Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
deep penetration strikes on enemy airfields, training centers, fuel and munitions
dumps, and other facilities supporting enemy aviation. Iy In addition,
independent bomber operations were to destroy military and administrative
centers, disrupt transport, and hit naval facilities-operations directly
controlled by the High Command.
As the authors of the standard work on the Great Patriotic War put
it, Soviet military art in the prewar years worked out correctly the fundamental
theoretical problems likely to face the VVS. But, as they add
somewhat pathetically, the theory did not take into account the possibility
that it might be the enemy who had the control of the air.*O In short,
Soviet air doctrine in early 1941 assumed that any German attack would
come after the VVS had absorbed its new types of planes and had completed
its network of airfields in the newly acquired regions. The theory
was predicated on the Soviets having the offensive edge and gave little
thought to defense.
German Air Superiority in the Early Days of the War
Hitler’s Operation BARBAROSSA, the plan for the invasion of the Soviet
Union, called for pursuing the Russians to “ . . . a line. . . from which the
Russian Air Force can no longer attack German territory” and that the
“effective operation of the Russian Air Force is to be prevented from the
beginning of the attack by powerful blows.”21 By late June 1941, the Ger-
mans had deployed the forces needed to execute BARBAROSSA. The main
offensive was to be a 3-pronged advance in the directions of Leningrad,
Moscow, and Kiev carried out by Army Groups North, Center, and South
respectively. Each of the 3 army groups was allotted an air fleet [LuftJlotte],
and the total number of aircraft committed came to 1,940 plus 60 planes
attached to Army Command Norway, for a total of 2,000 combat aircraft.22
In addition, the Germans had 1,270 transport and liaison planes and some
1,000 Finnish and Rumanian aircraft for a grand total of 4,270 aircraft along
the Soviet border. This is not far from the official Soviet estimate of “nearly
5,000 aircraft, including about 1,000 Finnish and Rumanian planes, on the
western frontier of the U.S.S.R.”23
The strength of the Soviet Air Force in the western regions is even
harder to ascertain than that of the Luftwaffe. Before the attack, the German
estimate of the number of Soviet aircraft facing them in the region
about to be attacked was 5,700. In Soviet Military Doctrine, scholar Raymond
Garthoff pointed out that as early as October 5, 1941, an alternate
member of the Politburo admitted in Pravda that Soviet air losses came to
5,316.24 Making some shrewd guesses, Garthoff concluded that Soviet aircraft
losses in the summer of 1941 probably totaled around 8,000 since they
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