The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

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