Junkers Ju 87 Franco did know nothing of it and that it was ordered directly by the Luftwaffe. During the Catalonia Offensive in January 1939, the Junkers Ju 87 returned to Spain. On the morning of 21 January 1939, 34 Heinkel He 111, along with some escorts and three Ju 87B, attacked the Port of Barcelona, five days before the city was captured by the Fascists. 29 Republican fighters were defending the city. There were more than 100 aircraft operating over the city and, while a Ju 87 was dive-bombing a ship, a Republican Polikarpov I-15 pilot, Francisco Alférez Jiménez, claimed it destroyed
Hugo Junkers in Dessau. The iron wings were patented one year later. Junkers had a wind tunnel built and invented a hydraulic brake. He had far-sighted ideas of metal aeroplanes and flying wings, but the necessities of the war held him back. During World War I, the government forced him to focus on aircraft production. In 1915, he developed the world's first practical all-metal aircraft design, the Junkers J 1 "Blechesel" (Sheetmetal Donkey), which survived on display in Deutsches Museum in Munich until World War II. His firm's first military production design in 1916–17 was the armored-fuselage, two-seat, all-metal sesquiplane known by