Leningrad, siege of

Leningrad, siege of. In all likelihood, a million or more non-combatants died during the 900-day siege of this Soviet city, making it a frightful human disaster by any standard (see Map 63). The USSR's allies regarded the siege—which was actually not a siege but a blockade deliberately imposed to wipe out the city and its population—as the ultimate test of Soviet steadfastness and determination to fight and win the German–Soviet war, and Stalin and Hitler waged a personal power struggle over it.

On 22 June 1941 the Germans invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA). On 8 July, at Shlisselburg, the old fortress guarding the point at which the River Neva flows out of nearby Lake Ladoga, the German Fourth Panzer Army severed Leningrad's land contact with the Soviet interior. To the north, Finnish forces were advancing east and west of the lake toward the River Svir and Leningrad. Field Marshal von Leeb, the Army Group North commander, believed his troops and the Finns together could take the city in short order. But complications were developing: the Finns refused to commit themselves to going beyond the Svir or their pre-1940 boundary 40 km. (26 mi.) north of Leningrad, and Leeb lost the Fourth Panzer Army staff along with half of its tanks to the Moscow offensive. Moreover, Hitler ordered the city and its whole population to be obliterated by bombing, shelling, starvation, and disease and prohibited a surrender from being accepted, were one to be offered. Leeb then settled in for an indefinite stay on two lines, one around the Oranienbaum complex of forts that included Kronstadt, the other just close enough to Leningrad to bring the entire city within artillery range. On the south shore of Lake Ladoga, German fronts facing east and west 18 km. (11 mi.) apart formed what the Germans, from its narrow, elongated shape, called ‘the bottleneck’.

In mid-October, on Hitler's insistence, Leeb began with misgivings a wide, 250 km. (155 mi.) sweep around the lake to make a junction with the Finns on the Svir. On 8 November, his armour, over-extended and much depleted, took Tikhvin, about halfway to the Svir. As the railway centre controlling access to the Ladoga shore, Tikhvin briefly attained strategic prominence alongside Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. In December, certain of victory at Moscow, Stalin poured reinforcements northwards, and on 18 December, Hitler had to allow Leeb to withdraw his troops to the River Volkhov and the line of the ‘bottleneck’.

Winter came early that year, and was exceptionally cold. Leningrad, always entirely dependent on outside sources for food, coal, and oil, had suffered from breakdowns in the distribution system before, most recently during the 1939–40 war with Finland, but never on the scale it was about to experience. Although the city had been in acute danger after mid-July, nothing had been done about evacuating the people or industrial plants, even though removing the factories was standard practice everywhere else (see USSR, 2). The Hermitage Museum's art works had been shipped out in secret, and not all were removed in time. The Leningrad party chief, Andrei Zhdanov, who ostensibly ranked next to Stalin in the hierarchy, and Marshal Voroshilov, whom Stalin had appointed to defend the city, had been afraid to do anything that might be construed as defeatist. Consequently, along with Leningrad front (army group) and the Red Banner Fleet in the Baltic Sea, they had 2.5 million civilians to feed. In November, the civilian ration fell to the starvation level. Thereafter, those who managed to come by a few frozen potatoes, some glue or linseed oil, a share in a dead horse or stray dog, counted themselves fortunate.

Lake Ladoga afforded a ‘lifeline’ to the interior—by boat in summer, by a road across the ice in winter—but it could not reliably sustain even a minimum ration and could not mitigate the fuel shortage at all. Initially, freight had to be unloaded east of Tikhvin and trucked 280 km. (175 mi.). The German retreat from Tikhvin did not show a substantial result until February 1942, when the railway was rebuilt, and German bombing and shelling combined with the weather to keep the lake-crossing hazardous at all times.

Death, from hunger, cold, and reduced resistance to illnesses, none of which could be treated, was commonplace in Leningrad. It could also come suddenly and violently from the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival, or from German bombs and artillery shells. The supply trucks carried evacuees on their return trips, which, in unheated vehicles, must have been the last journeys for many. The dead, hurriedly buried in mass graves when spring came, were perhaps never counted. According to Soviet figures, 850,000 persons were evacuated between January and July 1942 and 7–800,000 remained in the city, which leaves 850–950,000 unaccounted for.

On 7 January 1942, Stalin, emboldened by the victory at Moscow, launched General Meretskov's Volkhov front on an offensive to demolish the 200 km. (120 mi.) German front facing east between Lake Ladoga and Lake Ilmen. After a ragged start, Meretskov managed to open a narrow gap north of Lake Ilmen, through which Vlasov's Second Shock Army made a 62 km. (37 mi.) advance to the north-west before being halted by the thaw in March. Although the change in seasons shifted the advantage to the Germans, Stalin refused to let the army withdraw and lost it in June, when the Germans closed the gap.

Hitler's first directive for the 1942 summer campaign called for complete isolation of Leningrad when an adequate force became available, and Army Group North planned an operation (NORTHERN LIGHTS) along with half a dozen similarly tentative ventures. In late July, Hitler revised the directive. Leningrad, he said, would have to be destroyed and the whole area between Lake Ladoga and the Baltic coast occupied before the end of September in order to release Finnish troops for an operation against the Murmansk railway. He would be sending, he added, five divisions, large-calibre siege artillery, and aircraft used recently to reduce the Sevastopol fortress. On 24 August, after the German army group commander, then Field Marshal Georg von Küchler, had repeatedly protested that the solidly-built city could neither be blasted nor burned to the ground, he turned NORTHERN LIGHTS over to Manstein, who had commanded at Sevastopol.

On 27 August, Meretskov directed a powerful strike against the eastern face of the ‘bottleneck’. When it was stopped, on 4 September, Hitler sent in Manstein and his five divisions for a counter-attack. While Meretskov, intent on getting going again, poured in troops, Manstein took up positions at the mouth of the bulge and, on 25 September, locked two Soviet armies and two corps in a 10 × 6 km. (6.2 × 3.7 mi.) pocket, and two weeks later, Hitler, concerned about the coming winter, cancelled NORTHERN LIGHTS.

While the lake was ice-free, surface vessels kept the lifeline in operation, and pipelines and electric cables were laid under the water. The German Navy brought in E-boats, the Italian Tenth Light Flotilla operated midget submarines, and the Luftwaffe stationed Siebel-ferries, catamaran-type anti-aircraft gun platforms, on the lake, but they arrived late and the summer ended before effective tactics were devised. During the summer, enraptured audiences in the UK and the USA listened for the first time to the sombre tones of Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, dubbed (though not by the composer) ‘the Leningrad’ (see also USSR, 10).

In October 1942, Leningrad front, which had thus far not possessed an offensive capability, began receiving enough reinforcements, including tanks and artillery, to raise its strength from three to four armies. On 12 January 1943, General Govorov, the front commander, and his colleague on the east, Meretskov, mounted simultaneous assaults (Operation SPARK) on both sides of the ‘bottleneck’. Their points met east of Shlisselburg on 19 January, and Moscow celebrated the breaking of the blockade with artillery salvos. The Germans recovered, however, and held the gain to a corridor 10 km. (6.2 mi.) wide. On 7 February, a train steamed into Leningrad after having passed through the corridor and crossed the Neva on track laid over the ice. The line, although it was exposed to artillery fire and had to be repaired daily, operated continuously thereafter. In the city, random bomb and shell explosions were an equally continuous reminder that liberation had not yet been achieved.

In October 1943, the German Army Group North planned an operation (BLUE). Its front had not changed since January, but the fighting elsewhere was draining away its divisions. On the other hand, as the only army group not embroiled in the Soviet summer offensive, it had time to build its share of an ‘East Wall’ which Hitler had belatedly projected. This ran on the line of the River Narva–Lake Peipus–Lake Pskov, 120 km. (72 mi.) east of Leningrad. BLUE was to be a phased retreat. In December and January, Hitler took more divisions from the group but refused to commit himself to BLUE; and on 14 January, when Meretskov and Govorov hit with at least 2:1 superiority in troops and 4:1 in tanks and aircraft, he ordered all existing positions to be held. The Leningrad environs thereupon became the scene of one of the war's hardest fought and, for the German soldiers, most pointless battles. Pushkin, where a tower on Observatory Hill had given artillery spotters a direct view into the city, fell on 24 January. Three days later, after the Leningrad–Moscow railway had been cleared, Stalin declared the blockade broken, and that night the city's anti-aircraft batteries fired victory salvos while the battle rumbled on the western horizon.

Earl Ziemke

Bibliography

Meretskov, K. A. , Serving the People (Moscow, 1971).
Pavlov, D. , Leningrad 1941 (Chicago, 1965).
Salisbury, H. A. , The 900 Days (New York, 1969).