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This is the second of two books looking at the longest siege of the Second World War, the lengthy and incredibly costly siege of Leningrad. Volume one looked at the German advance to Leningrad, the incredibly bitter first winter of 1941-42 which saw the population starving, and the brutal battles of 1942. This second volume looks at the period where the Soviets were generally on the front foot, although at great cost.
The city of Leningrad actually plays a fairly minor part in this book. The worst of the siege was past, and a great deal of effort went into making sure that adequate supplies were in the city for the winters of 1942-43 and 1943-44. With the Germans largely on the defensive most of the fighting took place at a greater distance from the city than in the earlier part of the siege. Major battles took place thirty miles to the east, where the Soviets were able to open a land corridor to the city along the shores of Lake Ladoga, up to sixty miles to the south around Novgorod and Lake Ilman, and west of the city around the Oranienbaum bridgehead.
The main focus here is on the long series of Soviet offensives aimed at breaking the siege. This starts with the Iskra offensive of January 1943, which saw the Soviets finally establish a land corridor between Leningrad and the rest of the country (although a narrow one that was overlooked by German held high ground). This allowed the creation of a railway line into the city, and also cleared the Germans off the southern shores of Lake Ladoga, making it much harder for them to interfere with Soviet traffic on the lake.
One long running theme is the failure of the Red Army to correct its mistakes. What makes this most unusual is that the Soviets put a great deal of effort into examining each battle, often producing an in-depth list of problems. However little appears to have been done to actually solve these problems, other than issuing exhortations to do better. Buttar produces an interesting examination of this problem, suggesting two main problems. First, the intense pressure the Red Army was operating on at all times meant that there often wasn’t time to improve the training of new troops. Each costly attack created an urgent need for rapid reinforcements, reducing the time available to train new recruits. Second was the overall nature of the Soviet system, where individual initiative could attract very dangerous levels of attention, making it difficult for officers to risk deviating from their orders. However Buttar also acknowledges two factors out of Soviet control – the generally high quality of the German defenders, and the difficult terrain and dense defences found all around Leningrad. This played a part in the tendancy of the Soviets to carry out repeated attacks on the same location – there really weren’t many better alternatives.
On the German side we see a similar problem with the high command. Each Soviet offensive weakened the German forces around Leningrad, with new reinforcements not as well trained as the men they replaced, and the German focus on individual initiative tending to lead to high casualties amongst officers. The senior commanders around Leningrad became increasingly worried about their extended front line around the city, and began to plan to pull back to a new defensive line further south that would have allowed them to create a sizable mobile reserve. However Hitler always resisted any requests to retreat for so long that the benefits of that move were lost (mainly because further casualties during the gap eliminated those hoped for reserves), then used the lack of benefits to argue against the next request for a retreat. As a result when the Soviets finally broke the German lines around Leningrad in 1944 the Germans were too weak to carry out a skilful fighting retreat, and often found the Soviets had broken the next defensive line before most of the retreating troops had reached it.
We finish with a look at how the siege of Leningrad was remembered in the Soviet Union and how that changed over time. The wartime focus on the special nature of the hero city of Leningrad was quickly replaced post-war with the cult of Stalin, then after the fall of Stalin with a focus on the unique role of the Communist Party in the defeat of Germany (combined with an unwillingness to examine any Soviet failings in the early part of the war). As a result the distinctive struggle and suffering of the city of Leningrad was downplayed, becoming part of the wider story of how Stalin or the Party saved Russia. It thus took a surprisingly long time before major memorials to the battle appeared in the city.
This is a fitting conclusion to this story, and an excellent account of the brutal battles around Leningrad, which tend to get less attention than the more mobile battles in the south, but which sucked in millions of men and caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, before the fighting finally moved away from the city in 1944.
Chapters
1 – Unfinished Business
2 – Iskra – Planning
3 – Iskra – Execution
4 – Polyarnaya Zvezda
5 – The Last Battles Before Spring
6 – A Tense Summer
7 – The Summer Offensive: Sinyavino
8 – An Autumn of Blood and Attrition
9 – Winter Planning
10 – Yanvarskiiy Grom
11 – Retreat from Leningrad
12 – Schild und Schwert
13 – After the Siege
14 – Military Memories and Assessments of the Siege of Leningrad
15 – The Myths and Legends of Leningrad
Author: Prit Buttar
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2024