The raid on Vienna

On Friday 17 March 1944 heavy bombers of the Western Allies appeared over Vienna for the first time. More than two hundred four-engined B-24 Liberators of the US Fifteenth Air Force, flying from airfields in southern Italy, bombed the industrial outskirts of the city, above all the area of the refineries and plants on both sides of the Danube. Bombs fell among other places around Schwechat, Fischamend and Groß-Enzersdorf – localities that had been administratively part of so-called Greater Vienna since 1938.

Popular war chronologies sometimes describe this raid as a “heavy bombing of Vienna”. That description needs a qualification. The raid of 17 March was the first attack by American strategic bombers on the area of the former Austrian capital and for that reason it lodged in the memory of the inhabitants, but the city itself suffered little: part of the force turned back because of bad weather, and the targets lay on the periphery. The Vienna municipal chronicle lists raids on the city’s districts only from 12 April 1944, and regards the attack of 10 September 1944 as the first heavy raid on Vienna.

“The Reich’s air-raid shelter”

Since the Anschluss of March 1938 Vienna had been the second-largest city of the Third Reich, with nearly two million inhabitants. From 1940 it was governed by Baldur von Schirach as Gauleiter and Reich Governor. The city, with which Adolf Hitler’s youth was bound up, was also a stage for the Axis’s high diplomacy: the Second Vienna Award was announced in the Belvedere Palace in August 1940, and in March 1941 Yugoslavia signed its accession to the Tripartite Pact there.

For the first years of the war Austria lay beyond the reach of British and American bombers flying from England. It was jokingly called “the Reich’s air-raid shelter” (Reichsluftschutzkeller). Armaments factories were moved there from threatened western Germany, and the aircraft, engineering and oil industries grew in and around Vienna: refineries at Floridsdorf, Lobau, Schwechat and Korneuburg processed oil from the Austrian oilfields as well as crude brought up the Danube from Romania. According to some studies, Vienna had previously been attacked only once, by the Soviet air force in September 1942 – a single raid that had no significant effect.

The calm ended in the summer of 1943. On 13 August Liberators of the US Ninth Air Force, flying from Libya, bombed the aircraft works at Wiener Neustadt, which produced Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters – the attack was part of a plan that envisaged a simultaneous strike on the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg; the mission from England against Schweinfurt and Regensburg eventually took place four days later. The air defences were taken completely by surprise on that occasion; in the second attack on Wiener Neustadt, on 1 October 1943, the attackers suffered painful losses. The Reich authorities began hastily strengthening the defences of the Vienna area.

The Fifteenth Air Force over the Alps

The real threat to Austria arose only with the Allied capture of southern Italy. After the landings on the Italian peninsula in September 1943 the Americans took over the extensive complex of airfields around Foggia in Apulia. On 1 November 1943 the Fifteenth Air Force was formed there, commanded at first by James Doolittle and from January 1944 by General Nathan Twining. It was to be the “second arm” of the strategic bombing offensive: from Italy it was possible to reach targets in southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and the Balkans, often beyond the range of aircraft flying from England, and in winter visibility over the Adriatic and the Alps was often better than over the North Sea.

The first months of the Fifteenth Air Force’s operations, however, were spent mainly supporting the ground forces in Italy – bombing railway junctions and airfields, and in February 1944 also the Anzio beachhead and the monastery on Monte Cassino. Its bombers periodically returned to strategic targets deep in the Reich: during Big Week in February 1944 they attacked the aircraft works at Regensburg and at Steyr in Austria, suffering heavy losses. March was again dominated by Italian targets: according to the Fifteenth Air Force’s list of missions, in the first half of the month its bombers attacked Rome, Padua, Toulon and, on 15 March, Cassino itself, among other places. The mission to Vienna was an exception in that list.

The mission of 17 March

According to the American chronology of USAAF operations, on 17 March 1944 more than two hundred B-24s bombed Vienna and various targets of opportunity under the escort of P-47 Thunderbolt and P-38 Lightning fighters. More than a hundred B-17s that were to have taken part in the attack turned back because of bad weather. The Fifteenth Air Force’s own list of missions describes the Liberators’ target in general terms as the Vienna industrial area. According to Austrian studies, the main target was the refinery at Floridsdorf on the left bank of the Danube and the tanker traffic on the river; the chronicle of the nearby municipality of Gramatneusiedl records a “great Allied air raid on the Vienna area” and on Schwechat, Fischamend, Groß-Enzersdorf and Schönau an der Donau – some two hundred bombers were seen from the ground, and the sound of the explosions could be heard far to the south of the city.

The available sources give no reliable figure for the victims of this raid or for the attackers’ losses; in any case the scale of destruction was not comparable with what was to come later. The significance of 17 March was above all psychological: for the first time the sirens in Vienna signalled a real danger, and the inhabitants, who had until then been convinced that the air war would pass them by, saw American formations over their own suburbs. Two days later, on 19 March, Liberators and Flying Fortresses from Italy bombed the airfields at Klagenfurt and Graz – the reach of the Fifteenth Air Force now covered the whole of former Austrian territory.

The defence of Vienna

The Germans were better prepared for such attacks than in August 1943. Around Vienna, on the hills of the Vienna Woods and on the Bisamberg, a ring of anti-aircraft batteries had been deployed, manned in part by schoolboys called up as Luftwaffe auxiliaries (Luftwaffenhelfer). In the city itself, from 1943 onwards, three pairs of flak towers were built to designs by the architect Friedrich Tamms (PL) – in the Arenbergpark, by the Stiftskaserne barracks and in the Augarten. Each pair consisted of a gun tower with heavy guns on its roof and a fire-control tower with radar; the massive concrete blocks also served as shelters for thousands of civilians. Their combat value was debatable: the bombers flew high, and according to German calculations bringing down a single aircraft from the ground required on average some 5,000 light and 3,400 heavy-calibre rounds. More effective – as long as they had enough fuel and pilots – were the Luftwaffe fighters defending the industry along the Danube.

Place in the war

The raid of 17 March opened a campaign that over the following year turned Vienna into one of the important cities bombed from Italy. From 12 April 1944 attacks on the plants at Schwechat, Wiener Neustadt and the surrounding area came with increasing frequency, and from the spring of 1944 their main targets became refineries and fuel depots: alongside Ploiești, already attacked in August 1943 in Operation Tidal Wave, the Vienna area was one of the Reich’s most important oil centres. The strikes against them contributed to the collapse of German fuel production in the second half of 1944.

The first heavy raid on central Vienna came on 10 September 1944: some 350 American bombers struck nine districts, and according to German-language studies 791 people were killed. The heaviest attack fell on the city on 12 March 1945 – among the buildings destroyed then was the State Opera. According to figures from the Vienna city authorities, 52 major raids by the Western Allies killed 8,769 inhabitants of Vienna and 1,103 people from outside the city; together with the damage from the fighting in April 1945, nearly 37,000 dwellings were completely destroyed. Even so, Vienna suffered far less from bombing than the large cities of Germany and preserved most of its historic buildings. In April 1945 the city was taken after heavy fighting by the Red Army in the Vienna offensive.

Seen from March 1944, the raid on Vienna was a signal that there were no longer any safe corners in the Reich’s airspace. Only two days later the Wehrmacht marched into Hungary, and Central Europe, long a rear area of the war, within a few months came within reach both of Allied bombers and of the advancing Red Army.