The 900 Days (55 page)

No one really knew whether the Germans were stopped. It was better not to believe it. If they had been halted, blood had done it. The toll of lives taken in those September days could never be counted. A little stream ran past Klinovsky House. It ran red with soldiers’ blood for days. The Katyushas? Perhaps. Nothing more frightening had been experienced in World War II than the Katyushas with their scream, their fiery trails, their thunderous impact, the mass that filled the air suddenly with fire and sound.
¹

Was it Zhukov’s iron will?

He was terrible in those September days. There was no other word for it. He threatened commander after commander with the firing squad. He removed men right and left. And he insisted on one thing: Attack! Attack! Attack! This was the essence of his first orders on taking command. It made no difference how weak the unit. It made no difference if they had no weapons, no bullets, if they had been retreating for weeks. Attack! Those were his orders. Disobey and go before the tribunal.

Attack or be shot—a simple equation.

On September 17 Zhukov issued a general order to all commanders of all units in the Forty-second and Fifty-fifth armies. They were told that any withdrawal from the lines Ligovo-Pulkovo-Shushary-Kolpino would be considered the gravest crime against the Motherland. The penalty: to be shot.

In the early morning hours of September 18 Bychevsky was laboring on the Circle Railroad, transforming it into the inner defense line. Every fifty to a hundred yards he was installing gun positions, using equipment that had been salvaged from the ruins of the Gatchina and Vyborg fortified regions and thrown together in the Leningrad factories in the past few days. Artillerymen were calculating fields of fire. Ammunition was being brought up. There was no communications system thus far.

He had stationed sappers’ groups at the big destruction points where mines had been planted under the intersections of the major highways, at the car barns at Kotlyarov, at the Port Station and Shosseinaya. Special commands were set up to deal with German tanks which broke through the city.

At 4
A.M.
Zhukov’s adjutant appeared and ordered him immediately to Smolny. As Bychevsky entered the reception room, he saw General Fedyu-ninsky and his Corps Commissar, N. N. Klementyev. Judging from their faces they had had a rough time.

Wet, covered with mud, tired, Bychevsky shuffled into Zhukov’s office. The General was sitting with Zhdanov, leaning over a map.

“So,” said Zhukov. “Here at last. Where have you been gadding about that we have to hunt you all night—snoozing*..I suppose?”

Bychevsky said he’d been working on the fortification system.

“Does the commander of the Forty-second Army know about this system?”

“In the morning I’ll give a map of it to General Berezinsky, his Chief of Staff. General Fedyuninsky himself will be with his troops.”

Zhukov smashed his heavy fist on the table.

“I didn’t ask you about drawing maps. I asked you whether the commander has been advised about the system. Can’t you understand the Russian language?”

Bychevsky pointed out that Fedyuninsky was just outside in the reception room.

Zhukov flared up again.

“Do you ever think before you speak?” he said. “I don’t need you to tell me he’s here. Do you understand that if Antonov’s division doesn’t go into the defense lines along the Circle Railroad this very night, the Germans may break into the city?

“And if they do, I’ll have you shot in front of Smolny as a traitor.”

Zhdanov seemed uncomfortable. This was not his way of dealing with people. He never used rough language. Now he intervened.

“Comrade Bychevsky, how could you have failed to go to Fedyuninsky himself! He has just taken over the army. And Antonov’s division, which must occupy the line, has just been formed. If the division moves up in daylight, it will be bombed. Do you understand what this is all about?”

The reason for the urgency finally dawned on Bychevsky. The Antonov division, the 6th People’s Volunteers, had to get into position before daylight. He had not even known that the 6th Volunteers had been assigned to the Forty-second Army nor that they had been ordered into the lines behind Pulkovo before dawn.

Bychevsky asked to be permitted to show Fedyuninsky the new lines.

“Light dawns!” snapped Zhukov. “You better get your thinking cap on. If that division is not in position by 9
A.M.
, I’ll have you shot.”

Bychevsky made a hurried escape and met Fedyuninsky in the next room.

“Having trouble, Engineer?” Fedyuninsky said.

Bychevsky was in no mood for chaffing.

“Just a bit, Comrade General,” he snapped. “The commander has promised to have me shot if the 6th Division is not in the Circle Railroad lines by morning. Let’s go.”

“Don’t be angry, Engineer,” Fedyuninsky smiled. “We’ve just been with Georgi Konstantinovich and we’ve got some promises, too.”

The 6th Division got into place. But without much time to spare.

Aleksandr Rozen was with Fedyuninsky at his command post on the Pulkovo Heights. It had been an incredible time. All day long on the eighteenth the Germans had attacked. Now dusk was falling. The weak sun sank toward the west in a sea of clouds. A little rain began to fall, and the ground grew slippery. Fedyuninsky and his staff began to move toward a broken communications trench when the General suddenly halted and looked fixedly into the distance. It was growing dark, but he kept peering into the distance. A shell exploded. Some stretcher bearers came by. The Germans were bombing Leningrad through the clouds. Rozen edged up to Fedyuninsky in time to hear him say: “The 6th Division of Volunteers have occupied their defense lines on the Circle Railroad. That’s the last line.”

Zhukov demanded attacks, counterattacks, counteroffensives, from all the armies under his command. The Eighth Army was cut off from Leningrad when the Germans drove through to the Gulf of Finland, winning control of a tongue of land running from the Peterhof Palace on the west through Strelna to the Ligovo sector on the Leningrad outskirts.

Major General V. I. Shcherbakov, commander of the Eighth, was ordered by Zhukov to concentrate his forces, the 5 th Brigade of marines, the 191st and 281st rifle divisions and the 2nd People’s Volunteers, and carry out a counterattack on the Germans, centering on the village of Volodarsky in the direction of Krasnoye Selo. The idea was to hit the Germans from the rear while the 21st NKVD occupied them along the Pulkovo front. Zhukov transferred to Shcherbakov the 10th and nth rifle divisions and the remains of the 3rd People’s Volunteers from the Forty-second Army. He provided from the front reserves the 125th and 268th rifle divisions.

But the effort was beyond Shcherbakov. The divisions were mere decimals of their battle strength. They had been bled white and fought until they could not fight again. They had hardly any artillery. They had no shells for the cannon, no bullets for their rifles and few mines or hand grenades. Shcherbakov was compelled to report to Zhukov that he could not carry out the order. He had no strength for a counterattack. It was all he could do to hold the fading lines around Oranienbaum. Indeed, without the constant pounding of the Baltic Fleet cannon, those located on ships and the powerful coastal batteries at Krasnaya Gorka and Kronstadt, he could not have hung on.

Zhukov’s reaction was predictable. He removed Shcherbakov and the Eighth Army’s Military Council member I. F. Chukhnov. He put Major General T. I. Shevaldin in chargé of the army as of September
24
.
²

General Dukhanov, the old veteran of the Leningrad front, was rushed into the Eighth Army
place (Tarmes
to take over the ioth Rifle Division, which was fighting near Strelna. He got his orders September 17 and had to go by boat to Oranienbaum and then back along the coast by car to reach his troops.

He found a division in name only. Its biggest “regiment” numbered 180 men. This pitiful force was supposed to counterattack the German Panzers. Dukhanov managed to hold on, in part because the bridges at New Peterhof had been mined by Bychevsky’s men and he blew them up in the face of the advancing Nazi tanks.

Then he was ordered by the new commander, General Shevaldin, to carry out a counteroffensive aimed at Strelna and Ligovo. An amphibious landing of marines was being attempted simultaneously. Dukhanov’s men (now the 19th Corps) attacked and suffered heavy losses. The Germans were well dug in and couldn’t be budged. Shevaldin—on Zhukov’s orders—called Dukhanov.

“Not a step back!” said Shevaldin. “You must attack. All commanders, including division commanders, must lead the attack. All forward!”

Dukhanov started to protest, then swallowed.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I will tell the Chief of Staff to take over the corps and I will lead the attack.”

“No,” snapped Shevaldin. “You must direct the troops and take responsibility for their actions. Carry out the order.”

Dukhanov slammed the receiver down. His Corps Commissar V. P. Mzhavanadze
³
said, “What’s going on?” Dukhanov told him.

Mzhavanadze pulled on his greatcoat, grabbed his revolver and shouted, “Farewell.” He led the ioth Division into action.

Dukhanov carried out his orders. Every commander, every political commissar went to the head of his unit and marched into battle. The attack halted the Germans, but did little more. The Russians didn’t have the muscle to budge the Nazis.

“I could not then and I cannot today approve the measures for stiffening our troops which were taken by the Commander of the Eighth Army,” Dukhanov wrote years later. “The corps was threatened with complete loss of leadership and might have suffered a frightful disaster.”

But this was Zhukov’s way: Attack. Attack. The commanders could carry out his orders. They could die in the attempt. Or be shot.

Fedyuninsky was fond of quoting an infantryman named Promichev who is said to have told his fellow soldiers, “Our principle is this: If you retreat, I will kill you. If I retreat without orders, you kill me. And Leningrad will not be surrendered.” This was the Zhukov principle.

Zhukov applied the principle to all the armies. The Fifty-fourth, for example. This army had been created August 23 and sent into the Volkhov region for the specific purpose of relieving pressure on the Leningrad front. It had been designed to prevent a whole series of events: It was to keep the Germans from enveloping Leningrad from the southeast. It was to protect the city from being cut off from Moscow. It was to hold open the routes to Lake Ladoga. It was to keep the Nazis from cutting through to Mga and Shlisselburg.

It had done none of these things. In fact, it had done virtually nothing. It was led by G. I. Kulik, the police general and toady of the notorious Beria. Zhukov had him fired on September 25 and sent his reliable and ponderous Chief of Staff, General Khozin, to take over the Fifty-fourth. The Forty-eighth Army had virtually disappeared under the weak and unreliable direction of Lieutenant General M. A. Antonyuk. Zhukov simply absorbed the Forty-eighth into the Leningrad front. There was little left to absorb.

Attack—or die.

The grim slogan echoed throughout Leningrad. Vsevolod Vishnevsky took it up: Death to cowards. Death to panicmongers. Death to rumor spreaders. To the tribunal with them. Discipline. Courage. Firmness.
⁴

In the years to come there would be endless dispute over what stopped the Germans; and when they were halted.

Von Leeb had been under enormous pressure from Hitler to complete his assignment, to encircle Leningrad, to join forces with the Finns, to wipe out the Baltic Fleet. His forces were needed and needed badly on the Moscow front, where the Germans were closing in for the kill. But how could Hitler’s grand strategy—the envelopment from the rear of Moscow, the enormous wheeling movement which was to carry Army Group Nord down behind the Russian lines at the very moment von Rundstedt attacked from the center—how could that be accomplished if von Leeb was still mired on the Leningrad front? It was a matter of timing, and time was running out. The nervous tension rose day by day. In the massive journal of Colonel General Haider the developments were noted as they were seen at the Führer’s headquarters—and by himself.

Von Leeb had been instructed by Hitler September 5 to release his armor to the Moscow Group as quickly as possible. Because he was making good progress—or seemed to be—Haider with great reluctance let von Leeb keep the armor. He still had it on the twelfth. On the thirteenth Haider let him keep it “for the continuance of the drive.” The Germans then thought Leningrad was almost in their grasp. Just a day or two and it would fall. Two days later, September 15, Haider was still hopeful. The assault was making good progress.

But two days later the Moscow front could wait no longer. The 6th Panzers were wheeled out of line. The shift of the main weight, the high-powered punch which had carried von Leeb up to the outskirts of Leningrad, to Klinovsky House, had begun. The whole 41st Panzer Corps, the Hoepp-ner group, had been ordered to the Moscow front.

Zhukov had won. Leningrad had won. But no one knew this yet. Von Leeb was still trying frantically to grasp victory, to break into the city even though the parade of armor to the south was beginning. But success was doubtful.

Haider was gloomy. On the eighteenth he wrote in his journal: