Table of contents:
- The beginning of the war
- Fake factories and neighborhoods
- Instead of the Mausoleum - a mansion
- The disguise didn’t save, but it did
Video: Miracles of Disguise: How Artists and Architects Hid Moscow from Nazi Bombers
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, it was clear that the main goal of the Nazis would be to attack the capital from the air and destroy its main strategic facilities. The country's leadership had to protect the factories and plants concentrated in the city, life support facilities, cultural monuments and, of course, the Kremlin from bombing in any way. Literally in a matter of days, with the help of architects and artists, it was possible to draw a new Moscow in the full sense of the word - in which there was no Kremlin, and bridges, houses and roads stood in completely different places …
The beginning of the war
The only possible way to minimize the risk of airstrikes on important city targets was to camouflage them. First of all, it was necessary to “hide” the Kremlin as the main and most visible target. Already four days after the start of the war, the commandant of the Kremlin, Spiridonov, proposed two options for "sheltering" Moscow and the Kremlin. First, it was necessary to remove the crosses and remove the glitter from the domes of the Kremlin cathedrals, and disguise the towers, walls and other buildings as residential buildings. The second option involved the creation of models of important objects in the capital (including a fake bridge across the Moskva River) and entire painted blocks. All this was supposed to disorient the German pilots and make it difficult to find objects for bombing.
During the first raid, which took place a month after the start of the war, the city had not yet had time to be thoroughly camouflaged, so the consequences were very serious. Moscow was attacked by two hundred aircraft of the German Air Force, using both incendiary and high-explosive bombs.
Lighters were the source of hundreds of fires, as most of the houses were either timber or stone with timber joists. High-explosive bombs were dropped on large objects in order to cause the greatest destruction. For example, railroad tracks in different parts of Moscow were badly damaged and, in addition, dozens of freight cars loaded with food, cotton, ammunition, timber and other vital goods were destroyed. One of the bombs destroyed the Vakhtangov Theater - so much so that the building did not even begin to be restored, but a new one was built in its place.
And that's not to mention the fact that 130 people died during the raid.
Fake factories and neighborhoods
At the end of July, the main camouflage work was completed. The project was headed by the artist-architect Boris Iofan. Under his leadership, the city was simply transformed, and it was really impossible to recognize it from the air. The city quarters changed their appearance (the layout did not look at all the same as in reality), and the parks, which were most visible from the air, standing out with green spots, were built up by the camouflages with models of buildings and other objects. During the work, a camouflage net was actively used.
Defense factories, bridges (they were painted black), oil storage facilities, and water pumping stations were especially carefully "hidden". Along with this, in different parts of the city, fake enterprises with pipes, elevators, a petroleum storage depot and even a fake camp of the Red Army with tents and figures of fighters appeared. And there were also pseudo-airports with dummy aircraft.
By the way, the camouflage service, which consisted of artists and architects, received a salary allocated from the city budget. The paint was provided by the People's Commissariat of the Chemical Industry.
Instead of the Mausoleum - a mansion
The Kremlin looked like a residential area. All of its buildings were stylized as more modern, the domes were covered with dark paint, the stars on the towers were sheathed. On the Kremlin walls, the artists painted windows, and covered the battlements with plywood sheets that imitated the roofs of houses.
Military personnel, artists, volunteers from the townspeople took part in the work, and professional climbers worked at the highest objects (for example, the Ivan the Great Bell Tower).
While the body of Ilyich was evacuated to Tyumen, the Mausoleum itself was painted as an old mansion. False columns and a false roof appeared near the building of the tomb, and behind the "estate" was a "residential building".
State security officers headed by Major Shpigov flew around the disguised Kremlin on an airplane and were satisfied with the result, noting only that it was necessary to paint the buildings even more, and disguise the Alexander Garden by building up mock-ups and laying false paths.
The Kremlin was well hidden. According to statistics, during the war years, Moscow experienced almost one and a half hundred enemy raids, but the Kremlin was bombed only eight times.
The disguise didn’t save, but it did
From the moment of the first air raid on Moscow, the bombing of the city became regular and, of course, there was destruction. Firstly, such a camouflage was effective if only one looked at the city from a certain height and from a certain angle, so it cannot be said that Moscow and its objects all disappeared like invisibility in the eyes of the German pilots. For example, according to reports from the curators of the camouflage objects, the plan with the fake airfields did not work very well, since they were too static and they did not have an imitation of "real life".
Later, in the fall, bombs hit the Bolshoi Theater and the building of Moscow State University on Mokhovaya, as well as the buildings of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Tretyakov Gallery. A number of enterprises were affected, for example, the "Serp and Molot" plant, the GPZ im. Kaganovich, Trekhgorka.
However, the disguise of the city made it very difficult for the Nazis to find certain objects and, of course, confused, given that they usually carried out raids in the dark. Enemy pilots spent precious minutes to fly closer to the fake and, circling over it, figure out whether it was a real object or not. And often during such confusion, they met the fire of Soviet anti-aircraft guns.
Most of the bombs were dropped by the pilots almost at random, and not on specific targets, or on dummies. Moreover, some dummies were specially highlighted by the townspeople during the raids so that the planes were directed towards them. All this greatly helped Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft guns.
As a result, during the period from the beginning of the first air raids to April 1942, only 19 enterprises and slightly more than 200 buildings were damaged in Moscow. On the scale of daily raids and a big city, this was not so much. The destruction was many times less than if Moscow had not been "painted".
And in continuation of the topic - work metro during the war.
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