The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

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-range 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