The Ministry of Home Security, created for the emergency in 1939, was peremptorily closed down on 30 May 1945 and its powers transferred back to the Home Office. The five years in which it had taken the lead in preparing British society for total war on the home front and conducting its civilian offensive had represented an exceptional intervention by the state in the daily lives of Britain’s urban inhabitants. This had been achieved with evident areas of friction, social tension and occasional delinquency. The state provided a relatively sound organization but, in the beginning, poor facilities and limited material resources contributed to a high level of civilian casualties and community disruption. Fortunately for Britain’s war economy there was only a limited and temporary disruption of output. Over the course of the war the civil defence system became a large, expensively equipped and uniformed service with a higher operational capacity and potential effectiveness than it had enjoyed during the major bombing offensive.
Unlike the German home front, British society was not faced with an escalating and devastating offensive over five years of war, though the persistent threat of attack, including the final flourish with missiles instead of bombs, forced Britain to divert very substantial resources to keeping the home-front forces in being – resources that might well have been diverted to other more productive wartime purposes. Probably only in two months of the war, in September 1940 and May 1941, did the scale of attack and level of casualty suggest the possibility of a serious social or political crisis, but it would be wrong to argue that in either case the government was likely to compromise on the war effort. What is clear from the experience of bombing is the difficulty, later found in trying to evaluate ‘morale’ in defeated Germany and Japan, in separating out the effects of bombing from the many other sources of public concern. Bombing itself affects only very particular areas in clearly defined time. The scientist Patrick Blackett pointed out in his account of morale written in August 1941 the simple fact that no air force ‘will ever be large enough to bomb all the people all the time’.275
4
The Untold Chapter: The Bombing of Soviet Cities
In late September 1941 the British Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, found himself in Moscow attached to a mission headed by Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averell Harriman to discuss aid for the Soviet Union. Having experienced nine months of the Blitz on London, Balfour suddenly found himself again in the firing line from German bombers. He thought the blackout a model of its kind, ‘not a glimmer anywhere’, with cars dangerously invisible on the Moscow streets. The city was encircled by a thick apron of barrage balloons. On 2 October, as agreement was finally being signed on schedules of supplies for the Soviet war effort, the air-raid alarm went. Beaverbrook and Harriman were ushered down into the Moscow metro, where they dined and played cards to pass the time. Balfour instead disobeyed Soviet requests to shelter and went to the roof of the British Embassy, from which he was afforded a remarkable view of the heaviest anti-aircraft barrage he had ever witnessed. He reflected that for a country desperate for material aid from the West, their use of anti-aircraft ammunition was prodigal, but nonetheless apparently effective. Despite almost daily raids he saw comparatively little air-raid damage.1
The journalist Alexander Werth, who was in Moscow during the heaviest raids in July and early August 1941, had wondered whether Muscovites could stand a Blitz as steadfastly as Londoners had done. He found Muscovites grim and tired after the experience of long hours of compulsory fire-watching in a city where failure to extinguish incendiaries could end with execution. He witnessed one of the largest raids from a trench shelter near the British Embassy, though no bombs hit the city centre that night. Surrounded by the loud clatter of shrapnel, Werth gazed at a sky ‘filled with the lights of exploding shells, and tracer bullets, and all kinds of rockets’.2 Other visitors to Moscow that autumn found conditions there very different from war-damaged London. Sir Walter Citrine, head of the British Trade Union Congress, arrived shortly before the major evacuation of the city in October 1941 and was told by other non-Russians that German aircraft seldom got through to the centre of the city. Citrine found the blackout ‘impenetrable’, the shelters comfortable (but reserved for women and children), and the population unruffled; ‘most British cities,’ he concluded, ‘have suffered far more from the depredations by raiding aircraft than has Moscow.’3 The German campaign against Moscow was, in truth, a shadow of the bombing of England in 1940. The first and heaviest raid, on the night of 21 July 1941, involved only 195 aircraft, of which 127 reached the target, a fraction of the number that had pounded London in the autumn of 1940. Over the following month there were 19 raids, most with only a few aircraft; this resulted in the destruction of a handful of factories and residential buildings and the death of 569 Muscovites.4 By December the German Air Force made only small nuisance raids, killing that month 67 people and damaging a small number of buildings. After April 1942 the raids on the capital petered out.5
After a year of continuous long-range bombing of British cities, the German Air Force returned to a predominantly tactical role. The Soviet Union had prepared extensively for a repeat of the Blitz on Soviet soil, which explains the thunderous roar of the guns heard by Harold Balfour and the pyrotechnic performance watched by Alexander Werth. There was nevertheless persistent, if small-scale, German bombing against more distant targets beyond the front line over the course of the four years of the German-Soviet war. This resulted not in the 500,000 dead from bombing later claimed in Soviet publications, but in a little over 51,000 deaths and serious injury to 136,000 others. Buildings, industry and communications were attacked, but unsystematically and with limited effect. The story of this confrontation between Soviet air and civil defences and the German Air Force remains one of the least-explored areas of Europe’s bombing war.
‘A PROPER WAR’: AIR POWER ON THE EASTERN FRONT
Before the onset of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the air force chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, was heard to say ‘At last a proper war’.6 After months of indecisive strategic operations against Britain, the German Air Force returned to the role for which it had been principally prepared, supporting a combined arms offensive against the enemy’s armed forces. The directive for Operation Barbarossa, published on 18 December 1940, required the German Air Force to focus all its efforts ‘against the enemy air force and direct support for the army’. Attacks on the enemy arms industry were reserved for the unlikely point when mobile warfare ended and the industries of the Ural region came within range.7
The deliberate rejection of long-range bombing against industrial targets reflected Hitler’s own scepticism about the effect of strategic attacks and overweening confidence in the ability of the German armed forces to knock out the Soviet Union in a brief summer campaign, in which case Soviet industry would fall into German hands in a few weeks. There were also questions of geography. The air campaign against the Soviet Union was entirely different from the one being waged against British ports and cities. Britain was a small, compact island with many key targets no more than a short flight away. The Soviet Union was the world’s largest nation, with much of its modern industry hundreds or thousands of miles away from the closest German airbases. Göring told his first post-war interrogators that even for the Russian campaign he had ‘always believed in strategic use of air power’ but the problem was the lack of ‘concentrated targets’.8 The vast campaign, along a front of more than 1,000 miles, also spread German air resources thinly. The invasion of the Soviet Union was undertaken with 200 fewer bomber aircraft than the invasion of France in 1940, thanks largely to the long attrition war against Britain in the first half of 1941. High losses in the first three months of the campaign – a total of 1,499 aircraft – spread German air forces more thinly still and ruled out any large-scale independent bombing campaign.9
The Soviet Air Force, like the German, concentrated on close support for the front-line armies with short-rang
e bombing attacks aimed at tactical targets in the rear of the enemy army. This was an outcome with both military and political causes. In the early 1930s the Soviet air forces had developed major bombing capability and encouraged designers to develop multi-engine bombers. By 1935 almost two-thirds of the combat air force was composed of bombers. During the Spanish Civil War, Soviet close-support aviation demonstrated its utility and encouraged the air force to focus increasingly on battlefront aircraft and medium/light bombers for attacks on rear areas close to the front. The change in emphasis was underscored by the effects of the Soviet purges in 1937 when senior airmen close to the ill-fated Marshal Tukhachevsky were arrested and executed. Air force commanders had broadly favoured large bombers and independent operations, but practical experience and political intervention pushed them towards the German ideal of operational air warfare against enemy armed forces. Independent bombing came to be regarded as a bourgeois deviation that ‘overrates equipment and underrates man’.10 One of the victims of the Terror was the celebrated aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, who was arrested in October 1937 implausibly accused of handing over blueprints to the Germans to help them design the Me110 heavy fighter. One of the pioneers of heavy-bomber design, he was confined to a prison complex on Radio Street, Moscow, where he continued to design aircraft with a team of imprisoned engineers.11 The key contributions of his group of 150 prisoners were the medium bombers Pe-2 and Tu-2, which performed a significant battlefront role during the war.
The Red Air Force (VVS) in 1940 created a separate Long-Range Aviation section (DBA), but the bombers were, like the German and British, relatively short-range twin-engine aircraft, the DB-3 and TB-3, intended principally for battlefield support. In May 1941, shortly before the German invasion, the bomber and transport aircraft were reorganized in a Long-Range Aviation (ADD) force, but this, too, was designed chiefly for attacks on the enemy armed forces and supply chain and was long-range only by comparison with the short-range fighter and fighter-bomber units. The long-range force had 1,332 bombers in June 1941 out of a total of 8,465 VVS aircraft. A separate air organization was activated in 1932 for the defence of Soviet cities, composed of fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and the air-warning system. Known as protivovozdushnaia oborona strany (PVO), the units were organized in thirteen PVO zones corresponding to local military districts. Although PVO units cooperated with the combat air force, they retained a separate organization and status throughout the war.12
On the eve of the war PVO fighter forces totalled an estimated 1,500; most were obsolete models, but by the summer of 1941 a new generation of fast monoplane fighters, the MiG-3, Yak-1 and LaGG-3, were beginning to reach the fighter defence squadrons.13 The PVO personnel numbered 182,000, many of them assigned to the 58 anti-aircraft artillery regiments and 120 anti-aircraft units. Around the major cities an outer circle of anti-aircraft artillery and searchlights was set up, and an inner zone of machine guns and lighter anti-aircraft fire. Throughout the Soviet Union there were 3,659 heavy guns (including the powerful 85mm), 330 light guns and 650 anti-aircraft machine guns, supported by 1,597 searchlights. PVO defence was concentrated on the urban areas closest to the German threat; more distant urban targets were less well protected. By summer 1941 the zones facing the Axis attack had between 86 and 100 per cent of the protection assigned to them; Moscow had 89 per cent, but more distant Kharkov only 15 per cent.14 The whole organization was supported by the Air Observation Warnings and Communication (VNOS), which gave advance notice of approaching enemy aircraft. Located some 10–12 kilometres apart, the observer posts stretched along the whole western frontier from the White Sea to the Black Sea. The first line of observers was supported by a second line further east that was to be manned on mobilization. Although radar was in the process of introduction in 1941, the observer system relied extensively on visual observation, sound detectors and telephone reporting.15
In the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa, which was launched on 22 June 1941 by German, Hungarian, Finnish, Romanian and Slovakian forces across an entire front from the far Arctic north to the Black Sea in the south, both sides used their aircraft almost entirely for tactical support of the attacking and defending armies. Heavy raids were mounted against cities in the path of the approaching Axis armies, particularly the Belorussian capital of Minsk, but the main targets were airbases, railway hubs and military installations. The Soviet authorities counted 627 daylight and 212 night-time attacks. As in Poland in 1939, the damage to residential and non-military targets was extensive but not in this case deliberate. The 21 raids on Minsk left much of the wooden area of the city burnt out; the 15 raids on Smolensk inflicted heavy damage on the town and the rail network; 15 raids on Kiev wrecked areas of the city. Provisional estimates suggested 1,715 dead, 4,864 injured.16
There were many opportunities to inflict serious damage on the Soviet war effort during the opening weeks when the Soviet government authorized a frantic dispersal of threatened industrial production to areas remote from the German attack. A Committee of Evacuation was set up on 24 June, two days after the Axis assault began. Within weeks the first factories had been dismantled and were being transported by lorry or rail further east, including important elements of the aircraft industry. In the six months from July to December, 2,593 enterprises were moved, along with 25 million workers and their families. The industrial workforce in the Ural region increased by 36 per cent, that in western Siberia by one-quarter.17 The moves were made under the most difficult of circumstances, and sustained bombing by German aircraft might well have disrupted them further. Although Soviet aircraft production was dented by the evacuation, nonetheless 5,173 modern fighter aircraft were produced between July and December against a German output of just 1,619. The following year 9,918 Soviet fighters were produced, all of them the latest high-performance models, against 4,542 German.18
The first long-range bombing attacks were carried out not by German aircraft, but by the hard-pressed Soviet Air Force against the German capital, Berlin. The motive seems to have been largely political, since the small scale of the raids and modest bombloads were unlikely to achieve more than a pinprick effect. The first bombers carried German translations of Stalin’s speech of 3 July 1941 in which he summoned his countrymen to fight a war to the death against the invader. The first attack came on the night of 7 August when 15 DB-3 bombers belonging to the Soviet Baltic Fleet flew from the Baltic Sea base at Kagul on the island of Ösel. Only five reached the centre of Berlin where they dropped leaflet packs and 30 bombs. There were seven more raids by early September, but two failed to reach Berlin at all and the damage was insignificant.19 Two heavier RAF raids were made during the same period, the only time the two allies cooperated on bombing missions. The small number of Soviet aircraft and the tactic of flying high to avoid detection meant that on the night of the first raid the sirens sounded only 23 minutes after the bombs had dropped. The following day, the German papers referred only to ‘enemy planes’, rather than advertise the Soviet Air Force’s modest achievement.20
Small attacks were also made on targets in German-occupied Poland and East Prussia, but the demands of the fighting front limited further raids on rear areas. Only 549 sorties were made against more distant targets during the war, including raids on the oil-producing region at Ploeşti in Romania (attacked between 22 and 26 June and again by six bombers on 14 July) and the small raids on Bulgarian ports.21 German long-range bombing attacks were confined chiefly to Moscow, partly, according to Hitler’s directive, in revenge for the attacks on Helsinki and Bucharest – a repeat of the decision a year before to attack London in retaliation for the first RAF raids on Berlin.22 No doubt Hitler, like Stalin, wanted to make a political gesture in bombing the enemy capital, but he was also bent on its complete destruction once that became possible. Moscow together with the second Soviet city, Leningrad, was to be erased as an urban centre, and although the German Air Force certainly lacked the means to achieve that in the late sum
mer of 1941, the bombing could be interpreted as an opening salvo. Although most of the objectives had a military-economic importance, the Kremlin was also targeted as the centre of Soviet government and hit on occasion by showers of incendiaries. The bombing was limited chiefly by the diversion of bomber forces to help the ground campaign. It also seemed less urgent as confidence grew at Hitler’s headquarters that the Soviet capital would be captured easily in the next operational wave of the ground war, ‘to deprive the enemy before the coming of winter’, as a new directive in mid-August 1941 stated, ‘of his governmental, armament and traffic centre around Moscow’.23 Once that was achieved, he told his head of household, Otto Günsche, in September 1941, he had a powerful air force to deal with any possible Russian revival beyond the Urals. Günsche recalled how confident Hitler appeared: ‘Moscow will be attacked and then fall, then we will have won the war.’24
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 28