When Germany invaded in June 1941, Soviet cities were soon under German bombs and the front was collapsing. As a riposte, the Soviet high command ordered a symbolic strike on Berlin itself. The job fell to the naval aviators of the Baltic Fleet’s 1st Mine-Torpedo Aviation Regiment, flying DB-3 bombers (the immediate ancestor of the Il-4) from Kagul airfield on the island of Saaremaa — then almost the only Soviet-held ground within striking range of the German capital.

The raids were flown at the very edge of the aircraft’s range: a round trip of well over 1,500 km, mostly over the sea, at night, heavily loaded and lightly defended. The first mission on 7–8 August 1941 put a small number of bombers over Berlin; further raids followed through late August and early September, including larger efforts, until the Germans overran Estonia and took the island bases away. The tonnage dropped was tiny, but the message was not: several airmen, including Preobrazhensky, were made Heroes of the Soviet Union, and the raids became one of the enduring legends of the Il-4 family.

Alongside its work as a land bomber, the Il-4 was the backbone of Soviet naval strike aviation. The torpedo-carrying Il-4T could sling a single large aerial torpedo of around 940 kg under the fuselage, or carry mines and bombs, and flew anti-shipping and mine-laying missions with the Baltic, Black Sea and Northern Fleets. Attacks were pressed home at low level against convoys and warships — dangerous work in an aircraft that was neither fast nor agile — and the type gave the Soviet navy a reach it otherwise lacked. It is telling that the very first Berlin raids were flown by naval torpedo-bomber crews.

Pilots who flew the Il-4 remembered it as a handful. The controls were heavy, the aircraft wandered directionally, and an engine failure on take-off could be lethal; training losses were high. Yet it was also rugged, could absorb damage, and above all it could go the distance. For a bomber force that spent much of the war short of modern equipment, that combination of long range and durability mattered more than comfort or speed, and the Il-4 remained a front-line type from 1941 until the war’s end.

The Il-4 was a wartime Soviet state product, built to plan and never sold on an open market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply does not exist in the public record — and no credible cost-per-flight-hour figure exists for the type either. Its cost was reckoned in rubles, labour-hours and scarce materials inside a command economy fighting for survival, not in dollars. Any precise price you see attached to an Il-4 today is, in practice, a modern estimate rather than a sourced historical figure.