Khanzeer
Banned
Il-2 was frequently called upon to serve as a fighter. While the Sturmovik had no way of keeping pace with German fighters, it proved deadly in taking down slower German bomber, observation and transport planes, resulting in several Il-2 aces.It is one weird plane. It's payload is ridiculous compared to a Dauntless (500 kg for the IL2 at max loadout). This clay pigeon was shot down in more numbers than any other plane of which I know. (About 25,000 of them.). What makes it effective, is that there are a lot of them, and their unique "cassette" bomb dispensers that allowed them to make low level horizontal passes and drop lines of top-down HEAT grenades on massed enemy armor. (Means average pilots can use the plane for CAS, no need for fancy dive bomber training.) These grenades were dual purpose as not only could they defeat German armor topsides, but there was a blast frag feature that sprayed and killed panzer grenadier bodyguard troops if the grenades missed the tanks during the pass. Point contact detonators. The guy who came up with the IL2, Sergey Ilyushin, was absolutely brilliant because he thought of everything, as a system of systems guy, except the tail-gunner, who it turns out, was completely useless, so he was right (and Stalin was wrong) about that one, too.
^^^ above from article you referenced
Begs the question in a big war soviets probably planned to use ground attack strike aircraft [ mig27 and su17m3] as fighters too against recon aircraft, transports , observation/patrol planes etc ?