The Doctrine

T

he main doctrine of both the German and the So­viet air forces in 1941 was offensive.

One of the main characteristics of the air war on the Eastern Front is that it was mainly of a tactical and operational nature. A strategic air war, in its full mean­ing, never took place. The strategic air raids undertaken were few and sporadic. Still, in the summer of 1941 each of the warring sides initiated brief attempts to open stra­tegic air raids as sketched in the theories of General Giulio Douhet. According to this Italian military theorist as early as 1920, the air force was the predominant branch of any large country’s armed forces. Douhet’s approach—a true forerunner of the 1991 Gulf War Allied doctrine – outlined a scenario in which a superior force of strategic bombers annihilated the war potential of the enemy and destroyed the will to resist among its population.

Due to the situation in which Germany went to war in 1939—desperately poor in its own natural strategic resources—Hitler had no other option but to go for a short but decisive war, aiming at a rapid seizure of natu­ral resources in enemy countries. Thus it followed that the main emphasis was put upon the creation of a tacti­cal bomber force. The empirical attempt to apply the theories of Douhet to the German standard medium bombers in the early years of the war met with various successes—but to the despair of the populations in cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. Ger­many failed to achieve any rapid victory against its enemies, and its lack of a strategic bomber force became one of the main reasons for Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front—and in the entire war.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had built up a

Volume I: Operation Barbarossa. 1941

relatively large strategic bomber force during the prewar years. In fact, in the thirties, the Soviet Union created the first large fleet of heavy bombers—more than eight hundred four-engine TB-3s—at a time when other nations had only very small numbers of heavy bombers. This force mainly relied on a doctrine similar to that of General Douhet’s. But in the beginning of the forties, the Soviet strategic air force was crippled by a low stan­dard of air-crew training, poor navigational devices, and hopelessly outdated aircraft. The results of the attempted “moral bombing” against civilian targets in the war against Finland in 1939-40 were all but disheartening. During the war with Germany, a combination of the long dis­tances to the main German cities and the needs at the front ensured that-with only a few exceptions—WS (Soviet Air Force) strategic operations were limited to nuisance raids.

The key to the success of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 lay in the extensive use of air units in dose – support sorties. Called in by radio directly from the front­line commanders, dive-bombers or ground-attack aircraft would strike rapidly and hard against any encountered enemy stronghold. This method had been discovered and tested with success by German airmen in the Spanish Civil War. While close-support air units were in constant action over the front line, the task of the twin-engine tactical medium bombers was to destroy com­
munication lines, headquarters, and airfields in the enemy’s rear area.

According to the outlines of the Blitzkrieg, an inva­sion would open with all-out extensive air attacks against the enemy air force on the ground. The aim was to neu­tralize the enemy’s aviation, thus creating the precondi­tions for a successful ground offensive. Both at this and at the second, above described, stage of the Blitzkrieg air war, the twin-engine medium bombers were considered the backbone of the Luftwaffe.

Even if he had a career as a successful fighter pilot in World War I, the offensive-minded commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, emphasized the bombers, the dive-bombers, and-his per­sonal favorites—the Bf 110 Zerstorern (heavy fighters) to a greater extent than the single-engine fighters. The fighters of the Luftwaffe were put in a class by them­selves. Originally intended only for defensive purposes the fighters were somewhat superfluous to the predomi­nant Blitzkrieg doctrine; but Hermann Goring, chief of supply and procurement of the Luftwaffe Ernst Udct, and dozens of senior World War I-era fighter pilots influenced the young fighter pilots of the day with a romanticized von Richthofen mentality: "Find your enemy and shoot him down, nothing else matters” had been the classical maxim of the famous “Red Baron.” The ambitious fighter pilots of the new Luftwaffe embraced this doctrine, so that soon, to a йШН *ar8c extent> they were fighting a war of their own. What Baron Manfred von Richthofen cynically but correctly had described as “the art of manhunt” came to engage the entire Jagdwaffe (Hunting Arm). While fighter pilots of other air forces—not least the Soviet-fought a “real” war, striking at the enemy regard­less of if they found him in the air or on the ground, a whole generation of Ger­man fighter pilots was raised to seek an individualistic hunt of aerial victories, This is one important reason for the un­paralleled victory scores achieved by the top guns of the Jagdwaffe during World War II, and it fit well the task given to the single-engine fighters in the Blitzkrieg, to search and destroy any enemy aircraft encountered in the air. When the fight-

ers were not scrambled against enemy raids, this mission was normally fulfilled through fighter sweeps—so-called Freie Jagd (free hunting)—in groups normally consisting of not more than two to four planes over the combat area.

The manner in which aerial victories where more than one pilot participated were counted varied among different air forces. For instance, in the U. S. Army Air Forces of World War II, when two pilots shot down an enemy aircraft, each pilot was credited with half a vic­tory. Thus ten individual and two half victories were counted as eleven victories. In the Luftwaffe the entire victory was credited to just one of the participating pilots-most commonly the highest-ranking. Among Soviet airmen a distinction was always made between individual and shared (“group” or “collective”) victories.

The doctrine of the Soviet Air Force was similar to that of the Luftwaffe, although not as developed. Soviet military air doctrine was tactically offensive and strategi­cally defensive. The first aim of the VVS was to establish air superiority over the battlefield through bombing raids against the ground installations of the enemy air force.

Once air superiority had been achieved, the twin-engine medium bombers were assigned to the mission of sever­ing movement in the enemy’s rear area. There were almost no dive-bombers, as in the Luftwaffe, but increas­ing emphasis was laid on the creation of a ground – attack—Shturmovik—air force capable of providing the Red Army with excellent ground support. A large part of the VVS’s obsolescent 1-15bis and 1-153 biplane fight­ers had been adapted to this role, and the first specially designed Shturmovik, the famous 11-2, had just begun reaching combat units in 1941.

The Soviet strategic bomber fleet had not been appropriately modernized and was mainly comprised of twin-engine bombers. Still, a number of the huge TB-3s remained operative, and with them, the thought of a strategic bomber offensive remained during the opening phase of the war with Germany. Not least, the Winter War against Finland had demonstrated that Douhet’s theories still prevailed within the Soviet High Command.

As in the Luftwaffe, the task of the Soviet fighters was entirely defensive. While the “von Richthofen men­tality” nurtured individualistic aggressiveness among their

German counterparts, the Soviet fighter pilots of 1941 were largely defense-minded.

One main factor—particularly during the early stages of the war—that hampered effectiveness of all layers of the Soviet armed forces was the hierarchical command structure, or rather the fear of reprisals from the leader­ship, which curbed many individual initiatives. In 1941 most Soviet unit commanders feared Stalin more than they feared the enemy. The top leadership’s habit of issu­ing orders in the slightest matters, and of punishing unit commanders for issuing “unauthorized” orders in the slightest matters, paralyzed individual initiative at the local level. Although there was a doctrine for providing bombers with fighter escort, the absence of any explicit order from the High Command to assemble fighters for this task left the bomber units with the task of flying their missions without escort. This omission led to disas­trous losses in the VVS bomber units during the first weeks of the war.

Another difference between German and Soviet fighter pilots was the preparedness among the latter to carry out daring low-level attacks against ground targets. This was a lesson learned by the Soviets in the Winter War with Finland. The failure of the Soviet medium bombers during the first weeks of the war with Germany compelled the fighter pilots of the VVS to extend them­selves to undertake these operations.