Here, the Luftwaffer anticipated that the HS129 would be essential in countering the dense concentrations of Soviet armor, which included large numbers of upgraded T-34s and the heavier KV series tanks. On the 5th of July 1943, as Operation Citadel began, more than 60 HS129s took part in the opening strikes.

Throughout the 3-week battle, the aircraft would fly hundreds of sorties, attacking Soviet strong points, softening up defensive positions, and targeting tank formations attempting to counterattack. According to one pilot, Hutman Gueorg Dornan, attacks at dawn had the greatest effect.

Shortly after crossing the front line, we discovered in the first rays of the sun, the parked tanks with their crews still asleep near them. After my first armor-piercing rounds struck the tanks, and the first of them had been turned into a blazing wreck, the tank crews sprang to life. But I and each of my pilots quickly fired off the rest of our ammunition and were soon heading back to our airfield, flying now in the brighter sunlight, and already bracketed by some light flack.

In this attack, our cannon fire proved devastating. 50 or more Russian tanks littered the ground, burned out or incapacitated. My own score was three. None of our aircraft was lost in this attack, though my own was slightly damaged by small arms fire in the port wing immediately outboard of the engine cell.

Luftwaffer reports credits the HS129 with destroying a substantial number of vehicles during the battle of Kursk, though the exact tallies remain uncertain. What is certain though is that the losses that they incurred themselves were severe. 48 HS129s were lost during the operation, which was one of the heaviest attrition periods the type ever experienced.

Despite many local successes, including temporarily halting several Soviet penetrations, the efforts of the HS129 units could not alter the strategic outcome as Kursk marked the irreversible turning point on the Eastern Front. After the failure of Operation Citadel, the German retreat became permanent for the remainder of the war.

HS129 units were engaged in near continuous defensive operations armed at slowing the relentless Soviet advances. During this period, several units achieved some remarkable operational figures. Schlashkashvvada 9, for example, flew an extraordinary 10,000 combat missions in just 7 months, claiming the destruction of some 1500 tanks and armored vehicles, plus thousands of additional soft skin vehicles and artillery pieces.

The aircraft played a key role during the evacuation of Crimea in April 1944, conducting repeated low-level attacks to break up Soviet armored thrusts and buy some time for the German forces to continue their withdrawal. However, all of these achievements were now coming at immense cost.

During the first half of 1944, the Luftwaffer lost the equivalent of 15% of all HS129s produced. Onethird of this was from accidents or mechanical causes, and the remainder from combat. The combination of rushed pilot training, the rapid and constant redeployments, harsh weather, Soviet flack, and large numbers of fighter opposition placed a staggering strain on both pilots and machines in the HS129 units.

Among the many pilots who distinguished themselves during this brutal period, none became more renowned than Huttman Rudolph Hines Rufer. Commanding Schlattkashvvada 9, Rufer developed exceptionally effective low-level attack techniques using the MK 103 and the BK37 cannons, and he’s credited with destroying 80 Soviet tanks.

His aggressive style and willingness to fly repeated sorties under appalling conditions eventually earned him the Knight’s Cross on the 9th of June, 1944, when he was killed in action just over a month later on the 16th of July during the fighting in Poland. His death deprived the tank hunting force of one of its most experienced and tactically innovative leaders.

Losses continued to mount during the massive Soviet summer offensive in Bellarusia in June of 1944. Two HS129 groups fielding a combined strength of 67 aircraft were committed to the fighting, but Soviet air superiority, dense anti-aircraft batteries, and the sheer speed of the offensive overwhelmed them. By the end of this operation, 22 aircraft have been destroyed in combat and another 21 have been lost to accidents.

Many due to frantic relocations, poor weather, engine failures, or just crashes on landing on bomb-damaged airfields. The scale of the losses during this offensive and those of Kursk marked the effective end of the HS129 as a major factor on the Eastern Front. By this point though, Germany was no longer the sole operator of the Henchel HS129.

In Romania, it would also see a brief period of service, and it would play the unusual role of serving on both sides. Before 1944, the Romanian Air Force had recognized the need to modernize, and they had purchased 42 brand new 129Bs from Germany. This number was later bolstered by additional aircraft transferred from German stocks or acquired after emergency landings.

This brought the total number in Romanian service to anywhere between 190 and up to 250 aircraft. Sources and records differ and conflict on this. Romanian pilots would employ the 129 aggressively and to great effect against Soviet tanks in Mulavia and along the Nista front. However, on the 20th of August 1944, the Soviets launched a major offensive into Romania.

5 days later, Romania defected and allied itself with the Soviet Union. Overnight, Romanian operated HS129s began attacking German and Hungarian forces in Transylvania with German HS129s sometimes being operated in the same areas against Soviet and Romanian troops. These chaotic circumstances produced a few situations in which the HS129s from both sides appeared over the same front lines which created significant confusion among troops on the ground who often could not tell whether the aircraft overhead was friend or foe until they opened fire. However, it must be said that these situations on the whole were very rare and some that have been noted can’t fully be verified. By this point as well, most German HS129s had already been withdrawn from the area and were now operating from airfields in Poland. Now, getting back

to Germany, in the autumn of 1944, a small number of HS129 B3s armed with a powerful 75 mm anti-tank gun were delivered to frontline units. Though tests had shown the gun to be devastatingly effective, the handful of aircraft produced were far too few to influence the course of events as Soviet forces advanced across Poland.

However, they still saw some combat during the winter of 1944 to 45. They supposedly flew 14 to 20 sorties, destroying approximately nine or 10 Soviet tanks and a number of soft targets, including artillery pieces. According to reports, two of the tanks that they destroyed were supposedly the new IS-2 heavy tank.

Though they were few in number, pilot Ghard Vea, who flew a B3, was astonished by the firepower it offered and the ease in which it could be unleashed. Flying with me in an HS129 B3 as my number two was a young pilot with fewer than 10 operational missions to his credit. On our third approach against a T-34, his shot hit the side of the tank just below its turret.

The 75mm round blew a hole about 1 meter in diameter in the left hand side of the hole and the tank immediately caught fire. During the following operation later that day, a tank exploded after the first shot. The impact of the 75 mm cannon was extraordinary. Though it was impressive, this big gun could do little against overwhelming numbers.

Attrition, fuel shortages, dwindling spares, and collapsing infrastructure further eroded the operational strength of the lingering units. By late 44 and early 45, many aircraft were being destroyed by their own crews as they simply had no fuel left and didn’t want them falling into enemy hands. The last surviving HS129s did fight on into 1945 even as the German front collapsed on every side.

In March 1945, Schlathkash 9 claimed the destruction of 100 tanks, 30 assault guns, and hundreds of softs skinned vehicles reportedly using just six operational aircraft. Those numbers should of course not be taken as wholly accurate. As I’ve mentioned in a few videos by now, inflated kill counts were very common on both sides.

In April 1945, the last confirmed combat flights of the type were carried out over the Battle of Vienna, where the HS129 attacked Soviet spearheads attempting to encircle the city. In the final days of the war, with fuel gone, airfields overrun, and maintenance now impossible, the remaining 129s were rendered inoperable and lingered on the ground until the German surrender.

And that concludes a brief coverage of the service history of the HS129, which by war’s end had become one of the Luftwaffer’s most distinctive and feared grounds attack aircraft on the Eastern Front. Though it served on the front lines for nearly 3 years, the HS129 never achieved the same level of fame or appreciation as the attack versions of the Ju87 Stooker or the more ferocious reputation of the Fauvolve 190.

Part of this came down to how few of these were actually built. Sources vary in figures, but it’s estimated that between 850 and 890 HS129s were produced in total. But another part of its lack of fame came down to reliability and perceived effectiveness. The reliability of its engines colored its reputation among senior Luftwava officers.

Some felt that other aircraft like the tank busting variant of the Stooka would be superior, which is a somewhat damning reflection considering the Ju87G was slower and didn’t benefit from the same level of protection nor the benefits of twin engine redundancy. But perhaps more important though was its perceived effectiveness.

It started to appear in numbers just as the tide of the war turned against Germany. It spent most of its career supporting defensive operations. Even if a flight of 129s destroyed dozens of tanks in a mission, say during the battle of Kursk, this feat would be overshadowed by the overall strategic defeat that was suffered.

Conjecturally speaking, had the 129 entered service at the start of the war, its broader reputation within the Luftwaffer may have been different. But among those who flew it, supported it, or faced it in combat, the HS129 left a deep and lasting impression. It was a machine built with a singular and uncompromising logic to survive the point blank brutality of low-level ground attack over the front lines, and to deliver accurate and concentrated fire onto enemy targets, particularly armor. In this, it excelled. Pilots came to trust its armored bathtub, its resilient wing center section, and its ability to limp home riddled with bullet holes that would have downed many other aircraft in the Luftwaffer’s service. But even with this effective design, the purpose of the aircraft would come at a punishing cost to those who operated it. The HS129’s missions demanded repeated

passes at treetop height directly into concentrated enemy positions, often positions that were bristling with machine guns or anti-aircraft cannons. As such, casualties were unavoidably high, and even in periods of tactical success, frontline units were constantly drained by losses in combat, plus accidents in foul weather and the mechanical strain of operating from improvised forward air strips.

By the final year of the war, HS129 formations were a shadow of their former selves, reduced by attrition, starved of spare parts and fuel, and eventually displaced by the more flexible and more readily supplied FaulV 190 attack variants. The aircraft’s postwar fate was equally unforgiving.

Captured airframes were studied briefly and were then all completely scrapped. Today, no complete HS129 is known to survive, and the largest remaining fragment is a cockpit section owned by a private collector in Australia of all places. But the interesting legacy of this aircraft still lives on, both directly and indirectly.

It’s become something of a cult classic in the military flight sim community, and it’s a popular aircraft in the scale modeling community as well. Also, the design philosophy that eventually made it famous lived on. The idea of a twin engine, heavily armored ground support plane equipped with a frankly ridiculous weapon for cracking open Soviet tanks would resurface a few decades later in the Fairchild Republic A10 Warthog.

But that is very much a story for another day. As always, thank you all so much for watching and a big thank you of course to the patron supporters and YouTube members who help keep this channel going. A big shout out of course to our Wing Commander tier supporters, our highest tier members. And a warm welcome to Deso Callahan 5677, who is the newest member of this special group.

Now, because I am taking time off over Christmas, this will be a pre-recorded end screen. So, if I do miss any new members on the screen here, please don’t panic. I will update everything in January with the new upload. Hopefully, if my plan has worked out, this will be one of many videos I have uploaded in the last 2 weeks of December as part of a sort of present for all you wonderful people, newly joined or regulars, who have supported my glorified lectures over the last four years. But that is all for today.

Thank you all so much for your continued support and I will catch you all next time. Goodbye.