The air raids carried out against Moscow contributed very little to the coming ground assault. Between 21 July and 22 August there were 19 raids, among them the few heavy attacks of the campaign. According to Soviet records these resulted in 569 deaths and serious injury to 1,030; 18 enterprises were heavily damaged, 220 suffered some damage, and 153 residential buildings were destroyed.25 The German aircraft were supposed to be intercepted by the 6th Air Defence Corps of the PVO and a ring of anti-aircraft fire. Around Moscow, in an arc some 75 kilometres from the centre, were 800 guns and 600 searchlights; the commander of the fighter force, Colonel I. D. Klimov, had 420 aircraft under his command, but only eight of the 494 pilots available had been trained for night-flying. Although the anti-aircraft defences of Moscow recorded the use of 29,000 shells on 21–22 July, German records show that only one aircraft was lost in the first attacks.26 Soviet air units were for the most part less well trained than their German counterparts; the use of radio control for aircraft was still not developed effectively and Soviet air forces lacked a purpose-built radar chain like those in use in Britain and Germany. Some pilots resorted to simply ramming an enemy bomber when they met one. To help detect the approach of enemy bombers, the Soviet PVO used listening apparatus, the SP-2, and later the ST-4. Four large cones, like so many giant ear trumpets, were carried on the back of a lorry, three on one side of a fixed frame, one on the other, with two listeners for each apparatus. The SP-2 was supposed to detect aircraft at 5–6 kilometres distance, the larger ST-4 (with square rather than conical trumpets) at distances up to 12 kilometres. Various means were devised to cut out the noise of the wind, but it is difficult to imagine that much warning could have been given using such equipment. German aircraft were advised to throttle back their engines to reduce even further the prospect of being heard.27
The raids on Moscow soon faded away. Out of 75 raids on the capital between July 1941 and April 1942, 59 were carried out with fewer than 10 aircraft, only 9 with more than 50. A total of little more than 1,000 tons was dropped, where London had received 16,000.28 The last raid on Moscow itself occurred on 5–6 April 1942, killing just 5 people and wounding 10 others.29 From September 1941 the focus shifted to the bombing of Leningrad by the aircraft attached to Army Group North as it completed the encirclement of the city. In August the VIII Air Corps under General Wolfram von Richthofen had transferred 262 aircraft north to join General Alfred Keller’s First Air Fleet in support of the campaign towards Leningrad. Regular attrition caused by poor airfield conditions, high accident rates and the slow progress of repairs meant that seldom more than 50–60 per cent of German aircraft were now serviceable. At first German air forces concentrated on breaking the Soviet line and cutting Leningrad off from essential supplies rather than bombing the city. The air raids when they finally began were an extension of the military siege, rather than an independent operation, and they were combined throughout the winter of 1941–2 with heavy shelling of the surrounded city, which exacted a considerably higher toll of human and material losses than the bombs. Hitler planned to wear Leningrad down by starvation and the constant threat of death, but the small number of aircraft available and the hostile climate meant that the army had the more important role to play. Systematic bombing of the main urban area only began once the city was finally cut off and surrounded on 8 September, but the effect of the raids was blunted by the demands for air support for the ground fighting around Leningrad as Soviet armies struggled to break the German stranglehold. Help for the army left fewer bombers free to fulfil Hitler’s new directive on 22 September that Leningrad should be ‘erased from the earth’ by continuous artillery and air bombardment.30
Leningrad itself was divided into four PVO regions. The city was protected by PVO 2nd Air Corps and the regular VII Fighter Aviation Corps. Since the air defence and front-line zones were now the same, the air defence system was subordinated to the Leningrad front to allow more efficient use of resources. The air defence of the city was led by a young air force colonel, Alexander Novikov, whose success earned him rapid promotion to become air force commander-in-chief in April 1942. Alongside around 800 aircraft on the Leningrad Front, there were 160 anti-aircraft batteries with 600 guns, and 300 large balloons that floated gauntly above the city.31 German Air Fleet I, assigned to the northern front, began the campaign with an estimated 1,200 aircraft. The bombing was directed as far as possible at vital targets, and for the besieged population the most important object was food. On 8 September a group of German bombers attacked the large wooden Badeyev warehouses, burning them to the ground and creating a three-mile high column of pungent smoke from the burning meat and sugar. It was, recalled one Soviet eyewitness, an ‘immense spectacle of stunning beauty’.32 During September there were a further 23 raids, among them, as in Moscow, some of the heaviest of the war. In November there were 35, in December, as the weather worsened, only eight. In January, February and March 1942 there were no air raids. In April bombing started again with larger numbers of aircraft, but in May there were no attacks and in June only two. The casualties from bombing and shelling were counted together until April 1942, a total of 10,218 killed and injured. Deaths from artillery fire, which was less predictable and more lethal in its effects, were higher than deaths from bombing. In June 1942, 43 were killed as a result of two raids, but 258 were killed by routine shelling.33
There was little strategic gain from the bombing, which was too irregular and small-scale to do much serious damage. German bombers nevertheless tried to hit industrial centres, railway lines and hubs, and the port area in order to reduce the capacity of Leningrad, despite the famine, to continue to produce weapons and equipment for the front line. Throughout the period from 22 June 1941, when the invasion began, to the halt before Moscow in December 1941, German bombers also attacked a variety of military-economic targets across the western Soviet Union, principally railways and marshalling yards, often at considerable distance from the front lines. The majority of these raids were Störangriffe carried out predominantly in daylight, like the small raids made before the Blitz on Britain, designed to interrupt briefly the flow of traffic or the military support network, and to gather intelligence. Out of 839 raids recorded by the Soviet authorities in the first month of the war, 640 were made with fewer than 12 aircraft.34 There were later attacks as far away as Stalingrad, hit on 1 November by three Heinkel He111 bombers which destroyed three buildings and part of a timber mill, killing 36 people. More small raids followed on the rail network in and around the city, resulting in the loss of 15 locomotives, 359 carriages and 5 metres of track. Unprepared for attack and with no established civil defence system, 330 were killed and 522 injured. There were other raids on distant targets: Kuibyshev, far to the south-east of Moscow, where much of the government apparatus had been evacuated to apparent safety in October 1941 as German forces converged on Moscow; Kursk (to become famous later in the war as the site of a major German defeat), where three bombers attacked the main railway station with just five bombs; and Novorossiisk on the Black Sea coast, where large numbers of incendiaries were used to try to burn down the supply station of the Black Sea Fleet.35
The long-distance raids exposed numerous problems for the anti-air defences in areas which had been regarded as less likely to be under threat. In a raid by one aircraft on Rostov-on-Don on 28 August 1941, no air-raid alarm sounded because of poorly coordinated communications. The local PVO commander, whose failure it was, nevertheless threatened the head of civil defence in Rostov that if a single bomb hit a residential building, ‘you will be the one to pay with your life’. In other cities there were no bomb-disposal units, and local soldiers, ordered to try to defuse unexploded bombs with no proper equipment, sensibly refused.36 In the Yaroslav region, German aircraft attacked the rail network at low altitude either singly or in small groups, almost immune from the local PVO organization which had only six fighters, 20 anti-aircraft guns and half the required manpower to cover the entire area.37 Although the
PVO organization was expanded before the coming of war, 40 per cent of its guns and aircraft defended just three cities, Moscow, Leningrad and the southern oil city of Baku. The whole organization lacked 40 per cent of the required fighters, one-third of the necessary anti-aircraft guns and half the barrage balloons. Its decentralized character also made effective cooperation difficult between regions and on 9 November 1941 the State Defence Committee (set up in July 1941 with Stalin as its head) placed the PVO under a central commander in Moscow, Maj. General M. S. Gromadin. Under the new PVO regime defence facilities slowly expanded; by May 1942 there were 4,576 anti-aircraft guns, by September 1943, 9,134, including a threefold increase in guns to defend the rail network.38 Even then the anti-aircraft fire was of limited utility without radar-aided gun-laying equipment or proximity fuses. The large number of guns depended on a crude barrage effect that destroyed enemy bombers largely by chance.
Most German attacks were made against rail targets and bridges. Not only did this make military sense in order to hamper the movements of the Red Army, but many of these smaller targets were poorly defended. In many cases Soviet records show that a heavier tonnage was dropped on smaller rail targets than in the urban attacks. Between July and December 1941 there were 8,752 raids on communications; between January and June 1942, 1,304; in the first period 533 locomotives and 7,819 wagons were destroyed, in the second period 428 and 6,693. Since the attacks were generally carried out against stations or marshalling yards, casualties were considerable. In the period from January to June 1942, 3,080 people were killed in railway attacks, 5,675 injured.39 The German Air Force soon identified the most suitable targets. Air units were encouraged to attack locomotives, either stationary or moving, and to focus on the principal rail hubs, with repair facilities and supply centres. It was discovered that attacking stretches of rail line had little effect, particularly once the ground had become frozen, since bombs failed to penetrate effectively, ‘mostly bouncing away, to detonate harmlessly beside the rails’. Snowy conditions in general made air operations difficult, not only because of low serviceability and the difficulty of flying from and landing on snow-covered bases, but because of the poor visibility of targets once they were protected by the natural camouflage of winter.40
The futility of attacking railway lines was made evident by the rapid recovery carried out by emergency repair teams, using stocks stored near the critical stretches of track. The normal time required to repair short lengths of track was from two to four hours, though it could take some hours before the emergency team arrived. More serious craters could be bypassed by laying new track around them. The cases where the rail link was severed for longer were sufficiently unusual for them to feature in the reports of the War Communications Office. At the Shuvaevo-Zhukopa station, near the Kalinin front north of Moscow, the network was interrupted for 43 hours; on another stretch in the same area between Goritsa and Zhukopa, the track was only fully restored after 79 hours. The cumulative effect could be more substantial. The lines leading to the Kalinin front were the most heavily attacked between March and June 1942, resulting in a loss of 1,988 hours of traffic over a four-month period. Bridges took on average longer to repair, but were in general functioning again 8 to 36 hours later. The Soviet assessment of the railway campaign concluded that it was more strategically useful to mount more frequent attacks against fewer objectives, rather than less frequent attacks against many, as the German Air Force was doing. The overall conclusion by the summer of 1942 was that despite regular interruptions to stations and marshalling yards, rail traffic ‘has never been discontinued entirely’.41
The changing strategic focus of Axis forces in the summer of 1942 for the southern assault towards the Volga and the Caucasus (‘Operation Blue’) was signalled by the sudden increase in air attacks on railway communications across the southern zone as a prelude to the new campaign. In May and June a majority of attacks were directed at the southern Ukraine, the area around Voronezh and the Krasnodar region on the Black Sea coast leading to the Caucasus, 59 per cent of all German sorties. By the time Operation Blue started on 28 June the German Air Force had already inflicted substantial damage on rail centres and killed an estimated 1,400 people, including the two deadliest raids so far, when 415 mostly evacuees were burned to death at Kavkazskaia station and 466 killed at the rail centre at Kochetkova.42 In July attacks on railways targets more than 100 kilometres from the front line intensified, taking up almost two-thirds of all raids. These included the preliminary raids on Stalingrad and the region around the city as it became clear with German operational successes that the city would soon be an object within the grasp of Army Group South. There were 59 raids on the Stalingrad region, four on the city itself, doing little damage but killing 99 people. By August the German Air Force devoted one-third of all raids on the Eastern Front to the Stalingrad area, 17 per cent to the Caucasus.43
The commander of the German Fourth Air Fleet for the campaign against Stalingrad was Wolfram von Richthofen, the officer who had commanded the bombing of Guernica in 1937 and the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 and who had led the ferocious aerial assault on the Crimean city of Sebastopol in June 1942. This month-long campaign saw the progressive destruction of the fortress city by a combination of repeated air strikes and the effects of 2,000 artillery pieces around its perimeter. The 390 bombers and dive-bombers available to von Richthofen pounded the city into ruins, leaving at the end only 11 undamaged buildings. When they did not drop bombs, the aircraft carried scrap metal – old engines, ploughs, rail track – which they dropped on the defenders. Sometimes they dropped leaflets asking Wie geht es? (‘How’s it going?’). Thousands of civilians were evacuated across the Black Sea, attacked by aircraft as they went. Those who chose to stay or were ordered to do so lived a subterranean existence in the hundreds of caves, tunnels and storerooms on the rocky peninsula which gave a natural protection. The local authorities counted only 173 dead after the first days of bombing, though many more died from the powerful artillery barrage. The shelters were filled with stale air, making it difficult to breathe, and were piled high with a jumble of goods and luggage. The Russian journalist Boris Voyetekhov found himself in one of the largest underground caverns, where machinery turned out a stream of grenades, newspapers were typeset and printed, the party officials worked on their reports and artists worked on posters encouraging greater effort.44 In the underground post office, the postmen wrote ‘to be looked for after the war’ on letters that could not be delivered to the streets of rubble on the surface. Sebastopol finally fell on 1 July.
Much against his will, von Richthofen was moved from the Sebastopol campaign shortly before its conclusion to set up headquarters for the new operation in which he was to play a leading part.45 The German Air Force allocated more than half of all aircraft to the Eastern Front, 1,155 in total, for Operation Blue. But the number of serviceable aircraft available to von Richthofen for the drive on the Volga and the Caucasus that developed from mid-July was only around 750, divided between the VIIIth and IVth air corps, the first for the drive across the Don steppe to Stalingrad, the second to support operations further south in the Caucasus.46 Most of the air force action was in direct support of ground forces and in combat against the Soviet Air Force which proved unable to contest air superiority successfully, although night-bombing attacks against German bases inflicted some effective damage. As Army Group B, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, pushed its way rapidly across the steppe towards Stalingrad, the way was paved for a bombing assault on the city. This has always been treated in the literature as the most deadly bombing operation not only of the entire Eastern war, but of any day of raiding before Hiroshima.
The situation at Stalingrad, both at the time and since, has encouraged a popular sense of historical extremes, and there is no disguising the mounting drama as German armies, the Sixth Army under Paulus, the Fourth Panzer Army under General Hoth, pushed back the embattled Stalingrad defenders of the Soviet 62nd and 6
4th Armies into a narrowing zone in front of the city and, by September, back into the city itself. The Soviet Eighth Air Army commanded by General T. Khriukin had only 454 aircraft when the assault started, of which just 172 were fighters. There were too few heavy anti-aircraft guns, since Stalingrad had not been expected to be a major target. The balance of air power lay for the moment with the German Air Force. On 21 August the German army crossed the Don River and pushed on towards the city; the bank of the Volga was reached on 23 August. On that day von Richthofen was apparently ordered by Hitler’s headquarters to bring together as many of his scattered air units as possible to support a major bombing attack on the city. Around 400 Ju88 and He111 bombers were available. There is no record in the War Diary at Supreme Headquarters, where Hitler watched closely the course of the campaign, to indicate that a heavy bombing of the city was ordered that day, but air force records show that the bomber force flew 1,600 sorties against targets in Stalingrad, dropping around 1,000 tons of bombs, though it seems likely that this took place over a six-day period and not all on 23 August. Because of poor anti-aircraft defence, bombers could fly at around 2,000–3,000 metres to drop their bombs. Soviet records show that they came in waves of 70–90 aircraft, sometimes in much smaller formations.47
The attacks were not simply directed at destroying the city, which would be of little help in trying to capture it a few days later, but were concentrated on key military, administrative and economic targets, including the large oil-storage depots on the bank of the Volga. German air intelligence had produced detailed maps of Stalingrad, along with other cities, showing the key industrial sites and military installations. These included the vast ‘Dzerzhinskii’ tractor factory and the Red October metalworks, as well as an oil refinery.48 From early August the Soviet reports indicate attacks on warehouses, quays and industrial installations. The attacks on 23 August produced extensive damage to the main industrial installations and the communications system. The burning oil produced a vast fog of black smoke that contributed more than anything else to the sense that the raids on that day had substantially destroyed the city, but it was the bombing of the city centre the following day, 24 August, that did the most damage. Destruction of the central water supply system that day robbed the fire service of water at a critical juncture and allowed the fires to take hold, destroying or damaging around 95 per cent of the buildings in the central district.49 The standard figure cited for the losses of the Soviet population who remained in the city has been put at 40,000, which would indeed make 23 August 1942 the most deadly day of bombing before the atomic attacks.50
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