The Battle of Kursk actually began with one of the largest air battles of World War II, when German fighters scrambled just in time to blunt an enormous preemptive air strike by Soviet fighters and bombers. However, the cannons’ accuracy was so poor, due to excessive recoil, that production of this type was halted after construction of “only” 3,500 examples. Some Il-2s were equipped with two huge tank-busting thirty-seven-millimeter automatic cannons with fifty rounds of ammunition each. PTAB bomblets carried in underwing dispensers were better because they required less precision: around two hundred of the three-pound shaped charges could be deployed like cluster munitions to carpet an area seventy meters long and fifteen meters wide with armor-piercing bomblets. It could carry eight eighty-two-millimeter or four 132-millimeter rockets, but despite their excellent armor-piercing ability, they proved too inaccurate to be highly effective. The Il-2 disposed of a variety of specialized antitank weapons. The additional crewmember and weapon also reduced flight speed and badly unbalanced the airplane by shifting the center of gravity towards the rear. However, they weren’t protected by any armor plating, and suffered four times the fatality rate of the pilots. (Finding a suitable cannon for the Sturmovik proved a contentious process the designer of one failed cannon prototype, Yakov Taubin, was executed for “plotting the production of inferior-quality weaponry.”) The tail gunners did prove useful in shooting down harrying German fighters. Its wing cannons were also upgraded to high-velocity twenty-three-millimeter VYa types. The Il-2M, introduced in 1942, had an extended canopy to accommodate the gunner of a rear-mounted 12.7-millimeter UBT heavy machine gun. (First place goes to the ubiquitous civilian Cessna 172.) Stalin would influence the Il-2 in another manner: after receiving a letter from a Soviet pilot begging for a tail gunner to defend against German fighters, he ordered Ilyushin to switch to two-seater Il-2s. Over thirty-six thousand Il-2 Sturmoviks were built over the course of the war, making it the second most widely produced airplane ever. Thrust into a desperate effort to blunt German advancing mechanized spearheads, Sturmovik pilots discovered their armor rendered the Il-2 nearly immune to machinegun fire from the front, and even gave it a chance to survive twenty-millimeter cannon shells.Ĭoming from a man who had given no warning whatsoever to hundreds of thousands of Red Army officers executed for suspected disloyalty, the message must have proven motivational. Only a small number of Il-2s were deployed to frontline units-notably in the Fourth Aviation Assault Regiment-when the Wehrmacht began its devastating invasion of the Soviet Union on June 1941. Even the canopy averaged six centimeters of armored glass! The Sturmovik’s robust landing gear was also designed to handle rough frontline airstrips. An armored tub five to twelve millimeters thick shielded the cockpit, fuel tanks, AM38 engine and radiators. However, it was slightly faster, at 250 miles per hour, and more heavily armed, with two twenty-millimeter cannons in addition to two machine guns in the wings. After several prototypes, the resulting single-seat Il-2 production aircraft weighed nearly ten thousand pounds, compared to seven thousand for the Stuka, and could carry a similar maximum bomb load of around 1,100 pounds. Ilyushin’s solution was to make the steel armor an integral load-bearing element of the Il-2’s monocoque fuselage-even though the rear of the aircraft and the wings panels were still made of wood. Simply bolting on armor plates is liable to make an airplane fly like a brick.
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