The lengthiest bombing took place against Moscow and Leningrad, where there had been more pre-war civil defence preparation than elsewhere. When the war broke out the blackout in Moscow was enforced at once; street lighting was operated from a wide number of sources and had to be converted to central control so that it could be doused simultaneously across the city. The blackout was regulated by local self-defence units, the MPVO officials and the police. Cars drove slowly and without headlights; matches could not be struck outdoors or torches used. So anxious were Soviet citizens about not violating the blackout that when an American journalist found himself one night in a dark and windowless basement shelter, the women around him asked him to cover the luminous dial of his watch.69 Each Moscow district had its own MPVO brigades recruited from municipal workers and local volunteers. At neighbourhood level the self-defence units, wearing red armbands with ‘MPVO’ stitched on them, were responsible for ensuring that shelters were sanitary and orderly and also played a role in post-raid rescue and welfare.70 Every multi-storey building had firewatchers responsible not only for giving the alert when incendiaries were dropped but for tackling any bomb that landed on their roof-space. They were issued with asbestos gloves, long tongs, and boxes of sand, and told to douse the bombs in buckets of water or to throw them into the street. They were not supposed to shelter during a raid. Harold Balfour was told in September 1941 that the efficiency of the system depended on the simple equation that if a fire started the fire-watcher responsible was shot, an outcome less implausible in the context of the Soviet dictatorship than elsewhere.71 Alexander Werth was introduced to a number of girls from the Communist Youth organization (Komsomol) who did volunteer fire-watching duty. One gave the Party line, ‘we couldn’t allow even a little house to be destroyed by the Fascists’, but the other blushed and stammered about the fear she felt as she had stood her ground on a roof, surrounded by incendiaries and the boom of high-explosive bombs.72
Moscow’s bombing was disruptive for the first weeks after it began, but considerable effort was made to repair the damage quickly or to board up and conceal what could not be rebuilt at once. From September 1941 onwards the attacks were what the British Air Ministry later smugly described as mere ‘harassing raids’.73 In December there were 20 raids, but eight were merely reconnaissance patrols. The raid on 1 December involved only eight bombs, one on 4 December dropped 23 bombs, while the next raid on 6 December amounted to three. In January 1942 just three incendiary bombs reached the city. The last raid, in April, killed five people and injured ten, destroyed one wooden house and two buildings, and damaged a water pipe.74 Compared with the other problems faced by Muscovites as a result of the invasion, bombing was secondary. The MPVO troops in Moscow found themselves in a war zone by the late autumn. They laid 25,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the approaches to the city and were responsible for laying explosives on 27 bridges in case they had to be demolished when the Germans arrived.75 In October a rushed evacuation took place in conditions of mounting chaos as a German breakthrough to surround and capture the capital seemed likely, but it was not an evacuation prompted by bombing. Walter Citrine observed in mid-October lorries loaded with women and children heading out of the city, and long lines leaving on foot, mostly women, clutching what possessions they could: ‘As they went out on one side of the road, on the other came in the troops, tanks, anti-tank guns, howitzers and mechanized infantry in one continuous stream.’76
In Leningrad, too, bombing was just one of many issues confronting the population as the ring of enemy forces tightened, Germans from the south and south-west and Finns from the north. The Finns were embarking on what was called the ‘Continuation War’ to win back territory conceded in March 1940 after the four-month war with the Soviet Union. The MPVO station in Leningrad had 1,335 officers and men, supported by 124,000 civil defence workers organized in 3,500 units. As in Moscow, they found themselves drafted into the land battle as the enemy drew closer; they laid 2,600 landmines and prepared four bridges for demolition, as well as helping to build defensive structures on the approaches to the city, some among 900 eventually constructed by MPVO during the war.77 They helped to clear debris and to demolish dangerous structures; under the ruins of the State Bank they found and returned some 13.5 million roubles in cash. In September 1942 there were 23 German raids, many directed at military targets in Leningrad, which killed or injured some 4,409 people. This was the heaviest of the bombing. After that, and for the next two years, the city was subject to intermittent nuisance raids. By contrast there were 272 shellings by heavy artillery between September and December 1941, which resulted in smashed buildings, fires and a large number of dead and mutilated victims, both civilian and military, largely indistinguishable from the damage inflicted by bombs. The MPVO in the end ordered the alarms for both shelling and bombing.78
Many of the recollections and diaries of the Leningrad siege reveal a casual attitude to the bombing by much of the population. Svetlana Magaieva, a young girl during the siege, lived in an apartment block with no shelter. Her mother and their neighbours stayed in the apartment during raids, playing games to pass the time. When bombs detonated nearby, crockery would fall on the floor and smash and the wooden furniture move across the room as it might in an earthquake. Most people around her did not go to the basement or trench shelters, which were regarded as little safer than home.79 Shelter discipline was not strictly enforced in Leningrad and was lax elsewhere. Policemen were supposed to alert householders with whistles, since sheltering was nominally compulsory, but people braved the raids regardless. An MPVO report in April 1942 noted the persistent ‘undisciplined behaviour’ of the population during warnings, when they chose to stay in their homes rather than seek shelter. The lapses were blamed on an insufficient level of political education. Discipline was particularly bad among soldiers, who took a more insouciant view of the threat. A report in May 1942 noted that three-quarters of all bomb casualties in Kalinin province, north of Moscow, were military personnel who displayed a ‘careless attitude’ towards air-raid rules 80
For the people of Leningrad the chief problem was first hunger, then famine. The destruction of the Badeyev warehouses on 8 September 1941 was the start of a long winter of terrible starvation as the slender stocks remaining evaporated, leaving rations that could not, for almost a million Leningraders, sustain life. By December, Svetlana Magaieva lay in bed all day too weak to move, listening to the shells and bombs ‘which did not frighten me any more’.81 The young fire-watcher, Evgenii Moniushko, found it progressively more difficult to climb the stairs to his lookout post or heave his emaciated body through the skylight onto the roof.82 Workers continued to produce goods, chiefly weapons and munitions for the Leningrad front, until the raw materials ran out; they stayed in the factories after their shifts and those resting also took their turn fire-watching or extinguishing incendiaries. The MPVO found itself performing rescue and first-aid for the victims of shelling as well as the bombs, and it was also called on to help find and supply food rations for the citizens it was supposed to protect. In April 1942 the raids worsened with six attacks by an estimated 350 aircraft. The raids left 192 dead, but that same month the MPVO helped to move 104,880 decomposing corpses out of hospitals and makeshift morgues for mass burial.83 In this case, as in Moscow, the crisis caused by the consequences of the wider war posed a more substantial challenge to the morale of the population. During 1942 the number of air raids on Leningrad itself declined until September (there were only three raids between May and August), when a renewed German attack on the Leningrad front brought more than 60 minor raids on the encircled city and its surroundings. During 1942 and 1943 most casualties were caused by shelling, which did not cease until the successful Soviet counter-offensive in January 1944.
The only other major Soviet city to experience sustained and heavy bombing was Stalingrad, whose raids have already been described. Unlike Moscow or Leningrad, Stalingrad was deemed to be too far away from
the threat of bombing for the same level of protection to be offered. The MPVO station was only activated in early 1942 and by the time of the attacks on the city training had still not reached a level necessary to cope with the scale of raids. The first light attacks in the summer were nevertheless coped with satisfactorily by the existing structure of ‘self-defence’ groups, and the blackout functioned well. In July the bombing increased in intensity, but still only involved a small number of aircraft and damage that could easily be contained.84 Only in the last 10 days of August did the level of raiding temporarily overwhelm the civil defenders. After the destruction of workers’ housing blocks on 20 August, the population began to pour across the Volga to safety on the other side. The MPVO units managed to bring the first wave of fires under control, but the heavy bombing on the 24 August, which damaged the water supply, infected the civil defenders with panic too. ‘The centre of the city is in ruins and ashes,’ wrote the local MPVO commander. ‘The scope of the destruction is phenomenal. The debris on the streets are impassable.’85 He calculated that half his personnel fled over the river, but 500 workers volunteered to act as emergency units and came under MPVO control. Nevertheless, if the reports are to be believed, the emergency services succeeded in restoring damaged infrastructure as the bombing eased off. By 30 August water supply and high-voltage electric power were back in operation, linked to surviving industry. Telecommunications were restored in three districts by 29 August and in five more by the following day. Reconstruction of key roads and clearing of debris was completed at the same time.86 It proved a meagre triumph (though it demonstrated once again the limits of aerial bombing); Stalingrad ceased its function as a city during September and became simply a battlefield.
Once the early raiding was finished there was less need for the expanding MPVO organization. Like the civil defence organization in Britain, the MPVO reached its highest level of preparation and efficiency after the main bombing was over. By July 1944 there were shelter spaces for almost half the 18 million city dwellers who were deemed to qualify for protection. Some 6.5 million civilian gas masks were produced in 1943 and 1944 when the need was slight. By January 1943 there were 3,742 MPVO protection sites, for a far smaller territory than in summer 1941.87 The organization was nevertheless far from redundant. Small-scale raiding went on through 1943 and 1944, the large part of it on railway targets – approximately 60–70 per cent – with many raids by lone aircraft. Three-quarters of the raids were undertaken at night and a proportion were reconnaissance rather than bombing operations. Between March 1943 and March 1944 Soviet sources counted 4,930 incursions, which produced a cumulative death toll of 9,416 people. In 1944 German aircraft concentrated on railway targets at some distance from the fighting front, and out of 16,632 casualties recorded in 1944, 87 per cent were inflicted at or around railway targets. In 1945, with the Red Army on the brink of invading the German homeland, there were just two brief German raids recorded, one on Estonia on 16 January and the last incursion on 16 February over Lithuania by one German bomber.88
The changing pattern of German air activity and the large pool of manpower and equipment led to a reorganization of the MPVO structure. On 10 June 1943 resolution N3592 of the State Defence Committee created a separate MPVO organization for industry and transport to help cope with the persistent threat to the rail network. Experience had shown that the emergency and repair units fielded by the MPVO were generally far too small to cope with the practical consequences of a raid; after the June decree larger emergency columns of 100–500 people were established in 44 cities to try to cope with the restoration of damage to rail transport and, more occasionally, to industry. The number of MPVO personnel assigned to the rail network doubled from 76,000 to 149,000. The industrial units were also responsible for camouflaging factories and transport targets, a task that was undertaken with help from the national Academy of Architecture and the Academy of Science.89 As the fighting front moved westwards again with the Axis retreat, MPVO stations were restored in the liberated areas, allowing MPVO personnel to extend the work of reconstruction and repair as a direct contribution to the operations of the Red Army.
The new role adopted by the MPVO was reflected in the range of activities between 1941 and 1945 claimed as part of its contribution to the Soviet war effort. These included rebuilding 273 bridges (among them the vital bridge over the Dnieper through which the Red Army’s reconquest of Ukraine could be supplied); repairing 1,014 kilometres of rail and tram track, 412 kilometres of roads; and repairing and reconstructing 11,309 apartment blocks, industrial facilities and civic buildings.90 In Leningrad, despite the persistent shelling, 860,000 square metres of roofing had been repaired by 1944, and 3 million square metres of window, each aperture covered with plywood and a small inset of glass, to let in the light.91 The MPVO became the equivalent of the technical troops of the armed forces, restoring water supply in Kiev, Kharkov, Krivoi Rog and Smolensk, and electric power in Kharkov, L’vov, Smolensk and half a dozen other cities where the German army had practised a scorched-earth policy. A total of 8 million man-days were spent by MPVO personnel on reconstruction and repair work, almost 5 million of them in 1944.92 Civil defence in a more conventional sense declined. By 1944 trench and dugout shelters were being demolished or filled in. In Stalingrad the rebuilding had already begun.
The effects of the bombing on the Soviet population subjected to it are difficult to assess. Since air attack was conducted in most cases in conjunction with a destructive land campaign, its effects merged with the damage and dislocation caused by conquest or forced evacuation. In Leningrad the shelling was regarded as more menacing than the bombing, while the famine eclipsed everything. Most eyewitness accounts, however, remark on the calmness of the population. The head of the Leningrad Health Department told Alexander Werth that in his view the most remarkable thing was the absence of ‘cases of insanity or other nervous diseases due to bombing or shelling’.93 A worker at the Putilov armaments works recalled that the bombing made him and his comrades frightened but also angry. He described one night when 300 incendiaries landed on the plant: ‘Our people were putting the fires out with a sort of concentrated rage and fury; like a thousand squirrels they rushed around, putting out the flames. They had realized by then that they were in the front line – and that was all. No more shelters.’94 Children in Leningrad played games with the shrapnel picked up after the anti-aircraft barrage. Svetlana Magaieva and her companions even stayed outside while the shrapnel fell, on the promise that whoever stood nearest to a fallen fragment would have the right to claim it.95 There was occasional evidence that bombing was used as an opportunity to express political views impossible under normal conditions. Leaflets appeared calling for Leningrad to be declared, like Paris in 1940, an open city; as occupation of the city seemed imminent, swastikas were daubed on walls and pro-Hitler comments overheard. Later, during the famine, resentment spilled over at times from the knowledge that the Party elite were still able to enjoy food rations long denied to the rest of the population.96 Yet anti-Soviet sentiment, where it existed, did not need bombing to stimulate it. In most areas outside Leningrad, the bombing was a brief interruption, small raids that exacted a rising level of casualties, chiefly among those living too close to transport targets, but never severe enough to distort the way the population felt about the war effort, whether positive or negative. The conditions in Sebastopol and Stalingrad were different, dictated by the fact that both cities were defended battlefields upon which a fraction of the civilian population was trapped in a storm of shells and bombs and bullets.
The strategic and economic impact of bombing was, like the effects of the offensive against Britain, mixed. The Soviet Union was compelled to maintain a large active air defence and to expend large amounts of ammunition without much effect on the attacking aircraft, though once the threat to the cities had subsided the fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns could be used to supplement the fighting front. The MPVO involved at its peak 747,000
full-time workers and 2.9 million in the civil defence units, though in this case too many of the workers and full-time troops contributed directly to the Soviet advance towards Germany rather than providing redundant civil defence on the home front. In economic terms the limited amount of bombing had little effect. Soviet productive effort was affected critically by the loss of territory in the western Soviet Union, but was sustained thereafter by the success of the evacuation programme and the flow of Lend Lease from Britain and the United States. German efforts to interrupt the flow of supplies through the port of Murmansk by bombing proved futile in the face of severe weather conditions and concentrated ground defences. The damage to Soviet industry was slight. The MPVO calculated that industrial sites made up just 5.7 per cent of the destruction inflicted by bombing, communications some 38 per cent, and residential and public buildings, 48 per cent.97 Although attacks on railways had a cumulative effect in the number of hours of transport time lost, railway lines could not be permanently disrupted any more than had proved to be the case in Britain in 1940–41.
The bombing did of course exact continuous human casualties. The figures for those killed and injured from bombing attacks on population centres were collected by the local MPVO offices and submitted to the headquarters in Moscow. The figures for the whole war period are set out in Table 4.1. Given the difficulty of trying to distinguish between death from bombing and death from shelling, the figures will be less exact than the chart suggests. The detailed casualty statistics presented every month from each MPVO region were on occasion corrected when additional casualties came to light, which suggests that a considerable effort went in to ensuring that the casualty lists were as accurate as war conditions would allow. The large death rate in 1942 reflects the damage done in Leningrad, Kharkov, the Crimea and at Stalingrad. The half-million deaths from bombing claimed in later Soviet publications must be regarded as a rhetorical statistic, to demonstrate the level of sacrifice of the Soviet people and the wickedness of the German enemy; it bears no relation to the detailed wartime documentary evidence. An inflated figure was perhaps a useful tool for demonstrating that the sacrifice of Soviet citizens in the Soviet Blitz greatly exceeded the losses sustained in the Blitz on Britain, the Soviet Union’s erstwhile ally. The figure of 51,526 is much more consistent with the nature of the German bombing effort and the declining capability of the German bomber force as it struggled to sustain support for the ground war with dwindling resources.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 31