The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

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 summer 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