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Summary: "Only he is lost, who gives himself up as lost...."
Review: When I was 11 years old, back in 1984 or so, my Dad bought me this book in of one of those overpriced airport bookstores, probably to shut me up. Now it is 2004, and that same book, beat to all hell, sits on a bookshelf in my apartment. In the intervening 20 years I have probably read it once every year, faithfully, and it never disappoints. It was written in a different age, an extinct age, when it was possible for men to be great, and believe absolutely in their causes, and if it seems dated, that is probably a harsher judgement against us than it is against the author. It is not a political book, it has no "world view" and its only philosophy is the maxim of its author: you surrender when you die.Hans-Ulrich Rudel was the only son of a Silesian minister. An awkward boy, frightened of thunderstorms, addicted to athletics, a bit of a misfit, he was hardly the Aryan ideal. Pictures of him show a guy who looks more like Mandy Patinkin than Robert Shaw. As a young man he eschewed girls and beer in favor of sport, was considered a "queer fish" and found himself to be such a slow learner at flying that he spent the first two years of World War II gathering dust, deemed unfit for combat. On top of all of that, he found himself stuck flying the antiquated, ugly-duckling dive bomber known to history as the "Stuka" rather than the sleek fighter plane he had envisoned himself in as a kid, jumping out of his parent's second-floor window holding an umbrella. Not an auspicious beginning. Rudel was a classic example of a man making up for lost time. When he finally flew his first combat missions, in the fall of 1941, he took out all the frustration of being viewed as "unfit" on the Soviet army, who over the next four years learned to fear and hate the very sight of him, the very mention of his name. He was as much a boogeyman to the USSR as von Richtoften (the Red Baron) had been to the French and English twenty years previously. He was the man they could not kill, the man who came screaming out of the sky again and again from Leningrad to Stalingrad, hurling bombs and cannon shells and machine-gun fire down on them from an outdated old machine, killing without mercy and without pause, immune to fear, immune to pain, immune to wounds, fatigue, despair and the odds. How much of a bad-arse was Rudel? Well, let's put this in perspective. At the height of the air-war over Germany in 1943, it was considered a statistical improbability that a bomber pilot could survive 25 missions. Chuck Yeager, one hell of a fine combat pilot and tough, gutsy, ornery human being, shot down 12 German planes and flew about fifty-odd missions as a fighter jock. Tommy McGuire and Dick Bong, America's top aces of WWII, shot down 78 (confirmed) Japanese planes between them. Rudel, on the other hand, flew over 2,000 combat missions, blew up 519 Soviet tanks, sank the Soviet battleship "Marat" and a cruiser of 10,000 tons displacement, bagged numerous enemy fighters, and won so many medals that several had to be struck specifically for him, including his 2,000 sortie medal and the Golden oakleaves to his Knights Cross, of which he was the only recipient. During that time he was shot down six times behind enemy lines, took a bullet in the shoulder, a bullet in the leg and had another leg blown clean off....and kept flying. He kept flying despite orders not to fly, kept flying even when he had to work his control pedals with a cane, and when Germany finally surrendered, he refused to give up to the Soviets and had his entire squadron land on an American air base, "pancaking" their aircraft so the Yanks couldn't get their hands on them. In interrogations he was so arrognat (he insisted on behaving as if he were still in command, including giving and recieiving the Nazi salute) that he was written off as a "typical Nazi officer" but responded with the classic comeback, "Can't you see, I never fought for a political party, only for Germany?" Rudel's fight never really ends. Defeat, to him, comes at the moment of death, and the war did not kill him. Therefore, the war goes on. And on. And on. "Stuka Pilot" is written in a sort of battlefield-telegraph style, terse and spartan. Rudel is not a writer, but he has the occasional ability to comminicate more than the sum of his flight log entries. The most teasing parts of the book are his glimpses into the famous figures of history he met and worked with: Hitler, Himmler, Goring, Ribbentrop, Skorzeny, Riefenstahl, Speer, etc. If it has a drawback, it is that he doesn't spend near enough time fleshing his personal relationships out. Of course, it can be argued that without men like Rudel fighting and killing for him, Adolf Hitler would have been rendered harmless, a lunatic ranting on a streetcorner; and a case could be made that Rudel and his ilk "empowered" the homidical Fuhrer to do what he did. But according to Shakespeare, the other half of the argument goes like this: "If the cause be not good, our allegience to the king wipes the crime of it clean." Rudel fought for his country with every fiber of his being, and if he never once stopped to consider the rightness of what his country was doing, it does not make his story less inspiring. This was a man who should have passed the war peeling potatoes, and ended up as the greatest pilot of all time. As Rudel says: "All one needs is a break."
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