Hartman - Black Devil

 By Nicolas Trudgian

The top-scoring fighter Ace in history, Erich Hartmann achieved 352 aerial victories, a record never likely to be surpassed. Flying his beloved Me109 with JG-52, the Luftwaffe's leading fighter wing of WWII, Hartmann fought almost exclusively on the bitterly contested Eastern Front. Known to the Russian pilots as the "Black Devil" - a reference to the black tulip painted around the cowl of his Me109 - the Russian High Command offered a bounty of 10,000 roubles to the pilot who could fatally shoot him down.

Nick's powerful new painting shows the world's greatest Ace scrambling his Me109 G-14 out of an air base in Hungary, to intercept an incoming Russian air attack, October, 1944