The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944

Parameters, Autumn, 2003 by Earl F. Ziemke

By David M. Glantz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 660 pages. $39.95.

In the aggregation of awesome--and awful--events that composed the German-Soviet War of 1941-45, and probably also in the whole history of warfare, the Battle for Leningrad holds the record for sheer endurance. It began on 10 July 1941, when elements of German Army Group North crossed the Velikaya River, 145 miles south of Leningrad, and ended more than three years later.

On 8 September 1941, a German division took Shlisselburg, an old fortress at the mouth of the Neva River a half dozen miles east of Leningrad, thereby cutting land contact between the city and the interior. By then, the Finnish army had regained territory it had lost on the Isthmus of Karelia as a result of the 1939-40 Winter War and stopped on the old boundary, the eastern terminus of which was a bare 12 miles north of Leningrad. On the 6th, Adolf Hitler had ordered Army Group North to build a solid front around the city and starve it, not into submission, but literally to death. The ensuing "blockade" resulted, in the months January to April 1942 alone, in a staggering number of civilian deaths, very likely exceeding the whole-war combined deaths from bombing in Germany and Japan.

To sustain continuity in his description of the military operations, the author somewhat compressed his treatment of the civilian tragedy. Nevertheless, the result is a grim drama in four acts reminiscent of the First World War at its worst. The first opens in September 1941. In it, Army Group North manages only to expand its foothold at Shlisselburg east ten miles along the lake shore and fails to make contact with the Finns, who had advanced along the eastern shore and dug in behind the Svir River. That left some 65 miles of exposed shoreline from which an ice road to Leningrad could be operated in the winter. Attempts by the Soviet Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts (army groups) to break the siege began in January 1942, ended in failure, and resulted in the loss of a whole army in April. In the summer, Hitler detailed his star improviser, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to Army Group North to wipe out Leningrad, but failed to supply enough troops. By early fall, the Volkhov Front, at the cost of about an army, has reduced the German hold on the Ladoga shore to seven miles. By then also, all unessential civilians had been evacuated.

The second act begins in October 1942 when Leningrad Front, on the west, and Volkhov Front, on the east, start a buildup for a massive assault on the corridor reaching north to Lake Ladoga that the Germans called a "bottleneck." On 12 January 1943, with Zhukov on hand to coordinate, the Russians launched strikes that, in about a week, cleared a six-mile-wide strip of the lakeshore, technically enough to end the blockade. Thereafter, however, ferocious attacks failed to make further gains. After the April thaw, the front remained stagnant until the year's end. The German Eighteenth Army, the closest to Leningrad, took advantage of the hiatus to build the Rollbahn position, field fortifications along the Leningrad-Moscow highway (Rollbahn), 25 miles behind the bottleneck.

The astounding success of the Soviet 1943 summer offensive led Stalin to order a winter offensive to retake all lost Soviet territory, therewith ushering in the third act. With overall three-to-one superiorities or more, the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts took to the offensive on 14 January 1944. The Soviet commands' performance was less than exemplary, but their numbers brought Eighteenth Army to the verge of collapse in five days. On the 19th, Hitler had to approve a gradual withdrawal to the Rollbahn position; but late in the month, that too became untenable, and the army and army group commands clamored for a retreat to the Panther position, a line 160 miles to the rear, running due south from Narva, on the Gulf of Finland, to the army group boundary.

The military climax comes in Act Four, which can be said to begin with Hitler's appointment of Field Marshal Walter Model to the Army Group North command on 31 January. Model, famous on the Eastern Front as "the lion of the defensive," loaded with charisma, full of self-confidence, and a tactical virtuoso with the touch of a sleight-of-hand artist, the next day declared the Panther position nonexistent. Thereafter, he outmaneuvered his somewhat stodgy Soviet opponents, gave Hitler ample evidence of offensive spirit, and settled Army Group North in the Panther position by 1 March. There the thaw would soon transform the terrain into a vast swamp. When operations can resume, Stalin will turn the effort to the front against Finland, where Act Four ends inconclusively on 9 August. By then the Western Allies are sweeping across France, and Stalin is having to revise his priorities.

The Battle for Leningrad is an epic on a scale not likely ever to be repeated. Colonel Glantz's thoroughgoing account does it full justice, making it both comprehensible and engrossing.