Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (52 page)

Following the partial breakthrough of January 1943 the north saw little serious fighting for several months. An early spring thaw hindered troop movements, and save for another unsuccessful attempt to widen the land corridor to the ‘mainland’ in July, attention turned to the centre and south, where the Red Army’s great post-Stalingrad counter-offensives were gathering speed. Rostov-on-Don was liberated in February; Kharkov, following July’s great tank battles outside Kursk, at the end of August. On 3 September Stalin finally got his second front, when the Allies landed in mainland Italy.

Outside Leningrad, meanwhile, trench life fell into a quiet routine. South of the Kirov Works soldiers treated visitors to home-made pickled cabbage and salted cucumbers. On the Volkhov, Vasili Churkin slept a lot, collected wild raspberries, watched his general exercising with dumbbells in the mornings and wrote his diary at a desk equipped with a kerosene lamp, inkwell, box for nibs and glass filled with wild flowers. Elsewhere soldiers used dynamite to fish for bream and pike, distilled
samogon
, used tethered geese as sentries and whittled knives out of the Plexiglas windscreens of downed planes. On the other side of no-man’s-land Fritz Hockenjos passed the time birdwatching (the soldier who brought him news of the first lark earned a schnapps), taking photographs – favourite subjects churches (ruined) or trees (charred) silhouetted against dramatic sunsets – and making a pet of a stray cat, which he named Minka and allowed to sleep next to his head on his rolled-up coat. His men put up comic signs – ‘Berlin 1,400km, Leningrad 3km’;
Kein Trinkwasser
when their trenches flooded – and named the sheltered corners in which they played cards the
am Wilden Mann
and the
am
Alten Fritz
, after Swabian pubs. Separated by only a few hundred yards of wire-entangled mud, the two sides developed a sort of intimacy, ogling the girls that visited each other’s dugouts, shouting badinage – ‘You give us one of your Uzbeks, and we’ll give you one of our Romanians’ – and coming to unspoken agreements about when and where to shoot. ‘One night the Russians are all over no-man’s-land and we lie in front of the wire waiting to take prisoners’, Hockenjos observed, ‘and the next night we change roles.’
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He noted the tune of ‘Kalinka’ – picked up from Russian soldiers’ singing – in neat manuscript on the back of a range-finding form.

In September 1943, by which time the Wehrmacht was in general retreat along its whole central and southern front, Hitler’s generals began to argue for withdrawal from Leningrad. With armour and guns committed to defending Smolensk and Kiev, they no longer had any hope of reinstating a full blockade, and the retreat in the south left the northern armies dangerously exposed, especially since swelling numbers of partisans now regularly blew up railway lines and supply convoys that ventured off the major roads. (The head of the regional partisan organisation claimed, in a memo to Stalin of 25 September, that his five thousand-odd men had blown up 673 road and railway bridges, destroyed 7,992 freight wagons and flatbeds and burned 220 warehouses, 2,307 lorries and cars, 91 planes and 152 tanks. ‘The partisans let me through again’, Hockenjos wrote sarcastically in his diary on his return from a brief spell in hospital in Narva.
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) Soviet intelligence recorded the doubts spreading among the lower ranks: ‘We shouldn’t be bothering with these marshes’, one captured German soldier told his interrogators, ‘they should send us to defend Ukraine.’
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Another, a deserter from the German garrison at Novgorod, claimed that his officers spent all their time drinking and gambling, while the rank and file put their faith in ‘some destructive weapon that has so far been kept a great secret’. He himself had decided to swap sides before he got killed.
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A third explained that he had always got his news from the cook in his field kitchen, ‘but now he knows no more than we do. If we’re being kept out of the picture on events at the front it’s because things aren’t going so well. Russia is too big for us to defeat her.’
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Though unwilling to give the Finns (now putting out diplomatic feelers to America) an excuse to drop out of the war by abandoning Leningrad, Hitler allowed himself to be partially persuaded, giving von Küchler permission to build a new defensive ‘Panther Line’ behind the River Narva and lakes Peipus and Pskov. Fifty thousand labourers, mostly drafted from the local population, constructed 6,000 bunkers, laid 125 miles of barbed wire and dug 25 miles of trenches and tank traps. Army Group North’s lines were shortened by a quarter, the retreat including at least a quarter of a million Soviet civilians – some willing, others rounded up so as to prevent their recruitment into the advancing Red Army. (A peasant woman with whom Hockenjos was briefly quartered was busy packing – less, he thought, in compliment to the Germans, more because she feared the Bolsheviks even more.) The ring round Leningrad, however, remained as tight as ever. From Pushkin and the Pulkovo hills, the bombardment of the city continued with futile malice – the deaths caused (like those of two girl students at the Erisman in December) all the crueller since the end of the siege was now so obviously near.

At the end of September the Red Army recaptured Smolensk; on 6 November, having made a brilliant unobserved crossing of the Dnieper, it liberated Kiev, just in time for Revolution Day. In the north, General Govorov’s planning for the final liberation of Leningrad was now almost complete. The offensive was to be three-pronged – east from the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’, into which 52,000 troops had secretly been moved, towards Peterhof and Uritsk; south from the city itself towards Pushkin and Pulkovo; and west from the Volkhov towards Novgorod. Pleading by Zhdanov secured an extra 21,600 guns, 1,475 tanks, 1,500 of the multiple rocket launchers called ‘Katyushas’ and 1,500 aircraft. With nearly twice as many men as Army Group North (1.24 million compared to von Küchler’s 741,000), more than twice as many guns, and more than four times as many tanks and planes, Govorov now had overwhelming superiority of numbers, and controlled the air so thoroughly that Red Army lorries no longer bothered to shade their headlights at night.

The attack itself began on the morning of 14 January 1944, with a massive bombardment from Oranienbaum. In thick fog, 104,000 shells were fired in an hour and five minutes. ‘We can forget about my leave’, a German officer wrote to his wife that evening. ‘Here a battle is boiling which outdoes everything we’ve seen up to now. The Russians are advancing on three sides. We’re living through hell. I can’t describe it. If I survive, I’ll tell you about it when we see each other. At the moment all I can say is one thing – wish me luck.’
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The bombardment was followed the next morning by an hour-and-forty-minute, 220,000-shell onslaught on Pulkovo. Barrage and counter-barrage stunned Leningraders, shivering plaster from ceilings, setting light fittings swaying and shaking one of the workshops at Chekrizov’s shipyard to the ground. Huddled in shelters and stairwells, they prayed that this really was the end. ‘I sat on the edge of Mama’s bed’, wrote Olga Fridenberg on the 17th:

Thunderous shelling. I looked at the clock to check the intervals [between hits]. Another crash, but this time no explosion – a dud must have hit a neighbouring building. Yet another crash, and the world reeled. We were hit. I looked up to see all the windowpanes fly out at once. And in flew the freezing January air.

Superhuman powers were born within me. I seized a winter coat, wrapped Mama up in it, and dragged her heavy bed out into the corridor, then into my own room. One of my windows was miraculously intact, and I stuffed the other with rags.
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Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva spent the whole of the 18th and 19th in her bathroom, braced against the whistling and crashing outdoors. ‘I have to admit that the shelling throws my thoughts completely off track. In my head everything is twisted into a tight knot. Nobody can get used to this. Uncontrollable shaking overtakes me; my heart contracts. Every second you expect the shell that will end your life.’ That evening’s news bulletin made her weep for joy: Peterhof, Krasnoye Selo, Ropsha and eighty villages along the Volkhov had been freed.

Vera Inber, trying as usual to work in her room at the Erisman (‘Dear God, what a din!’), watched Red Cross buses driving back and forth from the railway stations, collecting wounded soldiers. How many, she wondered, were there in all the city hospitals put together? Surely, surely, their sacrifice could not be in vain? On the Sunday morning of 22 January – the day after Mga was liberated and von Küchler flew to the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ to demand permission to abandon Pushkin – she got a telephone call from the Writers’ Union telling her to be ready in an hour for a press tour of newly liberated Peterhof. The drive there took her through the recent battlefields. To the sides of the road, banks of rubble marked what had been villages; the fields, churned by artillery fire, were as brown as if new-ploughed. Sappers worked along a ditch with their dogs, and defused shells lay, finned and silvery, in rows on the verges, like displays of newly caught fish. Peterhof town itself was unrecognisable, a ‘strange, white, lunar’ landscape punctuated by a few fantastically shaped fragments of brick wall and a single ruined church. Rastrelli’s great baroque palace had been completely gutted by fire – it would ‘beyond human effort’, Inber immediately assumed, to restore it. On the drive home in the dark, by the light of a burning house, she saw a column of POWs. Dirty and unshaven, they were the first Germans she had seen for the whole of the war.

At eight o’clock on the evening of 27 January 1944 – four days after the last German shell fell on Leningrad – Inber made it from a Party meeting to the old riverside parade ground known as the Field of Mars just in time for the official victory salute. Parks, bridges and embankments were packed with people, mixed up with tanks and military motorbikes. From the dockyards in the west to the Smolniy in the east 324 guns fired twenty-four salvoes, flames shooting from their muzzles ‘like hellfire in old pictures’. Flares arched above the Neva, their crimson, green, blue and white reflected on the ice and on a sea of upturned faces. A searchlight picked out the gilded angel on top of the Peter and Paul spire, the beam so sharp that it seemed solid, a bridge up which one could walk to heaven. ‘The greatest event in the life of Leningrad’, Inber wrote in her diary later that night. ‘Complete liberation from the Blockade. And here, though I’m a professional writer, words fail me. I simply state that Leningrad is free.’
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Part 5

Aftermath

Sketch for a proposed memorial to the liberation of Leningrad (Aleksandr Vasilyev, February 1943)

I don’t often visit memory

And it always surprises me.

When I descend with a lamp to the cellar,

It seems to me that a landslide

Rumbles again on the narrow stairs.

The lamp smokes, I can’t turn back

And I know that I am advancing on the enemy.

Anna Akhmatova, 1940

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Coming Home

The end, like the end of all great conflicts, left a vast silence – the silence of hushed sirens and guns, of the never-to-return missing and dead, and in Leningrad’s case, of grief and horror unexpressed, of facts falsified or left unsaid. It also meant new beginnings – militarily, of the great Soviet push to Berlin; privately, of facing up to loss and rebuilding lives; publicly, of repopulating and repairing an emptied and damaged city; politically, of new rounds of repression.

The end of the siege was not the end of the fighting. It took the Red Army only three weeks to push von Küchler’s Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies back to the Estonian border, but until July 1944 to break the Panther Line and to expel them from the border citadel of Narva, dogged German resistance exacting a massive military death toll to book-end that of the opening months of the war. One of the fallen was Vasili Churkin’s seventeen-year-old son Tolya. In his free time, Churkin searched for his corpse, until he realised that ‘if I wanted to turn over every dead body on this little piece of ground it would take months and months. They were everywhere – along both sides of the roads, in the woods, in clearings. The Narva bridgehead was swallowing division after division.’
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In the six months from the start of Leningrad’s liberation offensive, more than 150,000 Soviet troops were killed, captured or went missing – often in the same sort of clumsy infantry charges that had cost so many lives two years earlier.
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Rejoining his men at Gatchina after Christmas home leave, Hockenjos was told ‘over and over how they had shot the Russians to bits and sent them packing – the Leningrad Guards, who attacked in large, unmissable groups, waving red flags’. Was it ‘Russian stubbornness’, he wondered, that made ‘fifty men come out of the forest in the middle of the day and march towards us through the snow across an open field’, or was it ‘the ice-cold devilry of some Commissar, sitting at the edge of the trees and sending out a company just so as to test our defences? Either way, we picked them all off easily with rifles, and didn’t even have to bother with our guns.’
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