Leningrad
Page 32
Responsibility for breaking the German lines around Leningrad was to lie chiefly with General Meretskov’s Volkhov Front, which faced Army Group North’s Eighteenth Army along a line running south-east from Lake Ladoga, then south along the Volkhov River to Novgorod. While the armies within the siege ring did what they could to push south and east, those of the Volkhov front were to break westwards across the river, cutting off the German forces around Lyuban, Tosno and Mga. Altogether, 326,000 troops were initially to be committed to the operation, giving a theoretical 50 per cent advantage in manpower, 60 per cent in guns and mortars and 30 per cent in aircraft.
Ignoring Meretskov’s pleas for more artillery, reserves and time in which to concentrate his troops and arrange his logistics, Stalin insisted that the offensive be launched in the first week of January. To keep (presumably terrified) Meretskov up to the mark, he despatched to Leningrad the loathsome Lev Mekhlis, head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate and one of the organisers of the 1937–8 army purges.14 Things went badly from the outset: on the 4th and 5th forty-eight hours of heavy fighting near Kirishi won a mere five kilometres of ground; on the 6th an assault across the Volkhov ice in the face of machine guns lost over three thousand men in its first thirty minutes. ‘Continued enemy attacks’, General Halder wrote dismissively in his diary, ‘but nothing on a major scale.’15 Uncoordinated and intermittent, the offensive continued in piecemeal fashion on into February. Hockenjos, returning to Zvanka on the twentieth, found the monastery half destroyed by shelling from the opposite bank of the Volkhov – the cloister full of craters, the chapel vaulting stove in, and the pines and oaks on the slopes leading down to the river reduced to ‘miserable broomsticks’. A week later a second Soviet attack was beaten off with ease:
Ivan plastered the buildings and their surroundings with a potpourri of greetings from artillery, anti-tank guns, bang-booms and grenade-throwers. The high point came at bright midday, when fifteen Russians in ski parkas, apparently fired up with vodka, crept out into the open. Artillery Lieutenant Vogt and I watched them from a communications trench on the forward slope. First they approached a group of dark lumps which have been sitting there in the middle of the Volkhov since the last Russian attack, and searched them for something to eat. Through our binoculars we could see them taking tin cans out of the dead men’s backpacks. Next they wandered over the snow towards our edge of the woods, which sticks out from the northern side of the monastery hill towards the river. Two hundred metres short we hit them with our big guns. Our aim was good – most of the fifteen stayed lying down. I would have liked to let the fellows get closer to my sentries, so as to pick them off with rifles, or even to the edge of the forest where my men have been lying in wait for quite a while. But the heavy weapons men didn’t want to miss an easy meal.
In the evening two of the dead Russians tried to come to life, but my sentry was paying attention and shot them down. Another seven [sic] Russ the fewer.16
A few kilometres upstream, opposite the village of Myasnoi Bor (‘Meat Wood’) the Soviet offensive made better progress. Its striking force was the newly formed Second Shock Army, which despite being led by a militarily inept henchman of Beria’s and manned by draftees from the treeless Volga steppe, broke through the German lines on 17 January and penetrated deep into the German rear. By the end of February 100,000 men held a ‘pocket’ roughly fifty kilometres square, its northern edge only ten kilometres away from one of the offensive’s key objectives, the railway town of Lyuban.
The gains, however, were more impressive on paper than in reality. Efforts to widen the gap in the enemy line foundered against swift reinforcement, Lyuban remained just out of reach, and the ground won consisted – a scattering of place names notwithstanding – of flat and virtually uninhabited forest, peat-workings and bog. Realising the Second Shock Army’s vulnerability, on 2 March Hitler ordered Georg von Küchler (who had taken over command of Army Group North from von Leeb in January) to mount an Operation Predator to cut it off from the rest of the Volkhov front. ‘Concentration of air force in that sector’, Halder wrote in his diary, ‘is requested for the period 7–14 March . . . After elimination of the Volkhov salient, no blood is to be wasted on reducing the enemy in the marshes; he can be left to starve to death.’17 The ground attack was launched at daybreak on the fifteenth, and within five days had severed both roads – nicknamed ‘Erika’ and ‘Dora’ – into the pocket. By the end of the month, after desperate seesaw fighting round Myasnoi Bor, the Soviets held a corridor into the pocket only a kilometre and a half wide, along which supplies had to be hauled on sleds by night.
In April it began to thaw, glittering silence replaced by drizzle and the sound of running water. Still quartered at Zvanka, Hockenjos watched the landscape change, photographing the first small patch of earth – dark and strewn with wisps of straw – to emerge, and sitting for hours at the top of the monastery bell tower:
Reed beds, wide bodies of water between stretches of yellowed grass, black moorland and the sparse remains of the snow. Over it all a high spring sky with fine lamb’s wool clouds: a sea of larks’ jubilations and lapwings’ cries. In the marshy forest to the right, goldfinches in every bush . . . Everywhere, the men sit in front of their bunkers with their shirts off, their torsos pale . . . They are whistling and singing. The cheerful noise must carry as far as the Russians, but I am not going to forbid it.18
For the trapped Second Shock Army, the thaw brought only new misery. The corridor connecting it to the rest of the Russian front became impassable, halting delivery of supplies and evacuation of the wounded. Horses died and were eaten; dugouts flooded and shells had to be carried by hand, the men wading up to their waists or jumping from tussock to tussock ‘like rabbits’, to derisive German shouts of ‘Rus, kup-kup!’ For daytime cover they built ‘breastworks’ of branches, moss and dead leaves; at night they slept in the open around fires, scorching their sodden felt boots and quilted jackets. To reanimate the offensive, Stalin reshuffled his generals, recalling Meretskov and subordinating the Leningrad to the Volkhov Front under Zhukov’s protégé Mikhail Khozin. Andrei Vlasov, a tall, spectacled professional soldier who had led the 37th Army out of encirclement at Kiev and spearheaded the December counter-attack in front of Moscow, was flown in to take over the Second Shock Army. On 12 May, having received intelligence that the Germans were bringing up reinforcements, Khozin ordered Vlasov to break out of encirclement and rejoin the rest of the Volkhov Front. Though five divisions and four brigades made it back through the Myasnoi Bor corridor, and at least two thousand men, according to German records, deserted, that left another seven divisions and six brigades – about 20,000 men in total – still trapped inside the German ‘cauldron’.19 ‘The enemy would first surround a unit’, a survivor remembered, ‘wait for it to weaken for lack of supplies and then start pounding’:
We were completely helpless, since we had no ammunition, no petrol, no bread, no tobacco, not even salt. Worst of all was having no medical help. No medicine, no bandages. You want to help the wounded, but how? All our underwear has gone for bandages long ago; all we have left is moss and cotton wool. The field hospitals are overflowing, and the few medical staff in despair. Many hundreds of non-walking wounded simply lie under bushes. Around them mosquitoes and flies buzz like bees in a hive. Come near and the whole swarm comes after you, covers you all over, gets into your mouth, eyes, ears – unbearable. Mosquitoes, flies and lice – our hated enemies . . . Nothing new about lice – but in such quantities . . . The grey devils eat us alive, with gusto, completely covering our clothes and bodies. You don’t even try to squash them; all you can do, if you have a free moment, is shake them off on to the ground. You find six or seven on a single button . . .
The main problem, though, was hunger. Oppressive, never-ending hunger. Wherever you went, whatever you were doing, the thought of food never left you . . . Our food supply now depended on air deliveries by U2 [a type of small, one-engined biplane]. Each could
carry five or six sacks of sukhari. But there were thousands of us – how could there possibly be enough for everyone? If a sack lands successfully, without bursting on impact, that means one piece of dried bread for two soldiers. Otherwise, you’re on your own, you have to eat what you can find – bark, grass, leaves, harnesses . . . Once somebody found an old potato, buried among the ashes of a hut. We cut it up and each got a tiny piece. What a feast! Some men licked their piece, some sniffed it. The smell reminded me of home and family.20
Another reshuffle of the top brass, removing Khozin and separating the two northern commands again (the Volkhov Front was handed back to vindicated Meretskov, Leningrad to a taciturn, poker-faced artilleryman, Leonid Govorov), came far too late to make a difference.21 By mid-June the remnants of the Second Shock Army had been pushed into a small stretch of swamp to the west of Myasnoi Bor:
White nights, so we had German planes overhead twenty-four hours a day, strafing and dropping bombs. The noise of shellfire was continuous and deafening, as was the sound of breaking and burning trees . . . We weren’t an army any more – we were a market crowd. A complete mess – no communication between units, and lines of command had ceased to exist. No information on our own situation, but limitless amounts of German propaganda – flyers, newspapers, coloured proclamations – covering the ground and urging us to surrender . . . The forest burns, the peat smoulders. There are bomb craters everywhere and twisted, broken trees – piles of useless rifles, wrecked gun carriages. And corpses – corpses everywhere you looked. Thousands of them, stinking and covered in flies, decomposing under the June sun. You pass one and the flies rise off it into your face – you can’t see anything, they’re in your eyes, your nose, everywhere. Big fat buzzing flies – disgusting to remember. On every bit of dry ground there are wounded soldiers, screaming, moaning, pleading – some for water, some for somebody to finish them off. But nobody cares. People wander about the woods, indifferent, sullen, half-mad; in hats with the ear flaps tied under the chin so as to keep off the mosquitoes; eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep . . . Nobody has a watch, we lose track of time. What date is it? Is it day or night?22
The end came on the relentlessly sunlit nights of 21–24 June, in a series of suicidal breakouts through a gap in the German lines four kilometres long and only a few hundred metres wide. Those with enough strength carried rifles, and the emaciated and wounded nothing at all. The German fire, in the words of a survivor, was ‘so fierce that everything was flung into the air – people, earth, trees. You couldn’t see anything for smoke.’ Stumbling over corpses old and new, he took shelter in a bomb crater, then slid down a bank past a German tank towards a stream. ‘An astonishing silence fell, then suddenly, a voice: “Stop! Who goes there!” It was our soldiers; we had got through to the other side.’23
One soldier who did not get through to the other side was General Vlasov, who had dropped all radio communication with front headquarters a few days previously. How exactly he spent the next three weeks is unclear, but on 12 July he was picked up by the Germans in a village on the western edge of the ‘pocket’ and flown to Vinnitsa in central Ukraine, site of Hitler’s new forward headquarters and of a special camp for high-ranking Soviet prisoners. Here – perhaps in rush of anger at the Myasnoi Bor disaster, perhaps as the cumulation of years of suppressed doubt and frustration – Vlasov turned against Stalin, writing a letter to the Nazi authorities in which he argued that since many Soviet citizens were strongly anti-Bolshevik, civilians in occupied territory should be better treated and Soviet POWs recruited into a Russian Liberation Army. He had misjudged his audience: ‘We will never build a Russian Army’, Hitler sneered. ‘It is a phantom of the first order.’ Though the Nazis made good use of Vlasov for propaganda purposes, touring him round the occupied territories and putting his name to leaflets inciting the Red Army to surrender, he never met Hitler and was only given command of two POW-based divisions late in January 1945. Four months later he was captured by the Soviets amidst the confusion of the Prague Rising, and in July 1946 tried in a closed court and hanged.24
Vlasov’s treason was also fatal to the reputation of the Second Shock Army, its demise transformed from heroic last stand into deliberate mass defection to the enemy. A Major General Afanasyev, Vlasov’s chief of communications, was flown out from behind enemy lines in August, having spent the intervening weeks living off hedgehogs with partisans. His interrogation report, in which he describes Vlasov as lapsing into dumb indifference before wandering off into the woods alone, reeks of fear of accusation of treachery. On flying back over the Soviet lines, he claims, he could not help shouting, ‘Hurrah! Long live our Great and Beloved Friend and Teacher Comrade Stalin!’, although he was ‘the only passenger, and the pilot could not hear’.25
Post-war, all mention of the Second Shock Army was taboo. No histories were written, ceremonies enacted or memorials erected, and the widows of its fallen were denied military pensions. Veterans were forced to treat their service as a shameful secret, on a par with having been the son of a kulak or priest. Rehabilitation did not begin until the late 1970s, when local volunteer groups began mounting expeditions into the backwoods to recover and decently inter tens of thousands of still unburied bodies.
Sasha Orlov is the son of one of the volunteer movement’s founders. Wearing rubber waders and an army-issue jacket, he stands next to a decommissioned half-track in wilderness a few kilometres to the south-east of Myasnoi Bor. Snow and sky are a flat, dull grey; the oranges and golds of new willow and dead reeds muted. Just out of sight, where the ground dips, lies the Volkhov. Save for the twittering of finches in a nearby bush, it is completely silent. Here, Sasha explains, was a German bunker. Scraping at the snow with his foot, he rapidly uncovers a leather boot, a rusty saw, two earth-filled green wine bottles, a length of ammunition belt, a stovepipe, the spiral skeleton of a hose and dozens of pointy nosed 7.92mm rifle rounds, packed in neat rows inside a rotten wooden box. Ignoring nervous health and safety pleas, he breaks open one of the rounds against a stone and tips out a little heap of shiny slate-grey flakes. A lighter rasps and they flare and crackle, throwing off a miniature fountain of bright white sparks.
The group’s finds are displayed in the gymnasium of a local school. There are hand-painted wall maps – the front lines carefully delineated in interlocking red and grey – a variety of guns (the police periodically take them away, Sasha says, but his group just goes out and gets more), and a litter of helmets, water bottles and tin spoons with Cyrillic initials scratched into the handles. Three fat ring binders are filled with the Red Army equivalent of dog tags: narrow paper forms, filled in by hand, which were rolled up and put inside small screw-top Bakelite cylinders. When found they are now almost always illegible, with the result that of the 29,000 bodies recovered from the Myasnoi Bor area to date, only 1,800 have been identified. Sasha’s prize exhibit, unearthed at the site of Vlasov’s last headquarters, hangs on the wall. It is a print matrix, lead type still gripped within a corroded metal frame, for the Second Shock Army’s one-page ‘newspaper’. The headlines read ‘Death to the German occupiers’, ‘The enemy will not break our resistance’ and ‘Our victory is near’. The issue, almost certainly never produced, is dated Wednesday 24 June – the day on which what was left of the Second Shock Army rushed the Myasnoi Bor corridor for the last time.
Overall, the winter offensive of January to April 1942 lost the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts 308,000 out of a total 326,000 troops committed to combat. Of these 213,303 were ‘medical losses’ – i.e. the wounded and those who died in hospital – and 95,000 ‘irrecoverable losses’ – i.e. the dead in battle, captured and missing. The operations of May and June lost the northern fronts another 94,000 men, of whom at least 48,000, according to German records, were taken prisoner at Myasnoi Bor.26
Ilya Frenklakh, survivor of the doomed People’s Levy, had been transferred to a reconnaissance unit within the Volkhov Front’s 52nd Army. His job was to lie motionless fo
r hours at a time in no-man’s-land, watching the enemy lines through binoculars. All around lay corpses, their relative states of decomposition indicating whether they had formed part of the autumn or spring ‘call-ups to heaven’. ‘As you lay there’, he remembered,
you couldn’t help thinking and comparing: why are the Germans so well-trained, while all we do is try to overwhelm them with numbers? Why do they use technology and brains, while all we’ve got is bayonets? Why is it that every time we attack, our blood flows in rivers and our dead pile up in mountains? Where are our tanks? Who needs this wretched village of Dubrovka? And lots more unanswered questions.
A feeling of nausea would descend – only people who fought at Leningrad or on the Volkhov in the first two years of the war will understand what I mean. If our generals and colonels had done their jobs properly we would have won with a quarter of the losses . . . Butchers and undertakers – we had plenty of those.27
19
The Gentle Joy of Living and Breathing
Through the spring and summer of 1942, for those with the mental energy to follow them, Sovinform’s bulletins brought a torrent of bad news. The defeat of the Second Shock Army at Myasnoi Bor (inferred from the fact that it abruptly ceased to be mentioned) coincided with the encirclement and loss of 200,000 troops outside Kharkov, and with the abandonment of Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula, its defence hopelessly bungled by Lev Mekhlis, the ignorant hatchetman who had helped to bring Leningrad’s January offensive to disaster. The most cutting blow was the fall of Sevastopol, on 3 July. The naval base, historic home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, had been surrounded since the previous November, 106,000 Soviet troops holding out against 203,000 Germans and Romanians under Erich von Manstein. Its civilians, like Leningrad’s, had not been evacuated, but sheltered from intensive artillery bombardment in cellars, caves and catacombs, where they turned out clothing and munitions while feeding off cats and dogs.