CourageJoyful
· Day 48 of 1418
Bombs over Berlin
Saaremaa island → Berlin
- there and back
- ≈ 1,760 km
- there and back
- in the air, almost all of it over the sea
- ≈ 7 h
- in the air, almost all of it over the sea
Nazi propaganda claimed the Soviet air force had been destroyed. But on the night of 8 August 1941, Colonel Yevgeny Preobrazhensky’s pilots took off from a small Baltic island and reached Berlin. The daring flight showed the whole world that the country was still fighting.
The bombers flew at the very limit of their range: at night, over the sea, at high altitude where the cold is fierce and the air is thin. In Berlin people first thought the British had come: nobody believed the aircraft were Soviet.
By early September the pilots had flown several more such raids. The enemy captured Saaremaa that autumn, but those flights had already made history.
See it on the map