Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik

Sergei Ilyushin set out in the late 1930s to solve a problem that had killed ground-attack pilots since the First World War: survivability at low level, in the teeth of small-arms and light flak. His answer was radical — instead of bolting armour plate onto an existing design, he made the armour itself a load-bearing part of the airframe.

The Il-2's forward fuselage was a single shell of armoured steel, between 5 and 12 mm thick, encasing the engine, cooling system, fuel tank and cockpit in one continuous 'bathtub' weighing some 700 kg. First flown in 1939 and in service from 1941, it was conceived to fly low and slow over the battlefield and survive what would shred any conventional aircraft.

Power came from a Mikulin AM-38 liquid-cooled V-12 of around 1,600 hp, giving a modest top speed near 414 km/h — speed was never the point. The early single-seat Il-2 carried two 20 mm (soon 23 mm VYa-23) cannon and two 7.62 mm machine guns in the wings, plus up to 600 kg of bombs or rockets.

The fatal early lesson was that the single-seater, with no rearward defence, was easy prey for German fighters attacking from behind. From 1942 the definitive two-seat Il-2M added a rear gunner with a 12.7 mm UBT machine gun — a fix that closed the vulnerability, but at a heavy human cost, since the gunner sat outside the armoured tub.

The two-seat Shturmovik hid a grim asymmetry: the pilot sat inside the armoured shell, but the rear gunner, added in 1942, sat outside it, protected by little more than the fuselage skin, working a 12.7 mm UBT machine gun. Gunner casualties ran several times those of pilots, and the position was often filled from punishment units in the war’s middle years.

Tactics matured around the aircraft’s strengths: regiments attacked in shallow 30° dives from around 1,000 m, then formed the “circle of death” — a rotating ring of Il-2s that kept a continuous stream of cannon fire and bomblets on the target while each aircraft covered the tail of the one ahead. Women flew the type in combat too, among them Anna Yegorova, who led Shturmovik formations and survived being shot down and captured in 1944.

The original single-seat Il-2 of 1941 gave way to the two-seat Il-2M and the improved Il-2M3 (Type 3) with revised, swept-back outer wings for better handling and the standard 23 mm cannon. Specialised anti-tank versions mounted two 37 mm cannon.

Production was staggering. Stalin himself signalled the factories that the Il-2 was 'as essential to the Red Army as air and bread', and output reached roughly 36,000 aircraft (including its Il-10 successor, over 42,000) — the most-produced military aircraft in history.

For all its cannon and rockets, the Il-2 struggled to kill tanks until it received its most ingenious weapon: the PTAB shaped-charge bomblet. A single Shturmovik could scatter around 200 of them in one low pass, blanketing a strip of ground; each could punch through the thinner top armour of a German tank that no gun in the Il-2's nose could defeat.

The PTAB made its debut at the colossal tank battle of Kursk in July 1943, where Shturmovik regiments fell on the German panzer columns and inflicted losses heavy enough to shake the assault. From then on the Il-2 was a genuine tank-killer, and a constant, dreaded presence over the armoured battles of the Eastern Front.

The Il-2 was the Red Army's airborne artillery from 1941 to 1945, flying low over the battlefield against tanks, vehicles, guns, trains and troop concentrations — in the path of the German advance in the dark years, and at the head of the Soviet counter-offensives that followed. German troops reportedly nicknamed it the “Black Death” (Schwarzer Tod); its own crews called it the Ilyusha or the ‘humpback.’

The cost was appalling. Flown low and slow into intense ground fire, the Il-2 suffered the heaviest losses of any aircraft type in aviation history — over 10,000 lost in combat and accidents. Yet there were always more. The type's combination of armour, firepower and sheer numbers made it indispensable, and it flew over every major Soviet battle to the fall of Berlin.

The Il-2 Shturmovik was not fast, agile or elegant, and it was murderously dangerous to fly. But as a battlefield weapon it was decisive: an armoured, cannon- and rocket-armed aircraft produced in numbers no other warplane has ever matched, woven directly into the fighting strength of the Red Army.

With around 36,000 built it stands as the most-produced military aircraft of all time, and one of the genuinely war-winning designs of the conflict. For the Soviet Union the Shturmovik was less a single aircraft than an institution — the flying tank that helped grind the Wehrmacht down from Stalingrad to Berlin.

• Yefim Gordon & Sergey Komissarov, Ilyushin Il-2 and Il-10 Shturmovik (Crowood).
• Oleg Rastrenin, Il-2 Shturmovik Guards Units of World War 2 (Osprey).
• Hans Seidl, Stalin’s Eagles (Schiffer).
• Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front (Slavica).