members of the city and provincial committees of the Party, by secretaries of the regional committees, etc. Several defence lines were built—one, from the mouth of the Luga to Chudovo, Gatchina, Uritsk, Pulkovo and then along the Neva; another, a line of
Leningrad's "outer defences", from Peterhof to Gatchina, Pulkovo, Kolpino and Koltushski; and then several lines in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, including one in the northern suburbs, facing the Finns.
By the end of July and the beginning of August nearly a million people were engaged in the building of defences:
People of the most different trades and professions—workers, employees,
schoolchildren, housewives, scientists, teachers, artists, actors, students, etc.—
worked with their picks and shovels. From morning till night they went on, often
under enemy fire.
[ Ibid., p. 69.]
Much of the digging done in these conditions, by people not used to this kind of work, was inevitably hasty and amateurish; many of the trenches dug were not deep enough,
and the minefields and barbed-wire defences were often laid and built in a haphazard manner. Nevertheless, when one considers that the Germans had reached the Luga line, 125 miles south of Leningrad, within three weeks of the Invasion, and that it took them over six weeks after that to reach the outskirts of Leningrad, it is clear that this building of defence lines played an important role in saving Leningrad. Altogether, the people of Leningrad succeeded in digging 340 miles of anti-tank ditches, 15,875 miles of open
trenches, and erecting 400 miles of barbed-wire defences, 190 miles of forest obstacles (felled trees, etc.), and 5,000 wooden or concrete firing points, [ Ognevyie tochki (firing points) included not only proper pillboxes, but even the most rudimentary gun and
machine-gun emplacements.] not counting the various defences built inside Leningrad
itself.
But, except for one successful Russian counter-attack in the Soltsy area at the southern end of the "Luga Line", near Lake Ilmen, on July 14-18, the most the Russians could do was to hold the various defence lines between the Luga River and Leningrad as long as possible.
The state of mind of these hundreds of thousands of people who were digging trenches and building fortifications, day after day, can well be guessed; the spirit of self-sacrifice was there, sure enough, but mixed with a great deal of bitterness. General Fedyuninsky tells how, on one occasion, some miles outside Leningrad, he saw a large group of young and elderly women digging like mad: "You are digging well, girls," he remarked. "Yes,"
said an elderly woman, "we are digging well, but you fellows are fighting badly."
[Fedyuninsky, op. cit., p. 68.]
This was perhaps unfair; the soldiers were doing what they could; but there was
everywhere a desperate shortage of both reserves and heavy equipment. Everywhere,
except along part of the Luga Line, the Germans had great superiority. Thus, Major-
General Nikishov, Chief of Staff of the Northern (i.e. Finnish) Front, wrote in August in a dispatch to Marshal Shaposhnikov:
The difficulties in the present situation arise from the fact that neither divisional commanders, not army commanders nor the commander of the Army Group, have
any reserves at all. Even the smallest enemy breakthrough has to be stopped up with improvised sub-units drawn from other parts of the Front.
Moreover, many of the opolcheniye troops had no experience at all; the kind of hardships to which they were subjected may be gauged from the example of the newly-formed 1st
opolcheniye division which, after a forced thirty-seven miles march, during which they were constantly attacked by German aircraft, was promptly thrown into battle against German motorised and panzer troops:
This first battle which the men had ever fought proved a terrible ordeal both to
them and their officers. Not only were they totally inexperienced, but they had no weapons with which to fight the enemy tanks, and when there were large-scale
armoured attacks, they inevitably retreated.
[Karasev, op. cit., p. 99.]
The strong Russian stand along a large part of the Luga Line since the middle of July nevertheless forced the Germans to regroup their forces and it was not till August 8 that the "final" offensive against Leningrad began. The defenders of the Luga Line were outflanked both in the west and in the east, and by August 21, they found themselves at the tip of a salient, thirteen miles wide and nearly 130 miles deep, with the Germans crashing ahead towards the Gulf of Finland south-west of Leningrad and towards Lake
Ladoga south-east of the city. For fear of being encircled, they had to pull out—which they did in chaotic conditions. On August 21 the Germans captured Chudovo, thus
cutting the main Leningrad-Moscow railway, and, by the 30th, after heavy fighting, they captured Mga, and cut Leningrad's last railway link with the rest of the country. Having concentrated an enormous number of tanks and planes both south-west and south-east of Leningrad, the Germans now confidently expected to take the city by storm. Despite
desperate Russian resistance, the German forces broke through to the south bank of Lake Ladoga. They captured a large part of the left bank of the Neva, including Schlüsselburg, but failed to cross the river. Leningrad was now isolated from the rest of the country, except for highly precarious communications across Lake Ladoga. South and south-west of the city the position of the Russians was equally desperate, with the Germans having broken through to the Gulf of Finland only a few miles south-west of the city and
attacking heavily in the Kolpino and Pulkovo areas some fifteen miles south of
Leningrad. The Russians, however, maintained a large bridgehead at Oranienbaum,
opposite Kronstadt, and to the west of the point at which the Germans had reached the Gulf. In the north, on September 4, the Finns occupied the former frontier station of Beloostrov, twenty miles north of Leningrad, but were thrown out on the following day.
As early as August 20, at the meeting of the Leningrad Party aktiv, Voroshilov and Zhdanov admitted the extreme seriousness of the situation. Zhdanov said that the whole population, and particularly the young, must be given a rudimentary training in shooting, grenade-throwing and street-fighting.
Either the working-class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves, and the best among them exterminated, or we shall turn Leningrad into the Fascists' grave.. .
[ D. N. Pavlov, Leningrad v blokade (Leningrad During the Blockade) (Moscow, 1961), pp. 14-15.]
On the following day the famous Appeal to the people of Leningrad, signed by
Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Popkov, chairman of the Leningrad Soviet, was published:
Let us, like one man [it concluded] rise to the defence of our city, of our homes and families, our freedom and honour. Let us do our sacred duty as Soviet patriots in our relentless struggle against a hated and ruthless enemy, let us be vigilant and merciless in dealing with cowards, panic-mongers and deserters, let us establish the strictest revolutionary discipline in our city. Armed with such iron discipline and Bolshevik organisation, let us meet the enemy and throw him back.
During those days there was no certainty at all that the Germans would not break into Leningrad. As Pavlov later wrote:
Everything had been prepared for destroying the enemy forces inside the city.
Factories, bridges and public buildings were mined, and their wreckage would have fallen on the enemies' heads and stopped their tanks. The civilian population, not to mention the soldiers and sailors of the Baltic Fleet, were prepared for street
fighting. The idea of fighting for every house was not an act of self-sacrifice, but aimed at destroying the enemy. Later, the experience of Stalingrad was to show that such warfare could succeed.. .
[ Pavlov, op. cit., p. 19.]
This sounds rather like a piece of bravado; for the problem of feeding and supplying Leningrad, with its nearly three million population, w
ould, in such conditions, have been infinitely more complicated than at Stalingrad. Nevertheless, it is certain, as I was told in Leningrad in 1943, that the possibility of gradually abandoning the southern (and main) part of the city, and of clinging on to the "Petrograd Side" and the Vassili Island on the right bank of the Neva was not entirely ruled out during those desperate days.
The shelling of Leningrad began on September 4, and on September 8, 9 and 10 the city was subjected to some particularly fierce air-raids. That of September 8 caused 178 fires, including that of the famous Badayev food stores—about the destruction of which such exaggerated stories were told, especially after the fearful famine had started.
Firewatching was better organised on September 9, and all but a few incendiaries were rapidly put out. The anti-aircraft guns brought down five planes, but the slow Soviet Chaika fighters were almost helpless against the Messerschmidts; it was then that, in desperation, several Russian pilots rammed the German planes.
In these first major raids, the Germans also dropped many delayed-action bombs and
land-mines, and, not being used to handling these, many volunteers (and there were
volunteers for everything in Leningrad) lost their lives.
There are numerous stories of desperate fighting during those days at Pulkovo, Kolpino and Uritsk—the latter only two or three miles from the Kirov Works, in the south-west of Leningrad; but except for a footnote in the official History saying that Zhukov was in command of the defence of Leningrad from September 11 till the middle of October,
post-war accounts are silent about the changes that took place in the High Command. The dramatic story I heard from several people in Leningrad in 1943 was that about
September 10, when there was practically complete chaos at the front, Voroshilov,
believing that everything was lost, went into the front line, in the hope of getting killed by the Germans. But on September 11 Stalin dispatched Zhukov to Leningrad, and it was
Zhukov who fully reorganised the defence of the city within three days; in a press
interview I attended in Berlin in June 1945, Zhukov proudly referred to this fact, though without going into any details, and Vyshinsky said "Yes, it was Zhukov who saved Leningrad." It was, undoubtedly, during the short Zhukov reign—after which he was placed in charge of the defence of Moscow—that the front round Leningrad became
stabilised.
Having failed to take Leningrad by storm, the German High Command (not
unreasonably) supposed that the city would, before long, be starved into surrender. But Hitler, characteristically, ordered that no capitulation be accepted and that the city be
"wiped off the face of the earth", as Leningrad would present a danger of epidemics and would, moreover, be mined, and so constitute a double threat to any soldiers entering it.
This order (and, incidentally, the German failure to take Leningrad) was to be explained by Jodl at Nuremberg:
Field-Marshal von Leeb, the Supreme Commander of Army Group North at
Leningrad ... pointed out that it would be absolutely impossible for him to keep
these millions of Leningrad people fed and supplied, if they were to fall into his hands, since the supply situation of the Army Group was catastrophic at the time.
That was the first cause. But shortly before, Kiev had been abandoned by the
Russian armies, and hardly had we occupied the city than one tremendous explosion after another occurred. The major part of the inner city was burned down, 50,000
people were made homeless. German soldiers ... suffered considerable losses,
because large amounts of explosives went up into the air... The purpose of the order was exclusively that of protecting German troops against such catastrophes; for
entire staffs had been blown into the air in Kharkov and Kiev.
[ Trial of German Major War Criminals, vol. 15 (London 1947), pp. 306-7. (To be referred to in future as TGMWC.)]
An order from the Führer's headquarters, dated October 7, 1941 and signed by Jodl,
reiterated the Führer's order not to accept capitulation "at either Leningrad or, later, Moscow". Refugees from Leningrad, says the order, must be driven back by fire if they approach the German lines, but any flight to the east by "isolated individuals", through small gaps in the blockade was to be welcomed, since this could only add to the chaos in eastern Russia. This order also said that Leningrad should be razed to the ground by air bombing and artillery fire.
The date of this document is significant: by the beginning of October, the Germans had given up hope of capturing Leningrad by storm. Leningrad, and most of the Leningrad
isthmus continued to remain in Russian hands, and was tying down an army estimated by the Russians at 300,000 men. Although there was no guarantee that the Germans might
not attempt another all-out attack on Leningrad, the desperate preparations made at the end of August and the beginning of September for defending every house and for
destroying any German paratrooper landing in the large open squares of Leningrad lost their immediate urgency; nevertheless the building of firing points and pillboxes inside practically every house (especially corner buildings) continued right on to December; 10,000 soldiers and 75,000 civilians were engaged in this work.
[Karasev, op. cit., p. 123.]
17,000 firing points were set up inside houses and over 4,000 pillboxes were built inside Leningrad, as well as fifteen miles of barricades. Mighty batteries of shore, naval and army artillery were being installed right round Leningrad, and the Baltic Fleet was
invaluable. Even the gun from the cruiser Aurora which had given the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, was now stationed on the Pulkovo heights, south of Leningrad. But, by a strange irony, though Leningrad was in grave danger, Moscow in October was in even greater danger, and, despite the blockade, 1,000 guns and
considerable quantities of ammunition and other equipment were flown from Leningrad
to Moscow!
[ Karasev, op. cit., p. 133.]
A grim thought, especially in view of the desperate shortage of ammunition on the
Leningrad Front later in the winter, when the hunger blockade had enormously reduced the output of ammunition in Leningrad itself.
The immediate danger of a German occupation of Leningrad had been averted by the
middle of September; but it was only too clear that, cut off from the "mainland", except for the Lake Ladoga route, the only real hope of keeping the city supplied with food, raw materials and fuel—as well as armaments and ammunition that could not be made on the spot—lay in the breach of the land blockade. In September the Russians made a desperate effort to drive the Germans out of the Mga-Siniavino salient, running to the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and so to clear the Leningrad-Vologda railway line. But although the Russians succeeded in establishing a small bridgehead on the south bank of the Neva, west of Schlüsselburg, and even in holding it, right through the winter, at terrible cost in lives, the Germans had fortified the Mga-Siniavino area so strongly that no progress could be made, and the German defences here were not to be broken up until February
1943.
[The story of this futile attempt to capture the Mga salient, which ended with the last defenders of the Neva bridgehead being wiped out on April 29, 1942, was one of the
most tragic episodes of Leningrad's attempt to loosen the German stranglehold.]
Chapter III THREE MILLION TRAPPED
So, by the beginning of September, Leningrad was completely isolated by land from the Russian "mainland", and nearly three million people had been trapped there. The only remaining communications were worse than precarious. In 1941 Russia was desperately
short of planes, and, with the Germans enjoying complete air control in the Leningrad area, any Russian plane there was in grave danger of being shot down, even at night.
Apart from that, Lake Ladoga, without any proper harbours, was
the only route by which Leningrad could communicate with the "mainland".
How was it possible that so many people should have remained in Leningrad, even
though the dire threat of a German occupation had hung over the city ever since the
middle of July? And what hope was there of feeding this enormous population in case
Leningrad was encircled?
It was clear, even during the war, that there had been some very serious miscalculations somewhere; but the factual material published in the last few years shows that this tragic situation was created by a whole series of specific mistakes. There had been lack of foresight on the part of the authorities who, primarily concerned with slowing down the German advance, had given almost no thought at all to the question of food supplies
inside the city; also, for several crucial weeks, when the Germans seemed to have been stopped on the Luga Line, there had been an excess of optimistic propaganda; this was responsible for much wishful thinking among the people of Leningrad, who simply did
not visualise the city being either occupied or blockaded.
This lack of foresight is illustrated by a number of striking facts. Thus, during the German blitzkrieg advance through the Baltic Republics and right into the Leningrad province in June and July, many thousands of tons of grain were evacuated by rail from areas about to be overrun by the Germans, but to the east, and not to Leningrad. At the same time, the evacuation of industrial plants from Leningrad continued to be delayed.
The very slow progress of the evacuation in July and August was due to wishful thinking: people did not believe that the Germans would come anywhere near the city. It is true that, owing to the danger of air-raids, children began to be evacuated in June and early July, but oddly enough to places like Gatchina and Luga, on the Germans' direct road to Leningrad. Soon afterwards they had to be hurriedly brought back to Leningrad, and
some—but not all—were then evacuated to the east, where they remained in perfect
safety until the end of the war.
Russia at war Page 36
