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Medals of Renown is a new series in which we take a look at the names of the medals in the game. Have you ever received one of these epic achievements and wanted to know more about the people they are named after? Here’s your chance!
This month we take a look at the Rudorffer Medal, which is awarded for the highly impressive feat of destroying at least 13 enemy aircraft in a single battle.
Erich Rudorffer was one of the Luftwaffe’s top flying aces. Over the course of his wartime career, he flew more than 1,000 combat missions and claimed 222 verified victories in air battles.
Unlike most wartime pilots on either side in the war, Rudorffer was already a career pilot and had seen service in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It was during this period that many of the tactics that the Luftwaffe became famous for were developed.
When World War II began, he was working as a civilian pilot for Lufthansa but was immediately called up for service. He then served continuously until the last days of the war in 1945. During this period he flew a range of planes but he is most known for his exploits in the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Messerschmitt Me 262, in which he claimed 12 victories alone, making him one of the world’s first ever aces in a jet plane.
A replica of Rudorffer’s Foche-Wulf 190, painted in his colourful livery
His first victory was against a French Curtiss Hawk 75 on 14th May 1940. After that, the victories kept coming. He took part in the whole of the Battle of Britain, shooting down numerous Spitfires and Hurricanes. One common legend has him flying low through the streets of the English town of Croydon while pursued by a Hurricane.
He then transferred to North Africa to support the operations there. Out of the 150 or so victories scored by German pilots in this theatre, a full half of them were scored by Rudorffer and his colleague, Kurt Buhligen.
After this, he headed over to the Eastern Front to fly in the offences against the USSR. On 11th October 1943 he shot down 13 Soviet aircraft in just 17 minutes. A few days later, he single-handedly took down another nine aircraft in ten minutes, earning him the nickname, ‘the Fighter of Libau’.
Erich Rudorffer survived the war. Afterwards, he returned to piloting civilian aircraft for PAN AM and Lufthansa before retiring in the 1980s. At the time of writing, he is still alive and well at the age of 96.
Can you beat Rudorffer’s record in the game, pilots?
