The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

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