Ramirezzz
Senior Airman
you should know Udet these losses were caused due to the poorly planned and performed operation by the Soviets , in fact the whole idea of the preemptive air strike at Zitadelle was ill - fated from the very beginning.In the very first day of operations of JG 3 for Unternehmen Zitadelle, meaning July 5th, 1943, the pilots of the Geschwader shot down 43 IL-2s; one should also add the IL-2s destroyed in the same day by pilots of the gruppen of JG 51, JG 52 and JG 54 flying in the same area [and those lost to Flak].
During the summer of 1943 when JG 52 became the only complete Geschwader operating in the East, the German boys of the Geschwader continued to chalk up air victories, with the IL-2 as the main dish.
The only theatre of the war where the Stuka remained operational in significant numbers throughout the entire conflict was precisely the Eastern Front, fulfulling its role: ground attack plane. With much less armor than the IL-2 the Stuka proved to be a highly survivable plane in the Eastern Front.
the organisation, tactics and equipment of the ShAPs in the early 1943 were still unsufficient enough to provide effective teamwork with the fighter regiments of the VVS -that doesn't mean the aircraft as such was bad. I can mention even worser examples than Kuban - just take a look at the horrible losses on the Kalinin Front in 1942, where some of the ShAP's were replaced some two or three weeks after arriving to front.Need examples? See the air battles in the Kuban bridgehead during 1943 where large formations of Stukas of Fliegerkorps I flew in operations; they never came close to take the losses the IL-2s did, say, in the opening day of Zitadelle.
The key element though was the air superiority - the Stukas performed as bad as Il-2 when the Luftwaffe couldn't achieve any - airbattles over the Dnjepr bridgeheads are just what comes to mind where some of the STGs were decimated by the VVS fighter regiments. So my point is the losses of any aircraft type in a single operation aren't good example to estimate its combat value.
Altough I must admit the early versions of the Il-2 were far away from being of really effective CAS aircraft indeed - in fact, it was underpowered, heavy beast with poor gun and bomb sights.
please keep such insulting comments to yourself - nobody calls Bf-109 or Ju-87a "best refugee strafing plane" ,because of what your beloved Luftwaffe boys did on the Eastern front in much greater scale when it was Russians who retreated back to Moscow and Stalingrad.Again the IL-2...
If there was a prize deserved by such plane that would be something like the "Best refugee strafing plane" as it occurred during late 1944 and 1945, when millions of civilians fled across the Baltic States and Poland, fleeing the advancing Red Army. Nobody will ever know the number of civilians that were murdered by soviet pilots.
Not a very demanding target: huge columns of civilians moving across vast portions of land...in many places there were dozens of thousands of them at the time and even more...even the hastily trained soviet pilots would hit them. Easier to kill than Panzers.
I was just repeating it for parsifal's post.
