Hans Rudel

[Vishnu]

I’ve almost finished his book, and have spent some time trying to take out tanks with the dual 3.7cm cannons.  

 

He says many times he sets multiple tanks on fire, if not actually brewing them up.    I spent several hours trying to duplicate this with unlimited ammo and the best I was able to do was make them smoke, or track them.   I tried from all angles.  Especially high and from the rear. 

 

What convergence did he use,  how hard is it to make them blow up?  Curious as to how he did it so often. 

[MajorMagee]

His talent for becoming dynamically "one with the machine" to extract the utmost out of its special qualities was unique in all of history. I would not be too disappointed in failing to attain the same results he did flying in a computer simulation.

Edited May 16, 2022 by MajorMagee

[JV44HeinzBar]

S! Vishnu,

Don't feel bad. I've had this sim since it was released and have flown the "cannon stuka" many times. I still can't reliably kill tanks in each pass. Your technique is the correct one.

 

HB

[[F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly]

The short answer is that he did not do it as much as he claimed to have done. There's a wealth of ww2 archival information that consistently shows that pilots claimed far more kills then the opposing side registered as losses. Stuka Pilot is not considered historically accurate for this and a few other reasons. The reason why you're not having success replicating Hans Rudel's feats is becuase the feats he claims to have done are impossible.

 

So there's several ways of looking at this:

1) Error in translation: A panzerwagen in German is simply an armoured vehicle. Rudel may have simply been talking about any armoured vehicle rather then tanks, but the general english-speaking public calls any armoured vehicle a "tank".

2) Error in memory: Hans Rudel's recollection of things that happened in the war, just like anyone's recollection, is not perfect. Even when you trust someone to be entirely honest in their recollection of events, you should not assume that this recollection is accurate. Criminal investigations often interview eyewitnesses, but also find that their recollection of events does not match up with other evidence. There's a pretty famous case of the husband of a murder victim, who was literally standing next to his wife when she was murdered, identifying who later turned out to be the wrong guy as the perpetrator. Rudel might be misremembering or even have initially just assumed the things he were shooting at were T-34s rather then something far less impressive.

3) Ego: Hans Rudel might just be a bit of an arrogant person who has a tendency to oversell his own abilities. This is quite common.

 

These are all reasons why you should take any memoir with a grain of salt if you look at them as a historian: They are ultimately just that person's perspective, and one person's perspective should not be considered to be accurate for anything other then that person's perspective (IE: We can assume that somebody believes what he is saying, but we don't have a reason to believe what he says). There is another consideration you have to take into account: Hans Rudel wrote a memoir, yes, but it's not the only thing he wrote. You can consider Stuka Pilot in the wider perspective of the other things that Rudel has said and done in the same timeframe, which brings us to point...

 

4) Propaganda: Hans Rudel was an unrepentant Neo-Nazi activist, who fled to Argentina after the war and helped Nazi war criminals escape prosecution, including Joseph Mengele. During the 50s he published several books that attempted to justify Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and Stuka Pilot is part of that collection. As such, Hans Rudel is not writing a historical work at all: He's a politician doing politics. This is the height of the cold war, and leaders of various nations were actively interested in using former Nazis to fight the Soviet Union. Rudel had an active interest in making the nazi war machine look more effective then it actually was.

Edited May 18, 2022 by [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly

[Robli]

2 hours ago, [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly said:

Rudel might be misremembering or even have initially just assumed the things he were shooting at were T-34s rather then something far less impressive.

 

Rudel does not really specify in his book which types of tanks caught fire or exploded. He says "four tanks explode under the hammer blows of my cannons", "a tank which is really on fire will show very bright flames", "in many cases the tank will blow up as the fire catches the ammunition" and sometimes instantaneous explosions that "happens to me twice in the first few days when I suddenly fly through a curtain of fire", but does not specify if he is talking about T34's or something else in these cases. He also says that they specifically studied where the vulnerable points (engines, fuel tanks, ammunition) of various tanks were and that is what they aimed for. So I guess the question is how much "hollywood" is there in his stories of exploding tanks or bright flames. There is also guncam footage on youtube about explosions and of course also pictures and videos of burning tanks.

P.S. Tanks do explode and burn in our game, too (unless something has changed recently).

 

[LachenKrieg]

4 hours ago, [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly said:

 This is.... "ultimately just that person's perspective, and one person's perspective should not be considered to be accurate for anything other then that person's perspective"

 

 

"(IE: We can assume that somebody believes what he is saying, but we don't have a reason to believe what he says)."

I just thought it was interesting how the first quote can be quite true, but the second quote doesn't even make any sense. The reason anyone would have to believe someone depends on the material proof they have to support/backup what they are saying.

 

Anyone interested doesn't have to take German claims for the number of Russian tanks knocked out, they can simply use the number Russia admitted to realize the number was pretty high. And like someone else already pointed out, then there is gun cam footage and of course the amount of top-surface armor protection that can be used to determine if someones memoir is even in the realm of possibilities.

 

But I don't think the OP's question has anything to do with whether someones memoir is accurate or not, I think the question being asked here has more to do with what/how well this is modeled in the game.

[BlitzPig_EL]

His thread on the same subject in the airplane side of the forums went off the rails rather quickly, going from not being able to recreate Rudel's results, to the validity of kill claims by pilots generally, to whether we should believe Rudel at all because of his political beliefs clouding everything he did. 

 

 

[LachenKrieg]

I never followed that thread, but I can well imagine how it might have gone off the rails pretty quick if people were trying to tie a story of mistaken identity in a murder trial to the validity of personal memoirs. That would be a little bit of a leap don't you think? 

 

To me the most obvious place to start wouldn't be someones real life personal account, it would be whats modeled in the game. I find these type of discussion quite amusing because they essentially take for granted that the game = real life and visa versa.

 

In another popular WWII flight SIM, someone became quite upset when he was unable to saw off a wing with a 50 CAL. The topic became quite hot, but the glaring mistake in his argument IMO was that it relied solely on real live gun cam footage from WWII.

 

I think it would be a tall order to be able to look at real gun cam footage of wings snapping off after they have been damaged by a large caliber gun, and then using that to claim what is modeled in a game.

 

The only way you can make use of something like real gun cam footage would be to simply verify whether the point of interest is even possible. If you can verify that it is, then you have to try and isolate the point of interest in-game to see if it can be recreated in-game. In the example I gave, it was shown that you can in fact see a wing snap off after it has taken damage.

 

In this case, it shouldn't be too hard to place various armored vehicles in an open field, and then strafe them with the desired weapon. Forget about kill counts from someone's personal memoirs, can you make a tank explode when shooting the top of its turret with a plane?

[MajorMagee]

Well, to that point, why do you think that modern anti-tank missiles like NLAW and Javelin are designed to fly above the tank, and shoot down at it, rather than directly attacking them from the sides?

[[F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly]

8 hours ago, Robli said:

 

Rudel does not really specify in his book which types of tanks caught fire or exploded. He says "four tanks explode under the hammer blows of my cannons", "a tank which is really on fire will show very bright flames", "in many cases the tank will blow up as the fire catches the ammunition" and sometimes instantaneous explosions that "happens to me twice in the first few days when I suddenly fly through a curtain of fire", but does not specify if he is talking about T34's or something else in these cases. He also says that they specifically studied where the vulnerable points (engines, fuel tanks, ammunition) of various tanks were and that is what they aimed for. So I guess the question is how much "hollywood" is there in his stories of exploding tanks or bright flames. There is also guncam footage on youtube about explosions and of course also pictures and videos of burning tanks.

P.S. Tanks do explode and burn in our game, too (unless something has changed recently).

 

 

That's the thing, since Rudel is obviously not a native English speaker, but in German an armoured car is a Panzerwagen and what we call Tanks is called a Panzerkampfwagen. People translating from German to English often assume that "Panzer" means "Tank" and translate it as such. It's a best-faith assumption about why Stuka pilot isn't exactly historically accurate.

 

Guncam footage is a far better source for how these things go then a book written by a politician in 1958.

[LachenKrieg]

Anyone interested in getting a little more insight into what it was like to face an air threat as a tank crew should give Panzer Lehr Division 1944-45 a try. It can be a little dry in places being based almost entirely from interviews, but if your interested in the WWII history of that Division in France, you will probably enjoy that one.

 

It's not specifically meant to address the face off between a tank and a plane, but it is well understood that American air superiority played a major role in the outcome of the battles and the war. The Germans could barely march from one place to the other without loosing large numbers of vehicles/tanks.

[MisterSmith]

12 hours ago, BlitzPig_EL said:

His thread on the same subject in the airplane side of the forums went off the rails rather quickly, going from not being able to recreate Rudel's results, to the validity of kill claims by pilots generally, to whether we should believe Rudel at all because of his political beliefs clouding everything he did. 

 

 

Yes it did and it required a bit of moderating as a result. I will be merging both threads in the morning after my first cup.

[LachenKrieg]

12 hours ago, [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly said:

 

That's the thing, since Rudel is obviously not a native English speaker, but in German an armoured car is a Panzerwagen and what we call Tanks is called a Panzerkampfwagen. People translating from German to English often assume that "Panzer" means "Tank" and translate it as such. It's a best-faith assumption about why Stuka pilot isn't exactly historically accurate.

 

Guncam footage is a far better source for how these things go then a book written by a politician in 1958.

You may be right MG, but in terms of the way something was translated from German to English wouldn't be a historical accuracy issue, it would be more of a book publishing issue wouldn't it?

 

And I wonder how many tanks Russia fielded on the EF compared to the number of armored cars? Something also tells me that German pilots would have considered tanks to be a much more valuable target. Not saying armored cars didn't make a good target, but a T34 had between 16 and 20mm of protection on their top surface. Engine vent covers and other similar openings could have had less.

[Robli]

I doubt that translation error is a major issue here. I guess assault guns, self propelled howitzers and things like that could be all "tanks", just like in IL2 Tank Crew, but I am quite sure that the translator would have understood the difference between a "Panzerwagen" and "Panzerkampfwagen", too. Also, even if it was referred to just as "Panzer", then the context in the book quite clearly indicates that he talks about tanks (and similar) rather than armored cars, for example. He describes how tests were done in a special "anti-tank experimental unit" and how they were specifically taught where the most vulnerable parts were located, how "sometimes tanks are dug in defensively", how he compares "numerically vastly superior Soviet tanks" to "our Tiger tank" etc. He talks about "steel monsters" and how "front is always the strongest part" and many other references that clearly bring a tank in mind, when reading the context.

[cardboard_killer]

Tanks, of course, often used smoke dispensers/grenades when attacked by aircraft. That is often mistaken for knocking out a tank by pilots.

 

I am doing some research into the landing on Leyte in October 1944, and was a little surprised to find that the plan called for a massive anti-air smoke screen to be generated at dusk and through the night to prevent air attacks by the Japanese on the beachhead operations (which were illuminated), as the Seventh Fleet did not contain any night fighter capable aircraft at the time, unlike the Third Fleet. The tepid Japanese response caused the plan to be cancelled for the most part.

[Eisenfaustus]

None of the T34 I saw at the tank museum in Munster had smoke launchers - did soviet tanks deploy smoke brother means? I don’t recall from the tanker memoirs I read the mentioning of smoke deployed by soviet tanks…

[Yogiflight]

21 hours ago, [F.Circus]MoerasGrizzly said:

That's the thing, since Rudel is obviously not a native English speaker, but in German an armoured car is a Panzerwagen and what we call Tanks is called a Panzerkampfwagen. People translating from German to English often assume that "Panzer" means "Tank" and translate it as such. It's a best-faith assumption about why Stuka pilot isn't exactly historically accurate.

From what I remember, I never heard Germans back then talk about Russian tanks as 'Panzerkampfwagen'. They were always called just 'russische Panzer vom Typ T 34'.

But I would guess, that not too few of the destroyed 'T 34s' were in fact T 70s, and 'KV 1s' in fact BT 7s. It happened to me in game more than once that I did mix them. American and British ground troops in the west at the end of the war had more time to look at them and still often mixed Panzer IV with Tigers.