The 900 Days (16 page)

There on the open meadows had been set up pavilions, bazaars, sideshows and entertainments. There were orchestras for dancing and buffets well supplied with beer and vodka.

During the night, of course, most of the garrison at Kronstadt had heard some shooting. There were rumors about. But it was always like that with a garrison: training, exercises, threats and rumors of war.

The bands were playing, the Field of Bulls was bright with girls in their holiday dresses and sailors in their Sunday whites. Suddenly over the crowd came a hush. A voice on the radio loudspeaker was saying: “
Vnimaniye
. . .
Vnimaniye
. . . Attention . . .”

Mariya Petrova was an actress. She had pondered before giving up the stage for the new and untried field of radio. Now, after ten years in radio, she was happy in her decision. She felt that her audience was far greater than it would have been on the stage. Her specialty was reading aloud fairy tales, verses and stories, both for children and grownups. She had read the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Samuil Mar-shak, Kornei Chukovsky, Lev Kvitko and Gaidar. She also read childhood tales by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Gorky.

She had looked forward to this Sunday. Early in the morning she was to read a chapter from a new story by Lev Kassil called “The Great Adversaries.” Then she and some friends from Radio Leningrad were going to the country. Soon her vacation would start and she would join her little daughter, Larisa, at the dacha in Rozhdestveno.

She gave her broadcast, met her friends, and they started out to the country. As they drove through the bright June day, they sang and joked about where to spread their picnic lunch in the birch forest.

They noticed that there seemed to be many more cars than usual on the highway, and all headed back toward Leningrad. There was something alarming, something strange, about it. No other cars were leaving the city. Finally, a truck driver leaned from his cab and shouted: “Haven’t you heard the radio?”

Vissarion Sayanov answered the doorbell on Sunday morning in time to take his mail from the hands of the red-cheeked postgirl. He was pleased at what he found, the kind of mail an author enjoys—a letter from a man who had been an aviator in the Russian Air Force in World War I.

The retired aviator lived now in a little town in northern Russia. He enclosed a photograph album of pictures from World War I. One showed a Russian village on which a German plane had dropped four bombs in 1915, one of the earliest air attacks of the war. The writer suggested that Sayanov might use the pictures if he were to republish his novel about the war in the air during 1914–17.

There was something even more interesting in Sayanov’s mail—proof sheets from the magazine
Zvezda
of his poem about General Kulnev, who died leading the Russian rear guard against Napoleon.

Sayanov glanced down the sheets. His eye caught a passage:

Sayanov spread out the sheets and patiently began to read line by line, checking the proof against his manuscript. Engaged in this pleasant work he lost all sense of time. The telephone rang and he picked it up, his eyes still on the manuscript.

“You haven’t heard anything yet?” a friend asked breathlessly.

“About what?” he said.

“About the war . . .”

Sayanov turned on the radio. A military march was playing. He threw open the window. The sky was cloudless. Along the wide Leningrad boulevards strolled men in their pressed Sunday suits, girls in summer dresses, youngsters in blue sport shirts, swinging tennis rackets as they hurried to the courts. On the Neva he could see launches cutting through the water, white sailboats bending to the wind and seagulls swirling around the bridges.

Sayanov thought of St. Petersburg as it had been in imperial days, of Petrograd as it became during the war against the Kaiser, and of the Leningrad it now was.

Like all Leningraders, he loved his city. Each time a Leningrader returned from an absence it was with the excitement of a young lover again meeting his love. How difficult to be separated from it for long!

Generation after generation the city had been celebrated by its poets. Never had they lacked passion. Innokenti Annensky called the city “Peter’s cursed error.” Pushkin wrote in awe and terror of the giant Peter, of his will, of his iron purpose in building the great capital in the marshy wastes of the Neva estuary, heedless of life, heedless of cost, heedless of flood, of storm, of cold, of sickness, of suffering and of death. To Dostoyevsky it was a double-imaged city, a city of fog and of abyss . . . the bronze horseman in the marsh . . . the edge of Russia. It was Russia and it was not Russia. It was the place at which Russia faded into infinity, the boundless sea, the invisible barrier between the end of Russia and the beginning of Europe.

All this and more passed through Sayanov’s mind as he looked out the window and across the golden spires, the needle point of the Admiralty, the upward-thrusting blade of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the dome of St. Isaac’s, the terrible gold and tatterdemalion enamel of the Church of the Blood, the cathedral erected at the spot along the Catherine Canal where Alexander II lay shattered, his body broken and bleeding from the assassin’s bombs.

And now, as so often in the past, as in 1919 when workers battalions marched out to stem the German tide, as in earlier times the Russians marched and countermarched in endless military minuet against the Poles, against the Lithuanians, against the Baltic knights, the Swedes and all the rest, the terrible sound of war was clamoring down the broad avenues.

Sayanov heard a band strike up a military march, and from the distance came the shout of a command and the sound of cheering. Somewhere closer a woman sobbed, low and continuously. Russia was at war.

There was a warm breeze blowing off the Gulf of Finland when Aleksei Lebedev, a young poet (he was also a junior officer in the navy), and his wife, Vera, finished their late breakfast at a friend’s cottage. The water was cold, but Aleksei went for a dip nonetheless. It was bracing after the drinking, dancing, toasts and laughter of the evening. Aleksei had recited poetry. He was a solidly built young man with a face some found sullen or even gloomy, but he had been gay and relaxed at the party. Later he and Vera had strolled in the luminous Leningrad night. They talked of the future, of their plans, of their love. He read to her some verses:

As he spoke, the air seemed unearthly still. The birches, their trunks pale and ghostly, their leaves spring-green, did not quiver. A light fog crept over the mirrored waters of the Gulf of Finland.

Now in the morning sunlight the couple walked into the forest and found a quiet glade. They stretched on the new grass. Aleksei had a volume of Jack London in his pocket. He drew it out and asked Vera to read, resting his head against her knee. Presently, she saw that he had drowsed off. She put down the book and, careful not to disturb him, moved so that she could watch him. She rested there, gazing at the sleeping poet for a long time. She had almost drowsed off herself when a young girl she had never seen before ran into the glade.

“Haven’t you heard the radio?” the girl asked. “It’s war!”

War. Vera’s heart trembled. She softly touched Aleksei with her hand and said very quietly, “War, Alex, war.”

He was wide-awake instantly.

“Well, it’s begun,” he said, clenching his teeth. “And we’ll fight them.”

Not far distant—at the resort villa owned by
Leningradskaya Pravda
at Fox’s Bridge—Vsevolod Kochetov, a brash cub reporter, and some of his seniors were playing volleyball on the court to the rear of the house, surrounded by pines. It was noon—almost time for lunch—when someone brought the word: War!

These were newspapermen. They didn’t stop to ponder implications or complications. They had only one thought: to get back to Leningrad, to get to the paper as fast as possible, to cover the story.

Within minutes a dozen or more of them were running toward the highway, the Leningrad-Vyborg road. They halted a passing ton-and-a-half truck and ordered the nonprotesting chauffeur to take them to Leningrad, to No. 57 Fontanka Street.

The men stood in the back of the truck. There was no conversation. Each was lost in his own thoughts. Near Novaya Derevnya where the road turns off to the Serafimov Cemetery the truck met a funeral procession—a white hearse, a coffin covered with red cotton, white horses with black funeral draperies. Behind the coffin walked the weeping relatives, and behind them a group of fifty friends. A band played Chopin, rather raggedly. The procession brought a somber hush over the newspapermen—except for one cynic who, motioning toward the coffin, said from the side of his mouth, “Reinsurer!”

It was the kind of a remark which sounded vaguely funny, vaguely gauche in Russia, where the perpetual preoccupation of bureaucrats was to “reinsure” themselves against any possible eventuality.

The truck rumbled on, and by late afternoon the newsmen were in their office. The editor and his chief assistant were waiting. None of them knew any more than the radio had reported. But all were ready to get to their task—the publication of a special edition of the
Leningradskaya Pravda
, the first “extra” that had ever been issued.

¹
The Germans had sown mines in the Leningrad waters during the night of June 21–22. The
Ruhno
was one of the first victims. The Merchant Fleet at this hour had still issued no warning to pilots or captains of possible German action.

²
A “practice” Civil Defense exercise was called by the Leningrad Antiaircraft Defense Command for 10
A.M.
, Sunday morning. The drill was ordered by Colonel Ye. S. Lagut-kin of the Leningrad Antiaircraft Command because he could get no orders from the Chief Antiaircraft Command in Moscow, a branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, one of the police ministries directed by Lavrenti P. Beria. Lagutkin was told to act on his own discretion. In order to get the AA units to their posts in the event of German attack he ordered the “practice” alert.
(Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni
, p. 11.)

THERE WERE PRACTICALLY NO QUESTIONS LEFT FOR decision when Adolf Hitler summoned his High Command to meet on June 14 in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin for a final preview of Operation Barbarossa. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch had returned the day before from another inspection of the forces in East Prussia, his second within a month. He was accompanied by General Adolf Heusinger. Von Brauchitsch reported that the troops gave a “pleasing impression.” Staff work generally was very good. Chief of Staff Colonel General Franz Haider had also been in the East and found the armies in excellent spirits. Their preparations, he noted, would be completed by June 22.

Hitler shared the general optimism. He addressed the commanders for an hour and a half with his customary fervor, dwelling at length on the reasons why it was necessary that Russia be destroyed.

The text of Hitler’s remarks has not been preserved, but several listeners recorded their impressions. Haider noted in his diary:

“After luncheon the Führer delivers a lengthy political address in which he explains the reasons for his intention to attack Russia and evolves his calculation that Russia’s collapse would induce England to give in.”

General Heinz Guderian, the Panzer general and one of the forty-five general officers present, recalling Hitler’s address, said: “He could not defeat England. In order to bring the war to a close he must win complete victory on the continent. Germany’s position on the mainland would be unassailable when Russia had been defeated.

“The detailed presentation of the reasons that led him to fight a preventive war against the Russians was unconvincing.”

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein described Hitler’s strategic aims as based primarily on political and economic considerations.

“These were,” he noted, “(a) the capture of Leningrad (a city he regarded as the cradle of Bolshevism), by which he proposed to join up with the Finns and dominate the Baltic; and (b) the possession of the raw-material regions of the Ukraine, the industrial centers of the Donets and later the Caucasus oil fields.”

After the meeting General Erich Hoppner, commander of the 4th Panzer Group which was to lead the armored assault on Leningrad, told a friend, “Now I am really convinced that the war against Russia is necessary.”

No one at the staff conference seems to have found irony in the fact that the final confirmation of plans for the war was given on the precise day that the Soviet (but not the German) press published the Kremlin’s agonizingly detailed Tass denial that there was any basis for rumors of a Soviet-German war.

Not everything went entirely smoothly, however. One argument arose. At what hour should the German offensive begin? Von Brauchitsch, having just returned from talks with his field commanders, argued that the attack should coincide with sunrise, which on June 22 in East Prussia would be at 3:05
A.M.
In accordance with von Brauchitsch’s view the decision was taken to start operations at 3
A.M.
instead of 3:30 or possibly 4
A.M.

The matter did not end there, however. Three
A.M.
on the Baltic shores of East Prussia would be virtually full daylight. Not so, farther south— there at 3
A.M.
it would still be dark.

The German attack forces had been divided into three groups: Army Group Nord, Army Group Center and Army Group Siid. The commanders of the Center and South wanted a later H-hour, 4
A.M.
at the earliest. On June 20 the argument was still going on. Like so many military questions it was finally resolved by compromise. The jump-off was fixed for 3:30
A.M.

The general objective of Operation Barbarossa, as outlined in Hitler’s draft of December 18, 1940, was to occupy Russia up to a line drawn from Archangel to the Volga, to crush it as a military power, and to turn Soviet territorial, agricultural and raw-materials resources to the use of the German war machine.

The ultimate target was Moscow, but the plan did not call for direct frontal assault on the Soviet capital. Barbarossa provided that Moscow would be attacked only after the fall of Leningrad.

Leningrad had a peculiar fascination for Hitler. In part this arose out of his view that the city was the mainspring and incubator of the ideology against which he was leading the holy Nazi crusade. Another source of his feeling was the ancient Teutonic mystique concerning the Baltic. For centuries the Germans had regarded the Baltic as
their
sea. Once they had controlled it through the militancy of the Teutonic knights and the cunning of the Hanseatic League. Hitler saw Leningrad not only as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism but as St. Petersburg, the fortress capital which Peter I built as the foundation for Russian power in the Baltic.

Thus, in the original draft of Barbarossa, and in the variants of German military plans which would develop during the fateful summer of 1941, Leningrad and the Baltic became for Hitler an
idée fixe
, a preoccupation which never left him.

Leningrad
must
be captured; the Baltic littoral
must
be secured; Soviet naval power
must
be destroyed; Kronstadt
must
be leveled. Then—and only then—would Hitler permit the assault on Moscow.

Thus Hitler stipulated on the eve of the war that the first German objective was to drive straight across from East Prussia, liquidating the Soviet positions along the Baltic, eliminating the bases of the Baltic Fleet, annihilating the remnants of Soviet naval power and capturing Kronstadt and Leningrad.

Then, having linked arms with the Finns, the Nazi armies would sweep down from the north while the main German forces closed in from the west. Moscow would fall in a gigantic pincers movement.

The army group assigned to capture Leningrad, Army Group Nord, was commanded by Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb, the senior German commander who had led the successful assault on the Maginot Line. Von Leeb, then sixty-five represented the Prussian old guard. He was no favorite of Hitler’s and, indeed, was cool to the Nazis. But he had proved an able commander in the takeover of the Sudetenland, and he won promotion to Field Marshal and the Knight’s Cross for his Maginot achievement.

Von Leeb was given two armies, the Sixteenth commanded by Colonel General Ernst Busch, and the Eighteenth, commanded by Colonel General Georg von Kiichler. In addition, he had the 4th Armored Group led by General Hoppner and the First Air Fleet, commanded by Colonel General Keller. Von Leeb had at his disposal probably 29 divisions, including 3 armored and 3 motorized divisions, numbering more than 500,000 men.
¹
These forces mustered more than 12,000 heavy weapons, 1,500 tanks and about 1,070 planes. Von Leeb commanded roughly 30 percent of the forces which Hitler committed to Operation Barbarossa.

According to the plan of operations, von Leeb was expected to capture Leningrad within four weeks, that is, by July 21.

Von Leeb’s attack was designed as a double-pronged offensive. The Eighteenth Army had been concentrated close to the Baltic coast, with its main strength packed into a sixty-mile front from Memel, on the Baltic, to Tilsit on the south. It was to strike along the Tilsit-Riga highway, forcing the western Dvina at Plavinas, southeast of Riga, and then head dagger-straight northeast to Pskov and Ostrov on the distant southwest approaches to Leningrad. This thrust would cut communications between the Baltic states and the main Russian fronts.

At the same time the Sixteenth Army, just to the south, was positioned east of Insterburg where von Leeb set up his headquarters. Its lines spread south almost to the Neman River. Its task was to smash east on a broad front to Kaunas, then drive northeast to the western Dvina and secure a crossing at Dvinsk (Daugavpils).

Once these maneuvers were carried out, von Leeb would have flanked the whole center of the Russian defense system. He would be within striking distance of enveloping Leningrad from the south, the southwest and the west.

The hammer of von Leeb’s drive was provided by the 4th Panzer Group* one of the finest armored forces in the Wehrmacht, commanded by Hopp-ner. The 4th Panzer was a powerful striking group. It was composed of two corps. One was the 56th, commanded by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, and including the 8th Panzer Division, the 3rd Motorized Division and the 290th Infantry. The second was the 41st Panzer Corps, commanded by General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, comprising the 1st and 6th Panzer divisions, the 36th Motorized Division and the 209th Infantry. The SS Death’s Head Division was to follow the Panzers in a mopping-up operation.

The 4th Panzer Group was directly attachéd to Field Marshal von Leeb. It constituted an independent striking force, although its actions were carefully coordinated with the two field armies, the Sixteenth and Eighteenth.

The task of von Manstein’s 56th Panzer Corps was to slash out of the flat pine forests north of Memel and east of Tilsit and head break-neck for Dvinsk, 175 miles to the northeast. His first objective was the Dubisa River bridges at Argala, fifty miles to the east. Von Manstein remembered the country well from fighting over it during World War I.

At a few minutes after 3
A.M.
, June 22, his Panzers broke across the frontier with a rush which overwhelmed the weak resistance on the border. Soon the tanks encountered a pillbox system which slowed them a bit.

Nevertheless, by 8
P.M.
Sunday evening General Brandenberger, commanding the 8th Panzer Division, secured the two Dubisa River crossings at Argala, according to plan. The shattered Soviet forces had no time to destroy the bridges. Behind Brandenberger’s tanks the 3rd Nazi Motorized Division and the 290th Infantry had crossed the frontier by noon and were moving rapidly in the path cleared by the armor.

The 41st Panzer Corps under General Reinhardt was to drive to the Dvina at Jekabpils (Jakobstadt), an old fortress town which was the midpoint between Riga and Dvinsk. The corps was held up temporarily by stiff resistance around Siauliai, but the Soviet units were quickly crushed.

The armored forces moved with a rapidity which astonished even veteran commanders like von Manstein. By the twenty-fourth, his 56th Corps had seized the river crossings near Ukmerge (Wilkomierz), 105 miles inside Soviet territory and less than 80 miles away from Dvinsk on the main highway. By early morning of the twenty-sixth the Panzers were outside Dvinsk, and by 8
A.M.
they had captured the two big Dvinsk bridges intact.

The 3rd German Armored Corps under General Hoth, part of the Nazi Army Group Center, just to the south, drove to the Neman River so rapidly that it was able to capture the bridges at Alytus and Myarkin, forty miles south of Kaunas, before the Soviets could demolish them.

This feat turned the Soviet Neman River line which protected Kaunas and made the fall of the city inevitable.

Small wonder that Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Colonel General Haider, summing up the first hours of the Nazi attack, wrote in his operational diary:

In view of what had happened in the opening hours of the war Haider’s statement must be regarded as a marvel of understatement. The Nazi performance in the initial phase of the attack gave Hitler every reason for self-congratulation. He had taken his enemy once again completely by surprise. The pattern of the blitzkrieg, the lightning war, which first had been demonstrated in Poland, then refined in Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, was being spectacularly repeated. The optimistic forecasts that Russia would simply fall apart under a few weeks’ pounding by the Panzers and the Luftwaffe seemed on the verge of fulfillment. There was no one in the Führer’s headquarters in those exciting days who was likely to recall the ominous precedent of Napoleon’s Russian venture. Once again the genius of the Führer was being proclaimed by the triumph of his strategy and arms.

¹
Some Soviet estimates make it 42 or 43 divisions, 725,000 men, 500 tanks, 12,000 weapons and 1,200 planes. Dmitri V. Pavlov,
Leningrad v Blokade
(Moscow, 1958), uses the figures 500,000 men and 29 divisions; the authoritative
Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni
(p. 37), says 29 divisions, including 3 tank, 3 motorized. A. V. Karasev,
Leningradtsy v Gody Blokady
(Moscow, 1959, p. 30), makes it 43 divisions, including 7 tank and 6 motorized, and 700,000 men. German sources give the figure of 28 divisions. (Orlov,
op. eh
., p. 40.)