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Although the Luftwaffe was largely built to directly support the German Army rather than for independent strategic bombing, there were several occasions during the Second World War where that was what it did. The most famous example was the Blitz of 1940-41, but there were also several occasions on the Eastern Front. One of the most effective was the 1943 campaign against Soviet industrial areas on the Volga, and in particular the Molotov plant at Gorky. Although this campaign only lasted for a month, before the Luftwaffe was called away to support Operation Citadel, the Germans were able to do quite a bit of damage in that time.
The authors have produced a detailed study of this bombing campaign, looking at the background, the units involved on both sides, each individual bombing raid, the Soviet counter-attacks on German airfields and the impact on the ground, including the impressively rapid rebuilding of the destroyed factories.
The tone is very judgemental. People who don’t live up to the author’s high expectations are drunks, incompetents, fools and so forth. There is very little acknowledgement that defence against night bombing was actually very difficult. Even the Germans, who put a great deal of effort into developing one of the most effective night fighter systems of the war, combined with a massive array of anti-aircraft guns, weren’t able to actually stop raids, only to make them more costly for the attacker. These German raids also hit an area that hadn’t been bombed for some time, so inexperienced defenders were up against veteran attackers. There is also a tendancy to take German reports at face value, even though the authors include a German summary of the campaign in which they claimed to have destroyed hundreds of T-34s on the production line at a factory that didn’t actually produce the T-34! I could also have done without the chapter psychoanalysing Goring, which really doesn’t feel like it belongs in this book.
On the positive side the book is very well researched, using contemporary documents from both sides. These range from the combat reports of individual aircrew up to top level government documents (in particular on the Soviet side, where these raids triggered a major response from the leadership). Some stick in the mind, including accounts of the efforts made to rescue downed German crews behind Soviet lines and the memories of the crewman of a barge on the Volga. The relatively small scale of the campaign allows the authors to cover every raid, with many covered in great detail. In general the sources are used well, with Soviet reports being used for damage assessment and German reports for their aircraft loses and the more reliable working documents preferred over the sort of less accurate reports that were sent to the top in these two dictatorships.
Once you get past the writing style, this is a solid account of one of the few main German air attacks on Soviet industrial centres far behind the lines, and suggests how much damage they could have done if that had been tried in real strength earlier in the war.
Chapters
1 – The Fuhrer’s Nazgul
2 – New Goal
3 – Two Deaths Carmen
4 – Missions on Schedule
5 – The Entire Volga Region is on Fire
6 – The Finishing Blow
7 – ‘One Hundred Days’
8 – Recipe for the Collapse of the Luftwaffe – Goring Psychosis
Author: Dmitry Degtev & Dmitry Zubov
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 248
Publisher: Air World
Year: 2021