The men of Sturzkampfgeschwader 2 (StG.2), flying Junkers Ju-87B Stukas, had been tasked with sinking the troublesome ship. Out in the Gulf of Finland, the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s 23,000-ton dreadnought Marat was hurling 12-inch, 1,000-pound shells 18 miles onto German forces encircling Leningrad. Lieutenant Hans-Ulrich Rudel and the rest of his dive bomber wing had gathered in mid-September 1941 to strike another blow in Operation Barbarossa, Germany's campaign to conquer the USSR. Ntil very recently the remote forward airstrip had been deep inside Soviet Russia, but now it was Nazi territory. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Germany’s most highly decorated combat pilot, only shot down nine enemy aircraft, but he destroyed the equivalent of more than three Soviet tank corpsĪs seen in the July 2011 issue of AVIATION HISTORY magazine Hans-Ulrich Rudel plunges to the attack in Eagle of the Eastern Front: the Story of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, by Don Hollway
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