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Special Units · Battle of Kursk, 1943
The Il-2 Shturmovik Regiments at Kursk
The assault regiments flew the hardest missions of the battle, low over the battlefield through German flak. On 5 July 1943 Col. Andrei Vitruk’s 291st Assault Aviation Division dropped the new PTAB anti-tank bomblet in combat for the first time.
- Soviet Air Forces · 2nd Air Army
- Southern face, Kursk salient
- 5–18 July 1943
The flying tank
The Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik was the armored assault aircraft that the Soviet Union built in greater numbers than any other combat aircraft of the war, 36,183 by its end. Its engine, cockpit and fuel tanks sat inside a shell of armor plate that formed part of the airframe, and it carried two 20 mm or 23 mm cannon, machine guns, rockets and bombs. Stalin had made its importance plain to the managers of two aircraft factories in December 1941.
Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats.
By 1943 most Il-2s at the front were the two-seat Il-2M3, with a rear gunner and a 12.7 mm UBT machine gun to cover the tail. The gunner sat behind only 6 mm of armor, enough to stop rifle-caliber rounds, and Oleg Rastrenin’s research shows that gunners suffered about four times the casualties of pilots. The Il-2 was hard to shoot down but not hard to hit. In 1943 the Soviet air forces lost one Il-2 for every 26 sorties, about half to fighters and half to antiaircraft fire (Gordon), and 3,515 Il-2s were lost that year (Bergström). The regiments developed their own defense, the “circle of death,” in which up to eight aircraft circled over the target, each covering the tail of the one ahead while taking turns to dive. Maj. Gen. Vasily Ryazanov of the 1st Assault Aviation Corps is credited with developing these tactics.
The regiments on the southern face
On the southern face the Voronezh Front was supported by the 2nd Air Army of Lt. Gen. Stepan Krasovsky. Its assault aviation was Ryazanov’s 1st Assault Aviation Corps, with the 266th and 292nd Assault Aviation Divisions, and the independent 291st Assault Aviation Division of Col. Andrei Vitruk, with three assault regiments of Il-2s and a fighter regiment flying Yak-1s, Yak-7s and La-5s for escort (Wikipedia, “2nd Air Army,” from the Soviet order of battle). The 16th Air Army on the northern face and the 17th Air Army east of the Northern Donets had assault divisions of their own. Their work was the most dangerous flying of the battle: low-level attacks through German light flak on tanks, guns, vehicle columns and infantry, often several times a day (Chapter 5).
Dawn, 5 July: the strike that failed
The regiments’ battle began before the German offensive did. On the night of 4–5 July, after prisoners confirmed that the attack would come at dawn, the 2nd and 17th Air Armies were ordered to strike the airfields of the Luftwaffe’s VIII. Fliegerkorps around Kharkov and Belgorod. The force was Il-2 assault regiments with fighter escort, about 400 aircraft by most counts. The idea was the one the Luftwaffe had used against the Soviet air force in June 1941: catch the enemy’s aircraft on their fields in the last minutes before takeoff.
It did not work. Many German bombers and Stukas were already taking off for their own dawn missions, and fighters of JG 3 and JG 52 were in the air. A Freya radar near Belgorod detected the formations approaching that town, but Bergström, who has gone furthest into the German records, rejects the story that radar alone defeated the strike; the main cause was timing. The Il-2s were intercepted before and over the airfields and lost heavily, and the damage they did on the ground was slight. German pilots called them “furniture vans” (Zamansky). The day cost the 2nd Air Army 114 aircraft by its own unit records, against 78 in the Soviet General Staff’s postwar study (Lawrence), and Zamansky counts 166 Soviet pilots killed or missing on 5 July, 111 of them junior lieutenants.
The PTAB
Against tanks the Il-2’s weakness had always been accuracy. Its cannon could not pierce the side armor of a Panzer IV, and its bombs had to hit almost directly to destroy one. The answer, ready just before Kursk, was the PTAB 2.5-1.5, a small shaped-charge bomb designed in 1942 by I. A. Larionov at Central Design Bureau No. 22, a bureau that specialized in fuzes. A 2.5 kg bomblet with a base-detonating fuze, it could punch through about 60 mm of armor at an impact angle of 30 degrees and up to about 100 mm on a direct hit, more than the top armor of any German tank of 1943. An Il-2 carried 192 of them in four cassettes of 48 and dropped them from low altitude in a stream that covered a strip about 15 meters wide and 70 to 200 meters long. One hit on the thin deck or engine plate of a tank could set it on fire (Rastrenin; Chapter 5).
Vitruk’s regiments were the first to drop it in combat, on 5 July 1943. In one attack, Gordon records, six aircraft led by Vitruk himself were credited with destroying 15 tanks, and the division reported 422 tanks destroyed or damaged in five days (Gordon, pp. 295–296). Il-2s of the 16th Air Army used PTABs on the northern face as well. Soviet factories delivered 1,171,340 PTABs by the end of 1943 and more than 14 million by the end of the war, the most widely produced Soviet aviation bomb. Larionov received the Order of Lenin in January 1944 and a Stalin Prize in 1946. A second anti-tank answer, an Il-2 with two 37 mm NS-37 cannon, was tried at Kursk as well; its recoil made it hard to aim, its bomb load fell from 600 kg to 200 kg, and the PTAB-armed Il-2 replaced it.
Claims and the record
Soviet accounts later credited Shturmoviks with destroying 70 tanks of the German 9th Panzer Division in twenty minutes on 7 July, 270 tanks of the 3rd Panzer Division in two hours and 240 of the 17th Panzer Division in four. None survives a check against the German records. The 9th Panzer claim, repeated in Western books since the 1960s, has no support in them; the 3rd Panzer Division’s panzer regiment had 90 tanks on 1 July, 180 fewer than the number claimed destroyed, and 41 were still operational on 11 July; and the 17th Panzer Division was not in the Kursk attack at all. Glantz puts German tank losses written off in all of Citadel at 323, most of them to antitank guns and tanks (Crosby; Glantz and House; Jentz; Liss).
The PTAB was still a real and dangerous weapon. German tank crews learned to space their vehicles farther apart, use villages, ravines and orchards for cover and dig in when they halted; a stream of bomblets that might have caught a close-packed column then caught one tank, or none. Against vehicles caught in the open, on roads and at river crossings, it stayed effective for the rest of the war.
The regiments paid heavily for every sortie. Assault aircraft made up 168 of the 2nd Air Army’s 371 losses on 5–18 July in the General Staff study, and 180 of its 481 losses in the army’s own daily reports (Lawrence). The air armies could replace their losses and the Luftwaffe could not. By 10–11 July the Soviet air forces had begun to gain the upper hand over the southern face, and after Kursk the Luftwaffe never again won command of the air over a major Soviet battlefield.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. Soviet air regiments wore no unit patches; their aircraft carried the red star of the Soviet air forces, and many Il-2s carried painted slogans such as “Za Stalina!” (For Stalin!).
Timeline
- Stalin’s telegram to two aircraft factories demands more Il-2s.
- I. A. Larionov designs the PTAB 2.5-1.5 shaped-charge bomblet at TsKB-22.
- The Il-2 with two 37 mm NS-37 cannon is photographed in Moscow; it is later tried at Kursk.
- Il-2 regiments of the 2nd and 17th Air Armies strike the German airfields around Kharkov and Belgorod; the strike fails.
- The 291st Assault Aviation Division drops the PTAB in combat for the first time; the 2nd Air Army loses 114 aircraft.
- Within five days of its first PTAB attack, Vitruk’s division reports 422 tanks destroyed or damaged.
- Date of the later Soviet claim of 70 tanks of the 9th Panzer Division in twenty minutes, unsupported by German records.
- The Soviet air forces begin to gain the upper hand over the southern face.
- By the army’s own reports, 180 of the 2nd Air Army’s 481 aircraft lost since 5 July are assault aircraft.
- Soviet factories have delivered 1,171,340 PTABs; 3,515 Il-2s have been lost in the year.
People of the units
Read the full story
- Chapter 5: The Air War over Kursk
- Chapter 4: The Southern Face: Panthers, the SS and the Road to Oboyan
- Chapter 6: Prokhorovka, 12 July 1943: The Battle and the Legend
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Il-2 regiments at Kursk by the numbers
What it cost the 2nd Air Army, 5–18 July 1943
Aircraft lost on the southern face by the two Soviet counts: the General Staff’s postwar study and the army’s own daily reports
Source: Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (2015), table IV.32; this collection’s Chapter 5
Claims against the record
Tanks claimed by Soviet assault aviation, set beside German figures; the claims do not survive the check
Source: Yefim Gordon (2008); David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House (1999); Crosby and Jentz, as cited in this collection’s Chapter 5
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2007), especially pp. 20–27; and Bagration to Berlin (2008), p. 132, as cited in Wikipedia.
- Christopher A. Lawrence, Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, 2015), table IV.32; Dupuy Institute, “The Soviet General Staff study on Kursk compared to unit records,” parts 1–3 (November 2020).
- Dan Zamansky, “At the Battle of Kursk, the Nazis Learned You Can’t Win a Tank Battle Without Air Power,” Military History (HistoryNet, 2022).
- Yefim Gordon, Soviet Air Power in World War 2 (Hinckley: Midland, 2008), pp. 295–296; Oleg Rastrenin, Il-2 Shturmovik Guards Units of World War 2 (Osprey) and Shturmovik Il-2: Letayushchiy tank (2007); Russian Wikipedia, “ПТАБ-2,5-1,5”; Wikipedia, “Ilyushin Il-2” and “2nd Air Army.”
- David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (University Press of Kansas, 1999); Crosby and Jentz on the 3rd and 17th Panzer Divisions’ tank strengths, as cited in Chapter 5; Lloyd Clark, The Battle of the Tanks (2011).