Leningrad Read online

  On the night of the 26th they reached the barbed wire and wooden watchtowers of the pre-1939 border with Russia itself. ‘I was sitting by the window and blew on the frost-covered glass so as to be able to see out . . . In the pale moonlight I could see heather, moorland, felled forests, untilled fields, undergrowth.’ From now on, the train had to be blacked out at night, and its wheels defrosted with blowtorches after every halt. Outside, the landscape remained ‘always the same, always comfortless’:

  A few stunted willows and birches; otherwise, white monotony. A herd of small dark huts huddle forlornly; dark forests circle the horizon; it snows a little. We were stuck on an open stretch for several hours. Thickly wrapped figures were working on the tracks – women and old men. They looked up as we passed, but it was as if they didn’t see us. Only the children waved or begged for bread – ‘Pan [Sir], gib Brot!’ they shouted. These were the first words we heard from Russians, and we were to hear them again and again.

  On 28 November Hockenjos and his men disembarked from the troop train and took to the roads, which was already seething with soldiers, horses and long columns of prisoners. Pushing their heavily laden bicycles into a freezing wind, they crossed the River Volkhov on a pontoon bridge, passed through the ruined town and castle of Gruzino, then on from village to overflowing village looking for regimental command, which they eventually found ‘squeezed into one small, smelly hut – staff officers, clerk, cartographer, messenger, telephone operator and radio operator all in one room’. Their own billet for the night was a cottage with a peasant woman and her three children. The family were not, the mother made haste to explain, Russians, but Latvians, descendants of Baptists exiled by the tsars for refusing to serve in the army. ‘In 1938’, Hockenjos gathered, ‘the Soviets had come and taken all the men, and sent them to a labour camp near Archangel. We promised that when we found her husband there we would send him home. Adolf Hitler – who she recognised on a stamp – would put everything right!’

  After supper their hostess played chorales on a harmonium, in return for which the young Germans showed her their family photographs, and amused the children by demonstrating the workings of their ink pens, pocket alarm clocks and the dynamo lamps on their bicycles. ‘I asked her about “Kolchos, Komsomol and Komissar”; no – in the town there were no Party members and no commissar, but there was a kolkhoz [collective farm]. “Oh, Kolchos kaput! Gutt, gutt! Bolschewik – nix gut!”’

  The next day the bicycle unit moved on to the village of Rakhmysha, eight kilometres behind the front line and its final destination. ‘We have been given’, Hockenjos wrote that evening,

  a typical Russian hut, so sour-smelling that we almost reeled straight back out again. The walls are papered with old newspapers – against cockroaches, as we soon discovered. A table, a bench, a bed behind the stove and two pictures of saints are the only furnishings. The only metal objects are the stovepipe and the samovar . . . Fedor, our host, is the archetypal Russian muzhik. His wife is unbelievably dirty and seems to be the source of all the unpleasant smells in the place. It’s difficult to tell the children’s ages, so it’s hard to say whether the blonde girl with red cheeks, who reminds me of a little piglet with her round body and dirty feet, is their daughter or grand-daughter. A small runny-nosed boy called Kolya completes the family . . .

  We don’t talk a lot. We sit at the table or lie on the floor, smoking and drinking tea. From time to time Fedor comes out from behind the stove and picks cigarette butts out of the herring tin that serves as an ashtray. If there’s nothing in it he takes a piece of newspaper, comes to the table, clicks his heels together and smiles, holding out the empty paper. Willynilly I then have to reach into my tobacco and give him a few strands, whereupon he makes a deep bow and retires behind the stove again.

  The poverty of these people surpasses all our previous conceptions of the peasants’ and workers’ paradise. Fedor hasn’t seen tea or sugar for years, and tobacco and paraffin are luxuries. Sitting in the embers of the fire is a pot filled with potatoes and some sort of unidentifiable broth, on which the family live from day to day. They drink hot water out of the samovar in old tin cans. When I gave little Kolya a roll of boiled sweets the old woman grabbed it from him and put one in each can, adding hot water.

  Life now began to be frightening as well as uncomfortable. On the very evening of his arrival in Rakhmysha, Hockenjos was sent to deal with the first of what was to be a long series of Soviet guerrilla attacks:

  Darkness falls at four, and in the gloomy light of the paraffin lamp the hours are long. So we all go to bed at eight – the Russians climb onto the stove, and we bed down on straw . . . At ten o’clock someone knocks on the door and shouts ‘Alarm! A field-ambulance is on fire on the road to Glad. Shots have been fired. Bicycle unit, go and investigate immediately!’

  Arriving at the scene, the unit found the ambulance burned out and its driver badly injured. ‘We can’t find any tracks through the forest. A long-distance patrol? Partisans? By two in the morning we are back lying on our straw.’ Over the next five days three more trucks ran over mines.

  When not picking up casualties, the Radfahrzug’s job was to patrol the gaps between German-held villages along the straggling front line. On the evening of 7 December, Hockenjos and his men were ordered to pick up reinforcements from a neighbouring battalion. In the pitch-black darkness and forty-one degrees of frost at six o’clock the following morning, they discovered that their lorry, despite having been kept running most of the night, would not start. Instead they set off on foot, the frost scorching lungs and icing up eyelashes and nostrils. At nine the sun rose out of the woods in a red haze, lighting up tiny ice crystals that hung suspended in the motionless air. At ten they reached a command post, by which time two men had already been disabled by frostbite. ‘In five hours’, wrote Hockenjos,

  it will be dark again. We creep out and dive once more into no-man’s-land – a long row of dark figures in a bright aspen wood, clumsy in the knee-deep snow and a frighteningly good target against the white. We have neither snow-capes nor snow-shoes.

  For a good hour we stumble through the tall, silent, snow-filled forest. Here and there shells have made little clearings amongst the spruce and pines. A larger clearing opens up, with a half-ruined cabin. We think we see movement so I set up a machine gun at the edge of the trees and send a group over. They find two shaggy horses, who have been feeding off the cabin’s thatched roof. They gallop away, manes and tails flying.

  Further on the woods thinned out and the snow reached the men’s hips. They crossed the tracks of what they guessed were wolf and elk. From the south came the sound of heavy fighting, and they pressed themselves against the trees when Russian fighters flew overhead. At seven in the evening, four hours after the sun had set, they came to a road, a neat stack of corpses and a line of huts – the village of Gorneshno. ‘Schnapps, tea, and army bread . . . Twenty of my men have frostbite, mostly of the worst degree. The feet of some have turned black, and they crawl to their quarters on hands and knees.’ The next morning Hockenjos was told that during the night a field kitchen had driven over a mine, leaving only one survivor. ‘We wait for our truck but it doesn’t come. Instead a patrol comes

  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 Shlisselbu
rg 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.2 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.3

  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.4

  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.5 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.6

  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.’7 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’.8 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 strugg
le 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.’9

  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.10 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.11

  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.’12