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Luftwaffe in Action. Part III (Aircraft In Action 004) By Uwe Feist, Mike Dario

In the early 1930s, the world began to learn of a new concept in aerial warfare. The United States Navy's highly trained carrier pilots had dev­eloped a new way to deliver bombs on to small targets, It was called "dive bombing". One of the people who was most interested in this new concept was a man named Ernst Udet. He was a World War One air ace and was a Colonel in the clandestine German Luftwaffe. Through Udet's efforts, he succeeded in interesting others in the German Air Ministry in the concept of dive-bombing, and even succeeded in having several Ger­man aviation firms submit designs for a German dive-bomber.

One of these firms was Henschel and its effort was later designated Hs 123. By the time the first Hs 123 was built and ready for testing, the German Air Force's technical staff had changed their minds about biplanes and had decided that they wanted a monoplane as a dive-bomber.

The Luftwaffe evaluated and rejected the robust Hs 123 as a dive-bomber, but the test pi lots liked the airplane to the point where the Hs 123 was accepted as a light attack bomber, or Schlachtflugzeug.

This plucky biplane saw action in the very first campaigns of the Sec­ond World War and continued to see action until late 1943, when all of them had finally succumbed to extinction through attrition.

The Henschel Hs 123 was built in two main subtypes. The Hs 123A featured an open cockpit, an armament of 2 x 7.9mm MG 17 machine guns mounted to fire through the cowl and the propeller arc, and she could carry up to 250kg of bombs under the wings and on the fuselage mount under the belly.

The Henschel Hs 123B was very similar to the A version, except that it featured a clear glass sliding canopy to protect the pilot from the nat­ural elements, and was fitted with additional armor plating around the cockpit in order to protect the pilot from the man-made elements. All *B* versions were designed for and specifically used by the Schlachtgesch-waders. or ground attack wings, on the Eastern Front.

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