COUNTERING A WARSAW PACT BLITZ
Pierre Sprey

There is an airplane that would change that situation and, I think, radically. What we really would need to convert that investment into something that could affect the outcome of a war is a large quantity of airplanes that are effective against the kind of targets that we would see early in the war. We need several thousand such airplanes to really make a difference. I mean the U. S. and the European countries need several thousand such airplanes to really impact the outcome of a war in which the Warsaw Pact would make an all out attempt in Central Europe.

Of course, the first question that might occur to you is what is wrong with doing the job with our latest aircraft, say A-10's and F-16's. I think there are a few things wrong with trying to do the job or trying to buy several thousand of those airplanes. The first is you cannot buy several thousand of them because they are simply too expensive. Even the A-10, which at one time we had hoped would not be very expensive, is up to $5 million fly-away, probably $7 million programmed cost. The F-16 is substantially worse than that in cost. It is just not the kind of airplane you are going to buy several thousand of. Second, both aircraft are too big. For instance, the A-10 is about 900 square feet of plane view area. It has been oriented to a reasonable-sized fighter. The World War II Messerschmitt 109 had about 250 square feet of presented area. That was a good-sized fighter—small, relatively small in World War II. So here we are with almost four times that size with the A-10. That is a very significant factor. I will be coming back to that factor again.

Even the F-16, which we thought was a small aircraft a few years ago, is not a small aircraft. It is twice the size of a Messerschmitt. It has about 500 square feet of presented area. It is a large airplane. Of course, I do not need to dwell on what is wrong with airplanes that are very large, but obviously in the tactical environment that we are talking about, it is very, very valuable not to be seen or not to be seen until the last moment.

The A-10 has one other disadvantage, of course, that is associated with its size. It is pretty sluggish. It does not have the kind of performance to get really good evasive maneuvers and, of course, it is a little sluggish in acceleration and climb-out for evading air defenses. The F-16 cannot be faulted on acceleration. On the other hand, it simply has not got the left-hand envelope performance that you need for a real anti-armor aircraft. Basically, its maneuvering capabilities down around 300 knots or below are just not what is required by the nature of the target. We will get into that a little more. Finally, its greatest deficiency at present: it simply has no weapon that is very effective against tanks or any of the targets associated with tanks. That of course, is the great strength of the A-10—it has a superb weapon very suited to the job and I think that is the thing we can be proudest of in the A-10 program.

Now, let us assume that we could build an airplane of which we could afford several thousand and which was really suited to the job of attacking armor. What would we do with it? I think you can see very clearly from the talk yesterday that there are a number of very exciting roles that airplanes have not played before that are possible.

First of all, this airplane would be very valuable in the weakly held areas, the areas outside the main efforts, outside the shoulders of a well-organized blitz campaign. Very important, and something that no one describes as well as Colonel Rudel, is the matter of visual recce. The single most important kind of recce that air forces can do is simple eyeball reconnaissance by pilots who are in direct contact with tactical commanders. That is a kind of reconnaissance that we have not had for years and probably never had on an organized basis. Rudel describes it very clearly in his book. That might be an interesting thing to ask him about. His contribution in that area may very well have been more valuable than the 500 tanks he killed.

Closely related to the question of patrolling and sweeping areas that are thinly held on the ground is the question of using this kind of airplane, a blitz fighter, to back up and. coordinate with armored recce units. There is a possibility of real integration of the role and the tactics of a blitz fighter and armored recce units. Of course, armored recce units are absolutely critical to any kind of mobile warfare.

A very obvious use of this airplane is simply to reinforce the antitank capability of the main effort. Keep in mind, however, that in doing that, we are really talking about very carefully timed operations. We are talking about fast-moving warfare, countering breakthroughs and so on. Just having an planes scouring the general area of enemy armored columns simply is not good enough. You have to talk about things that are carefully and closely timed and integrated with the ground tactics and the ground ef rrts.

Then, of course, the airplane, if it was able to do all the previous things, would be a great close-support airplane. I do not need to belabor that point. I think there are two main, points that I would like to make out of this and that I think you would like to think about addressing with Colonel Rudel.

The first is that we are not talking about just attacking tanks. We are not even talking about attacking groups of tanks. We are talking about attacking, disrupting, slowing down armored units and that is very different. That means we are talking about tanks, trucks, accompanied by antiaircraft, APC's, and even, depending on the battle situation, we are also talking about attacking dug-in troops.

Secondly, just from the very sketchy description I have given and probably much more from what you heard yesterday, you can see that there is very little role for independent air operations. In this concept of Blitzkrieg or counter-blitz, independent air operations would have very much less effect than air operations that are closely tied into the ground.

Given that we wanted to proceed with a blitz fighter, what are the effectiveness characteristics that we should really home in on? Well, the first, and very critical, of course, is finding armor units. If we look at what a new blitz fighter can do compared to the A-10 and previous aircraft, the improvement potential available to us now is modest. The reason for that, of course, is that there is only one sensor that can reliably find tanks and that is the eyeball. The best we can do is provide a platform that provides the proper speed and the proper visibility to help that eyeball. We have just been through another go-around of the eternal quest after a night sensor or a bad-weather sensor for tanks. We have just been through the infrared business with the Maverick again and that is only, I would say, about the tenth repetition of the great infrared hope that started late in World War II and was already heavily exploited or explored in Korea, and, of course, without fail, that great hope has proven a disaster every time. Of course, our latest experiments in Europe show that again. So the one area of effectiveness in which you cannot expect great improvements from the new airplane is, in fact, the are. of finding tanks. However it will critically affect the design of the airplane, as I will get into in a minute.

On the question of destroying and disrupting armored units, I think we can look towards a fair improvement. We have already made a great leap, a tremendous leap, probably the most important single weapons advance in air since World War II, with the 30-millimeter gun. However, I think there is some room left for improvement in several areas, both in the airframe and the gun area.

Thirdly, very important, is the question of response and being able to respond very, very rapidly and fast enough in a tactical situation, and to respond with large quantities of airplanes, the several thousand, that I am talking about. There we can certainly make major improvements over anything we have.

Finally, in the area of surviving the kind of defenses we will see over the 90 Pact divisions I was talking about, there also I think we have a potential for making very, very large improvements.

Let us address the question of finding armor. As I have said, the only sensor we can rely on to find armor is the eyeball. Radar, of course, is completely out of the question. We discussed IR. And, of course, the radio helps a lot. After all, there are people on the ground who are being overrun by tanks and so on. If you are in a position to use their information and, of course, taking peacetime preparation and training, a little hardware, if you are in a position to use the information of the people on the ground, it certainly adds greatly to the capability from the air.

The second thing that is important is, of course, the performance that is associated with using the eyeball properly and this is another area that I think you need to explore with Rudel. He is very clear on this subject. The first factor you have to deal with is that you are not going to see tanks very far away. You do not see them very far away on the ground, you do not see them very far away from the air. Tanks have a vested interest in not being seen and they do whatever they can towards that end. You cannot count on seeing tanks at much more than a thousand yards and probably (a lot of times) less.

We know what the weather in Europe is like. Although we have been so inundated with weather statistics that we have this impression that 90 percent of the time a randomly chosen man standing in Europe is standing in a fog, that is not exactly true. There are low ceilings a very large percentage of the time in Europe. Interestingly enough the visibility under those ceilings is quite good most of the time, and we are talking about being able to operate well below a thousand feet, then all of a sudden the visibility situation in Europe is not bad at all. If we can operate at 500 feet and below, we should have visibility in Europe something over three-quarters of the time.

What does operating below a 500-foot ceiling and trying to respond to a target you see at less than a thousand yards add up to? It all adds up to a fact that is going to be the first way to make an airplane ineffective. When you are searching for tanks, you need performance capability down to 150 knots, and I do not mean 150 knots with the airplane on the edge of a stall. I mean an airplane capable of very hefty maneuvers at 150 knots. I am not saying that that is where you will stay, and I think an extended speed range is very important, but I think the first thing you have to be careful of in working on this airplane is to protect the left hand envelope performance which in some of these early developmental studies has been sliding pretty badly.

Of course, if you are going to use the eyeball, obviously you want to be able to see out of the airplane in as much of a full sphere as possible and that implies an airplane with a very, very narrow fuselage to the point of discomfort for the pilot. This is necessary in order to get over-the-side visibility, which is really the critical thing and one in which our airplanes up to now, perhaps barring the F-16, have been relatively poor.

The next point, if you have found tanks and you are not flying too fast to attack them from the position in which you find them, the next point is how are you going to go about "killing" them? I put killing in quotes for the very simple reason that you do not have to melt the tank or return it to the scrap heap. Stopping the tank is very adequate for our purposes. We have done a lot of testing in the last ten years. We have explored, I think, pretty thoroughly the range of options the current technologies have to offer. During the 1960's we looked very carefully at cluster weapons. We developed the Rockeye, which is a cluster weapon that is almost as expensive as a missile, and it proved to have very little effectiveness. Not only did it prove to have low effectiveness, it was also relatively easily countermandable with stand-off screens. As you remember, Rockeye was a little cluster weapon that tried to spread shaped charges over a sizable area. I think our experience in that testing and the calculations we did convinced us that Rockeye was not going to ball out the basic inaccuracies of dive bombing. We checked all kinds of missiles. We checked several kinds of electro-optical missiles. We have now just gone through a big go-round of IR missiles and laser guided missiles. Basically, our tests in Europe of the Maverick show clearly that you cannot pull the lock on a tank and that you are far too vulnerable in trying to launch a TV missile just because it takes so long to line up and track and lock on. We cannot afford weapons that take 10 to 15 to 20 seconds to get rid of.

So that returns us to the only weapon that showed much promise against tanks in World War II, which was a large-caliber gun. I mentioned we have made tremendous progress with that. The results are very, very impressive. We are now at the point, I will not get into the exact numbers, but we are now at the point where we have a gun that reliably, at over a thousand yards, will give us the total destruction of the tank almost half the time and will give us mobility kill of the tank over three-quarters of the time. That is far and away better than the record of any missile that we have tried so far. In fact, as you know, with the missiles we have tried so far we cannot even get lock-on a quarter of the time, much less kill, and there are many a slip between the lock-on and the kill.

I do not want to belabor the gun point any more than that. It is critical to the design of this airplane, of course. As you may recall, I mentioned that I think there are opportunities for improvement. I think the first and clearest opportunity for improvement is the need to get out more shots in the very opening of the burst. This goes back to an old controversy of some ten years ago about the relative effect of shots early and late in the burst and we can discuss it later if anybody is interested. I am convinced that shots early in the burst, the first quarter of a second, are an order of magnitude more effective than shots fired upon the second. Therefore, we can reflect that kind of knowledge in the design of the gun by getting guns that get up to rate very quickly.

The second area in which we certainly can make improvements is in the question of aircraft handling as it affects gun accuracy. I want to be very clear on what we mean by gun accuracy. We do not mean gun accuracy on marked ranges. We are talking about gun accuracy in a tactical environment. That means in a constantly jinking approach with relatively high g’s, certainly more than two or three g's, and a bare minimum of tracking time, say on the order of one and a half, perhaps at most two seconds of tracking time. Whatever accuracy you can get under those difficult-approach conditions, that in my opinion is the real accuracy of the airplane. In that kind of accuracy it is obvious that we can make great improvements over the A-10, largely because of the size of the A-10 and secondly because they did not really try for that in the A-10.

A third area in which we can make an improvement, once we come clear on what weapons work, what weapons do not, and what we are designing this airplane for, if we recognize the fact that this airplane is, strictly speaking, a gun-carrying airplane, then I think it becomes clear that we need a selectable feed. That is, we cannot go out loaded up with nothing but armor-piercing ammunition on a mission where we may encounter things other than tanks. Armor-piercing ammunition will not do much for us if we run into dug-in troops. It will not really address soft targets, like trucks and so on as effectively as he will.

I think we need at least the ability to select two kinds of ammo, possibly three. That will be, in essence, the equivalent of an increase in payload.

Further, I think we need not be rigid on sticking with exactly the gun we have. As good as it is, I think we should be quite open towards the possibility of either increasing its caliber, or increasing the velocity of the round, or of changing the configuration of the round, if we see real effectiveness improvements. Since we are already doing live firing against tanks, I think we are in a good position to do that. We are in a good position to get away from the model building approach to tank vulnerability and lethality. We have to look at our live firing results, carry out some new line firings to see whether added penetration or added behind armor spall or any one of the characteristics that we could change in our round would really give us a lot more kill. If it does not, then fine, let us proceed with the round we have.

Anyhow, I think you see that there is quite a bit of potential there for improvement. My guess would be we are talking about lethality improvements perhaps on the order of fifty percent or more per pass, at least at the longer ranges.

The next question in killing armor is how do you get into the position to shoot. The first thing I would like to say is that a subject that we have ignored in the past is the rate at which we kill tanks. Some of you may be aware that there has been a recent little exercise for the A-10 to see how fast a pair of A-10’s could kill ten tanks laid out on the desert. A lot of people when they first hear about that exercise think it is some kind of stunt. If you stop and think about it, it is far from being a stunt. It is addressing, in fact, the heart of the tactical problem that you face once you have found a tank unit. After all, when you have attacked your first tank, they are not all going to sit there like they do on the range. They are going to take counter measures, they are going to disperse, they are going to head for the woods. They will do everything they can to destroy the effectiveness of your attack. In turn, the faster you can reattack and the faster you can wipe out the entire unit, the less time they have to take countermeasures, the more effective you will be, the less likely they are to get into a position in the woods or a barn or something that makes them invisible. This is again the kind of thing that people who have been there can tell you about, and I think Rudel is interesting on this subject. His book mentions it and I think it is something to keep in mind.

Now, what does it take to reattack fast? To reattack fast, it takes a very high level of maneuvering components at moderate speed. In particular, the thing we are interested in, and I think this is in large part an outcome of some of John’s work on fast transients in air-to-air fighters, is what we call the button hook turn, which is of real interest and a really critical capability.

By button hook turn we mean a turn at high g and high deceleration. That is, if for one reason or another, you are in a fast cruise speed and you run across a tank, you want to convert as quickly as possible into an attack. That is the first step in getting a high rate of kill. The ability to decelerate very hard while turning into position is extremely useful because, of course, it leads co a turn at rapidly decreasing radius which is exactly what you want instead of having to fly out a couple of miles, reposit and reattack. If you have a real button hook turn capability, you will be able to greatly reduce the separation between you and the tank as you come in for the first attack. And, of course, I think all of you who are involved in aircraft recognize that means low aspect ratio wings.

The time we are talking about is something that can be worked out. There are some programs running in the country that will do optimum reattack profiles and we need to exercise those programs more heavily than we have in the past. We used them once or twice in the A-10 program and now it is time to get serious about them. I think using those programs we will see that we should be able to get substantially below thirty-five seconds reattack time. I think that will.be an important element in trading off the final controlling characteristics of this airplane.

There are two lessons here that I would like to leave you with. One, as I think you now realize from our A-10 experience, including bombs and missiles in payloads of the close support airplane inevitably makes the airplane big and sluggish.

The second point is for the kind of performance we are talking about, the kind of reattack capabilities and the kind of capabilities that I will be talking about later that are necessary for survival, I think we are going to be talking about quite high thrust weights, higher than people have generally talked about in close-support aircraft. I think the range we should be looking at is 0.7 and maybe a 1.0 kilometer. At the same time, we are not interested in just maximum turn capabilities similar to that of the A-10. We would like something better and, in particular, we would like it to be able to decelerate at a very high rate while turning.

Assuming we have found tanks, assuming we have the performance and are in a position to kill them, and have the weapons to kill them effectively, the next question is how to put up enough airplanes to make a difference. In thinking about how many airplanes make a difference, I think there are basically two kinds of missions that we want to keep in mind that in essence define effective force size for us. Obviously, there are vastly more missions than this that the airplane can carry out. But just in looking at what affects force size, we are looking at covering weak sectors, some kind of all-day patrol situation, or it could be covering one of our own ground units against surprise attack as basically done in Patton's advance on France. If we are talking about that kind of situation, the force size that counts is the number of airplanes in the air all day long, and it is very simple to calculate what affects that. The thing that affects that is loiter time. The more loiter time you have the more airplanes you will have on station under the fixed force size. The sortie rate is directly proportional to the effective force in the air and cost is inversely proportional.

The other kind of mission we have is not one where we are trying to maintain a presence over some period of time but where we are trying to meet the need for an attack at a fixed time or over a fixed period of hours or days. In that case, the force that counts is our surge sortie rate or our surge number of sorties delivered to the target times the number of kills that those sorties can deliver. So very clearly what counts there is the surge sortie rate itself, the probability of kill on each burst, and the number of bursts you have on board.

Both these kinds of effective force size have to be addressed and I think you will see very clearly how they relate to the kind of airplane we are talking about. For the kind of simplicity that we have envisioned, obviously the sortie rate will be high, perhaps even higher than with the A-10, although the A-10 is certainly not to be faulted on that score. On cost we hope to make a big improvement over the A-10—that situation is not really satisfactory. In loiter time, of course, the A-10 is not to be faulted. The key thing for us is to see how to get very adequate loiter time without making the airplane big.

Given that we have enough airplanes to make a difference, they still have to be there. They have to be where they are needed and they have to be there on time. As we know from our Vietnam experience, that is easier said than done. In general, our response times in Vietnam, even in close-support and emergency conditions, were pretty poor. They normally averaged on the order of 45 minutes, which is practically an order of magnitude too large for emergency situations on the ground. I think there is some agreement among people with experience in this area, people who have performed real close support and ground tacticians, that something on the order of a five-minute response is what is really needed if you are talking about airplanes reinforcing a unit that is suddenly surprised and about to be overrun. The only way you can achieve a five-minute response—there simply is no way other—is to respond by being on station in the air and not too far away, and the only way to get that capability is to have plenty of loiter time. Keep in mind that the kind of loiter times we are talking about here, two hours or more, are not the loiter that is in the basic mission of the airplane, these are additional capabilities with wing-mounted external fuel.

The other critical thing, of course, since we have been talking about new ways of using air and integrating it with blitz or counterblitz operations, is that we have to be able to move this force and shift it far more rapidly than we are used to shifting air forces. This you might call the strategic, mobility or the basic mobility of a blitz fighter force. To really use this airplane and to apply it at the points where, it is needed and within the response time of the ground tactics, you need to be able to shift a wing-size base overnight and a squadron-size base a good deal faster than that. That means very light support and stuff that basically can be operated from trucks—the kind of efforts that went into the bare base package perhaps squared.

At the same time, given that we are in generally the right part of the front because of our strategic mobility, or, if you wish, theater mobility, we also need to be able to respond very rapidly from a strip alert, and I guess if it is something like ten minutes, it is desirable. We obviously cannot put all the airplanes up on loiter all the time because it is far too expensive. But we do need to have a very substantial reserve force that can respond to the needs of some reconnaissance outfit that gets cut off or some main unit that is starting to get overrun or whatever. With that reserve force we would be on strip alert and we need roughly ten minutes to respond. That means we really cannot afford to be based much more than forty miles away. That, in turn, means we are going to have to live with a very different kind of base than we have been used to before. Perhaps many of you know we have already made progress in that area with the exercises at Bicycle Lake with the A-10. But we need to go a little further than that.

Now, in this concept of airplane we are talking about an airplane that can be based on a road or on a grass field or on light strips suitable to Cessna-and Piper-type like planes. That, as you will see in a moment, leads to some painful choices on landing gear.

The last question, and one about which there has been a great deal of conceptual discussion, most of which has served to cloud the issue rather than to clarify it, is the question of survival. Naturally, whenever we raise the question of airplanes whose principal weapon is a gun, the technology lobby immediately counters "They’ll never survive" and then we get out the usual statistics of the number of SA-6’s and the SA-8's and the SA-9's in a Soviet division and all that. I think, in fact, the standard views on the air defense threat over a Soviet division are misinformed to say the least.

If you put yourself in the position of a division commander who has just been told to make twenty miles during daylight, you will begin to see what the problem is. It is simply not possible to move, fast with a modern mechanized armored division and carry along the quantities of air defense that our intelligence people say would be associated with divisions. In fact, if you get down into the details and the bean counts, you will see the threats that are quoted are not air defense that is associated with divisions, that it is all army-level air defense. There are no SA-6's that are organic to the divisions. Now, of course, SA-6's could be assigned forward to divisions as could SA-2's for that matter. But with a little more care about the question of the organizational level at which air defenses are located, it is very important to assess this. There is a good reason why SA-6’s and other large radar missiles are not assigned to divisions and that is they are basically not supportable by divisions during most operations. Because of the long setup times involved with all radar missiles, even if they are mounted on track chassis, and because of their very large support requirements in terms of people, parts, and logistics, they are really a burden to a division commander and, in fact, will never be seen with a Soviet division that is on the move.

The actual weapons that you will see with a Soviet division that is moving fast towards a breakthrough or after a breakthrough will be surprisingly similar to World War II weapons. That is, you will see all the kinds of guns that can be towed by jeep-size vehicles and trucks or that can be mounted on trucks and you will see the types of missiles that people can carry and set up in a couple of minutes or less, and that means RED EYE type missiles, basically SA-7 or its variance. And that is it. That is all you will see in a tactically engaged, moving Soviet division.

Now, it is very important to contrast that with what you would see in a static situation. If you have a division dug in in a static position, as for instance the Egyptian division on the Suez Canal, then, of course, the nature of the defenses changes totally. Then you have time for the half-day emplacement time or so that most radar missiles take. Then you have time to bring up all the extra ammunition, the very bulky missile ammunition. You have time to bring up the technicians and get everything calibrated and so on. Then, of course, you will encounter very fierce defenses. The gun defenses too will be far fiercer because they will have better logistics and much higher densities too and that is exactly what the Israelis ran into. Remember, the Israelis did not run into any kind of mobile air defense. The high attrition rates that we have all been so worried about that the Israelis encountered, were all against static defenses. There is probably a general principle there. I will not go much further, but, in general, it is probably not possible for aircraft to do much in the face of static defenses. It never has been in the past, it probably will not be in the future.

But we are talking here about a very different aircraft in a very different situation. That is important to keep in mind. Given that long preamble, what can we do to really increase the survivability of this airplane over what we have had in the past? First and most important, and this again is a subject on which Rudel is very clear and very helpful, absolutely minimum non-maneuvering time in the presence of guns is critical. The difference in the hit probabilities of guns against straight level airplanes versus maneuvering airplanes is probably on the order of two orders of magnitude. The only reason that we keep on ignoring this kind of thing and the importance of it is, of course, that we have no decent anti-aircraft guns and no anti-aircraft gunners. As a result we do not know some of the simple basics.

The last time Rudel was in this country, I think he really amazed us in telling us when we asked him what his tracking time was with guns. He said it was one and a half seconds, and, of course, most of us are used to thinking about four, five, six, seven seconds tracking time associated with dive bombing. I think our first reaction was that he was exaggerating. But after a lot of questioning on that point and on the tracking times and what average pilots were getting and so on, I came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth and that he, in fact, could execute a hard maneuvering approach basically alternating from one wing, from standing on one wing tip to the other during his approach to a tank, at say thirty to fifty feet altitude, snap out, wings level for one and a half seconds, fire and go off into his maneuvering climb out. We need an airplane that is designed to do that and the only way to get that is to insist on major improvements to the aircraft in terms of pitch and roll acceleration. In fact, we have been discussing some interesting measures that will be a little better than just plain pitch and roll acceleration.

Probably just about as important as the question of aircraft design for constant maneuver is the question of invisibility. There is just no exaggerating the importance of that and there are only three ways to get the kind of invisibility that is critical which is invisibility to ground guns, particularly ground guns and little tactical missiles which are Infrared missiles. The only ways to get that is to have a small airplane, to use camouflage that makes it invisible against the sky background, not just the ground background, and to have an engine that an SA-7 or a Sidewinder missile cannot lock on to. Those are achievable. But we are in fact talking about design. There is an engine available off the shelf that has a very cool exhaust and that will essentially eliminate the infrared missile problem. We are just about there on a real step increase in survivability.

Then there are some other points that I think were already quite well addressed in some of the original A-10 conceptual work, such as reducing vulnerability in structures, measures taken with respect to fuel and so on. I will not belabor those.

There is another important point that i think we have not addressed enough, again due to lack of recent tactical experience, and that is the question of tactics and suppressive fire against anti-aircraft defenses. Once we have a gun fighter that is lethal against tanks, it is going to be extraordinarily lethal against anti-aircraft systems, particularly against anti-aircraft vehicles which are thin skinned, never heavier armored than APC, and just full of ammunition. They should be a far more vulnerable target than a tank and by the use of mutual support tactics, it should, in fact, be possible to make life very dangerous for antiaircraft gunners. That is a very important element in the survivability equation.

The last and probably the least important of all the survivability provisions, as I think about it, are the survivability provisions with respect to radar. I know in the past we have made a lot of noise about radar cross section reduction and so on. My guess is that we have taken into account scintillation effects and the fact that we almost never see airplanes head on but always from some more or less beamed aspect, not always, most of the time there is some beamed aspect, my guess is that radar cross-section reduction is not worth the sacrifice that it requires. In any case, it is hard to foresee any radar weapon in division level environment that is likely to be effective against this aircraft.

There are two points on this that I would like to express and that are really important to keep in mind. First of all, that we badly misconstrued and misestimated what the air threat really .is like over a Soviet division. And the second point, which follows from the first one, is that, in fact, it is possible to achieve very satisfactory survival in the environment that you are going to see over a Soviet division.

Let me give you a little diagram just to show why we place so much stress on size. This is, of course, by no means the complete size question—we really should be showing front views and side views. I think you can see even just from this plan view size comparison how big the differences in size are among these airplanes. Using the F-5 as our standard, the A-10 is two and a half times the size of the F-5. On the other hand, in the past, the British have built an airplane that is almost half the size of the F-5 and a very fine jet fighter that is called the Gnat. One of the early blitz fighter design studies came up with an airplane that was very similar in size to it, again about half the size of the F-5.

Keep in mind now that the F-5 itself is a large airplane by World War II standards. By the standards of the last time that we did really intensive anti-armor work, the F-5 probably is not a satisfactory size. That is why I stress the importance in these design exercises that we are going through which are aiming for airplanes that are significantly smaller than the F-5.

Now, just wrapping up on these individual effectiveness dimensions that we have been talking about and turning them into an airplane, here is my best guess at what is feasible, based in part in looking at a few design studies and in part on some scratch calculations of my own. I make no claim, that these are hard and fast numbers, but I think that they are feasible. I think we can build an airplane in the range of five to seven thousand pounds while preserving the maneuver ability that we are talking about, the low-speed performance that we are talking about, we can make that airplane two-thirds the size of the F-5. It would be nice to go further but there would be some difficulty. Of course, it would sacrifice low-speed performance. It is easy to make it half the size of the F-5. In cost, if we stick with roughly the level of technology of say the A-37 air frame, it should be easy to make it less than 1.5 to 2 million dollars. Of course, on the other hand, that is a big "if". We have had lots of experience in trying to build airplanes simpler than the prevailing fashion and somehow things always get a little out of hand on the cost of them and they rarely turn out as simple as we hoped. In fact, if we were to redo an A-37 today, it would cost a little under $800,000, including all the inflations from the last time we built it. That gives you a feel for how much margin there is in these cost estimates. An A-37, I might add, is slightly larger than the airplane we are talking about.

As for lethality, as I mentioned before, I think we can probably increase our kills per pass by perhaps fifty percent or maybe a little better.

In terms of performance we are looking for a very wide speed range and one that will be challenging to achieve. We are looking for good maneuvering performance over the range of 150 knots up to a maximum speed of say 450 knots. We are looking for substantially more acceleration in climb than the A-10, at least 75 percent better, and with some luck maybe better than that.

In transient performance, whether you measure it in acceleration, roll acceleration near the stall, or in terms of perhaps a more realistic measure, the time to execute transient maneuvers, I think my estimate of 200 percent is very conservative. I would be very disappointed if we did not get 400 percent improvement over the A-10, just because the size of this airplane and its moments of inertia are so much smaller than the A-10.

Finally, we would like to be able to operate from grass fields or asphalt roads substantially shorter than 4,000 feet, and I mean operate from, I do not mean take-off roll calculations for 4,000 feet. I mean all the safety factors included that we would include in actual operation, and including landing with a loaded airplane to execute this strip alert, ground loiter type mission we are talking about.

I think that some of the features of the kind of design, at least that I have been looking at, are a high thrust-to-weight, if we get just a midpoint weight of 6,000 pounds, we will have a thrust-to-weight of 0.85 which is certainly a great improvement over the A-10. We should have a wingload that will be very much lower than the roughly fifty or so that people have been looking at. I am looking at a wingload of 30 pounds per square foot on a tailless delta configuration that is a thick-wing tailless delta. As I mentioned, we are looking at a very cold engine, the ATF-3 engine, a commercially developed and commercially available engine. If we are going to be serious about a grass-field capability, and I know as painful as it is to pilots who have grown up with tricycle landing gear, tricycle landing gear just is not adequate for landing in a grass field. There are years and years of pre-World War II experience, there are years of crop-duster experience that show that if you are going to land on a grass field, a bicycle landing gear, two wheels, is the only way to go.

A very important capability for the surge sortie rate we are talking about is hot refueling and rearming. The airplane has to be designed to be safe, to be refueled and rearmed, with the engine running.

And, finally, it would be very nice, particularly in the configuration that I was looking at, I think it is feasible with a tailless delta, that there be no external fuel at all. The amount of fuel with the kind of mission we are talking about, which after all are pretty short range missions, is small and there is lots of extra fuel volume. As long as we treat that fuel volume just the way we treat external tanks and do not count it in the structural requirements of the airplane, we will be able to meet these very small airplanes and maybe do away with the inconvenience of external tanks.

Okay, so much for the technical features of that airplane. Let us talk just a brief moment about the program. This is a subject that deserves a lot of discussion and I will just essentially open the discussion.

As we have seen in the past, when we have tried to build relatively simple airplanes, the most critical thing towards any kind of performance for the size and the cost is design discipline and that is something that we all know is very hard to achieve in the atmosphere of the Pentagon and the aircraft development bureaucracy.

I think we have two programs now based on competitive fly-off. Both show, I think, very significant advantages to having had that competition. The benefits were not all that we could have gotten, but both programs went substantially better than our standard prototype and procurement-type programs. I think that needs to be repeated, maybe even improved. And certainly, if we are going to do a fly-off with an anti-tank aircraft, it has to be made on an actual live shooting of those tanks. There should be no ducking that issue.

Very important, and a place where we really got hurt badly on our last competitive development, is the fact that we developed two sets of prototypes, had a fine fly-off, both prototypes were excellent airplanes, both prototypes were combat capable as they grew, they both had guns and IR missiles, and despite that we went into a one billion dollar engineering development program which ruined the airplane. I will not say ruined it completely because the F-16 is still a very good airplane, but they came close to doubling the cost and added about a third more weight and really destroyed a lot of the components that we were hoping for in the airplane. One way or another, this kind of program has to avoid that full-scale engineering development after a competition.

Finally, and this is in a sense the point of today’s session, where-ever we come out on the design of this airplane and whatever disagreements we have on what is really needed, the critical thing is that we base the design and our discussion on things that are associated with hard combat experience, and not on the promises of the R&D cartel and those endless conversations about how great it is going to be tomorrow. And, of course, that is why we have Colonel Rudel here today, exactly for that reason.

I think it will be helpful if we follow roughly the outlines that we have been talking about here, of the critical aspects of finding and killing tanks. If we follow that kind of outline in talking with Rudel, I think you will be astounded at how much insight you will get into what today's blitz fighter can do. When you sit down and think seriously about what we are setting out to do in building a new anti-armor airplane, I think you will realize just how much insight a man with Colonel Rudel's experience really has into the problem that faces us today. After all, tanks hardly look different from the air today than they did in 1944. There certainly have been no improvements in tank tactics since 1944. I think we are all sadly aware of that, and so we can expect that they will maneuver in the same way, that they will try to hide from whatever threats they have in the same way.

Secondly, we had a long discussion on effective defenses. At least in my view, the defenses today look very little different from the way they did in World War II, with one exception: They will be less dense and less lethal than they were in World War II because all armies of the world have used up so many resources in buying missiles that the gun density will be substantially lower. The missiles will not be on the battlefield and the gun densities will be lower. And, of course, the gun effectiveness has changed very little. Gun ballistics, which is really the heart of gun effectiveness, has hardly changed at all although.it could have. Radar fire controls for guns do not fight in this kind of. arena because they do not work against a maneuvering target, they only work against straight and level targets.

What about tactics? I would be very, very surprised if anywhere in the world there were any advances in anti-tank aircraft tactics since 1944. Much more likely is the fact that we have forgotten some of the best tactics we knew then.

What about weapons? This is the one area which has really changed substantially since Colonel Rudel, surprisingly enough. The gun we have today is very different from the gun he used. He had to make do with two 37-millimeter cannon that fired one shot per burst for each cannon, which demanded a level of accuracy completely different from what we need today with our high rate 30-millimeter cannons. So in that sense, we have made progress and we have eased our problem.

And finally, what about the ground battle itself, which is perhaps the most critical determinant of all? Well, it seems clear to me that we have not made much progress in blitzkrieg, in counterblitz operations, or, in general, in mobile armored warfare. And again, just like in the anti-air tactics, we have probably retrogressed to some extent.

Summing all those, I think you will see why I feel that it is so important for us to really probe in depth with a man with Colonel Rudel’s experience. I will not belabor his background for you other than to say that beyond the shadow of a doubt, he is the single man in the world who knows most about killing tanks from the air. He personally has destroyed two divisions worth of tanks, several battleships, perhaps a hundred locomotives, and God knows how many trucks and other targets. Probably no other pilot in World War II had as much effect on the outcome of battles as Colonel Rudel, and I do not think there is a better man in the world that we could talk to on this subject. Thank you.

Moderator: Colonel Rudel is not here yet. Let us entertain questions.

Mr. Sprey: Let me say first of all, I have really gone very quickly over some areas which need a lot of discussion. I think for today the most important thing is to have a very thoroughgoing discussion with Colonel Rudel. If there is time afterwards, I will be very happy to stay and we can kick around any of the issues that I have raised here. But for the time remaining let us have some questions.

Question: I was a little bit concerned about the Quad 23 operating in an offensive roll. Do you see that as a threat?

Mr. Sprey: About the same threat as four single 23's. Do you think it is better than four single 23's?

Questioner: Not particularly.

Mr. Sprey: Yes. And there is a lot more maintenance problem because of the tracked chassis. I am not advocating that the Russians get rid of the Quad 23. I do not think it qualitatively changes anything. We have had that thing presented to us as some frightful threat. We know first of all that the ballistics are nothing to write home about. The mount itself is not a particularly good mount and has some problems with recoil. The radar fire control is irrelevant with an evasive target. So why is that such a frightful weapon? We know it is not going to be there in tremendous density. Certainly not in World War II type gun density. I see no reason to be overwhelmed or awed by the threat of a Quad 23.

Question: (Inaudible question about the SA-8.)

Mr. Sprey: You mean Roland-type missiles? We will have to see whether those can really move with the division that has got to cover some territory. I have some doubts. However, I do not think it is a worrisome system because it could be substantially worse against maneuvering targets. It is a beam rider and beam riders have pretty poor kinetics on maneuvering targets. I see no reason to worry about it, you know. It is of course, quite lethal with straight level targets, but we are designing this airplane to not be straight and level ever except when firing.

Moderator: Excuse me. Let me interrupt here because Colonel Rudel has arrived.

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COLONEL HANS-ULRICH RUDEL QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION
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Moderator: Let us start out with the subject of how they, Rudel's forces, were controlled and oriented prior to the mission, the kind of steps that we are going through, what kind of control they had, what kind of intelligence they had, prior-to-take-off thoughts as a first area of questioning. Then we will go after the take-off to learn how you find the tanks and so on, and we will work our way through a mission with Colonel Rudel.

Pierre Sprey brought up a couple of things about Colonel Rudel. He had more missions than any man in World War II, with 2500 combat sorties. He personally killed 500 plus tanks. The way that was verified was that after he killed a tank, it had to not only burn, it had to burn and explode and it had to be seen by another person in order to have a verification of a kill. Now, Don Tribble is here from Nellis, and we have done a lot of shooting at tanks and one of the things that we found out is that tanks do not necessarily burn and blow up right then. A lot of times that happens five and ten and even thirty minutes later, after you are long gone. So the probability is that there were more kills than that, but that was how it was done at the time.

Colonel Rudel did sink a battleship, at that time the largest ship sunk by air. It reminded me a lot of the movie "Star Wars" because he had to get it down the chimney. In the book he pulled out and it was a heavy high g pull out to the point where he blacked out and he was just above the water at 50 feet when vision came back so he had really gotten close. Let me introduce Colonel Hans Rudel and pass on to him our thanks for being here and then explain the procedure that we are going to have.

We will start out with questions to Colonel Rudel on pre-mission briefings and any pre-mission control arrangements as Colonel Rudel knew them on the Russian Front.

From the floor: Mr. Christie asked Captain Ratley to give a brief run down of the Luftwaffe's anti-tank operations on the Eastern Front.

Captain Ratley: I might just mention how very important it is to understand that there were only two squadrons of cannon-equipped Stukas on the Eastern Front. There were a total of something like 300 of these JU-87G's built and they were fed through these two squadrons which, of course, had a very sizable attrition rate. Colonel Rudel himself had thirty airplanes shot out from under him, which is a little over one percent loss rate from his 2500 missions.

Question: How did they decide what they were going to do the next day?

Interjection: Just give the rough size of the units.

Answer: There were a lot of Stuka wings and squadrons and so forth, but there were only two units that had the cannon-equipped aircraft; that is with the 37-millimeter cannon under each wing. Each aircraft had two 37-millimeter cannon hung under the wings, one on each side, and they had a clip of six shells in them for each side, a total of twelve. They were supposedly synchronized to fire two shells out at the same time to keep it symmetrical when they were firing.

The two wing-size units’ (Geschwader) nominal strength was 150 aircraft Geschwader 2 and 77 had the cannon-equipped aircraft and each of those units had one enlarged squadron that had the cannon-equipped aircraft. Each on-line string in the field ran about 15 aircraft each, so there were only, at any given time, about thirty Stukas that were cannon-equipped at a time. There was also another unit that was equipped with HS129’s. It was a group-size unit and it had at its inception sixty-eight HS129’s, which was a twin-engine aircraft with a belly-mounted 30-millimeter cannon. It was a Mark 101 and later a 103 Mauser, similar to the Oerlikon KCA which some of you may be familiar with. It carried 30 rounds of 30-millimeter ammunition. All of these used a tungsten carbide penetrator. Any questions on that?

Question: Ask Colonel Rudel if he can remember the date that he first attacked a tank with his aircraft with the cannon on it. Does he remember that time? And was he successful?

Answer: The first time that they had a chance to use the cannon-equipped aircraft was in May of 1943 on a bridgehead down in the Southern Army Group. It was noteworthy by their unsuccess because the front in that particular area had been stabilized for over a year and a half—very, very firm lines on both sides and the defenses in the area were too formidable for them at that time to use their aircraft successfully. The had an encounter with tanks, but they did not report any kills to their knowledge. However, there were some ships that they did attack.

Interjection: Let me translate directly a very telling phrase that Colonel Rudel just used. He said, "That day we discovered the limits of the cannon-equipped Stuka and we realized that when you attack static defenses, static positions, you cannot have any success." This relates obviously to what we were just talking about.

Question: Here let me insert Tom Christy's question. What time of the day did they start, how did he get his mission for the day, how did he perform his pre-take-off preparations, how many people went?

Answer: Just talking about force size, Colonel Rudel says that going out with a group of more than five to six airplanes was simply nonsense. They just got in each other's way and they started attacking the same tanks and there was no point to it. So he favors tactical formations of no more than five to six. He is talking here about the cannon-equipped aircraft, which you should realize was an extraordinarily unmaneuverable airplane. It was really a marginal war plane. It was a very heavily overloaded JU-87. It was right at the maximum limit. It was considerably more limited in top speed than a normal JU-87 which was not known for its blinding speed, and secondly it was quite unmaneuverable. In general, I think, they were limited to maneuvers of less than three g's with this airplane. So you can see what kind of hindrances they were working with, but the effectiveness of the gun was so critical because it was the only thing they had that really worked against tanks. They were willing to take all these disadvantages and a really poor handling aircraft just to have the gun.

Moderator: With regard to the intelligence that they had in their preparation prior to their attack, they got most of their information from army units that would report that there were tanks attacking or in preparation for attack in a certain sector. Sometimes they would go there and sometimes tanks would be there and sometimes they would not. They also got intelligence from their own reconnaissance units and again, when the information was relatively new, it would work out and they could go there and find the enemy. Other times, it just did not work out because they had already dispersed.

Interjection: They were being briefed by division-level staff, ground division level staff intelligence was what they were getting.

Colonel Rudel is returning to the subject of the stable front. He said in May of 1943 they really discovered the limits of their weapon. There was a stable front in the south, it was Kunskia (sp. ?), and they just found there was simply no point in attacking that front. It was better simply not to fly, not attack, because all you could hope for was high losses and very few Panzers to show for it.

Question: Let me return to the original question. What time did he start the day out, how was he told, was it radio communications, who was he attached to, where were they located relative to the front, what did they do in the way of preparation for the mission? Can you answer those questions?

Answer: They would attack the enemy tanks as soon as they made contact with friendly units. Sometimes this would be as early as five in the morning or as late as ten in the evening. There was not that much preparation in the way of a briefing or anything of that sort. Everyone was expected to know his job before he got there and as soon as they were contacted and given information about the enemy, they would take off and try and get there as soon as possible.

Interjection: Let me add one thing to that. The normal preparation for a day’s operations, and this is from Colonel Rudel’s book, was a morning meteorological flight, usually conducted by Colonel Rudel alone, and that was the first flight of the day, take-off was well before dawn and that flight both served the purpose of getting the visibility conditions in the area in which they were supposed to operate and, of course, was a reconnaissance flight and, in fact, I was referring to the very valuable reconnaissance he was doing, a lot of that was gained on these first morning flights. He would be in touch by whatever means he could either through a radio tank equipped with an equivalent of a forward air controller or, on occasion, as he has described in his book, he actually wrote out a note on a knee pad and enclosed it in a metal capsule and then dropped it on a battalion commander’s cent in order to communicate with him that there were tanks in the next village. This was invaluable information. A lot of this was derived from these first flights of the morning, which he called meteorological flights.

Question: Was his mission tasking out of the army or did it come from air force? At what level did it come to him and by what means? Was he told that he was going to be at such and such a point at a particular time with a given bomb load or whatever, a mission load? Was he given those kind of details or was he told, like John Boyd was talking about, "Here's the main activity of the day. Do your mission?"

Answer: The usual request was from Army level to "liege division" which was the air division level, although sometimes there was much higher air level, the next two levels up. The critical thing is that the army had no control whatsoever of the air assets. The army could only request. It had no control over the actual air assets. Decisions were made at air division level or these higher levels as to whether Colonel Rudel’s squadron was going to be here today and attacking tanks in this area or somewhere else in the front. Of course, the army could state their preferences, that was essentially it. Furthermore, of course, as all higher level staff processes are, that was kind of slow. By the time the word got to Colonel Rudel, the tanks were somewhere else. However, he had a lot of freedom for choosing his own area of operations. It was up to him and the army expected it of him to find where those tanks were by this time. You know, the request might be a day old or more. He based his mission simply on the request and then it was within his authority to find the tanks that he thought had been referred to in the original request. So he had a lot of tactical flexibility about the area he operated in. I might add one other thing and that is that the reason the Stuka units were so responsive, or one of the reasons, is a very significant thing that you will see in Rudel’s book. He never refers to himself as a pilot, he always refers to himself as a soldier and that seems to me a very critical difference in the responsiveness that was actually achieved, even though the ground units he was supporting had no authority whatsoever over allocating his efforts.

Question: I think the question was asked how close to the front they based themselves and what were the facilities they had at the base, what did. they require in the way of support coming in to them, and how did they do that?

Answer: Normally, they were based fifty to sixty kilometers from the front but, because of the fluid situation, sometimes around a hundred kilometers.

In some instances, of course, they were much closer, as close as a kilometer or maybe even on the other side. Their normal supplies and fuel were brought up through rail to the nearest rail head and then from there they would be brought directly into the airfield with trucks. In normal instances, they had quite an adequate supply of both supplies and fuel and only very seldom did they use air to bring in any kind of supplies, when there was a critical shortage or perhaps in one of these instances where they were real close to the front.

Question: Did the trucks belong to the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht?

Answer: They belonged to the Luftwaffe ground organization.

Interjection: His deliveries incidentally were every one or two days, deliveries of supplies, but every once in a while they would get interrupted because of the situation, then they would eat less.

Question: What was the vehicle for getting these requests. Was it by radio, telephone, or how?

Answer: By radio.

Question: In his book, Colonel Rudel made a reference to frequent moving of the base from position to position in response to the changing ground situation and Pierre also brought it up in his briefing. As this is very important for the blitz fighter, I would be interested in some illumination on what it took to move a base and how long it would take to move it and how they moved it.

Answer: They had no bare base moves. It just was not part of their system. Corps level, air corps level knew in advance that they would need certain bases and did all the provisioning of the bases in advance and this included when they were in the retreat, they would be preparing bases to the rear, knowing that the front would be moving back or lateral moves or whatever. So those would already have munitions and fuel and some ground personnel. Their moves were very fast because they did not have to bring that heavy stuff. They brought essentially crew chiefs and airplanes and started off with borrowed technical people, borrowed maintenance people and then could bring in more of their own if they needed them. So, as far as I can see, the moves were essentially not much longer than the flight time.

Question: That is assuming that they were retreating all the time. When they were going forward they did not have that opportunity. What did they do then?

Answer: Let us amplify that a little bit. They had more flexibility I think than our units do. They would tailor a force for whatever particular operation they happened to be involved in—roughly an equivalent of a wing commander would have reconnaissance units, Stuka units, cannon aircraft, and maybe just straight ground support ME-190’s or something like that. Their forces were much more flexible and much more tailored to individual operations than we are.

And they could do the same thing going forward or back. I just used the example of the retreat. But then again when they needed new fields it was not up to them to arrange it. The corps level had to have foreseen that and already had ground personnel on hand.

I have a follow-on on that. One of the reasons why they had to move, of course, probably had to do with the limited range of the aircraft but an interesting question would be whether even if he had more range would Colonel Rudel have wanted to move like he did just to keep the intimacy with the evolving situation, to be closer to the target. This is the answer to a slightly different question. He was asked whether he preferred to stay with certain ground units and whether that helped coordination and cooperation. He said they did not have that luxury because of course there were so few cannon-equipped aircraft. They had to cover the whole Eastern front with the few cannon-equipped aircraft they had, so they did not get any choice whatsoever about where they would rather fly. He said, however, it did make a lot of difference to them which units they flew with. They knew which were the elite divisions, which were the divisions that had tradition and a really aggressive spirit and had a good fighting record. Of course, this made a difference in how they felt about their flying, and to some extent perhaps the effort, because if they knew that they were just one of the ordinary run-of-the-mill or cannon fodder divisions they knew they had only been assigned there in order to kind of soothe the ground commanders. But when they were with an elite unit they knew their attack and their losses would have some effect, because they would be followed up on the ground, you know, with some results.

This is quite interesting. If he had had more fuel on board and more range he would not have used it to move his fields further back 50 or 60 kilometers but he would have used it in the target area for more search time because that was invaluable to him. He would have liked to have stayed the same distance, the 50 or 60 kilometers, because of the matter of time—time to respond. In case they got an emergency request, or when there was an attack on the front, he wanted to be able to respond in what he thought was u reasonable time and to go much further back than 50 or 60 kilometers would just take too much time to get there. You can calculate for yourself what he is talking about because the Stuka had a cruise speed of something like 140 knots or so.

Question: Would you ask him please what the optimal killing zone was. How far did he range from the FEBA and did he ever engage enemy tanks when German and Soviet tanks were actually fighting and were actually mixed up together?

Answer: We might even start out, could he sea the FEBA? He could not because it did not exist. How could he be told where the FEBA was if none existed.

He goes back to Kunskia (sp. ?) which taught him the lesson that as soon as the tanks were within their defenses, you did not want to touch them because you were not going to have any success until they started to move; that is, move out from their assembly positions. In their assembly positions they were covered by heavy flak and you just could not go in there and make six or seven passes on them without expecting really heavy losses yourself. It was not worth it. The time to get them was when they started to move out. As soon as they went into their road march or into their attack formation they would move out 1 or 2 kilometers from their defenses. They were a little careless, they were mostly concerned about the battle itself and the flak was not that mobile. That was the time to get them. Anytime they were back of there, back of the actual deployment for attack, you were going to be in trouble if you tried to attack them. You were just going to take very high losses.

Question: Ask him if enemy air ever interfered with their operations at their bases. Was enemy air a problem?

Answer: He said they had very few attacks by Russian fighters on their own bases to the extent that they rarely used camouflage, the camouflage nets were not a standard procedure because when the Russian fighter pilots attacked their aim was so poor that they almost never destroyed any airplanes. They did not worry about it a lot. There were some elite units—the Stalin Falcons were quite good, but that was just a few squadrons in a huge air force, and so on the ground at their own bases they did not worry very much because even if they were attacked they were unlikely to get hit. Now we are going to ask him the next step of what he felt.

They did camouflage their aircraft by painting them different colors for different times of the year. In the winter, it would be white, and then it would be spring and it would be greenish-brown, and then a lighter brown in the summer time.

Question: I would be curious if he could project or if he could imagine what if the Russian aviators had been as good as he was in air-to-ground and decided to attack his bases, what effect would that have had?

Answer: He says that is a very theoretical question. He says that the real reason that he got to be good was experience. Experience with sortie after sortie after sortie. The Russians generally were shot down after 20 or 30 missions and never had a chance to get the experience. He says very modestly, and I think he is probably falsely and incorrectly modest, he says that he was not any better than the other pilots, it is just that he flew so much longer. That is excessive modesty.

Question: A more basic question is security of the forward basing. Forward basing was very practical, but if the enemy had any kind of a decent air force at all I do not understand how he could operate.

Answer: On that subject of relative quality of pilots and the importance of experience, he says it was clear being there that by the middle or end of 1942 the German Luftwaffe had declined very significantly in effectiveness, in the results they were getting, the quality had declined greatly because a lot of the experienced people, highly trained and experienced people, had been shot down by that time and the effect was very visible. From the end of 1942 on you just did not see the kind of results that you had seen up to that point. That question of who were the experienced and good people was absolutely dominant in the effectiveness of the whole air force. He says he was just lucky, he was one of the guys who was left at the end of 1942. He already had the experience.

Question: (inaudible) This will be the last question before lunch. Make it rather short if you can.

Answer: Sir, to answer your question about the Russian pilots and if they were better what would things have been like he really does not want to address that because it is very theoretical in nature but I asked him. I mentioned that he was obviously not a very good example to take, so how would he find the difference between an average Russian pilot during the war and an average German pilot. As he mentioned, the power the Luftwaffe had declined very seriously after the middle of 1942 because they lost so much of their experience.

However, he said a lot of the difference in the character and the quality of the German pilots versus the Russian pilots was just because of the national mentality of the Russians and their attitudes as opposed to those of the Germans. Where the Russians tended to be more dogmatic and more authoritarian, the Germans tended to be more flexible in their operating methods. Just as a national characteristic.

Moderator: Now that we have finished lunch, I think we can get started again. We have a couple of questions remaining from just before lunch, and we heard some very interesting commentary during lunch and it will probably come up as we ask more questions. General Casey, I believe, had a question just before lunch. He wanted to know whether many Luftwaffe personnel became casualties as bases got real close to the front or even got to the wrong side of the front.

Answer: Colonel Rudel can give you a pretty precise answer on that question. He had a Geschwade of 1500 men and he thinks in four years of war they lost about 30 men—30 casualties due to ground attacks. On various occasions their air field was either within artillery range, and I think on one occasion it was actually overrun by tanks. In toto, out of 1500 men they had 30 casualties in four years of war due to ground action.

Question: How about airplanes?

Answer: He says that at most they lost perhaps 40 airplanes in the entire course of four years of the war due to direct ground action—either artillery on the airport or direct tank fire. He says they lost substantially more airplanes than that due to having to move fast and not having the last washer or tiny part in place so they could not fly them out. They lost far more because of their constantly having to move and leaving the airplanes behind that were not quite ready. And then, of course, as you know their hostile action air losses overshadowed all that. These are very small numbers compared to how many airplanes their wing lost in four years of war because their attrition rates were high and they took them continuously. What I am saying is that the total of all forms of loss on air bases including air attack was no more than 40.

Question: Did they ever get an airplane shot down by a tank?

Moderator: Let us hold off a little until we get into our tactics, but please ask the question then. I am sure they did.

Answer: To answer the other important question from before lunch, Mr. Myers asked if the Russians had been better would it have been possible to operate from bases as close as 50 kilometers behind the front? I just asked Colonel Rudel and he says if the Russians had been better attack pilots and had been better shots in strafing, he says with the addition of very careful extensive daily camouflage such as camouflage nets and so on, plus heavy flak at every base, he said they would not have changed their tactics. He thinks that it would have been quite feasible to continue to operate, and the disadvantages of moving further back than 50 kilometers would have been too strong.

Question: You say he would have added more camouflage and flak protection.

Answer: Yes, he says they would have added in their TO&E more camouflage equipment, and I presume the men to do it, and they would have added more flak batteries.

Question: Do you think he could have operated in the west?

Answer: He says he would have to answer that question with a flat no. They could not have operated in the west because the air superiority of the Allies was simply too overwhelming. Keep in mind that it was not just a quantitative thing, it was also due to the fact that the really first-class pilots of the Luftwaffe by 1943 were pretty much wiped out. Earlier than 1943, of course, as you know over northern France, and so on, the Luftwaffe more than held its own and there was no such air superiority. But after 1943 and by the time of Normandy they had both the quantitative losses and much more importantly the good pilots were gone. Therefore, they did not have the situation of necessary air superiority and therefore the Stukas could not have operated.

Ignoring the factor of the Allied air, he says, in every other way it would have been lovely to operate on the western front because he said the Sherman tank burned much more beautifully than the T-34. The T-34 was one of the finest armored tanks of its time.

Question: What is the secret they used to keep from being shot down by German troops and how much of a problem was that?

Answer: He cannot remember a single loss among the Stukas to friendly flak. He attributes that to several factors. One was that they were pretty austerely equipped with flak in the first place. There was not much German flak. They were concentrating much more on the main ground weapons.

What flak they had was very heavily engaged in anti-tank combat because the 88 was such an important anti-tank weapon. Since they did not worry much about the quality of the Russian pilots, and so on, that was a far more important application. One, there was not much flak. Two, the JU-87 had a very distinctive shape. So distinctive that even the dumbest flak gunner could see that it was German. Third, they had Very pistols that they would fire off and if they thought they had friendly flak firing at them they would actually fire a Very pistol out of the airplane. Lastly the flak gunners were very, very carefully and constantly instructed on aircraft recognition, although in the case of the Stuka it was not so difficult, but other German airplanes were a little more like the Russian airplanes. He was also mentioning during lunch, I might just add, that the pilots were under constant instruction on tank recognition, and always being brought up to date on the very latest Russian models and the very latest German models. He himself in his career thinks that he fired on friendly tanks once or twice; fortunately, without lethal results. Once he remembers he fired at a tank and he happened to be shooting a little high and hit it in the turret which he did not penetrate completely, and immediately a helmet popped out. He was still watching to look for the results and he saw by the shape that it was a German helmet, and the guy was waving to him like that. He felt very badly. He said luckily they had the tungsten carbide round and not the uranium because the uranium round would very likely have set the tank on fire and that would have been bad. But his shot was nonlethal.

Question: Can we get a sense of what the battlefield looked like? I am interested in how many tanks he would normally engage. Was this a division main attack or was it a smaller group of tanks that he would pick up and attack with a flight of five or six airplanes? Is it five or six airplanes against 500 tanks in an attack or five or six airplanes against five or six tanks?

Answer: If you do not make the question theoretical, I think you will get a better answer. If you ask him how many tanks he would see at one time he will tell you. I do not think he could possibly tell how many there were in the attack if he did not see them.

Question: Okay, how many tanks would he see, were they mainly dispersed across country, or were they maybe on roads?

Answer: Difficult question because of the variability, but he will try to answer it.

In those which were huge battles, much larger than any tank battle since, one saw five to six hundred in assembly areas ready for the trip. But they were so defended by flak in static situations that there was simply no hope of attacking them. When the tanks went into the attack out of these assembly areas they would typically be in groupings of 20 to 30, and their spacings would be 50 to 60 meters apart. And incidentally, just as a side comment, that of course is what destroys the effectiveness of cluster weapons. That is too far apart to get much overlap from cluster patters.

Question: About the tanks on the roads.

Answer: He says you have to remember the special quality of the Russian terrain. It is very flat and almost all of it is trafficable with some exceptions and so there was not much need for road. Furthermore, there were not many roads. There are not now and there were not then in Russia and so there was nothing to restrain the tanks to the road. So they would go into attack positions. Even if they were on the road when they saw a Stuka attack coming they would leave the road and start weaving maneuvers as much as possible in order to defeat aiming.

Question: I would like to get back to an earlier statement you made, Sir. Do you actually look for specific areas where the tank is vulnerable. Do you actually aim for those points, shoot at them, and have you found that to be an important factor?

Answer: That was discussed at lunch. Let me repeat the question first of all. For specific tanks did they aim for specific points that were vulnerable. To make it quick I will just give you the gist of the discussion at lunch. Colonel Rudel said this was one of the great differences between the gun he worked with and the new uranium round. The gun he worked with was not particularly incendiary, that is the round was not particularly incendiary and so you had to hit specific areas, preferably always the area that had the ammunition. In fact, they would aim to hit within 10 centimeters of an aim point to really get assured destruction. They were talking about tiny vulnerable spots because of the difficulty of getting a visible kill. Remember, they only got credit for kills that could be seen burning or exploding. He says that is one thing that has changed totally. Now you have the uranium round, and now he says all over the tank there are vulnerable places and you can set it on fire from a very wide area and these accuracy requirements, to hit within 10 centimeters of where you aim, no longer exist. He says that is a tremendous new freedom.

Question: At what range did he shoot?

Answer: 200 meters for him and less experienced pilots would shoot at 400.

Question: I would like to get back to the question of firing on his own tanks—how did he handle recognition and what effect did weather, smoke, and what not have on this?

Answer: Okay, the question of recognition was discussed at lunch. He says the principal thing was of course the constant training of the pilots on recognition of friendly and enemy tanks and the latest models. If it was not clear from some other clues as to which tanks you were dealing with, then as a last resort they would go to extremes and actually overfly the tank at 5 to 10 meters to make positive recognition because they all understood the very serious impact of firing on friendlies. The incident where he fired on the friendlies was caused by the fact that he had two German tanks right next to a Russian flak gun. It was in very close combat; when he saw the Russian flak gun he figured there would not be two German tanks next to one of those and that is when he attacked, you see, it was a mistake.

Question: Colonel Rudel, in your book you made considerable reference to the futility of cutting bridges. The basic thought was that you cut them well enough but they had portable bridges and they rebuilt them so fast that it just was not worth it—it was not worth the losses and it was not worth the effort. We are putting considerable effort into that today so I was just wondering if he had any thought there.

Answer: He says they attacked bridges as you mentioned and it always took lots and lots of effort to get a bridge, you know, you would have side winds. You would have all kinds of problems in placing the bomb just where you wanted it and it always took lots of bombs and lots of sorties and then finally you would drop the bridge with effort and losses and, lo and behold, the next morning it would be fixed or there would be a pontoon bridge right next to it and all the effort was down the tubes. He says it rarely took them more than half a day to fix a bridge. So, he says, of course there are tactical situations when a few hours may be very important and then you need to attack it despite the losses, but he says as a matter of constant targeting he thinks it is a very bad idea to attack bridges as a regular matter. He said they would figure out exactly how many bombs it would take but that points back again to the fact that they were very resource limited. They had lots and lots of things to do with Stukas and never had enough to go around and bridges just turned out not to be very useful.

Question: Could we explore the impacts of obscuration of the battlefield due to smoke and the impact of artillery shells a little bit more?

Answer: He said smoke was much less of a problem than you might think. Obviously, if a tank is smoked in and he needs to hit it within 10 centimeters of a certain spot he is not going to do it. But he said the typical situation when smoke was used as a tactical measure there would always be three or four tanks that somehow were not covered at the edge of the smoke barrage. They would go after those first. Fifteen minutes later the smoke would be gone and they would go after the rest of them.

Question: Friendly artillery and enemy artillery in the impact area?

Answer: Well, he is talking specifically of enemy artillery putting down a smoke barrage to protect their own tanks. That was the situation he has been discussing.

Question: How about camouflage. Did they try to use camouflage while they were advancing or anything? I am just trying to think of the difficulty of acquiring targets in that arena.

Answer: Right. He said there is a world of difference between moving and standing. Standing, of course, the Russians were masters at camouflage. They would put bushes and what not on the tanks, but he said once they were moving it did not help much to do all that. If you are interested, I will ask him about detection ranges.

He says typical recognition distances for knowing that they were tanks— not identifying but just knowing that there were tanks out there—moving tanks as carefully camouflaged as they could be on a field, not on a road, 400 or 500 meters he said. Pretty close. Even closer than I had expected.

If you used the speed of the A-10 at 900 kilometers an hours, he says, it would be totally useless. You might as well forget about it. You would never see tanks at 900 kilometers an hour. You have to use the low-speed capability of the airplane. That brings up an interesting point that came out at lunch that I think is of major significance here. Colonel Rudel thinks that we have made a terrible mistake in the A-10, and that we would be likely to repeat that mistake in any new airplane, by not having a second seat facing to the rear. He says there is no question in his mind that if you are going to do anti-tank work you cannot do without that second seat. He gives the following reasons. You must give undivided attention to scanning the terrain in order to find the tanks because they are terribly difficult to find. To do that you cannot be distracted by any requirement to look to the rear or to cover your own six. As soon as you have to interrupt your scanning to look back, you are out of the tank finding business. You will not find them. It will be impossible. Secondly, there is also the issue that if these airplanes have a high-speed capability and the pilot is in some fear that he is going to be bounced he is simply not going to use the low-speed capability and he will be using the upper end of the speed spectrum, the 900 kilometers an hour that he is talking about on the A-10 or on any new airplane. So you must have the second seater to cover six simply to give the pilot security so he will be willing to use the low speed, because if he does not use the low speed he is not going to find the tanks and that is all there is to it. He is absolutely definite on that, just unshakeably firm in that opinion. I think it is something we have to take very seriously. He is talking about this more. He talks about it much more in terms of just seeing than in terms of defense. As you know, the Stuka had a gunner back there and he has not really brought up the question of the effect of having the gun itself. It is just the effect of having a pair of eyeballs looking to the rear.

Question: At what altitude did you make the reconnaissance flights that you mentioned earlier and at what altitude would you normally fly?

Answer: The question was what altitude, what typical altitudes were used for these early morning reconnaissance meterological flights and what were the typical altitudes used when searching for tanks?

In fairly thin defenses on the morning reconnaissance flight he would fly about 800 meters. If there were stronger defenses he would fly at 1500 meters. Normal search for tanks when he went out on normal attack flights was 400 meters altitude. Then he says if they knew there were tanks down there but could not see them he would look for evidence of tanks. If he saw tracks or something he knew there had to be tanks down there and if necessary they would continue circling and go down to 200 meters knowing there were tanks down there and simply not being able to find them. They would just keep on circling and circling. After 10 minutes they might find them. Remember they were doing this at perhaps 270 kilometers an hour. There was just no way to do this at any higher speeds.

He said he remembers a typical situation. They would be circling and circling, knowing that there had to be tanks. They could not find them. They would be looking and looking a little more closely at the houses and suddenly they would notice that one of the houses would have this long rod sticking out a window and suddenly they would realize that a tank had driven into the house through the wall on one side and only the gun was sticking out because the tank was too long. He says, with the A-10 at 900 kilometers an hour, how are you going to see a rod sticking out of a window?

Question: Would you get him to discuss the tactics they used to find tanks at night, if they did?

Answer: There were in the Luftwaffe specialists for night attack and there were specialized night-attack airplanes that were used to go out to try to find targets. Colonel Rudel does not think much of their effectiveness. He says basically their main effect was to spoil people's sleep but they would not have any effect. He said the job was so tough in the day, the job of just finding the tanks, that the night business was completely hopeless—was and is. Another reason they did not go on night operations was because they got very little sleep, particularly in the summer when the days were long. They were up much more than an hour before dawn and they were flying until last light, and it was not humanly possible to fly more than that. Furthermore, he said the Russians did not normally operate at night so there was not much need.

Question: In view of the fact that he flew 2500 combat missions in a little over four years he obviously flew in pretty bad weather. What were the limitations on ceiling for your missions and the visibility distance?

Answer: He says if the ground forces were really screaming for help in a very serious emergency then they would be willing to fly at 50 meters ceiling and 600 meters visibility and make attacks under those conditions. He says, however, that you knew in advance you were going to get heavy losses, naturally. But they were willing and able, and did fly, and did make successful attacks on tanks at 600 meters visibility and 50 meters ceiling.

He says you have to remember though that the climate in Russia is continental climate. It is not the same as central European climate, say. The incidence of bad weather was relatively less than you would expect in Europe. They had generally better weather, but those were the limits in Russia, those were the limits he flew against.

Question: That brings up the question of navigation. In bad weather did he have severe navigational problems? How did they get to the target—did they have a leader?

Answer: Well, you know you cannot find anything without an inertial. We might pursue that a little bit about the flight leader. How they did it with bigger formations. Colonel Rudel says that he flaw 2500 combat missions and on every single occasion, 2500 times, he was always afraid he would not find the field. He said, however, he did find it on 2500 occasions. But that is not necessarily true of everybody. Other pilots did have to make emergency landings because that was not particularly serious, you know, because you could land almost anywhere in Russia. You could always find a place to land. But he says Russia was particularly difficult from a navigational point of view because the country was so uniform and the chart material was terrible. He says they had terrible maps. Very inaccurate. And in winter it was really bad because you could not even find the railroad tracks in the winter. Either you would have just unbroken woods or unbroken open fields. It just made navigation very tough and so he said he flew rigidly by compass and clock. Absolute, as precisely as he could, and 2500 times he was afraid he was lost and 2500 times he would get back to the right field. He attributes a lot of that to experience. Experience made up for the navigational difficulties that he might have expected. But we will pursue what the role of the flight leader was in finding a target.

He always made sure to have an experienced pilot to lead every formation and that mostly solved the navigation problem for them.

You see there was always the problem of bringing in inexperienced people because of the high attrition rate. They always had a substantial number of inexperienced people to do the formation leading.

He says he has no experience with inertial so he cannot comment.

Question: I guess my question was that if he had had that capability, does he feel it would have resulted in a significant improvement?

Answer: I asked him if he had an instrument of say 6 to 10 kilometers accuracy, roughly, at our current level of inertial accuracy, would it be useful? He said, sure, if somebody gave it to you it would be great. He says, of course, you have to remember that it also strengthens the laziness of your air crews.

Question: (Pertaining to his supposedly getting an expensive inertial navigation unit.)

Answer: He said of course in Germany people normally say America is so rich they can buy anything, and he says if that is really true, sure, he says, buy inertials at $20 0,000 each and pay a price, whatever it is, 10 percent in sorties or something. But if it was up to him and if the real truth was that you do have to consider cost, then he says no he would not be interested. He would much rather spend the money on training.

Question: On this experience question, after him what was the experience of the air crew in terms how many sorties they had been on?

Answer: I will break the answer up into two parts. One is the question of combat experience. The next most experienced pilot on the Russian front had 1400 attack missions. The next one after that had 1300 and then there were 10 or 12 who had over a 1000. So you can see there was quite a leap even from the largest of those to Rudel’s 2500 missions. A lot of those were not equipped with the cannon-equipped Stuka, they were flying bombing Stukas. The highest scoring tank-killer after Rudel had 900 sorties, combat sorties, and shot up a hundred tanks. The next best after that shot up 70 tanks, and then there was a group of 40 to 50. Of course, you are talking about a relatively small group of pilots, all those pilots who went through two squadrons which had the cannon-equipped Stukka.

Question: Could we get into the question of tactics—the attack formation. Did they attack in trails of several aircraft or did they come from different directions. Did they try to attack the rear of the tanks?

Answer: I will ask him that question. Let me first give you a wrapup of what he said during lunch. I think Tribble asked him what the best formation would be—what the best size of formation would be for attacking tanks. He said if you have the quantity of ammunition you are talking about in the A-10, he would not want to take more than two people per attack mission because you have so much ammo you do not need the others along. At most, he would take three. But certainly beyond that you would just be getting in each other’s way. Then the question was asked since the A-10 is a single seater with nobody covering your rear, does that modify your views of how many people you ought to have along. Then he says, if you have the luxury of pilots in your attack squadron who have air-to-air experience, who are well trained in air-to-air, then he says he would probably feel that the best unit to go out would be four A-10’s to fly air cover and still no more than two at a time to be doing the attacking, four watching and two attacking. You see why they feel so strongly about having the guy in the back seat. He thinks he needs four just to make up for the lack of the guy in the back seat. I will continue with your question now though about the specific maneuvers and attack formations.

Question: In your question would you ask him how much communication there was between aircraft during those maneuvers, and so forth, in the target area.

Answer: We will ask him also about the communications just prior to the attack and while the attack was going on.

He says if we were flying in two's he would assign one tank or group of tanks to his number two man a few hundred meters away from his own. They would attack, them independently. But he says, however, that has a tremendous drawback if you do that in the A-10 because you have nobody covering your six. In the Stuka it was perfectly feasible and was not any problem because you always had somebody watching your rear. But you would have to balance that in the A-10. In general, the unattractiveness of having two airplanes fire at the same target is very great. It is silly and it is a waste of ammunition. You know he feels very strongly about ammunition because he only had six bursts of two each on his airplane, so he is very economical about that. His preference is to fly separately. His preferred dive angle, if everything else allows, would be 20 degrees.

Question: Would you ask Colonel Rudel what the FEBA looked like as far as depth and also the silhouettes that the tanks presented. Was there any uniformity at all or was it a mix?

Answer: Well we went round and round on that subject at lunch time because there were some people who were very keen to know about typical distances. The question at lunch was how far ahead of friendly troops his typical attacks were. He was very reluctant to answer that question. He did not like the question. We kept on insisting and finally he said first of all a lot of time he would attack behind friendly troops because a lot of their missions were against tanks that had broken through. There was no question of being in front of them. You were behind them. And then things were very, very confused. Those were the toughest recognition situations, because friendly and enemy tanks were just totally intermixed and there was no telling which was which by position or anything else. From a defense point of view that was a good situation—from a flak point of view—because these tanks had outstripped their defenses. That is when he could overfly them. For those situations where there was not a breakthrough where he really was somewhere ahead of his friendly troops, he said the average distance, again he was reluctant because it varied so much, but the average distance at which he would attack tanks was maybe 3 kilometers in front of friendly troops. Again, his preference was always to get tanks that were moving out of the assembly area. The assembly areas were tougher. Of course, if he would see the tanks there and if the defenses were not too bad, of course he would shoot them in the assembly areas too.

Question: What I was really interested in was the appearance of the Russians' FEBA. In other words, how much distance might there be between the forward or leading tanks and the lagging tanks, all of which theoretically should be in a nice straight line?

Answer: He says it is very difficult to answer, but in terms of what he saw he would say perhaps there would be 500 meters between the furthest forward tanks and the last tanks in an organized assault.

Question: And what would be the silhouette appearance of the various tanks? Would they all be uniformly presenting the same aspect or would they be heading in different directions?

Answer: He says first of all that if they were inexperienced, if they had never been attacked by Stukas, they would try to hold a parallel formation. Now remember this is in Russian terrain on the flat fields. They would try to hold parallel formations. If they had Stuka experiences, if they had been attacked before, then they would just break wildly in all directions. And if you looked across a wider front, a division front, again in this terrain, he feels they were mostly trying to adhere to a rigid parallel attack direction. But of course that is completely conditioned by terrain.

Question: In situations where there were some defenses present, did he still have the latitude to determine his attack azimuth on the tank or was he constrained to attack from certain aspects?

Answer: He says the main effect of increasing defenses was that they required very hard maneuvering approaches. He said there were only two possibilities: either you jinked constantly and very hard coming in and used just the tiniest amour, of tracking time to fire and get out; or, if you did not have the experience you could not fire and hit from such a jinking approach and tried to come in pretty smooth and level, he says then you would get shot down.

That is all there was to it. If you did not jink you would get shot down, this was just guaranteed. It was on or off—that simple. If you jinked hard and you were good at it you could survive. Now, not everybody could hit from such a jinking approach with such a tiny amount of tracking time, but with experience you could do both. You could come in, jink, survive, track for a very small amount of time and get good hits. Hit within that 10 centimeters that you had to. Secondly, he said they normally did not change their attack direction because of the presence of flak. They preferred to attack from the rear. For them there was a bigger vulnerable area from the rear into the engine or into the back of the turret. If because of where they were and they wanted to attack directly, the other preferred attack was from the side. That was harder because the vulnerable area into the munitions from the side was quite a bit smaller, but they world attack on occasion from the side and try to aim for just that spot where they knew they could get into the munition containers.

Question: What would the effect have been on his operations if it had been necessary for him to fly no higher than 100 or 150 meters?

Answer: He says if you had an upper ceiling of 150 meters due to guided missiles and the same defenses they had in Russia, it would have been totally impossible because the guns would have gotten you for sure. You had to have the flexibility to come up higher in the areas where you were uncertain as to whether the guns existed or did not exist. I think that is an important comment because of our recent obsession with low-level tactics. I think low-level tactics are a very important part of the repertoire, but there are places where they are obviously impossible, and where you want to fly at 800 meters instead of 150 meters or 20 or 30 meters as he did many times too.

I think there was an earlier question as to what kind of flexibility the squadron or wing commander had in picking targets, and so on, and Colonel Rudel has answered that question at a previous session. I will give his previous answer, then I will ask if he has anything to add. The German command in that respect was very flexible and they took into account the experience of each commander. For instance, Rudel himself was given very wide latitude. He was never told the coordinates of targets. He was just given the most general kind of guidance about what unit he was supposed to help and what problem they had and then the rest of it was up to him. Of course, he had a lot of experience. He knew exactly what kind of attacks the Russians were likely to mount and where the critical points would be, and so on. However, with squadron commanders or wing commanders of decreasing experience, the tactical initiative allowed them by the air division would decrease, and the greenest squadron commanders would be given quite specific target coordinates.

He adds to that commentary that very often they would attack a different target than they were assigned and they would tell the army, "We just attacked tanks over here by this village instead of over there because these tanks were further ahead than the others". They said the army was always very happy because they had very short range vision. They only see a limited part of the world and if he was in a position to know that they were more closely threatened by another group of tanks he would attack it and they were always very happy with his results.

If you had a completely green squadron commander, if he was told to attack tanks at such and such a point, such and such coordinates or village and he flew out there, if he found the tanks he would attack them. If he did not find them he would go home. They did not have any authority really to go out and then search and sweep.

Question; That brings up the concept of FAC’s. Did they have such a thing as the FAC?

Answer: Yes, I will give you the answer from our previous session last year and then I will ask him to add to it. I will answer both those from last year. First of all, they did have a forward air controller, non-flying but Luftwaffe, who rode in a radio tank. They had to take the gun out of the tank and install radios instead. They were pretty scarce. Normally something like one per division and he had the right radios to talk to the Stukas and would relay the needs of the division that they were supporting and, perhaps, even more important, receive the reports of the Stukas on what they had seen. This was the visual recce that I referred to earlier. Colonel Rudel recounts one incident where an armored division commander was down to this last half-dozen tanks and announced in public that if he was down to his last tank, his last tank would be a radio tank. He would take the gun out. He would put the radios in because the value of the information he was getting from Colonel Rudel and his observations on where the enemy was and where the greatest threat to him was were more valuable to him by far than his last tank.

Question: That sounds like a liaison officer instead of a FAC.

Answer: I will ask the question but you have to remember of course, that Colonel Rudel had an unusual amount of authority. That fact may have had a different position relative to a greener air commander.

The general's name was General Unhein, who is still alive, who made this public comment about the value of Rudel's reconnaissance information. The title is "Fliegerverbendungs offizier" (FlieVO) which means flier's liaison officer. He was really a liaison officer as best I can tell. He was really subordinate to the ground. He had to pass what the ground wanted on to Rudel or to any commander. The division commander wanted to tell his air support, "My problem is such and such", or, "I absolutely want you to attack over here", or whatever. The liaison had to pass that on and likewise he passed on whatever information Rudel had. He apparently had very little authority and he was nonflying.

Question: I would like to explore the nature of the threat at low altitudes as we referred to earlier and the reasons they did not spend more time operating at very low altitudes. Was that largely from dedicated AAA or was that from just machine guns on tanks and other vehicles?

Answer: Let me say first of all Rudel is talking strictly about being very adaptive on the question of what altitude you fly at. He says any time that they started to get the sense that there was not much flak around they would simply descend in altitude, go down to the best altitude for search. They would start off at 800 meters because they were uncertain. If they did not catch a little fire for a little while they would go to 400 meters. If they did not catch any fire there they might even go a little lower. But it was constantly a question of probing the defenses and then of course, the very important point of being absolutely current on the dispositions of the defenses and again I will bring up a point from last time. Rudel said that critical to survival was to be there all the time and to be in total constant touch with the current front situation. He said the most dangerous thing you could do was go home for a week’s leave. He said when you came back after a week's leave the front situation had changed so much and you were out of touch with it, that was the time you were likely to blunder into a very strong flak position. It was critical to be right on top of the very latest information on dispositions and to have personal knowledge of it. Just to be briefed on it was not good enough. I will ask him the other question now.

He started off with a German saying which literally translated is “With enough hounds the hare is dead”. He said if you ran into some place where everybody was shooting everything, you were going to take a lot of hits. Each hit might not be that dangerous; he came home often with 50 hits in the airplane. It was not uncommon at all, but if one of those was in the radiator he had seven minutes to get down. But he says you never know what the exact causes were and which was the most dangerous, whether it was the specialized flak or the ordinary machine guns. But certainly ordinary machine guns could bring down Stukas, particularly with these hits in the radiator. That is what they were most afraid of. Furthermore, he says it was very dangerous for them, and very uncomfortable when the flak would fire without tracer. When they fired with tracer, it was great. You could always evade and go up in altitude, but if they were firing without tracer you were flying along fat, dumb, and happy, thinking nobody was shooting. It was very dangerous. There is an interesting point for tactics of anti-aircraft. Since everybody shoots with tracer, tracer is the right way to do it.

Question: Did he ever run into any communications jamming or any of that kind of disrupting communications or false information being passed to them from the ground?

Answer: He heard some noise on his communications channels. He heard no deception conversations in his experience. And in fact, he said it is very important to remember in this connection that they were very rigid about communications discipline in the Stukas because they believed that all you had to do was talk a little and the fighters would be on top of you. Okay, so they just did not talk. There was no chatter. Absolutely no chatter and if they could assign targets or whatever without conversation, all the better. There was absolute minimizing of conversation because they knew it led to losses. On the other hand, he said the Russians had no discipline at all. as far he could tell. There was just constant chatter on their channels and he had. a man in his squadron who. was born in Vilna who could understand fluent Russian and who said they were always yelling on the radio, “Attack the first one, attack the first one. Because it's Rudel who's shooting up all our tanks”.

Question: Did he have any problems of discipline with his noncommissioned pilots or between them and the commissioned pilots?

Answer: He says his experience is limited to his own units and he says in his unit there was no discipline problem, so they did not have any problem between NCO's and officers. The discipline in his unit was as good the first day of the war as it was the last day. He says, however, it was different in fighter units. A lot of the air-to-air fighter units had poor discipline, particularly towards the end of the war. Discipline really started to break down in those units and he does not know whether under those circumstances certain frictions or problems developed between NCO pilots and officer pilots. He cannot comment on that. For his own unit he can comment. There were not any problems.

He says he will venture a general opinion beyond just his unit. In general he does not see that having good quality NCO's is any problem, in fact, he is for it. And you have to remember that the ones that he dealt with had mostly at least 8 to 10 years of service. Some had 12 years. And they were good soldiers. He emphasizes the word soldiers. Then he says even more so in the coming war with the Russians. If you want to conquer the Russians, he says the first quality that air crews have to have is they have to be soldiers; the second quality they have to have is to be soldiers; and the third quality they have to have is to be soldiers. And then, at some much higher or much lower level of priority, they also ought to be pilots.

Question: How does he rate NATO and how does he think the German and U. S. air forces would stand up against the Russians today?

Answer: He says first of all that he thinks in general the German Air Force has become commercialized or materialized and that lots of the personnel are more interested in a little more leave, or a little more privilege, or material things like that. And he says against the Russians that will not do. That just will not do. The question of spirit is absolutely the first and most critical thing and he feels that has declined—declined substantially. Of course, there are exceptions, naturally. And he just hopes that the Americans have not had that kind of decline and that they have the requisite spirit with which his unit served in the war—this idealism and dedication is essential.

Question: Ask him if he is familiar with Sturmovik and if so, how would he rate that in some kind of reasonable sense that you could understand relative to Stuka.

Answer: And then we will take one more question and that will be it.

He says the Sturmovik had one great advantage and that was that 20-millimeter flak just bounced off it. It was very heavily armored and it flew and it survived beautifully against 20-millimeter flak. Inside it was extremely primitive, I mean really surprisingly primitive. Just all those things that the Americans do 150 percent better and maybe too well, he says the Russians did not do at all. It was really primitive. The Americans, of course, do it much more expensively, but the airplane was a perfectly respectable flying machine and very survivable. The main problem was the crew of the Sturmovik. The crew was not very good. At most, 10 percent were in any way competent; 90 percent would just fly blindly right into the flak and just get shot down. Just shot down in droves. Just no idea of what they were doing and just get shot down. Then the other thing is of course it had no anti-tank weapon. It was strictly a dive bombing airplane for whatever targets were addressed by dive-bombing then.

Okay. One more question.

Question: Pertaining to the availability of aircraft and experienced pilots during the war.

Answer: He says, of course, each one of these was a problem at one time or another. Essentially, he never ran out of gas. Essentially, gas was no constraint on their operations but it had a lot to do with the quality of people they got, because there were so few flying hours given these people, so little gas given to train them, the people that he was getting late in the war, we are talking about late 1944 and on, he said it was astonishing that they knew how to fly at all. If he had to enter the war on the amount of gas they had to fly, he certainly would not have known how to fly when he got to Russia.

And he said it was astonishing and a tribute to them that they could fly at all when they got there. He was always surprised that they did as much as they did with so few hours. But that of course, really hurt because with people that inexperienced, they would get shot down right away and they never had a chance to build up the experience to become really effective and good. On aircraft, he never ran out of aircraft. For perhaps a week he would have a shortage of an airplane or something that had not arrived yet. But he says that may not have been the general experience on the Eastern Front because he got high priority. By that time in the war he was certainly the most famous German pilot of all and the whole system would bend itself to the maximum to supply him with airplanes. I am adding that as commentary. He did not say that. He just said you have to remember he had special priority and other people might have had shortages. He does not know.

Moderator: I think that wraps it up. Colonel Rudel has been very patient with all our questions and our lack of experience in Panzer warfare. Every time that I have talked to Colonel Rudel I have discovered completely new insights, and I am sure we have not even gotten close to the bottom of what he knows about attacking tanks with airplanes. On behalf of all of you I would like to thank him for having been so absolutely forthcoming with his views and, in my opinion, very rigorously objective. Thank you very much, Colonel Rudel.