CAS

Ilyushin Il2m3 Sturmovik

I've always been interested (if "interested" is really by the right word) by close air support operations in World War Two, and especially with two aircraft that were pretty good at it. Everyone did close air support, of course, and most everyone was pretty good at it. Just as the sad-sack German tankers in the Falaise Pocket how effective Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter-bombers were, and USAAF Thunderbolts rained on many a Wehrmacht party.

But only the Soviets and Germans built dedicated close air support machines in the modern sense, aircraft that sported heavy armor and were designed to take the fight to enemy tanks and vehicles at treetop height.

The primary German machine was the Henschel Hs-129, a twin-engined ground attack airplane whose chief defects were that it was not built in large quantity (less than 800 total) and its French-made engines were never terribly reliable. But the Hs-129B2 variant armed with a 30mm MK-101 or MK-103 cannon in a ventral pod proved to be extremely effective. The 30mm gun wasn't so big it prevented the aircraft from carrying its normal MG-151 "secondary guns" and it could even carry 50-kilogram bombs on wing pylons. Later versions replaced the compact-but-effective MK-101 with bigger and less graceful weapons, culminating in the colossal 75mm BK7.5 semi-automatic gun based on the Wehrmacht's 75mm PAK-40 anti-tank gun.

The Soviet equivalent was the Ilyushin Il2 "Sturmovik", an aircraft that enjoys relatively little exposure outside of Russia. Every nation came out of World War Two with an airplane that in some way exemplified its resistance to the Nazis. For the British, the symbol of resistance was the shapely and effective Spitfire, victor of the Battle of Britain. For the Americans, it was the P-51 Mustang, the fighter that took the war all the way to Berlin and broke the back of the Luftwaffe in the great fighter battles of 1944. For the Russians, though, the symbol of resistance was the big, brutish and heavy Sturmovik.

There's not a lot of point in listing specifications, because they aren't that interesting for most people. But the Sturmovik was a pretty effective flying tank, armed with a pair of 23mm cannon or 37mm cannon (depending on the version) and able to drop PTAB anti-tank cluster bombs and carry 82mm or 132mm rockets under its wings. The Soviets ended up building about 36,000 of them during the war, making it one of the most widely produced aircraft of all time. Sturmovik crews suffered horrendous casualties, but in the end, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, they were led as much by the clouds of snarling Sturmoviks overhead as by the obdurate courage of the Red Army's soldiers.