The 900 Days (38 page)

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After World War II when Soviet naval specialists subjected the Tallinn disaster to careful analysis, they concluded that the Baltic Fleet seriously overestimated the dangers of Nazi submarine attack. Had the fleet steamed straight out to sea, it would have been able to avoid most of the German mine fields and shore batteries. It would have risked attack by Nazi submarines, but the Germans were not present in strength in that area and, moreover, the Baltic Fleet was much better equipped to cope with submarine attack than with mines. There was also a channel close to the shore which Soviet ships had been using and which was known to be comparatively free of mines. However, it had been closed August 12 by order of the Northwest Front Command after the Nazis reached the Finnish Gulf at Kunda. (V. Achkasov,
Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 10, October, 1966, p. 30.)

THE COMMANDERS OF LENINGRAD’S DEFENSES TREATED the Northern Front—that with Finland—like a savings bank. From almost the beginning of the war they systematically transferred troops and matériel from the north to feed into the bleeding fronts on Leningrad’s south, southwest and southeast.

But the Northern Front was not an inexhaustible reservoir of manpower. Marshal Voroshilov and Zhdanov could rob Peter to pay Paul, but sooner or later there was going to be a serious overdraft.

For weeks the Twenty-third Army, first under General P. S. Pshennikov and now under Major General Mikhail N. Gerasimov, had held off Finnish forces north of Leningrad which were estimated at nearly twice its size. The Finns had a margin in guns of 1.2 and a 2.2 ratio of air superiority.

But now the Twenty-third Army was falling into serious trouble. The Finns launched an offensive July 31, driving in the Keksholm direction, hoping to reach the northern shores of Lake Ladoga and split the Twenty-third Army in two.

General Gerasimov had taken command of the army on August 4. A man of great self-confidence, his presence exuded calm. Once Colonel B. V. Bychevsky, the fortifications specialist, heard him report on a serious Finnish breakthrough. He showed no signs of nervousness. When he finished his report, he began to whistle a pleasant melody from an operetta.

General Gerasimov’s task was complicated by the fact that he had no reserves. None whatever. All had been drained off into the defense of Leningrad’s southern approaches. Nor was that all. The High Command kept drawing on both the Twenty-third Army and its northern neighbor, the Seventh, to reinforce the shattered Leningrad front. It was a policy that was bound to lead to disaster. Now that disaster seemed near.

The Finns drove through to the shores of Lake Ladoga near Khitola, northwest of Keksgolm, on August 6. Gerasimov’s eastern units—the 168th Rifle Regiment, the 367th Rifle Regiment and the 708th Rifle Regiment— were cut off from the west, fighting a defensive battle north of Sortavala. Another group, the 142nd Rifle Regiment and the 198th Motorized Division, continued to fight north and northeast of Kiitola. A third group was fighting south and west of Keksgolm.

Only one division could be spared to reinforce Gerasimov. This was the 265th Rifle Division. The Finns had opened a gap of nearly twenty miles between Gerasimov’s divisions and were heading for the Lake Vuoksa, with the aim of getting behind him and encircling the forces defending Vyborg at the new Soviet-Finnish border.

By August 15 the Finns had smashed across the Lake Vuoksa, east of Vyborg. The threat of encirclement to Gerasimov’s main forces was grave, and there were no troops available to help him. The Finnish front was crumbling at the precise moment when the Nazi offensive south and southwest of Leningrad was gaining in momentum.

Because Leningrad had lived for so long under the danger of the nearby frontier with Finland, the Leningrad Military Command before World War II had always considered the north as the most critical area. Here the Soviets had invested tens of millions of rubles in concrete underground fortifications. Here were located the heaviest gun emplacements, the most powerful siege guns. The 1940 war with Finland had been fought to secure Leningrad’s northern approaches.

Now the command was confronted with the tragic decision of abandoning the northern shield which had been wrested from Finland in the winter war. There was no alternative. The demands of the Southern Front were insatiable. On August 20—the very day that Zhdanov and Voroshilov prepared their “enemy at the gates” proclamation—the Supreme Command ordered the Twenty-third Army to retire to a shorter, more easily defensible line that ran from Lake Pukya to Lake Vuoksi and the right bank of the Vuoksi River, just north of Vyborg.

The Vyborg defense group began to demolish the heavy fortifications along the new Finnish-Soviet frontier and fall back to the Vyborg area. But the Finns were too fast for them. The 2nd Finnish Corps cut behind the Russians and reached the Vuoksi, driving to within seven miles of Vyborg by the twenty-sixth of August.

The options available to the Soviet commanders suddenly began to vanish. On August 28 Gerasimov was ordered to withdraw his three divisions to the old Mannerheim Line, along Lake Muolan and Rokkala. He was instructed to blow up all fortifications in Vyborg, to dig in on the new line and hold there.

This was the news which greeted Colonel Bychevsky when he arrived at General Staff headquarters the night of August 28. He knew that Gerasimov had proposed withdrawal to General Popov, the Leningrad commander, several days earlier, fearing that the Twenty-third Army might be cut off. But Popov summarily forbade such a move and reprimanded Gerasimov for what he called his “passivity.”

The retreat in Karelia came as a personal blow to Bychevsky. He had directed the construction of much of the heavily fortified system which was now being destroyed. It was probably the best defensive line which the Soviets had ever built. He had overseen the mounting of the great guns just before the war started. He had laid the enormous and powerful mine fields which protected the forts. Now all this was lost. In fact, in the considered opinion of the Leningrad commander, General M. M. Popov, the new fortifications “played no special role” in the city’s defense. Bychevsky could not help feeling that by some means the Finns should have been halted on the fortified lines rather than on new ones which would have to be hastily improvised.

“What is to be done now?” Bychevsky asked his assistant, Colonel Nikolai Pilipets.

Pilipets spread his hands.

“Nobody knows,” he replied. “Army staff already has changed its location twice today, and now communications with Gerasimov have been interrupted. One thing is clear: the three Vyborg divisions are in a trap.”

The Vyborg divisions, the 42nd, the 115th and the 123rd, had no chance to reach the Mannerheim Line on the Finnish side of the old frontier. They had virtually no ammunition and were cut off from headquarters. On their own initiative they retreated southwest to the little fishing port of Koivisto on the northern shore of the Finnish Gulf. The Finns drove steadily forward, occupying Vyborg August 29; Kivennapa, thirty miles south, on the same night; Raivola on the thirtieth; and Terijoki, on the old Soviet-Finnish frontier, August 31. The 168th Division, which had been isolated, defending Sortavala on the northern coast of Lake Ladoga, suffered extraordinary losses and finally had to be removed across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad.

The remnants of the Twenty-third Army attempted to move back to the old Karelian fortified area and occupy the system which had defended Leningrad’s northern approaches prior to the 1939–40 winter war with Finland. This line was only twenty miles from the Leningrad city limits.

Even this was not accomplished without great difficulty and risk. The retreating troops, destroying their equipment, attempted to slip out in small groups through the dense forest and boggy marshes. Many units lost their way and became disoriented in the gloomy wilderness. Some became demoralized. Others managed to make their way to the Sestra River and the Sestroretsk fortified line.

For two or three critical days at the end of August there was almost no organized defense. The Finns could have pushed ahead and stormed the Beloostrov fortifications, marching into the northern suburbs of Leningrad. The only units holding on were some detachments hurriedly taken from the Baltic Fleet and thrown into battle as land marines. This handful of Soviet units staved off the storming of the northern capital by the Finnish troops.

One of these units was a small reconnaissance outfit headed by Anatoly Osovsky. He had twenty-six men. On September 1 he found himself in Sestroretsk, where he reported to the local Party secretary and the head of the NKVD, who sent him to the highway just north of Sestroretsk where a Nazi tank column had been reported. There he discovered a handful of soldiers, who joined his group. A mile north of the city near the local customshouse he spotted a German T-3 medium tank firing down the highway. His men took cover in a sand pit. The tank slowly advanced, but Osovsky disabled it with two accurately hurled grenades which tore off its treads.

Soon two more tanks and forty or fifty infantrymen appeared. Osovsky had fifteen men left. They opened fire with small arms and brought the advance to a halt. Osovsky’s men stayed in their positions for six days, winning personal congratulations from Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov.

Leonid Zakharkov, member of a naval air unit, volunteered for a naval detachment which was hurriedly thrown into the same Beloostrov front.

“We sloshed all night through the marsh,” he recalled, “up to our waists in water. We carried our equipment over our heads—guns, mortars, ammunition. Suddenly we found ourselves almost to our necks in water. We moved ahead under machine-gun fire from the railroad tracks.”

Fighting beside him were two girls, Valya Potapova, wife of a scout, and black-eyed, black-haired Anna Dunayeva. They lived in Terijoki and had joined a patrol battalion which on August 31 found itself fighting a Finnish parachute detachment in the Pukhtolovo Hills. There were 10 girls in the unit of 140. They had three machine guns and several dozen rifles.

Forced to retreat to Terijoki, they found the city burning and empty. The bakery was on fire, the city hall ablaze. By nightfall they reached the road to Sestroretsk. There they got a ride part of the way and joined the little band of defenders. On that first night the lines ran through a swamp beside the Sestra River. After two days they fell back into the fortified lines, where the naval brigade joined them.

The battle for Beloostrov went on and on into September. Twice the Russians were thrown out of the city and fought their way back in hand-to-hand combat in which an outstanding Soviet tank commander, Major General Lavrionovich, was killed. But his tanks moved forward in heavy rain and mud and managed to secure the city. Finnish attacks went on for the next three months, but the Soviet lines held.

The collapse of the Twenty-third Army was marked by savage fighting. Ivan Kanashin, one of the youngsters who had volunteered at Komsomol headquarters at Gryady on Sunday, June 22, now was serving with a detachment of twenty-eight Young Communists, defending an airfield outside Vyborg. They had beaten off a heavy paratroop attack and on the windy, dark morning of August 29 lay in field positions and watched the thin red sunrise streak the sky. Soon an enemy tank column appeared on the Vyborg highway. The tanks halted to inspect some ditches beside the road where lay the bodies of several hundred paratroopers, killed in an attack of the previous day.

The young troopers held their fire until the last possible moment, then opened up with hand grenades. The Finns tossed back grenades, and Kanashin dropped with a splinter wound in his neck. When he regained consciousness, he saw an officer standing over him and a group of eight Russian wounded.

“The valiant German troops already are marching down the boulevards of Leningrad,” the officer said, in Russian. “And you stupid kids think you are going to save Russia. What’s the idea of this suicide, I ask you? Soviet Russia is
kaput
.”

A youngster named Misha Anisimov raised himself, blood streaming from his mouth and down his face. “Hitlerite baboons!” he shouted. “I spit on you. Go ahead. Shoot.”

The officer kicked Anisimov, drew his pistol and shot him. Then he shot a youngster named Ilyusha Osipov.

“What’s the matter, ytau Russian bastards?” he said. “Are you dying of terror? Maybe you’ll come to your senses before it’s too late. One word for mercy and I’ll give you your lives.”

Kanashin lifted himself and spat in the officer’s face.

A minute later he was yanked to his feet. Two troopers put a chain around his neck, attachéd it to their car and started to drive off. Kanashin with his last strength grabbed the collar as he felt his body swaying behind the careening machine.

A cold rain brought him to consciousness. He lay beside the road, half in, half out of a small stream. He had been left for dead by the troopers. Staggering to his feet, he entered the forest. Somehow he managed to make his way across the countryside, through marshes and underbrush. He stumbled into the Russian lines beyond Terijoki at the Sestra River on September 8.

On the morning of September 1 Admiral Panteleyev had gone out into the staff garden at Kronstadt to get a little fresh air. He had been working since the night before on plans for new mine barriers to guard the approaches to Leningrad and on means of supporting the garrisons at Hangö and on the Moonzund Islands, which still held out at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.

As he strolled in the open, listening to the roar of the Kronstadt guns, backing up the heavy fighting on the Leningrad approaches ashore, an aide called him to Admiral Tributs.

“There’s a call from Smolny,” Tributs said. “The 115th and 123rd divisions, falling back from Vyborg, have suffered heavy losses and they are surrounded almost without supplies and weapons along the shore at Koivisto. We don’t know the exact situation. Communications are cut. They should be somewhere near here.”

The Admiral stepped to a chart and made a black circle with his long pencil between Koivisto and Makslakhti.

“Is everything clear?” Tributs asked.

Nothing at all was clear, but Panteleyev waited for Tributs to continue.

“Voroshilov has ordered us to collect the divisions from Koivisto and bring them to Leningrad. You are in chargé. Is it clear now?”

Tributs gave Panteleyev permission to telephone his family in Leningrad —he had not had time to see them since the Tallinn evacuation. Panteleyev talked to his family, then made his plans. He would need six or seven transports for the new evacuation. While they were being collected, he decided to go to Koivisto and see for himself what the situation was.