Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (28 page)

out of the forest with the bodies of the seven scouts we met yesterday. Their heads have been crushed and their noses and ears cut off.’ Hockenjos also heard the news, two days late, of Japan’s attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. ‘If that’s not a world war’, he wrote with uncharacteristic acerbity in his diary, ‘I don’t know what is. It seems that I might make captain after all.’

Hockenjos was in the rear of the second battle for Tikhvin, a town 175 kilometres to the south-east of Leningrad and the easternmost point of the German salient over the River Volkhov. It was important because of its location, on the railway line along which supplies were delivered for transport across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. The Wehrmacht’s hold on Ladoga’s southern shore, established when it took Shlisselburg on 8 September, was tenacious but only thirty kilometres wide. Passing through Tikhvin, trains were able to unload at Volkhov, twenty kilometres from the small port of Novaya Ladoga, whence barges sailed, braving German air attack, to Osinovets, on the lake’s Soviet-held western shore. A small suburban railway line covered the final forty-five kilometres into Leningrad. Twenty days’ worth of rations had thus run the blockade during the autumn.

On 8 November – at the height of the Battle of Moscow – Tikhvin fell to the Germans, together with 20,000 troops, 96 tanks, 179 guns and an armoured train.
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Its loss cut Leningrad’s lifeline in two. The closest supply trains could now get to Novaya Ladoga was Zaborye, 170 kilometres to its east. Leningrad’s Military Council immediately ordered the construction, through almost virgin forest and using conscripted peasant labour, of a new 200-kilometre road, to be completed within a fortnight. The Council also ordered that front-line troops’ bread rations be cut for the first time, from 800 grams per day down to 600 grams. The allocation for rear units fell from 600 to 400 grams. Another three ration cuts – one more for the military, two for civilians – quickly followed. At the same time, ice brought navigation across Ladoga to a close, the last barges reaching Osinovets on 15 November. Until the new road was completed and the lake ice grew thick enough to carry trucks, no food could now reach Leningrad except by air. Though sixty-four planes, at Zhdanov’s angry insistence, were eventually assigned to the route, only a third or fewer were operational at any one time, and they daily delivered only forty to fifty tonnes, mostly blocks of pressed and frozen meat.
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Watched with desperate attention by hydrologists, the ice thickened agonisingly slowly. (To estimate its likely rate of spread, one man consulted medieval records kept by the monks of Valaam, who each winter recorded the date on which pilgrims were first able to reach their island monastery on foot.) Ten centimetres of ice, it was calculated, was needed for a horse and rider, eighteen centimetres for a horse pulling a sled, twenty for a loaded two-ton truck. A road from Osinovets to the village of Kobona, on the nearest stretch of Soviet-held ‘mainland’ lake shore, would need a minimum of twenty centimetres of ice along the whole of its thirty-kilometre length.

On 17 November, when the ice was only ten centimetres thick, the first scouts ventured on to the lake, wearing life belts and carrying long poles. The following day the wind began to blow from the north, the temperature dropped and work began on clearing the route of snow, marking it and building bridges over crevasses. By the 20th the ice was eighteen centimetres thick, and the first transports – 300 horse-drawn sledges – set off, followed two days later by the first trucks, widely spaced. On the return journey, though carrying only a few sacks of grain each, several went through the ice. To spread weight, the next convoy towed sleds. To no avail: by 1 December only about 800 tons of flour – less than two days’ requirements – had been delivered, and forty trucks had got stuck or broken down. The rough and narrow new overland road to Zaborye was even worse: the first convoy to set out along it, on 6 December, took fourteen days to make the round trip, and more than 350 trucks had to be towed or abandoned. Vasili Churkin, the artilleryman caught up in the chaotic flight from Volosovo back in August, was ordered to march across the ice on the windy, pitch-black night of 7 December. Slowed by frostbitten feet, he fell behind his unit and would have become completely lost if it had not been for red flashes from a lighthouse on the ‘mainland’ shore. He reached Kobona at 1 p.m. the next day, having passed ten flour-laden lorries with their back axles sunk through the ice, and a young soldier dying of exposure.
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No further convoys attempted this route. On 9 December, after a series of piecemeal attacks on the overextended German salient’s southern flank, the Fourth Army, taken over by General Meretskov a month earlier, finally retook Tikhvin in heavy fighting, leaving up to nine thousand German dead.
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Supply trains could now be unloaded at Tikhvin, and the truck route shortened to 160 kilometres – 130 kilometres overland by way of Novaya Ladoga and Kobona, and 30 over the lake. The liberation of two more railway towns, Voibokalo and Zhikharevo, allowed a further improvement: from 1 January supply trains were able to unload only thirteen kilometres from the lake shore, and the truck route was reduced to less than forty-five kilometres. Thereafter, deliveries over the Ice Road – in reality six different parallel routes – gradually improved. Though plagued by blizzards, bad management (the Road’s first head, a Colonel Zhmakin, was sacked for incompetence), German bombing and bottlenecks along the small, underequipped Osinovets–Leningrad railway, a total 270,900 tonnes of food and 90,000 of fuel and other supplies were delivered by the time the ice melted again at the end of April.
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Less successful were November and December’s attempts to lift the siege itself. On his departure for Moscow, Zhukov had bequeathed the Leningrad front a tiny, bloodily won bridgehead on the left bank of the Neva just to the south of Shlisselburg, the so-called ‘Nevsky
pyatachok
’, or ‘Neva five-kopek piece’. Only two kilometres long and less than a kilometre deep, it looked significant on the maps but was in reality far too small and exposed (the Germans held a fortress-like power station just along the river) to form the platform for a successful breakout. Successive attempts – on 2, 9, 11 and 13 November – all failed, at enormous cost.

A parallel breakout attempt, over lake ice to Shlisselburg’s north, was a fiasco. On 13 November the 80th Rifle Division was flown out of the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ to Leningrad, force-marched to Ladoga and then ordered to charge entrenched German positions. A large number of men fell through the too-thin ice; others, emaciated and exhausted, dropped even before the attack began. Stalin was furious at not being informed of the disaster: ‘It’s very odd that Comrade Zhdanov seems to feel no need to come to the phone . . . One supposes that in Comrade Zhdanov’s head Leningrad isn’t in the USSR, but on some island in the Pacific Ocean.’
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Zhdanov scapegoated the hapless officers in charge, Colonel Ivan Frolov and Commissar Konstantin Ivanov. Three hours before the attack began, their sentencing document records, Frolov had ‘declared to two Front representatives that he did not believe in the successful outcome of the operation’ – words underlined in the copy sent to Zhdanov. On 3 December both men were shot, for ‘cowardice and defeatism’.
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In total, of the roughly 300,000 Red Army troops employed in the battle for Tikhvin and its associated offensives, 110,000 were recorded as ill or wounded, and 80,000 as killed, captured or missing. On the German side, casualties were 45,000.

For the Eastern Front in general, the close of 1941 was nonetheless a genuine turning point. The Germans had encircled Leningrad but failed to take it, and were also being brought to a halt outside Moscow. In early November, slowed by slushy snow and Zhukov’s brilliantly organised resistance, Operation Typhoon had begun to peter out. The psychological turning point was 7 November – Revolution Day – on the eve of which Stalin gave a defiant speech in the Mayakovsky metro station, followed by the magnificent gamble of a full-scale military parade in Red Square. Faced with deepening cold and mounting casualties, Hitler’s generals asked permission to dig in for the winter. ‘The time for spectacular operational feats is past’, Halder wrote in his diary on the 11th: ‘Our troops can’t be moved around any more.’ Hitler disagreed, insisting that Moscow be taken by the end of the year. Reluctantly, his generals reanimated the offensive. ‘Field Marshal Bock has himself taken charge of the Battle of Moscow, from an advanced command post’, Halder noted on the 22nd. ‘With enormous energy he drives forward everything that can be brought to bear.’ Though the German divisions to the south were ‘finished’ – one regiment in his old 7th Division, Halder noted, was now commanded by a first lieutenant – in the north they still had a chance of success and were being ‘driven relentlessly to achieve it. Von Bock compares the situation to the battle of the Marne, where the last battalion that could be thrown in tipped the balance.’ A week later Bock telephoned Halder again. It was not the Marne that he compared the battle to now, but Verdun – ‘a brutish chest-to-chest struggle of attrition . . . I emphasise that we too are concerned about the human sacrifice. But an effort must be made to bring the enemy to his knees by applying the last ounce of strength.’
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On 16 December – with his forward units tantalisingly within sight of the flash of Moscow’s anti-aircraft guns – Hitler finally called a halt. Typhoon was over, but the eastern armies should hold their positions all along the line. More ‘stormy discussions’, ‘mad outbursts’ and ‘dramatic scenes’ followed, as his generals argued for withdrawal to firmer defence lines.
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Three days later – twelve days after Pearl Harbor and eight after suicidally declaring war on the United States – Hitler sacked von Bock as head of Army Group Centre and Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief, and announced that he was taking over High Command himself. After another furious meeting at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 13 January, von Leeb asked to be relieved as well, and was replaced by the more pliable von Küchler. In the south, Runstedt was replaced by Reichenau, who promptly died of a heart attack. Altogether about forty senior officers resigned or were dismissed. From now on, Hitler’s propensity to micromanage military operations would have full rein, with ultimately disastrous results.
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This was the point, most military historians agree, at which the whole war turned, not because it was when Germany started to retreat, but in the sense that from then on she stood no further chance of winning. With three great powers ranged against her, she had simply bitten off more than she could chew. In London, Churchill had no doubt. Nothing, he declared to his War Cabinet on 10 December, could compare to the US in warfare, and the Russian front would ‘break Germany’s heart’. From Leningrad to the Crimea, the Wehrmacht was in ‘a frightful condition: mechanised units frozen, prisoners taken in rags, armies trying to stabilise . . . Russian air superiority.’ On the state of the Wehrmacht he exaggerated, but his general point was sound: ‘Germany is busted as far as knocking out Russia is concerned. The tide has turned and the phase which now begins will have gathering results . . . There should be no anxiety about the eventual outcome of the war. The finger of God is with us.’
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Tikhvin having been lost again, Fritz Hockenjos’s
Radfahrzug
was ordered to retreat back behind the Volkhov. On 21 December they left their poverty-stricken billet in Rakhmysha, not before setting fire to barns and slaughtering sheep and chickens for the road. ‘Women’s wailing’, Hockenjos wrote, ‘followed us out of the village.’ Again they pushed their bicycles along choked, snow-covered roads, past broken-down motorised columns and a stream of overladen peasant sleds, cows and goats in tow. The following afternoon they ran into fighting – shouts of ‘oorah’ up ahead, a burning lorry, injured horses standing in the middle of the road, heads drooping. When darkness fell they crept forwards in the shelter of roadside ditches: ‘We came to lots of dead Russians, and then we were through, and ran as fast as we could. When we got to Glad we found the staff of the 2nd Battalion just sitting there, completely oblivious. I could have wept.’ At 3 a.m. they set off again, firing blindly into the woods either side of the road in reply to shots from invisible Russians. With daylight they came under heavy fire while passing a supply column:

Bangs and whistles everywhere. The injured are brought in, coats and boots cut off. Open wounds leak dark blood. And next to all that people stand about, smoking and munching
Knäckebrot
. Only when there was lots of whizzing in the air did they take cover behind their vehicles or horses for a moment. I couldn’t decide whether this was admirable equanimity or stupid indifference.

They were among the last troops back over the Volkhov at Gruzino, crossing as darkness fell. Behind, the skyline glowed red where villages burned. On Christmas Eve they reached Chudovo, a town on the main Leningrad–Moscow railway line, and settled for the night in an empty-windowed glassworks. ‘We huddle with our cigarettes in front of the great glass ovens’, Hockenjos wrote. ‘In one corner a Christmas tree is being set up; in another some engineers are building tables and benches. Someone is bashfully practising carols on a harmonica. I have my notebook open on my knees and am writing a Christmas letter to Els by the light of the flames. I have never felt further from my love, nor closer to her, than this evening.’ In the distance he could hear the thump of shells, as the Russians ‘threw suitcases’ at the railway station – it was amazing how fast they had brought up their heavy artillery. When he and his men toasted Christ’s birth at midnight, it was with looted armagnac that they had brought with them all the way from the Loire.