Seen in retrospect, the German campaign in Russia in 1941 was the greatest display of maneuver warfare in history, and it will likely remain so in the future. In point of preparedness, doctrine, numbers available for the offensive, and leadership, the German armed forces had peaked during the summer. These qualities enabled them to storm forward, advancing over 600 miles in less than six months while fighting against an opponent who was numerically at least equal, and to conquer territory about twice as large as Germany itself. The key to this unparalleled achievement was operativ warfare, now waged with the aid of armored and mechanized units and honed into the blitzkrieg. Its essence consisted of never taking on the enemy in a frontal attack if it could be helped; instead, massive forces were concentrated on very narrow fronts in order to achieve a breakthrough, after which they would move forward to drive deep wedges into the enemy, pulverize (zerstuekeln), outflank, encircle, and annihilate him in a Kesselschlacht with inverted fronts whenever possible. Coordinated mobility, even more than firepower, formed the key to this method of warfare, and indeed the entire German system of organization and C3 were specifically designed to assist large separated forces in coordinating their movements against a single enemy. As a glance at the map shows, the campaign consisted of first breaking up the enemy front into separate sectors and then building a series of huge cauldrons, each of which contained several hundred thousand Red Army troops. In point of sheer operational brilliance, it has no parallel.

 

This above does not mean that the German conduct of the war, even if narrowed down to the 1941 campaign alone and even if regarded from a purely operativ standpoint, was perfect. Having underestimated both the power of their opponents and the difficulties posed by distance, terrain, and climate, the Germans did not have sufficient troops for the campaign and logistically their preparations for it were rather sketchy.  Once the invasion got under way, the funnel shape of the theater of war meant that the number of objectives was forever increasing. This should have acted as a spur to the German High Command (Hitler in particular) to decide priorities and to create Schwerpunkte. Instead, they often chose to scatter their forces and "send them off along a growing number of diverging axes in order to, from left to right (or north to south), link up with the Finns, capture Leningrad," keep in touch with Army Group Center, capture Moscow, keep in touch with Army Group South, overrun the Ukraine, and invade the Crimea . Whether the Germans could have won the war by imitating Napoleon and marching straight for Moscow is doubtful, given that the fall of the city would not necessarily have caused the Soviet Union to break up. Also, it is not clear whether such a thrust could have been logistically supported using the road system in Belorussia. As it was, this strategy was never put to the test.

 

The contribution that the Luftwaffe made to the campaign was enormous. It was able to secure air superiority and protect friendly forces against attack, although its ability to carry out the latter mission diminished as time passed. Next, its forces used every means at its disposal to help the army move forward. Luftwaffe units reconnoitered the enemy ahead of the army and often helped the latter's commanders decide on the best direction in which to mount their operativ thrusts. They flew supplies to army units that could not be reached in any other way. They protected the long, exposed flanks that naturally resulted from the blitzkrieg style of war, forming Schwerpunkte wherever and whenever the enemy showed signs of preparing a counterattack. They helped prevent the withdrawal of trapped Soviet forces and launched punishing attacks on those that had been cut off inside the pockets created by the army's operativ thrusts. Whenever a river was to be crossed or an important city to be captured, the Luftwaffe was certain to be found flying close-support missions even to the point where it literally dropped its bombs at the German infantryman's feet.

 

Though the achievements of the Luftwaffe were thus considerable, it became increasingly clear that the available forces were not really sufficient to master the enormous spaces involved. This was particularly true in view of the equally enormous difficulties involved in having to operate from bases that were primitive, far from home, and often connected to each other, the rear, and the ground forces only by the most tenuous of communications. The farther east the Germans went, the more difficult it became to keep the Luftwaffe units supplied and their aircraft operational. The more intensive the fighting, the greater the army's tendency to call in the air force wherever an advance was to be made or whenever a local crisis took place. This combination of circumstances had the effect of gradually bringing operativ warfare to an end. The Luftwaffe was forced more and more to act as flying artillery, a role for which the majority of its aircraft were not well suited and in which they took correspondingly heavy losses.

 

In Russia, as in Poland and France, the Luftwaffe was originally forbidden from attacking strategic targets, it being assumed that such attacks would be a waste of effort and that the campaign hopefully would be over before the effects of such attacks could be felt. However, just as the army tended to divide its efforts between many objectives, so the Luftwaffe had to go beyond this strict line of reasoning. Beginning in the second half of July, some of its forces were diverted from interdiction in order to attack industrial targets in Moscow, Rharkov, Rostov, Orel, Tula, Voronezh, Bryansk, and a number of other places. In the absence of a heavy four-engined bomber fleet (which, given their overall economic situation, the Germans probably could not have created even if the necessary prototypes had been available), strategic warfare had to be carried out by two-engined medium and light bombers. However, even these were only capable of hitting individual targets more or less by accident.

 

It is therefore not surprising that such warfare remained without any noticeable effect, of nuisance value at best and a waste of resources at worst. The only thing that can be said in its favor is that it probably did not seriously impact on whatever chances the Germans stood to gain a victory, given that during the would-be decisive advance on Moscow the effort that went to operations other than mittelbare (indirect) and unmittelbare Unterstuetzung (direct support) was not very great.

 

All in all, the strengths and weaknesses of the Luftwaffe in this period reflected those of the German armed forces as a whole. Unequalled determination and sheer Schwung (elan) was based on the unlimited Einsatzbereitschaft (initiative) of air crews and ground personnel. The Germans were unmatched in their grasp of operativ warfare, but only at the expense of weaknesses in logistics (sustainability in particular) and a somewhat uncertain overall strategy that caused them to go after too many different objectives at once. There is still much to learn from the Luftwaffe's methods of waging war. There is also much to avoid.

Up to this point, the Luftwaffe's task in the east had consisted almost exclusively of operativ warfare in indirect or increasingly direct support of the army. Indeed, Hitler's Directive No. 21 had explicitly ordered attacks on Soviet "strategic" targets such as arms manufacturers to be postponed until after the Archangelsk-Volga-Astrakhan line would be reached. However, the need to consolidate the Smolensk pocket, as well as the inability of the German High Command to make up its mind concerning the next objective, created some breathing space. Working day and night, the Luftwaffe brought its ground organization forward, a task that was already being made difficult by the operations of scattered Red Army units as well as the first partisan forces . It was only about 250 miles from the Dnieper to Moscow, making it possible to mount a series of raids against the Soviet capital. The first and largest attack was launched on the night of 21-22 July and was carried out by 195 bombers; of these, 127 reached their targets and dropped 104 tons of high explosives as well as 46,000 small incendiary bombs. From then until 5 December-the day the final German attack on Moscow opened-75 more raids were mounted, all by night and the great majority by forces numbering fewer than 50 aircraft each. The 1,000 Soviet antiaircraft guns concentrated in the city, as well as opposition from Red Air Force fighters, forced the Luftwaffe to operate mainly by night. Even if their bombers had been capable of accurately hitting their targets, which they were not, this was not nearly enough to make an impression. The Soviets later put the total number of dead at 1,088, comparable to the figure killed at Rotterdam in the previous year but a small fraction of those destroyed by the vast Allied raids on German cities later in the war.

 

As for maneuver warfare, the raids on Moscow undoubtedly constituted a wasteful diversion of effort away from the main task, which was and remained the destruction of the Soviet armed forces. However, it should be remembered that, owing partly to logistic reasons and partly to the need to clear up the still-seething Smolensk pocket, ground operations on the central front were almost at a standstill at this time. While Luftflotte 2's attack aircraft took part in preventing the Soviets from breaking out of the pocket, its bombers were not very suitable for this task. They were therefore used on other missions even if the value of those missions proved disappointing in the end. When large-scale operativ warfare was resumed late in August, the raids on Moscow continued but were greatly reduced until they only represented a small fraction of the German effort. To the Soviets, they were never more than a nuisance, but they probably did tie down greater forces committed to defending the city than were ever committed to attacking it.

 

By the end of August, after almost a month of stationary fighting, Army Group Center had its supply situation improved to the extent that the railway supporting its southern flank now reached the city of Gomel.  This enabled Guderian's Panzer Group 2, supported by the newly created Second Army, to start its drive southward into the Ukraine, where it acted in conjunction with Gen Ewald von Kleist's Panzer Group 1 coming up from Kiev. The Germans thought they were operating against only the Soviet Fifth Army; however, the entire enemy force consisted of parts of several other armies as well, so that the operation took longer and yielded far more prisoners and booty than originally expected. As usual, the missions of Fliegerkorps II and Fliegerkorps V, supporting the two panzer groups, were to gain and maintain air superiority, isolate the pocket against counterattacks from the outside, and attack the encircled Soviet forces until they laid down their arms.

 

Beginning on 28 August, Fliegerkorps II supported Guderian's crossing of the river Desna by blasting away at the Soviet artillery positions on the other side.  It next flew missions against the Soviet railways on Guderian's exposed left flank while using its dive bombers to blast a way for the panzers on their way south, helping them to advance rapidly and preventing the bulk of the Soviet forces from withdrawing.  Simultaneously, Fliegerkorps V launched attacks on roads and railroads in the Romodan-Poltava area, prevented a counterattack by Soviet forces coming from the Lubny-Lokhvitsa-Priluki-Yagotin area, helped the army capture Kiev ("to be reduced to rubble and ashes," according to Hitler's order), and in general bombed the encircled Soviet forces, making them ready for surrender. The war diary of this corps for the period is one of the few documents to survive the war, making a quantitative analysis of these operations possible.  It shows that the forces of Fliegerkorps V flew 1,422 sorties between 12 and 21 September alone, losing 17 aircraft destroyed, 14 damaged, nine soldiers dead, 18 missing, and five wounded. In return, they dropped 577 tons of bombs and 96 cases of incendiaries (presumably over Kiev) and destroyed 65 enemy aircraft in the air and 42 on the ground. They also destroyed 23 tanks; 2,171 motor vehicles; six antiaircraft batteries; 52 trains; 28 locomotives (this apart from 335 motor vehicles and 36 trains damaged) ; demolished one bridge ; and interrupted 18 railway lines. To the extent that these figures mean anything at all, it seems that the Schwerpunkt during this, as during all German mobile operations, was on interdiction; this is indicated by the small number of tanks destroyed as well as the absence from the list of major weapons such as ground artillery.

 

Meanwhile, along the Dnieper on both sides of Smolensk, the rebuilding of the railways and their conversion to standard gauge was proceeding apace. Fliegerkorps VIII, its mission in the north only half accomplished, was brought back under the command of Luftflotte 2. Panzer Group 3 was taken from Army Group North and returned to its original position on the left of Army Group Center, where it was subordinated to the Ninth Army; these were thus the same forces that had formed the northern arm in the battles of Minsk and Smolensk. To compensate for the loss of Guderian, Hitler ordered Gen Erich Hoepner's Panzer Group 4 to be used as well. In this way, it operated under the command of Fourth Army at Roslavl on the south flank of Army Group Center, where Guderian had previously been. Meanwhile, Guderian himself was to create a third prong by driving due north-northwest through Bryansk towards Tula. The German forces now totaled 70 divisions, including four armored and eight motorized; average actual strength was probably around 70 percent, up from 50 percent five weeks earlier. Opposing them were 83 Soviet divisions of the western theater, commanded by Gen Georgi Zhukov. Its principal parts, from north to south, were the West Front, the Reserve Front and, facing Guderian, the Bryansk Front.

 

Guderian's offensive opened on 30 September, and the remaining German armies following two days later. At first, the new offensive promised to become as successful as anything in the past; on 10 October, forward units of Panzer Group 3 and Panzer Group 4 met at Vyazma, trapping some 300,000 Soviet troops. Meanwhile, Panzer Group 2 (now redesignated Second Panzer Army), operating in conjunction with Second Army on its left, came up from the south and succeeded in working its way behind Gen A. I. Eremenko's Bryansk Front. At this time, the weather broke and the autumn rains began. The entire countryside turned into a vast sea of mud that prevented wheeled vehicles from moving at all and caused tracked ones to move forward only slowly and at an enormous cost in fuel.

 

As the offensive began, the Luftwaffe's raids on Moscow were reduced in scale until they became of nuisance value only. Luftflotte 2 went back to its usual role of interdiction behind the front; on 4 and 5 October, it was able to achieve very good results against Soviet rail transport, including the destruction of no fewer than 10 trains loaded with tanks. However, when the weather broke, it too found itself reduced to flying isolated sorties against such targets as could still be identified. There were even days when the entire air fleet, its ground organization suffering grievously under the impossible conditions, was only able to get one or two reconnaissance aircraft into the air. Red Air Force resistance, favored by prepared airfields and short lines of communications, was stiffening and had to be held down. Under such circumstances, Fliegerkorps II was only able to achieve isolated successes, such as preventing a bridge over the river Snopot from being blown up until German armored units could arrive on the scene. Farther to the south, it was all it could do to keep the supply routes of Second Panzer Army open against the usual remnants of Soviet forces that, though outflanked on the map and supposedly defeated, had not been destroyed. In doing so, it suffered many losses due to the bad weather.

 

The tremendous German success in the autumn battles had left Hitler and the OKH in an optimistic mood. The double encirclement at Vyazma and Bryansk had yielded as many as 350,000 prisoners, though even this huge figure did not account for many Soviet forces that had made good their escape on the southern part of the front. The continuation of the offensive had originally been ordered for 17 November. However, a few days after this date, the weather brought snow and fog with temperatures sinking to below zero centigrade. Fliegerkorps II was taken out of the line and sent to the Mediterranean, where the British had driven Rommel back from Tobruk and were threatening Tripolitania. With them went the commander of Luftflotte 2, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was destined to spend the rest of his career commanding the German forces in the Mediterranean theater. All that was left in front of Moscow was Fliegerkorps VIII, whose commander, Gen Wolfram von Richthofen, took over from Kesselring on 30 November. By this time, the airfields used by the Germans were scarcely serviceable, and the few units that were still able to advance at all were being overwhelmed by the cold. On 8 December, faced by a massive Soviet counterattack that threatened the flanks of Army Group Center on both sides of Moscow, Hitler reluctantly ordered the offensive to be abandoned.

Even as these operations were going on, the most important part of the drama was taking place neither in the Baltic nor in the Ukraine but with Army Group Center north of the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia. The armored forces, forming the spearheads of the army group, were put on its wings: 3d Panzer Group (Gen Hermann Hoth) on the left and 2d Panzer Group (Gen Heinz Guderian) on the right. Setting out from Suwalki and Brest Litovsk, respectively-the distance separating them was about 200 miles-these spearheads were to converge on Minsk, some 250 miles inside Soviet territory, in order to form a gigantic pocket. Between the two armored spearheads marched the infantry armies-Ninth Army to the north and Fourth Army to the south. This well-thought-out plan, which gave the German forces shorter distances to cover and enabled them to participate in the campaign by sealing off the pocket formed by the armored spearheads, was designed to allow them to form a second and smaller pocket inside the larger one by meeting at a point on the Bialystok-Minsk road some 100 miles to the east of their starting positions. As usual in maneuver warfare, everything depended on speed and boldness in finding the weak spot and then, having burst through it, striking deep into the enemy's rear. As usual, this could only be achieved by presenting to the enemy long, open flanks that the Luftwaffe had the task of holding and protecting.

 

The starting positions of Guderian's tanks were on the river Bug. As usual, when there was a river to be crossed, the effect was to divert the Luftwaffe units on the spot (Fliegerkorps II) from deep strikes to close support, especially since the crossing sites could be dominated by the guns in the ancient fortress of Brest Litovsk. Fliegerkorps II was accordingly directed to this task even before it could achieve full air superiority; its "rolling attacks" (rollende Einsatz), a kind of operation already familiar from the Battle of the Meuse in 1940, afforded Guderian's rear echelons a safe passage until the fortress finally surrendered. Next, on 23 June units of Luftflotte 2 were instrumental in beating back a furious Soviet counteroffensive at Grodno. It was only after these operations were over that the weight of the attack could be shifted farther to the east. It now fell on the railroads leading into the area of the prospective pocket (interdiction) and also on the roads leading out of them through the Belorussian forest.

 

Even at this early point in the campaign, growing distances were already creating a situation where the long-range reconnaissance and bomber units could not be brought up fast enough for the latter to attack targets identified by the former. With the results of photoreconnaissance often many hours out of date, it became necessary to resort to armed reconnaissance by having the bombers act in both roles at once and attack targets of opportunity, a method that proved wasteful in terms of the time that the units could spend on mission. Acting in this way, Fliegerkorps II was able to obstruct but not entirely prevent the attempts by forces of the Soviet West Front (Gen D. G. Pavlov) to retreat and break out of the pocket; also, since it could not be everywhere at once, it was unable to intervene against the sorties flown by the Red Air Force against the German cavalry division forming the extreme right flank of Army Group Center. Further north, Fliegerkorps VIII was instrumental in beating off a Soviet counterattack launched against Hoth's flank on 24-25 June in the Kuznica-Odel'sk- Grodno-Dembrovo area. Since roads in this area were few and far between, it also airlifted supplies to the rapidly advanced 3d Panzer Group. By means of all these operations, the Luftwaffe contributed substantially to the closing of the pocket at Minsk, the first great German victory in this new campaign.

 

The Battle of Minsk was concluded on 3 July, when the Soviet forces inside the pocket formally surrendered, although it was another five days before resistance came to an end and 290,000 Russian prisoners had fallen into German hands. Meanwhile, the arrival of the infantry had enabled the armor to be disengaged and resupplied. On 9 July, Guderian and Hoth were off again. This time the goal was to close the jaws at Smolensk, 400 miles from the starting positions, thus building another one of those gigantic pockets that were the specialty of the blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe's principal task was to prevent the Red Air Force from disrupting German preparations for the crossing of the Dnieper, which it did most effectively but not without causing some friendly casualties. On 23 July the pincers met and trapped a mass of Russians. As one might expect from the vast distances, however, the pincers were at first rather thin. The German infantry divisions, though marching hard, had been left far behind by the panzers. Consequently, it again fell to Luftflotte 2 to do its best to hold the pocket until they could arrive. It did so with only partial success; unlike the French in the previous year, the Russians for the most part did not surrender simply because the map showed that their units had been cut off. Using the wooded terrain to hide during the day, many of them were able to break out at night. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring of Luftflotte 2 later estimated that 100,000 Soviet troops had made good their escape in this way, albeit at the cost of leaving their heavy equipment behind and watching their large units disintegrate.

 

Although it was not until 5 August that the pocket west of Smolensk could be regarded as properly closed-and even then gaps remained Fliegerkorps VIII had already been taken away from Luftlotte 2. By Hitler's orders, it joined Fliegerkorps I in its attack towards Leningrad. The remaining formation, Fliegerkorps II, now found its forces strung out thinly across the hundreds of miles forming the front of Army Group Center and attempting to protect its flanks. It had to assist in sealing off the pocket, but at the same time it had to beat off a series of determined Soviet counterattacks against the exposed Yelnya salient across the Dnieper (occupied by Guderian's troops). To add to its trouble, it was called upon to operate far in the south, using Stukas to strike at Soviet armored boats that appeared unexpectedly on the northern edges of the Pripet Marshes and inflicted stinging losses on the German cavalry division there. By this time, the Red Air Force had found its bearings to the extent that it was able to join in the army's attacks on the Yelnya salient. Unable to be everywhere at once, the fighters of Fliegerkorps II were often too late to interfere. Attempting to pursue the low-flying, heavily armored Soviet attack aircraft, they were fired at from the ground by every possible weapon. As a result, an order went out to the German ground troops to imitate the Soviets and defend themselves against air attack with machine guns. This was OKH's first admission that, in these enormous spaces, the army no longer had nor could hope to have all the friendly command of the air it desired.

 

As the German forces consolidated their hold at Smolensk on the Dnieper, Hitler and the Army High Command engaged in the famous debate as to which objective, Moscow or the Ukraine, should be given priority. On Hitler's orders, Hoth's 3d Panzer Group now followed Fliegerkorps VIII in turning to the assistance of Army Group North, though without much success since the country between Smolensk and Leningrad contains some of the largest and densest forests in the whole of Russia. We cannot debate here whether or not it was feasible, let alone desirable, to pursue the offensive against Moscow at this time. Suffice it to say that this author's research indicates that the logistic basis for this action was not available since the railways supplying the German infantry forces in particular (unlike the armored groups, they did not have their own motorized transport capable of bringing up supplies from the rear) had been left hundreds of miles behind. 

Meanwhile, far to the south, Army Group South advanced from Poland. Its left wing was formed by Sixth Army, acting as a flank guard against possible counterattacks coming from the Pripet Marshes; next, from north to south, came 1st Panzer Group, Seventeenth Army, and, emerging from Rumania on 2 July, Eleventh Army operating in conjunction with some Rumanian forces. As usual, the planners at OKH had staked their main hopes for operativ warfare on 1st Panzer Group, though not to the extent of freeing it from subordination to Sixth Army. (Throughout the summer of 1941, German panzer groups continued to be under the orders of infantry armies in order to prevent them from wandering off on their own.) The 1st Panzer Group was expected to break through the frontier defenses and advance very fast, its mission being to outflank the Soviet forces on its right until, by turning southward to the Black Sea, it could crush them in a Kesselschlacht against Eleventh Army coming from its Rumanian "balcony." This strategy in turn rendered the south flank of the panzer army open to attack. As always, there were wide gaps between the advancing German columns, and Fliegerkorps V had already been instrumental in beating back a corps-sized Soviet counterattack on 26 June in the area between Lutsk and Rovno.  

 

It soon became clear that the Soviet forces in this area, which formed the Southwestern Front under Gen M. P. Kirponos, were better commanded than elsewhere. In the sector of Seventeenth Army, they slowed down the German advance, did not allow themselves to be disrupted, and, fighting for as long as the situation permitted, made what were on the whole well-ordered retreats. Some of Gen M. I. Potapov's Fifth Army withdrew into the marshes to the north, where the Luftwaffe was unable to find them and from which they were to emerge later in the campaign. Others fell back on the Stalin line and, after that line was breached, tried to cross the Dnieper to safety. It was the task of Fliegerkorps V, attached to the left wing of the army group, to prevent the retreat. At first it did so with some success by attacking roads, railroads, and transportation centers in Lvov, Brody, Zlotuv, Zhitomir, Berdicev, Starokonstantinov, Belaya Tserkov, and Kazatin. Other than an occasional thunderstorm, the weather was good and the country completely open. Hence, these attacks, which went on day and night, were as successful as any that the Luftwaffe mounted in Russia throughout the campaign. A high point was reached on 30 June when two or three Soviet motorized columns, moving four abreast, were caught near Lvov and subjected to what amounted almost to a slaughter. However, Fliegerkorps V did not have dive-bombing units under its command. It was instrumental in keeping the air clear of Soviet aircraft, but its ability to offer direct support to First Panzer Army was limited. This was one factor that caused the advance of that unit to be considerably slower at first than had been planned.

 

Penetrating farther to the east, the Germans faced different problems. Whereas the nature of the terrain in the north had caused the advance to proceed along the forest tracks, the countryside in the Ukraine presented no limitations. Under such circumstances, it did not take long before Luftflotte 4, like Army Group South as a whole, found its forces threatened by lack of cohesion. The problem was made worse by the almost complete absence of roads. This caused the army and air force to compete for the few available roadways in order to bring supplies forward. At times it became necessary to supply the forward units of the Luftwaffe by air, always a very costly operation. As a result, the bombers were increasingly left behind, the fighters could not reach the front at all, and only the attack aircraft got proper logistic support. Although bridges on the Dnieper were repeatedly hit by sorties flown by Fliegerkorps V, traffic over them was never completely halted because they proved difficult to destroy. Attacks were also made on the railway network east of the river in the Konotop-Glukhov- Gorodishche-Priluki-Bakhmach region. Tactical results were very good, with some 1,000 railroad cars destroyed, but again the withdrawal of at least some Soviet forces in front of 1st Panzer Group could not be prevented.

 

Meanwhile, having reached the Dnieper on 10 July, 1st Panzer Group was forbidden by Hitler from crossing it. Thereupon the Germans turned their armored spearheads towards the southeast, keeping west of the river. This brought them into the rear of the Soviet armies that were slowly falling back in front of the German Seventeenth Army and led to the creation of the pocket at Uman. Here Fliegerkorps V was more successful than before in helping the ground forces seal off the pocket and prevent the escape of the Soviet forces, particularly since it was assisted by units of Fliegerkorps IV coming from Rumania in support of the German Eleventh Army. However, this meant that Sixth Army in the north had to be left completely unsupported. That army accordingly had to beat off the Soviet Fifth Army coming out of the Pripet Marshes and directing its attack against the exposed rear of 1st Panzer Group. It did so, but at the cost of slowing its own advance to a snail's pace and thereby laying-even though unintentionally-the foundations for the subsequent vast Kesselschlacht of Kiev.

 

When Army Group South had finished clearing the Uman pocket and was preparing to cross the Dnieper on 7 August, it found itself exposed to a sudden counterattack by the Soviet Twenty-sixth Army on the right flank of the German Sixth Army. This, had it succeeded, might have cut the army group in two or at least driven a deep wedge between the widely separated German forces. As usual, the only force immediately available to hold off the threat was the Luftwaffe; and, as was often the case during this period, it did so quickly and effectively, though at the cost of switching to battlefield operations for which many of its aircraft were not really suitable. A week was to pass before the German forces coming from the north and the south simultaneously (one of 1st Panzer Group's armored divisions had to turn around and retrace its previous movement) were able to halt the Soviets and throw them back across the river. During the first decisive days, Fliegerkorps V, throwing in every available unit and forced by unfavorable weather to fly at altitudes as low as 50-100 meters, fought on its own and later claimed to have destroyed 94 tanks and 184 motor vehicles.

 

By the middle of August, although isolated pockets of enemy resistance remained, the situation west of the Dnieper could be regarded as stabilized. From 17 August on, Luftflotte 4 accordingly moved its efforts farther to the east, hitting the communications center of Dnepropetrovsk day and night in the hope of preventing the Soviets from making further withdrawals and preparing for the Germans' own forthcoming offensive. Owing partly to distance and partly to sheer wear and tear, the number of fighters available to Fliegerkorps V was down to 44. Although these fighters performed marvels (on 30 August, there was an announcement that 1,000 Soviet aircraft had been shot down in air-to-air combat), they could not be everywhere at once. Hence, a Soviet attack on the bridge across the Dnieper at Gornostaypol, which the Germans had taken in a coup de main, was successful in delaying the advance of Sixth Army once again. Fliegerkorps V was, however, able to protect the first bridgehead built by 1st Panzer Group across the Dnieper on 8 September against determined Soviet attempts to attack it from the air.

 

Throughout this period, Fliegerkorps IV, with its weaker forces, continued to fly missions in support of Eleventh Army, which was approaching the Crimea. It attacked the bridges across the Dniester to prevent Soviet reinforcements and to prevent the escape of Soviet forces from the Uman pocket. The center of gravity gradually shifted eastward until Odessa, used by the Soviets in an attempt to evacuate their forces by sea, became the most important target.  When the Rumanians crossed the Dniester in the middle of July, Fliegerkorps IV typically switched back to close support. The same pattern was thus revealed in this somewhat separate theater as everywhere else. If only because not even Richthofen's close support experts could respond to the army's demands in less than two hours, the Luftwaffe's normal preference was for what the Germans called operativ warfare and what we would call behind-the-front interdiction. At least during the early phases of the campaign, close support came into its own only when a clear geographical line divided the forces on both sides or else when a Soviet counterattack created an emergency.

At 0300, 22 June 1941, the Luftwaffe opened the campaign by the now-standard method of a surprise strike at the enemy's airfields. The weather that day was almost perfect-warm and sunny with a slight haze that cleared up later during the day. For reasons that remain inexplicable to this day, the Soviets had made no preparations to oppose the aggressors. The German pilots found Red aircraft by the hundreds lined up wingtip-to-wingtip on the aprons, and they reported very little opposition on the ground or in the air.  According to whether they consisted of bombers, fighters, or dive bombers, German units flew as many as four, five, six, or even eight missions per day-astonishing figures attributable to the simplicity of the machines, the often short distances that had to be covered, the excellence of the ground organization (including a specially developed apparatus that allowed nine aircraft to be refueled simultaneously), and the unparalleled determination of the crews. The first attack was carried out by 637 bombers (including dive bombers) and 231 fighters . Reportedly it hit 31 airfields, three suspected billets of high-level staffs, two barracks, two artillery positions, a bunker system, and an oil depot, all at the cost of two fighters missing. By the evening of the first day, some 1,800 Soviet aircraft were reported destroyed, the great majority on the ground but 322 of them shot down as they rose to meet the German machines. (This disproportion was to prove important later on because Soviet aircrews had not been affected and would survive to fight another day.)

 

Meanwhile, photoreconnaissance was being conducted on a grand scale. It disclosed the existence of numerous additional airfields, 130 of which were identified and attacked during the next few days. By the end of the first week, the Armed Forces High Command was able to report the destruction of 4,017 Soviet aircraft against a loss of only 150 German ones.  By 12 July Soviet losses had risen to about 6,850. This included entire bomber squadrons flying obsolescent machines without fighter cover that were shot down like turkeys as they hurled themselves at the invading German columns. After the first few days, Soviet air operations were reduced to scattered attacks by small numbers of aircraft that appeared out of nowhere, dropped or fired their ordnance, and made off as best they could. Having achieved air superiority to the point that they could command the sky whenever and wherever they wanted, the Germans on 25 June felt that the time had come to shift the center of gravity to support their own ground forces. In so doing, they soon discovered that the number of aircraft available was never really sufficient to cover the vast theater of operations; this in itself made a coordinated system of operativ warfare difficult since the constant demands for air support tended to disrupt planning, dissipate the available forces, and hinder the creation of Schwerpunkte. Russian roads, often consisting of mere tracks, were difficult to attack because they were usually easy to repair or bypass. Attacks on Russian villages, designed to reduce houses to rubble and thus block the communications passing between them, seldom led to lasting results owing to the wide distances separating the houses and to the wood used in their construction. In the north, as well as on the fringes of the Pripet Marshes, extensive forests enabled even large units, particularly those consisting of infantry or cavalry, to escape observation from the air.

 

Still, in other ways the Russian countryside offered advantages to the attacker from the air. The density of the railway network was relatively low, there being only 52,000 miles of track (many of them single) in the entire gigantic country. Hence, the task of disrupting the lines and bringing traffic to a standstill did not appear as insoluble as it would have been if the USSR had been a developed Western country with many intersecting, parallel, and redundant lines of communication and numerous technically advanced facilities for repair and maintenance. In the center and south, the open, flat, almost treeless terrain-much like the American Midwest-made it nearly impossible for ground units to find cover against air attack except by utilizing the occasional ravines. A well-planned campaign should have exploited these advantages and avoided the obstacles. However, this was something that the Germans, operating with only relatively small forces and trying to achieve too many things at once, were never really able to do.

 

The Luftwaffe's central archives were destroyed at the end of the war, and no good information is forthcoming from the Soviet side. Therefore, what little quantitative data can be found on the impact of the German air attacks on the Soviet ground forces, transportation system, and logistics have to be put together from the scattered surviving records of individual Luftwaffe units. These show that Ju-88 light bombers of a single Kampfgeschwader (bomber group) belonging to Fliegerkorps II claimed to have destroyed 356 trains and 14 bridges, interrupted railway traffic 322 times, and flown 200 sorties against troop concentrations, barracks, and supply depots in support of Army Group Center in "indirect" operations between 22 June and 9 September. During the same period, and acting in "direct" support of the army, the same unit claimed to have destroyed 30 tanks and 488 motor vehicles in addition to flying some 90 sorties against artillery positions. The Me-110s (twin-engined fighters) of another group claimed to have destroyed only 50 trains and 4 bridges between 22 June and 27 September but compensated by scoring 148 tanks, 166 guns, and 3,280 vehicles of all kinds.

 

As the records of many ground units show, Soviet opposition in the air during this period was so weak as to be almost negligible. This permitted even single-engined fighters to be diverted away from the escort role to attacking ground targets, and so one Jagdgeschwader (fighter group) flying in support of Army Group Center was able to report 142 tanks and armored cars, 16 guns, 34 locomotives, 432 trucks and one train destroyed. Certain entries in the diary of the chief of the German Army General Staff-who himself relied on information originating in the Luftwaffeshow that these attacks were not without effect on ground operations. On individual occasions, they deprived the Soviet armies of supplies, blocked reinforcements, and created congestion on the Ukrainian railroads in particular. However, the available evidence does not permit a detailed reconstruction of the impact of these operations on the campaign as a whole.

 

In the north, the German ground operations had three aims. They were to surround and cut off the Soviet forces in the Baltic countries (Eighteenth Army on the left), advance on the shortest line to Leningrad (4th Panzer Group in the center), and cover the right flank while keeping in touch with Army Group Center (Sixteenth Army on the right). These diverging objectives, imposed on Army Group North by Hitler himself, are open to criticism; however, because the terrain in this theater, as in Russia as a whole, became more open as the attacking army advanced further toward the east, gaps were bound to appear on the flanks of the advancing spearheads.

 

The German system of maneuver warfare was by now fully developed. Its consistent aim was to drive deep wedges into the enemy and to encircle his forces (consisting, as of 10 July, of 31 divisions and six independent mechanized brigades grouped together under Soviet Field Marshal Kliment Voroshilov's Northwestern Front). The speed of the advance was spectacular, reaching 40 miles per day during the first few days. Nevertheless, Army Group North never really succeeded in cutting off the main Soviet forces as it had planned to do. Nor did it have the infantry needed to seal what pockets that were formed; many Red Army units, though isolated from each other, remained intact or, at any rate, sufficiently cohesive to continue fighting, especially since the dense forests afforded plenty of room for them to hide. It fell to the Luftwaffe to leap into the breach and to identify and prevent counterattacks from developing into dangerous threats. This caused its independence to be gradually eroded until finally it was reduced to the role of a mobile fire brigade, just the kind of thing Luftwaffe leaders had always wanted to avoid.

 

For example, on 27 June units of Fliegerkorps I were instrumental in beating back a Soviet counteroffensive near Shaulyai (Schaulen), Latvia, where approximately 200 enemy tanks were destroyed. 24 On 2 and 3 July the same units first helped breach the fortifications along the old border and then, switching back to operativ warfare, attacked the bridges over the Dvina River in order to prevent the Soviets from making good their escape to the northeast. In this they were only partly successful. On 6 July it was the turn of the Red Air Force to try and wreck the bridges over the Dvina in order to slow down the German pursuit. This enabled General Keller's Luftflotte 1 fighters to shoot down 65 out of 73 attacking aircraft, thus putting an end to large-scale enemy attempts to interfere with ground operations in this sector. Units of Luftflotte 1 also assisted in supplying Sixteenth Army during its advance, given the single road (in reality, little better than a forest track) leading from Pskov toward Narva had not yet been cleared and was dominated by isolated Red Army units.  

 

Thus, during the first two weeks of the campaign, all the ways in which an air force might assist maneuver warfare were displayed to the fullest. As flying units were moved forward onto newly captured Soviet airfields, the distances between them and their targets diminished. Beginning in the second week of July, this permitted the Luftwaffe to mount repeated attacks on the Moscow-Leningrad railway with the aim of severing communications between Russia's two most important cities .28 Like others after them, however, the Germans were to learn that railways, while not difficult to disrupt, were not difficult to repair. Though traffic suffered, the line could not be completely cut until the ground forces had advanced sufficiently to throw a ring around the city.

 

Beginning in the last week of July, Luftflotte 1 was reinforced by Gen Wolfram von Richthofen's Fliegerkorps VIII, which was detached from its original assignment to Army Group Center and brought up to the newly occupied Baltic airfields. Acting in his favorite role as a close-support expert, Richthofen repeatedly massed his forces to deliver concentrated blows at key targets. On 15 August they assisted Sixteenth Army in the capture of Novgorod. On 24 August their intervention was decisive in beating back a Soviet counteroffensive against the left wing of Army Group North at Staraya Russa. On 28 August they helped bring the attack on Tallinn (Reval) to a successful conclusion. However, despite repeated attempts and many hits on both warships and freighters, Luftflotte 1 was unable to prevent the bulk of the Red Fleet from retreating to Kronstadt and Leningrad. In a sort of mini-Dunkirk, the Soviets succeeded in evacuating some of their troops in the Baltic, and these were later instrumental in the defense of Leningrad.

 

Fliegerkorps VIII was still available when the offensive against Leningrad got under way on 26 September. Against strong antiaircraft fire, it helped the units of Fliegerkorps I attack targets within the city as well as ships in the harbor; a Soviet counterattack in the direction of Lake Ladoga was beaten off, and the ring around "the capital of Bolshevism" closed. However, only a few days later, Richthofen's units were taken away and sent back to support the offensive of Army Group Center against Moscow. Army Group North itself had now been deprived of the bulk of Fourth Panzer Army, which was also sent to the Moscow area. Relying on a single motorized corps (XXXIX), it was still able to carry out a last offensive effort, crossing the Volkhov River in the direction of Tikhvin, where it hoped to link up with the Finns on the river Svir. Though its aircraft (Ju-88s) were not really suited to the task, especially in view of the densely wooded nature of the terrain, Fliegerkorps I flew missions directly supporting the operation as well as attacking railway lines leading into the area. After bitter fighting, Tikhvin fell on 9 November. However, the battle was by no means at an end, and the Germans, finding themselves counterattacked by three Soviet armies under Gen K. A. Meretskov, were forced to evacuate it a month later. By this time, bad weather, including persistent winter fog, affected the operations of Luftflotte 1 to the point where it was unable to reconnoiter effectively, let alone mount coordinated attacks on what targets could still be identified. The operations of Army Group North became essentially static and were destined to remain so until the siege of the city was lifted in January 1944.

 

In this siege, Luftflotte 1, its forces much reduced by losses and by the limited availability of aircraft, was assigned the task of attacking military targets within the city as well as the supply routes leading to it. In spite of the reported destruction (by 23 August) of 2,541 enemy aircraft plus 433 probable kills, Soviet opposition began reviving in the autumn, and by the end of the year the city was defended by several hundred fighters, 300 balloons, and 600 antiaircraft artillery barrels. Although the Germans never lost the ability to gain air superiority where and when they wanted, they were unable to make much headway in capturing Leningrad. From September through December 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped a total of 1,500 tons of bombs on targets in and around Leningrad; this was less than the amount dropped by Allied air forces on a single German city in a single night in 1944-45. As a result, the lifeline to Leningrad, which as of 18 November consisted of motor convoys (later a railway as well) crossing over frozen Lake Ladoga, could never be completely severed for any length of time.

 

As 1941 drew to an end, the troops of Luftlotte 1, living under impossible conditions and prevented by the weather from flying much of the time, were drowning their sorrows in alcohol.