Ilyushin Il-4

The Il-4 grew out of Sergei Ilyushin’s DB-3 of the mid-1930s — dalny bombardirovshchik, long-range bomber — refined into the DB-3F and renamed Il-4 in 1942 when Soviet practice began naming aircraft after their designers. Two M-88B radials of about 1,100 hp gave it a range approaching 3,800 km with a normal load of 1,000 kg of bombs.

That range is the whole point of the aircraft. The Soviet Union had no four-engined heavy bomber force worth the name — the Pe-8 was built in tiny numbers — so the Il-4 was, for most of the war, the longest reach the country possessed. Everything else about it was compromised to keep that reach: it was slow, lightly defended, and hard work to fly.

In the summer of 1941 the German advance had reached Leningrad’s approaches and Berlin had announced that Soviet aviation was destroyed. On the night of 7–8 August 1941, fifteen naval bombers of the 1st Torpedo Bomber Regiment of the Baltic Fleet Air Force took off from Saaremaa — the Estonian island of Ösel, already behind the front line — and flew to Berlin.

The aircraft were DB-3T naval torpedo bombers, the Il-4’s own immediate form, operating from grass and dirt strips at Kagul and Aste that had to be lengthened to take them. Militarily the raid changed nothing: a handful of bombers, a small load, negligible damage. Politically it changed a good deal. A country whose air force had officially ceased to exist had just bombed the enemy capital, and it had done it with naval aircraft flying from an island the Germans were about to capture.

Crews respected the Il-4 and very few of them enjoyed it. The controls were heavy — long missions were physically exhausting, and the aircraft demanded constant attention in the cruise — and the type had a reputation for being unforgiving of a mistake on one engine.

Its defensive armament was thin: three machine guns for a crew of three or four, in a bomber expected to cross defended airspace alone at night. The Soviet answer was the same as everyone else’s in that position — fly in the dark, fly low or fly high, and accept the losses — but where a Lancaster carried eight guns and a Fortress thirteen, the Il-4 crew had very little to shoot back with.

The type’s other career was maritime, and it lasted the whole war. As the Il-4T it carried a torpedo under the fuselage for the air arms of the Baltic, Black Sea and Northern fleets, attacking German convoys along the Norwegian and Baltic coasts and the supply traffic that kept the northern flank alive.

It is the role in which the aircraft is most often photographed: Il-4s lined up on the strip at Vaenga above the Arctic Circle, and the machines of the 5th Guards mine-torpedo regiment of the Black Sea Fleet. Torpedo work meant approaching a defended ship low, straight and slow — the same arithmetic that made the job lethal for every navy’s torpedo crews — and the regiments that did it were among the most decorated in Soviet naval aviation.

From 1942 the Il-4 was the backbone of ADD, Soviet Long-Range Aviation, a force reporting directly to the high command rather than to the front commanders. It bombed rail junctions, supply dumps and German rear areas at night, and it flew the deep symbolic missions — Berlin again, Königsberg, Danzig, Budapest, Helsinki — that a country fighting on its own soil uses to demonstrate reach.

It was not a strategic bombing campaign in the Anglo-American sense; the Soviet Union never had the aircraft or the doctrine for that, and its air power was overwhelmingly tactical. The Il-4 gave the Stavka the one thing that army-support aviation could not: the ability to put bombs somewhere the front line could not reach. The scale is worth stating plainly: ADD flew tens of thousands of sorties, but with medium bombers carrying a tonne of bombs each, against a Bomber Command that sent 700 four-engined aircraft to a single city in a night. The Il-4 was not a strategic bomber force. It was the closest thing the Soviet Union could afford to build while it was also producing 36,000 Il-2s.

About 5,256 Il-4s were built, and rather more than 6,700 counting all the DB-3 variants that preceded them. The type stayed in production until 1944 and in service to the end of the war, by which point it was thoroughly obsolete and still doing the job because there was nothing else to do it with.

Its place in the record is fixed by one night in August 1941. Measured by tonnage the raid on Berlin was trivial; measured by what it said, at the moment the Soviet Union was being told it had already lost, it was worth more than the bombs. The Il-4 is the aircraft that made that gesture possible, and then spent four more years doing unglamorous work at night over the Baltic.

• Yefim Gordon & Dmitri Khazanov, Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War (Midland Publishing).
• Von Hardesty & Ilya Grinberg, Red Phoenix Rising: The Soviet Air Force in World War II (University Press of Kansas).
• Yefim Gordon, Ilyushin Il-4 (Midland, Red Star).