Il-2 Sturmovik vs Ju 87 Stuka
The Stuka was built to hit the target. The Sturmovik was built to come home. Both were right, and only one of them was still doing the job in 1945.
Attacking ground targets from the air poses two problems at once: hitting something small, and surviving the return fire from everything around it. Germany and the Soviet Union answered them in opposite orders. The Ju 87 solved accuracy first, with a near-vertical dive that put bombs within metres of an aiming point when nothing else could manage a hundred. The Il-2 solved survival first, by wrapping the pilot and engine in armour that formed part of the aircraft’s structure.
Each choice dictated everything else. The Stuka’s dive demanded an aircraft slow enough to be steady and a sky empty enough to let it work. The Sturmovik’s armour cost speed, altitude and bomb load, and bought an aeroplane that could be flown at fifty metres over a defended front line by a pilot with a few dozen hours. One of those bargains aged well.
| Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik | Junkers Ju 87 Stuka | |
|---|---|---|
| First flight | 2 October 1939 | 17 September 1935 |
| Attack method | Low passes at 50–500 m | Near-vertical dive, automatic recovery |
| Max speed | ~414 km/h | ~390 km/h (B), ~410 (D) |
| Armour | 5–12 mm steel “bathtub”, ~700 kg, structural | Light armour for crew only |
| Forward armament | 2× 23 mm VYa + 2× 7.62 mm | 2× 7.92 mm MG 17 |
| Bomb load | Up to 600 kg | Up to 1,800 kg (Ju 87 D) |
| Anti-tank version | 2× 37 mm, and PTAB shaped-charge bomblets | 2× 37 mm BK 3,7 (Ju 87 G) |
| Rear defence | 1× 12.7 mm UBT (two-seat versions) | 1–2× 7.92 mm MG 15/81 |
| Crew | 1, later 2 | 2 from the start |
| Units built | ~36,000 | ~6,000 |
On accuracy there is no argument. The Stuka went down at close to 80 degrees with dive brakes out, held steady by an automatic recovery system that pulled the aircraft out even if the pilot blacked out, and released its bomb from a few hundred metres. In 1939–41 it could destroy a bunker, a bridge span or a ship with a single aircraft, at a time when level bombers measured accuracy in hundreds of metres. The Jericho-Trompete siren was theatre, but the bombing was not. The Il-2 never approached that precision: it attacked in shallow passes and compensated with cannon, rockets and volume.
The dive that made the Stuka lethal also made it helpless. An aircraft committed to a vertical dive is slow, predictable and alone, and once the Battle of Britain gave it fighters to contend with, losses were so severe that the type was pulled off operations over Britain within weeks. It went on being useful in the East and the Mediterranean for exactly as long as the Luftwaffe could keep enemy fighters away from it. The Il-2 assumed the opposite from the start: that it would operate in contested air, be shot at continuously, and have to absorb hits — which is why the armour is not bolted on but is the airframe itself, carrying loads as structure.
Both aircraft had to be corrected in service, and in the same direction. The Il-2 entered production as a single-seater, and losses to fighters attacking from behind were so heavy that a rear gunner was added — initially in field conversions, with the gunner outside the armoured bathtub and dying at several times the rate of the pilot in front of him. The Ju 87 was a two-seater from the beginning but ended up carrying, in the Ju 87 G, a pair of 37 mm cannon that turned a dive bomber into a low-level tank-killer that could no longer dive. Both types finished the war doing a job neither had been designed for.
Roughly 36,000 Il-2s were produced — more than any other military aircraft in history — against some 6,000 Ju 87s. That ratio is not a detail of industry: it is the difference between an aircraft and a system. Soviet doctrine could commit hundreds of Sturmoviks to a single breakthrough sector, accept the losses, and repeat it the following week; German ground-attack aviation was always a scarce asset, husbanded and moved from crisis to crisis. At Kursk the Il-2 added PTAB shaped-charge bomblets, scattered by the hundred, which meant a single aircraft could damage several tanks in one pass without aiming at any of them.
The Ju 87 was the better aircraft for the war Germany expected to fight: short, decisive campaigns under its own air superiority, where a precision weapon delivered from a vertical dive is worth more than any amount of armour. For two years it was exactly that, and the image of it is fixed in the popular memory of the war for good reason. The moment that assumption failed — over Britain in 1940, and everywhere after 1943 — the aircraft had no answer, because its entire method depended on being left alone for thirty seconds.
The Il-2 was the better aircraft for the war that actually happened. It was less accurate, carried less, flew no faster, and was built around the assumption that it would be hit — by rifle fire, by flak, by fighters — and should survive anyway. Stalin’s formulation, that the Red Army needed the Il-2 “as it needs air and bread”, was a production order rather than a compliment, and it produced 36,000 of them. Both aircraft converged on the same late-war answer, a 37 mm gun under each wing, and only one of them was still being built when it got there.
- Yefim Gordon & Dmitri Khazanov, Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War (Midland Publishing).
- Peter C. Smith, Junkers Ju 87 Stuka (Crowood Press).
- Von Hardesty & Ilya Grinberg, Red Phoenix Rising: The Soviet Air Force in World War II (University Press of Kansas).
- John Weal, Junkers Ju 87 Stukageschwader of the Russian Front (Osprey, Combat Aircraft 6).