Henschel Hs 129
The Henschel Hs 129 was a German twin-engine ground-attack aircraft built by Henschel Flugzeugwerke AG, designed from the start around an armoured cockpit and heavy cannon for attacking tanks at low level. First flown in 1939, it entered Luftwaffe service in 1942 and fought chiefly on the Eastern Front, with a troubled deployment to North Africa. Continually up-gunned, it ended with a 75 mm anti-tank cannon in the B-3; 865 were built before production ended in September 1944, and no complete example survives.
Why It Mattered
The Henschel Hs 129 was one of the few aircraft of the Second World War designed from the outset for a single job: attacking ground targets, above all tanks, at low level. Rather than adapting a fighter or dive bomber, Henschel built the type around armour plate and heavy forward-firing cannon. It entered service in 1942 in small numbers and fought mainly against Soviet armour on the Eastern Front. History of War calls it a capable 'tank killer' whose numbers were always too small for it to influence events in any major way. That balance — a specialised weapon that worked, fielded in hundreds rather than thousands — defines its place in the record.
Design Notes
The type answered a Reich Aviation Ministry (RLM) specification shaped by the Condor Legion's experience in Spain, which expected the main threat to be small-arms fire from the ground. The pilot sat at the very nose in a steel 'bathtub' of armour plate — 12 mm under him, 6 mm at the sides — that enclosed him to head level, behind a steel canopy pierced by tiny windows. The sharply triangular fuselage left almost no room to move: the instrument panel sat low beneath the windscreen, some engine instruments were mounted outside on the nacelles, and even the gunsight was placed outside, ahead of the windscreen. The same specification required engines that were not in demand for other aircraft, which saddled the prototypes with 465 PS Argus As 410s; overweight and underpowered, the type only became workable when it was re-engined with captured French Gnome-Rhône 14M radials of 700 PS. Armament centred on a fuselage cannon that grew as Soviet armour improved: a 30 mm MK 101 in a centreline pod in 1942, the faster-firing MK 103 by the time of Kursk, and finally the 75 mm BK 7,5, adapted from the PaK 40 anti-tank gun.
Operational History
The prototype first flew in May 1939, and Henschel's design won the RLM's order over Focke-Wulf's rival largely because it cost a third less. Series production of the B-1 began late in 1941; the first aircraft reached a service unit in January 1942, and the type entered Luftwaffe service that April, equipping Schlachtgeschwader 1, the first dedicated ground-attack wing. In 1942 its squadrons fought around Kharkov and in support of the advance on Stalingrad; in 1943 they fought in the Kuban bridgehead and at Kursk. At Kursk, History of War credits the Hs 129 with destroying large numbers of Soviet tanks, while noting that with only five Staffeln equipped there were never enough aircraft to make a real difference. Reports that the 30 mm MK 101 was proving ineffective against newer T-34s drove the search for heavier guns, through the 3.7 cm BK 3,7 to the B-3's 75 mm BK 7,5. Around twenty-five B-3s were completed before production ended in September 1944; they were said to be very effective, even against the heaviest Soviet tanks, but their small numbers meant they had little effect on the war. The type's second theatre was North Africa, where the first aircraft arrived at Tobruk in November 1942; the deployment was, in History of War's assessment, a near total disaster, as the French engines suffered in the desert, and later aircraft were given tropical filters. Through 1944 the Hs 129 units retreated with the Eastern Front, concentrating in Romania in April, and, as the conflict drew to a close, almost none of the type remained in flying condition, with many of the survivors idle for want of fuel.
Afterlife
No complete Hs 129 is known to survive. The best documented of the captured aircraft, a B-1/R2 taken at El Aouina in Tunisia in May 1943, was shipped to the United States and evaluated at Freeman Field, Indiana, under the designation FE-4600. It was cut up for scrap in 1946, but its cockpit was purchased and is reported to be on display at a small Luftwaffe museum in Sydney, Australia. Another captured aircraft, flown in Britain as NF756, was scrapped in August 1947. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds a smaller relic: a Ratier propeller from an Hs 129, kept in storage rather than on display.