Thank you – excellent site!

right, sirens were fitted both sides…it also wouldn’t make sense aerodynamically to mount them asymmetrically. Maybe the tank for hydraulic fluid was in port wing…one system controlled both sirens simultaneously, with ‘brakes’ fitted to both of the prop shafts. listening carefully to the existing recordings it’s clear that at a certain point the siren ‘starts’, it doesn’t fade in from nothing. perhaps the siren’s brakes failed so much that they stopped repairing them, thus the statement ‘they couldn’t be turned off’??? Thoughts?

the sirens actually had a quite robust system to keep props from turning until the plane went into its dive, see attached.[ATTACH=CONFIG]246855[/ATTACH]. i think they operated on the same principal as an air raid siren, only think which still baffles me is that there are no air openings visible in the part labeled ‘noise maker’ – how did air get in /out to produce the sound…

But are you actually hearing a ‘siren’? They are spoken about as being heard on the beaches at Dunkirk, and in the Battle of Britain. However, I’m convinced the siren-like noise was a combination of several things; the engine note in a dive, air rushing through/around the dive brakes, around the spats and perhaps the chin scoop and angular airframe itself, plus, the possibility that part of the howl is also propeller noise. A different note, for sure, but have you ever heard the sound of a T-6 Texan/Harvard at full chat? It has a peculiar and very distinctive propeller induced noise.

In short, I have two or three letters from veterans saying they never had sirens fitted to the Ju 87 Stuka and that they were certainly removed by 10 May 1940. As an absolute certainty, none of the Ju 87 Stukas shot down over Britain from July 1940 onwards were fitted with such devices.

Finally, I did suspect it was for Dunkirk as I believe a colleague is already assisting you!

Yes, and I hear you and your colleague are in agreement on this (I haven’t spoken to him yet myself)…. Have any stuka pilots ever referenced the sound we’ve all heard and known as the ‘stuka siren’ (which has become so famous as the generic plane crash sound / anvil falling on wiley coyote’s head sound in the american cartoon, etc..) in their interviews or memoirs that you know of?

I would go to deutschluftwaffe.de and go to archiv – j for Junkers and then look through the Ju87 manuals there.

is there more the address? I didn’t have any luck with deutschluftwaffe.de…thanks!

I’m afraid the whole siren thing is a bit of a myth!

By the very early stages of the Battle of France they had been removed/faired over and I have a quote about this from a 1940 Stuka pilot who flew during May 1940.

The howling/wailing sound was as much to do with the whine of the engine in a dive and wind through the structure; dive brakes, wheel spats, angular features.

I’ve read the accounts of the sirens being removed early in the war due to the increased drag. I’ve also read that some individual commanders took it upon themselves to remove them while others didn’t. Maybe your pilot was in one of those squadrons. There are dozens of eye witness accounts from Dunkirk of soldiers hearing the ‘screaming, howling’ sound as the stukas dove. Some of that might be explained by the planes design but I can’t imagine all of it was. Noise = drag, I don’t think the Germans wouldn’t have built planes with that much inherent drag. Playing devils advocate…..

(slightly off topic)
The Stuka siren sound from TV and film must come from a stock sound,
much like the Disney Frog and Car Screech.
You’ll even hear the `Stuka` sound when a bi-plane goes into a dive in some old movies (and deliberately in Airplane 🙂 ).
As an aside I would be interested to know where that TV `Siren` sound originated.

the sound can be heard in German newsreels from 1939/40, so I think it’s the real thing. Probably an afternoons work for the newsreel crew and that recording has been carried down through the generations