The first Stuka prototype flew on a British Rolls-Royce engine
The Junkers Ju 87, the gull-winged Stuka, became a symbol of early German Blitzkrieg with its wailing sirens. Yet its first prototype was built in secret in Sweden, powered by a Rolls-Royce engine, and it only won its contract after a rival aircraft broke apart under Ernst Udet in a test dive.
Designer Hermann Pohlmann believed a dive bomber should be simple and tough, so he dropped a retractable undercarriage in favour of fixed legs in streamlined spats, which with the inverted gull wings made the Stuka instantly recognisable. Design work started in 1933. Junkers ordered ten Rolls-Royce Kestrel engines in April 1934, and the first prototype, assembled by AB Flygindustri in Sweden and quietly shipped to Germany, first flew on 17 September 1935. In January 1936 it crashed near Dresden when its twin tail fins failed in a dive, killing chief test pilot Willy Neuenhofen and his engineer, and later aircraft got a single fin and a German engine.
Official enthusiasm was lukewarm. Wolfram von Richthofen thought it underpowered, and in June 1936 the air ministry ordered work stopped in favour of the Heinkel He 118. Weeks later Udet dived the Heinkel prototype, its engine oversped, the propeller tore away, and he promptly declared the Stuka the winner. Udet had loved dive-bombing since flying an American Curtiss Goshawk, although a hair-raising 1934 demonstration left senior officers doubting that average pilots could manage it.
Two features addressed that worry. Automatic dive brakes pulled the aircraft out of its dive even if the pilot blacked out from g-forces or fixated on the target, and ram-air sirens on the landing gear, officially noise devices, gave pilots an audible sense of speed while doubling as propaganda. The type debuted with the Condor Legion in Spain in 1937 and led the air attacks on Poland in September 1939, then supported the 1940 campaigns in Norway, the Low Countries and France.
Its weaknesses showed over Britain in 1940. Slow, unwieldy and lightly armed, it needed heavy fighter escort, and once Germany lost control of the skies it became easy prey. For lack of a replacement, production ran until August 1944, totalling an estimated 6,000 aircraft, and ground-attack versions of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 largely took over its role by 1945.
Source: Junkers Ju 87
