The first air raid on Moscow

On Monday 21 July 1941, exactly a month after the German attack on the USSR, nearly two hundred German bombers took off from airfields in occupied Belarus and Lithuania. Late that evening the sirens wailed in Moscow, and for the next five hours, in several waves, Luftwaffe aircraft bombed the Soviet capital. It was the first of several dozen raids on Moscow in 1941 and also the first test of its air defences, which had been prepared for years with precisely such a moment in mind.

It is often written that the Luftwaffe “struck Moscow hard”. This is true in the sense that the raid of the night of 21/22 July was, together with the two that followed, the largest the Germans ever carried out against the city. Compared with the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam or London, however, its effects proved limited, and in the overall balance of the air war over Moscow it was more a show of strength than a blow that could have broken the city.

The decision to bomb

In the first weeks of the war the Luftwaffe had no time to bomb distant strategic targets. First it destroyed the Soviet air force on its frontier airfields, then it supported the ground forces in the encirclement battles of Białystok–Minsk and on the Dnieper. Moscow lay beyond the range of most bombers until the front had moved far to the east. By mid-July, when the troops of Army Group Centre had reached the Smolensk area, the Soviet capital was only a few hundred kilometres from the airfields around Minsk, Borisov and Orsha.

Adolf Hitler had demanded raids on Moscow by mid-July, and on 19 July they were written into Directive No. 33 on the further conduct of the war in the east, issued a few days after the Germans broke into Smolensk. The forces of Luftflotte 2, reinforced with bombers brought in from the west, were to attack Moscow “as soon as possible”. The official justification was retaliation for the Soviet raids on Bucharest and Helsinki at the end of June, which in Finland had become the immediate reason for entering the war. The real aims were broader. Hitler wanted to strike at Moscow as the “centre of Bolshevik resistance” and to hamper the evacuation of the state apparatus, and on 21 July Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the raids were to contribute significantly to breaking the enemy’s will to resist.

The raids were commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of Luftflotte 2, who a year earlier had directed the attacks on London during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The organisation of the raid was entrusted to the commander of II Air Corps (II. Fliegerkorps), General Bruno Loerzer. The bomber wings (Kampfgeschwader) KG 2, KG 3 and KG 53 were assigned to the operation, along with, according to Russian studies, two groups of KG 55 from Luftflotte 4, flying Heinkel He 111s, Junkers Ju 88s and Dornier Do 17s. The way was to be led by Kampfgruppe 100, a unit specialising in target marking and experienced from the raids on Britain. Units of KG 4, KG 26, KG 28 and KG 54 were brought in for subsequent raids, which is why the lists of wings taking part in the first raid differ from source to source.

Moscow awaits the bombers

Moscow was the Soviet city best prepared for air attack. As early as August 1939 it had been decided to adapt the stations and tunnels of the Metro as shelters for hundreds of thousands of people. The defence of the capital was entrusted to the Moscow Air Defence Zone under Major General Mikhail Gromadin (PL). The city itself was protected by the 1st Air Defence Corps under Major General Daniil Zhuravlyov (PL), to which Colonel Ivan Klimov’s 6th Fighter Aviation Corps was operationally subordinate. According to Soviet and German figures, which on this point are similar, in the second half of July the defenders had about 600 fighters, more than half of them new MiG-3s, Yak-1s and LaGG-3s and the rest older I-16s and I-153s, as well as more than 1,000 anti-aircraft guns, about 600 searchlights and more than a hundred barrage balloon positions. The network of observation posts was supplemented by several radar stations, still a rarity in the USSR.

A blackout had been in force in the city since the first days of the war. Residents were trained to put out incendiary bombs, and thousands of firefighting teams were formed in apartment blocks and workplaces. Architects and painters camouflaged the most distinctive buildings. The golden domes of the churches in the Kremlin were painted over, the stars on its towers were covered, false roofs and streets were painted on walls and squares, and Lenin’s Mausoleum was hidden behind a mock-up of an ordinary building. Some 70 per cent of Moscow’s housing at the time consisted of wooden houses, so fire was the greatest danger.

According to Zhuravlyov’s memoirs, on 21 July itself Joseph Stalin held a staff exercise at the Stavka simulating a massed raid on the capital and testing the readiness of its defences. A few hours later the exercise became reality.

The night of 21/22 July

The Germans were counting on surprise. The crews flew in several waves at 2,000–3,000 metres and throttled back as they approached the target to make it harder for the sound locators to detect them. A Soviet radar station nonetheless picked up the raid at a range of about 100 kilometres, and observation posts reported aircraft over Vyazma. The alarm was sounded in time, and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites went down into the shelters and Metro stations.

According to German figures, 195 bombers took off, of which 127 reached the target. Soviet studies speak of about 220 aircraft. Some 104 tons of high-explosive bombs and about 46,000 incendiaries were dropped. The targets designated were the Kremlin, the city power station, the building of the party’s Central Committee, the Belorussky railway station, industrial plants and bridges in the western and northern parts of the city. The bombers ran into fire such as most of the crews had never known. The anti-aircraft artillery put up a barrage, placing a “curtain” of shells in front of the aircraft, searchlights dazzled the pilots, and the barrage balloons flew higher than over Britain. According to Soviet figures, some 29,000 anti-aircraft shells were expended, and the fighters flew 173 sorties.

The British journalist Alexander Werth, who lived through the raid in Moscow, compared it with the raids on London and wrote that shell splinters from the anti-aircraft guns rained down on the streets like hail. The American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White photographed that night the sky over the Kremlin criss-crossed by tracer and searchlight beams. Incendiary bombs fell, among other places, on the roof of the British embassy, where the fire was put out by the embassy staff together with Moscow firemen.

The toll of the first raid

According to Soviet figures, 130 people were killed, 241 seriously and 421 lightly wounded. Thirty-seven buildings were destroyed, and 1,166 fires broke out in the city, most of them quickly extinguished by firemen and fire-watchers on the roofs. Neither the Kremlin nor the most important factories suffered serious damage. In this raid and in those that followed, incendiary bombs also fell within the Kremlin, where soldiers of the garrison put them out.

Estimates of the attackers’ losses vary. The Soviet side announced the destruction of 22 bombers, 12 of them by fighters in 25 night engagements. German records show that between one and a few aircraft failed to return: Western studies, including that of Christer Bergström, speak of six or seven aircraft lost, and according to some German figures the defences shot down only one bomber. On 22 July Order No. 241 of the People’s Commissar of Defence expressed thanks to the soldiers of the 1st Air Defence Corps for repelling the raid.

On 23 July the German news agency DNB reported a “sea of flames” visible from well over a hundred kilometres away and compared the destruction in Moscow with the bombing of Manchester and Sheffield. Foreign correspondents who walked around the city in the following days saw no such destruction.

The following nights

The Luftwaffe returned to Moscow the very next night. On the evening of 22 July, according to Bergström, some 115 bombers took off, of which five failed to return, and on the night of 23/24 July about a hundred more appeared over the city. After the experience of the first night the Germans dropped their bombs from ever greater heights: according to Soviet figures, the second raid was flown at 4,000–4,500 metres and later ones at 6,000–7,000, which greatly reduced accuracy. In one of these raids – on 23 July, according to Russian studies – a heavy bomb pierced the roof of the Metro tunnel between Smolenskaya and Arbatskaya stations, and others fell near the station entrance on Arbat Square. Several dozen people were killed, largely in a panic on the stairs leading down to the shelter.

In those weeks the Metro stations became the symbol of wartime Moscow. Every evening queues formed at the entrances. Mothers with small children spent the night in carriages standing at the platforms, everyone else on the platforms and in the tunnels, and part of the General Staff worked in one of the stations.

The last of the great raids of July and August, by about a hundred aircraft, took place on the night of 10/11 August. After that the Germans usually sent only a few aircraft, or a dozen or so, over the city. According to the calculations of the German historian Horst Boog, of the 76 raids on Moscow up to the spring of 1942 only the first three were carried out by more than a hundred bombers, and it was they that did the greatest damage, while 59 involved between three and ten aircraft. According to Soviet figures, 736 people were killed in Moscow between 22 July and 22 August and more than 3,500 were wounded.

Significance

For Hitler and Goebbels the first raid on Moscow was above all a political gesture: the enemy capital was to feel the war just as Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade and London had. The Luftwaffe, however, built primarily to co-operate with the ground forces, had neither heavy bombers nor the reserves of strength to wage war at the front and at the same time conduct a campaign against a city several hundred kilometres from its airfields. In the battles around Smolensk in July Luftflotte 2 lost several hundred aircraft, and when at the end of the month Hitler shifted the main effort to the flanks of the front, one of Kesselring’s two air corps, Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, left for Leningrad. Kesselring himself later admitted that the anti-aircraft fire and searchlights over Moscow had impressed even airmen who had flown over Britain.

For the Soviet side, the night of 21/22 July was one of the first successes in a war that for a month had brought nothing but defeats. Less than three weeks after Stalin’s speech of 3 July, calling for every inch of land to be defended, the capital had shown that it could defend itself. On the night of 6/7 August Junior Lieutenant Viktor Talalikhin rammed a German He 111 bomber over the forests outside Moscow and, as one of the first Soviet airmen to carry out a night ramming, became a propaganda hero. On the night of 7/8 August Soviet bombers of the Baltic Fleet’s air arm, flying from the island of Saaremaa, bombed Berlin for the first time, which Moscow presented as its answer to the raids on its own capital.

The raids on Moscow went on until the winter. They intensified in the autumn, when in October the front drew close to the city, some government offices and the diplomatic corps were evacuated to Kuibyshev, and panic broke out in the capital. At the end of October a bomb hit the Central Committee building on Staraya Square, killing, among others, the playwright Alexander Afinogenov, and another damaged the Bolshoi Theatre. By then, however, the raids were tactical in character, connected with the Battle of Moscow. According to various Soviet figures, between just over 1,000 and more than 2,000 inhabitants were killed in the raids on Moscow in 1941–1942. Tragic as it was, this figure was many times lower than London’s losses during the Blitz. Moscow became neither a Rotterdam nor a Coventry, and its air defences were among the strongest in Europe. The fate of the city was decided not by bombers but by the ground forces that halted the Wehrmacht at its gates in December 1941.