ISBN 0-7110-2890-7
160 pages

Equivalent ranks; Glossary and Abbreviations; Introduction; photos; maps; OBs; Footnotes; Bibliography; Index

   Given that virtually none of the Eastern Front combatants spoke English as their mother tongue, it seems amazing that the Russo-German War of 1941-1945 comprises the single largest body of published works in the English-language literature of the Second World War. On the other hand, among all those thousands of books about the Russian Front, those devoted specifically to the Russo-German air war comprise a relatively small number, especially compared to the wealth of books covering air operations elsewhere in the war (where it sometimes seems like every English-speaking pilot has penned a memoir).
   Despite that limitation, Andrew Brookes has constructed his history of air warfare on the Russian Front almost exclusively from English-language sources. That means he breaks no new ground with this slender volume. Instead, Brookes presents a fairly brief synthesis of mostly secondary works in his informative but not especially insightful or original book. As long as readers expect no more and no less, they should be quite satisfied with Air War over Russia.
   The books opens with about seven pages tracing in outline the history of German and Soviet airpower and the opening stages of World War II. The second chapter covers Luftwaffe planning and the first day of Operation Barbarossa when German airpower effectively smashed the Soviet VVS and took control of the sky.

   In effect, the German Army insisted on attacking at dawn while demanding a guarantee that the Russians would be confined to their airfields. The OKL's argument that neither men nor technology were up to delivering a knockout blow in darkness, and that the Army should delay its advance to allow the Luftwaffe to deliver a shattering, pre-emptive blow at first light, was rejected. The Army line, supported by Hitler, meant that a sizeable medium bomber force would have to get airborne and transit for up to an hour at night without alerting the opposition.
   Luftflotte 2 staffs compromised by gathering 30 handpicked crews experienced in night operations, and launching them during the early hours of 22 June. Flying in Ketten—three-aircraft Vic formation—these Do17s, Ju88s and He111s flew at maximum altitude over unsettled marsh and forest areas to avoid detection to strike 10 major Soviet air bases precisely at 03.15hrs. 'At 02.11hrs we took off on our first mission against the East,' recalled Hptm Gerhard Backer of III./KG1. 'It was a clear night and the horizon was bright from the midnight sun in the far north.' Backer could see the Ratas ('Rats'—the Spanish Civil War nickname for Polikarpov I-16 single-seat fighters) at Libau airfield, Lithuania, parked in nice tight rows, 'offering us a good target in the bright night'.
   At lower altitude, a far greater number of German bomber, dive-bomber and fighter formations went for targets closer to the front line. A host of German aircrews had been brought to readiness at 22.00hrs the previous evening. The first wave was briefed at midnight, whereupon commanders gathered their men about them and read out, often by torchlight, Hitler's message entitled 'Soldiers of the Eastern Front' which called on every man to give his best. BMW, Junkers and Daimler-Benz engines roared into life in East Prussia, Poland and Romania. Gen Guderian, godfather of the Blitzkrieg who had seen the unoccupied Russian defences on the eastern side of the River Bug, was at his command post. His Second Panzer Group watched the Luftwaffe tail-lights vanish east over the frontier. Tanks, artillery and poor bloody infantry waited the last few minutes before their combined force fell upon the Soviet Union.
   As the short summer night ended, the first air wave in the early morning of 22 June was directed against 31 airfields, three suspected senior command posts, two barracks, two artillery positions, a bunker system and an oil depot. It was a complete success. Obstlt Paul Deichmann, Chief of Staff at Fliegerkorps II, observed that 'at only one field was a fighter unit met which was just taking off. The bombs fell in the midst of the unit so that the aircraft lay destroyed in take-off formation at the end of the field.' Only two German aircraft failed to return.

   The next chapter provides more background on the Soviet Air Force and continues the saga of the opening of the Barbarossa air offensive.

   Although the Russian military analyst I. V. Timokhovich described the VVS reaction to the Luftwaffe assault as 'spontaneous, unco-ordinated and purposeless,' individual Soviet bravery and initiative were in evidence. Notwithstanding the surprise attack, severed communications and that most personnel were stood down on a Sunday, some VVS pilots fought on 22 June. As the first bombs fell on Kurovitsa airfield, southwest of Lvov in the Ukraine, pilots of 164th Fighter Aviation Regt managed to get airborne thanks to a warning message. As the Ju88s of KG5 1 turned back for the Reich, they found a number of small I-16s and even 1-15 biplanes on their tails. Lt R. N. Rubstov machine gunned a Ju88 until it caught fire and crashed within sight of Kurovitsa field. It was probably the first Soviet air victory of the conflict.

   Although Brookes certainly doesn't ignore the VVS, especially in the early going his text emphasizes German commanders, plans, units, aircraft, operations, and pilots. The fourth and fifth chapters continue the story, and that trend, through Operation Typhoon—the German offensive against Moscow—while Chapter Six turns to strategic bombing on the Russian Front. The author discusses the German raids against Moscow and offers a few words about the Soviet ADD ("...although Long Range Aviation still reported to the High Command, its bombers were almost wholly involved with this tactical battle"), but this chapter ends up being a bit of a jumble with notes concerning theories of strategic bombing, comments about the RAF's development of four-engine bombers, Allied interdiction of railways in occupied France, remarks by Sir John Slessor about the proper role of bombers, an aside about the American war in Vietnam, and the deaths of Ernst Udet and Werner Molders.
   Chapter Seven returns the focus to operations in 1942, including Case Blue and the capture of Sevastopol. Chapter Eight looks at Stalingrad and the defeat of the German Sixth Army. Although still largely tilted toward the German experience, Brookes includes increasing amounts of material about the VVS.

   Gen S. A. Krasovskiy's 17th Air Army supported the 5th Tank Army and 21st Army, Rudenko's 16th Air Army flew in support of the 65lh Army, and Khryukin's 8th Air Army deployed 75% of its operational aircraft in support of the 50th Army. Support also came from the 2nd Air Army of the Voronezh Front. No fewer than 426 of these combat aircraft, such as U-2s and R-5s, were there to operate at night and keep the pressure on around the clock. Besides numerical superiority, the VVS would benefit from Novikov's insistence that units assigned to the offensive would have the most modern aircraft. By mid-November, 75% of all aircraft and 97% of all fighters in the Stalingrad sector were the newer models. Among the 125 fighters of the 16th Air Army, only nine were older vintage and almost all its 103 Shturmoviki were the new twin-seat Il-2s. To confuse the enemy, alongside 25 new VVS airfields, 19 decoys were built with mock night exercises conducted on 14 of them.
   Novikov would run the air campaign alongside Zhukov, and the air-land campaign plan for what the Soviets codenamed 'Uranus' was pure Blitzkrieg. The VVS would first gain superiority by hitting German airfields for three days prior to the attack. Soviet airmen would then concentrate on the breakthrough areas, clearing the opposition from the skies while providing the Red Army with effective close air support. Fighters and Il-2s were to continue attacking airfields and any German aircraft that managed to get airborne, while bombers and other ground-attack aircraft would bomb and strafe in front of advancing Red Army formations. ADD squadrons would hit more distant Luftwaffe airfields and transport nodes, and interdict reserves moving toward the front. Once the Axis line broke, the VVS would pursue retreating forces relentlessly to prevent them re-establishing a stable defensive line.

   The next chapter, "Maritime Air," looks at air operations over the Baltic Sea and Black Sea very briefly before turning to air-sea operations from Arkhangelsk to Norway. Much of this material deals with German efforts to interdict Allied convoys sailing to the Soviet Union, notably a comparatively long section on the story of PQ17. Brookes also devotes a couple of paragraphs to the British air units stationed at Murmansk. Interestingly, almost an entire chapter, "Kuban Heel," is devoted to the battles around that bridgehead, and the tenth chapter also marks something of a turning point in that VVS operations receive most of the ink.
   Brookes compresses the remainder of the war, from Kursk to Berlin, into twenty pages. Needless to say, this means some operations receive only sketchy treatment and some none at all. For example, Chapter Eleven includes this sentence—"Among those who distinguished themselves in the battle for air superiority were Free French pilots of the Normandy Squadron"—without any other information whatsoever about the Normandie-Niemen Squadron or why French pilots were serving in Russia. Likewise, these last two chapters become increasingly less precise about OBs, units, strengths, and commanders as the VVS totally eclipses the Luftwaffe.
   Finally, the last chapter, "Conclusions," in five pages succeeds as one of the stronger parts of the book by ticking off some of the most important reasons for the success of the Soviet Air Force and defeat of the Luftwaffe. Brookes makes the point that, even at the beginning of the war, the VVS was not "backward technologically" as some other accounts have claimed. "Where the Soviets were backward was in the way they used military technology in June 1941, and the Stavka knew this." However, more so than the Luftwaffe, the VVS was able to evolve into a more effective force by producing improved aircraft and better aircrews. The Soviets also concentrated almost exclusively on the ability to mass above critical points on the battlefield attack aircraft capable of supporting the Red Army and ripping holes in German ground defenses. By the end of the war, the VVS had learned its lessons, while the Luftwaffe was only a shadow.

   As the Red Army struck along the main axis from Warsaw towards Berlin, the VVS deployed 10 air armies and mustered 15,815 aircraft, not counting substantial reserves. Soviet air superiority pilots flew the latest Yak-9 and La-7 fighters while their ground-attack colleagues were now operating Il-10 Shturmoviki. Operational training standards were of a high order and even with the Luftwaffe on the ropes, the Soviets were professional enough to build 55 dummy airfields with 818 mock aircraft deployed on them. VVS air armies flew 92,000 missions during the taking of Berlin, over half of them at night and in bad weather.
   German industry produced 8,295 aircraft in 1939 and notwithstanding all the bombs dropped on it thereafter, Albert Speer managed to increase output to 39,807 in 1944. The Russian front lost its absolute priority for the Germans after September 1943, with the most modern German aircraft being concentrated against the RAF and USAAF. By the beginning of 1944, front-line German strength in the East had dropped to some 1,800 aircraft, set against 2,600 in the West. As the Allies converged on Berlin, the Luftwaffe fused its commands and set up an air defence system that simultaneously looked both ways. The ability to switch German fighters rapidly from west to east forced Soviet air defenders to fight 1,317 air engagements in the battle for Berlin, during which they lost 527 aircraft to German fighters and AAA guns. The highest scoring Soviet ace, Ivan Kozhedub, closed his score on 62 when he forced down two Fw190s over Berlin on 17 April 1945.
   At the very end, the Luftwaffe had 1,798,500 personnel under arms, and Gen Stumpff, who was responsible among other things for operations against the Russians, still had some 2,000 aircraft. But his units were broken, scattered and disorganised. When the Red Army invaded East Prussia, the VVS could mount as many as 10,000 sorties a day using the most modern combat aircraft, while the Luftwaffe was incapable of any meaningful air operations. The Air Ministry had left Berlin for the so-called 'Redoubt' in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, and some saw it as symbolic that the OKL's alternative HQ ended up in a lunatic asylum near Munich.

   Taken as a synopsis or primer, this is ultimately a balanced and competent effort, albeit one unlikely to win many awards for ground-breaking research or scintillating prose. Students of the Second World War who are familiar with the work of Plocher, Muller, Bergstrom, Wagner, Murray, Hardesty, and Hayward won't discover a great many surprises here. (See also our Air operations in the Russo-German War, 1941-1945 collection.) On the other hand, those less familiar with air operations on the Russian Front and the basic literature on that subject could do much worse than beginning with Air War over Russia. As a starting point, the maps and air OBs (including Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak forces) are also very useful.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Ian Allan Publishing.
   Thanks to Ian Allan for providing this review copy.