The raid on Tallinn

On the evening of 9 March 1944, at around half past six, the sirens wailed over Tallinn. Over the following hours, in two waves separated by a break of several hours, Soviet bombers dropped thousands of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the capital of occupied Estonia. Fires that there was nothing to put out consumed the wooden suburbs and a large part of the city centre, including the Estonia Theatre building and the medieval St Nicholas’ Church. According to an official report drawn up over the following days, 757 people were killed, 586 of them civilians, and some 20,000 inhabitants were left homeless at the tail end of winter. The military damage was slight. The raid, known in Estonia as the “March bombing” (märtsipommitamine), became the most tragic day in the city’s history during the Second World War – and at the same time part of a wider series of attacks on Estonian towns, which on 26 March also struck Tartu.

Background: the front on Estonia’s borders

At the beginning of 1944 the war returned to Estonia. After the siege of Leningrad was broken, the Red Army reached Narva in February and seized bridgeheads on its western bank, but successive attacks broke against the German defences, which had been reinforced by Estonian conscripts. The mobilisation declared by the occupier was backed in a radio address on 7 February by the last constitutional prime minister, Jüri Uluots, who hoped that armed Estonians would defend the country against the return of Soviet rule. Several tens of thousands of men were soon in uniform, and a week later the underground National Committee of the Estonian Republic was founded in Tallinn.

Tallinn was then the main rear base of the Narva front: supplies for Army Group North passed through its port, and stores and reserves were assembled in the city. Soviet aircraft had attacked the city before – in May and September 1942 and several times in 1943 – but those had been small raids. In February 1944 the Soviet Long-Range Aviation carried out three great night attacks on Helsinki, the last on the night of 26–27 February, intended to force Finland out of the war. In the first days of March the blows shifted to the towns of Estonia: on the night of 6–7 March bombers reduced Narva to ruins, its inhabitants having been evacuated earlier. A week before the attack on Tallinn the mayor called on the inhabitants to leave the city, but the evacuation failed – neither the population nor the German command expected a blow on such a scale.

The night of 9–10 March

The first wave arrived at around 6.30 p.m. and bombed the city until 9 p.m. According to Estonian tallies, some 300 aircraft took part, dropping 3,068 bombs – about 1,725 high-explosive and more than 1,300 incendiary. Before the raid Soviet saboteurs had blown up the municipal pumping station, so the fire brigade, small as it was, had almost no water. The fire quickly engulfed the wooden residential districts and then the masonry buildings of the city centre. At around 2 a.m. the second wave arrived and for an hour and a half bombed the burning city. According to reports at the time, roughly a fifth of Tallinn’s buildings were burnt out; Estonian figures speak of 1,549 buildings destroyed and 3,350 damaged.

The bombs fell above all on houses and public buildings. The Estonia Theatre was burnt out – a symbol of Estonian national culture, in which the Constituent Assembly of independent Estonia had met in 1919. The Gothic St Nicholas’ Church burnt down, and a synagogue, four cinemas and part of the city archives were destroyed. The blocks along Harju Street on the edge of the Old Town suffered, although the medieval centre itself largely survived. Military losses were negligible: a few installations and warehouses burnt down, along with – the Germans’ greatest loss – a fuel depot holding about a million litres of fuel. The Luther plywood factory and a cable works producing for the Germans were also destroyed.

The official report gave 757 dead: 586 civilians, 50 soldiers and 121 prisoners of war. 213 people were seriously and 446 slightly wounded. Over the following days further bodies were dug out of the rubble, and later estimates speak of about 800 dead; some studies, including part of the Western literature, also give a rounded figure of about 500 civilian victims. According to various tallies, between 20,000 and 25,000 people were left homeless – in the frosts and thaws of March.

The Finnish strike

The raid had an epilogue over the Gulf of Finland. The Finnish air force, which had been waiting since February for a chance to retaliate for the bombing of Helsinki, sent some twenty bombers that night – Junkers Ju 88s, Blenheims and Dorniers – after the Soviet aircraft returning from Tallinn to their airfields near Leningrad. In the darkness the Finnish aircraft joined the formations of returning bombers and attacked the airfields just as the Russians were landing to refuel and load new bombs. According to Finnish and Estonian sources, about ten aircraft and fuel stocks were destroyed on the ground, and the confusion meant that the second wave over Tallinn was much weaker than the first. Estonian authors, among them the historian Jaak Juske, believe that had the second wave matched the first, little would have been left of the historic Old Town. Figures for Soviet losses – both over Tallinn, where German anti-aircraft defences and fighters are said to have shot down some 25 aircraft, and at the airfields – come solely from the German and Finnish side and have not been confirmed in Soviet sources.

The raid on Tartu

The March series of raids did not end with Tallinn. Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city and the seat of its oldest university, had already been bombed by Soviet aircraft in February – on 18 and 26 February – and the second attack, carried out in broad daylight by some twenty aircraft, caused serious damage in the northern part of the city. The biggest raid, however, came in March. Towards the end of the month bombers attacked Tartu in two night waves: the first lasted from roughly half past six until nine in the evening, the second from half past ten until half past one at night. Some 220 bombs fell on the city. According to Estonian tallies, 59 people were killed, including four German soldiers, 43 were seriously and 60 slightly wounded; 39 houses burnt down, 53 were completely destroyed and 216 damaged. Some studies give higher figures – nearly a hundred civilians killed and about 80 buildings destroyed.

Sources differ over the date. Some war chronologies, and a number of lists that follow them, place this raid on 25 March or on the night of 25–26 March. Detailed Estonian studies, based on reports of the time and eyewitness accounts, point to the evening of 26 March and the night of 26–27 March 1944. Tartu had suffered before: in July 1941, during the German–Soviet fighting for the city, roughly an eighth of its buildings had been destroyed, and in the summer of 1944, when the front passed through again, further destruction followed. In March 1944 bombs also fell on other towns, including Jõhvi and Pärnu.

Aim and effect

The Soviet command treated the raids as part of the operations supporting the offensive at Narva: Tallinn and Tartu were communications hubs and supply bases for the front. The pattern of destruction – heavy civilian casualties, negligible military damage – leads Estonian historians and some Western ones, however, to regard them above all as an attempt to break the population’s morale and to discourage Estonians from supporting the German defence, just as the February attacks on Helsinki were meant to force Finland to capitulate. Scholars disagree about how far this was a deliberate aim and how far the result of imprecise night bombing.

If the intention was intimidation, the effect was the opposite. The raids hardened opposition to the return of Soviet rule, which Estonians knew from 1940–1941, a time of mass arrests and deportations. Both Estonian and Western studies note that after March 1944 even more men answered the call-up, and the defence of the Narva isthmus, in which Estonian regiments played an important part, became for many a fight for their own country. German occupation propaganda made extensive use of the destruction, presenting it as a foretaste of what awaited Estonia once the Red Army arrived.

Place in the war

The March raids brought the Red Army no breakthrough. The attacks at Narva that they were meant to accompany died down on 24 March, and the Battle of Narva settled into several months of positional warfare. Estonia came within reach of the Soviet offensive only in the summer of 1944: Narva fell in July, there was fighting near Tartu in August, and on 22 September the Red Army entered Tallinn, which the Germans had abandoned a few days earlier. Three years before, in August 1941, the city had changed hands in the opposite direction – the fall of Tallinn and the evacuation of the Baltic Fleet through the minefields off Juminda were among the bloodiest episodes of the war in the Baltic.

Rebuilding took a long time. The Estonia Theatre was restored by 1947; St Nicholas’ Church was rebuilt from the 1950s onwards and reopened only in 1984, as a museum of sacred art and a concert hall. The ruins on the northern side of Harju Street lay exposed until 2007, when they were covered by a park and a fragment of a former lane was uncovered. In Soviet times the victims of the raid were not spoken of publicly – the raid did not fit the official narrative of Estonia’s “liberation”. Its memory survived in families and in exile, and after independence was regained in 1991, 9 March became a day of remembrance in Tallinn: every year memorial ceremonies are held, and residents light candles at the places destroyed by the bombs. For Estonians the March bombing became, alongside the deportations of 1941 and 1949, one of the most important symbols of the experience of a war in which their country was occupied in turn by both totalitarian powers.