On the morning of May 7, before dawn had broken, every German military airfield on the Eastern Front was already bustling. Whether field airfields or large-scale airports, all were brightly lit.
Ground crews were refueling aircraft, loading them with munitions, and making preparations for takeoff and combat.
An H-21 heavy bomber was being loaded with ammunition with the help of ground crews. Ammunition trucks carried entire loads of bombs beside the aircraft, and cranes hoisted the bombs one by one into the plane.
An H-21 heavy bomber could carry up to eight tons of munitions. It could carry as many as eighty 100-kilogram aerial bombs. The H-21 heavy bombers of just four strategic air groups could drop more than seven thousand tons of bombs on Moscow. Add the H-11 medium bombers, dive bombers, ground-attack aircraft, and the rest, and they could drop more than ten thousand tons of bombs on Moscow in a single strike.
Although Moscow covered a considerable area, repeated bombing would be enough to turn it into a field of ruins within a week.
With the Russian Air Force having suffered grievous losses in a series of aerial battles and no longer able to threaten the German Air Force, German Air Force fighter planes also carried bombs in this operation. FW-190 fighters, capable of carrying 100-kilogram aerial bombs beneath their wings, would likewise participate in the bombing. Of course, in order to strike important Russian military targets within Moscow with precision, some FW-190 fighters had Rocket Pods mounted on them, allowing them to pour rockets directly onto Russian anti-aircraft positions within the city.
Faced with the German Air Force's large-scale bombing, perhaps the Russian defenders' only option was to fight back with anti-aircraft positions. To prevent their own bombers from suffering excessive losses, suppressing—and even destroying—the Russian