in hand, I’d have done a better job on both the modifications and the color scheme, though both were more than adequate for a 1970s-era kit build.

Today’s modelers demand more research and more accuracy, and the Classic Colours book on the Stuka (Vol. 1) will give modelers just what they need.

The Motorbooks (MBI) book by John Ward, Hitler’s Stuka Squadrons – The Ju 87 at War 1936-1945, is a far more ambitious book – and it more than amply fulfills the author’s most sanguine ambitions. It is a 224-page developmental and operational history of the type – filled to overflowing with photos, featuring side-profile drawings of the various versions (complete with operational specs that are mostly on-target based on my standard references, Green’s “Warplanes of the Third Reich”).

Some of the photos here overlap those in the Classic Colours book – a few are the hoary old chestnuts we’ve been seeing since Hitler invaded Poland, but some photos found in both are new to me, suggesting that they’d come from recently declassified ex-Soviet photo archives. True or not, it is great to see new photos, and Ward’s book has hundreds of clear, detailed new-to-me Stuka photos.

The photos are worth the price of admission – whether you’re a modeler or a historian/aviation buff – but the text on the aircraft’s development and operational deployment will really, really (and I mean really) strike a positive note with the armchair historian and aircraft buff. I literally couldn’t put it down – and considering how many aviation books I devour (and how many I put aside unfinished), this is high praise indeed, and well-earned.

I particularly appreciated Ward’s analysis – I never before heard how close the Stukas came to delivering a death-blow to the RAF (and I’ve read a lot of Battle of Britain books), nor did I realize how effectively the Stuka was reborn over Russia (or how effective even a handful could be when air superiority was first achieved. I think I liked most the fact-based analysis and explanation of how relatively low numbers of Stukas could do so much war-winning damage in 1939-1942. This put the plane in a new and welcome perspective, and made the book every bit as good a read as it is a resource for modelers and researchers.

Bottom line – both books come highly recommended, though for somewhat different reasons. They cover the core material differently enough – and in sufficient depth – for me to be able to recommend both of them as a kind of “tag-team” – historian, buff or modeler, the pair of these books will serve you better than either one standing along.