Barbarossa (23 page)

On 9th September, Reinhardt was ready and the attack went in: the
1st Panzer following the left bank of the Neva, the 6th Panzer on
either side of the main railway to Leningrad from the south. Both
divisions were soon enmeshed in a net of antitank ditches and
straggling earthworks which had been thrown up by the construction
battalions and
Opolchenye
during the previous weeks. These
defences were often poorly sited and crudely finished, but they were
extensive.

[Karasev, 73, and other sources (see Goure,
The Siege of
Leningrad
, 313, n. 39) give details. "Earth walls" over
620 miles in length; over 400 miles of antitank ditches; 185 miles
of wood abatis; 5,000 earth, timber and concrete pillboxes; over 370
miles of wire entanglements. But Goure also quotes a private
informant as complaining, ". . . the fortifications were dug in
the wrong places, with pitifully poor equipment, and for very little
purpose."]

The Russians were seriously deficient in artillery, and indeed, in
all arms not produced on the spot at Leningrad and its environs. But
they had a large number of medium and heavy mortars whose weight of
fire, at the ranges of that first day's battle, was nearly as
effective as regular field artillery. On the coastal sector, between
the sea and Krasnoye Selo, the twelve-inch guns of the Black Sea
fleet pounded away at the German rear. Over the battlefield KV tanks
roamed singly and in pairs, manned often by testers and mechanics
from the Kirov factory, where, at that time, they were still being
produced at the rate of about four per day.

This was the kind of close infighting in which Russian
qualities—courage, obstinacy, cunning in camouflage and
ambush—more than counterbalanced the deficiencies in command
and technique which had crippled them in the open battlefields on the
frontier and on the Luga.

The Panzers, in contrast, were suffering as armoured troops always
do when they encounter close defences after weeks of mobile fighting.
Like the British 8th Army when it hit the Tunisian mountains after
months in Libya, or the "Desert Rats" pinned down in the
Normandy
bocage
, the tank commanders took fearful punishment
as they sought to adapt their tactics in an unfamiliar element. On
the first day of the assault four successive commanders of the 6th
Panzer were casualties.

Leeb's committal of over half his tank strength to an attack on
closely fortified lines
after
he had been ordered to release
it for operations on another front is a further example of the casual
insubordination of the "Eastern marshals."

[The 41st. Panzer Corps held over 60 percent of Hoepner's tanks.
The 56th Panzer Corps, which had not been affected by the OKW
directive, was understrength and located west of Lake Ilmen, where it
had remained after checking the diversionary attack of the Russian
48th Army.]

By taking advantage of a proviso in the directive that the
redeployment be subject to "first achieving a close
encirclement," he was trying to finish the job on his own,
before Army Group North was reduced in status and power to the level
of a couple of army corps. Leeb's action is still less excusable when
we recall that the purpose of the redeployment, namely the use of the
two Panzer corps in a fresh series of mobile battles in the centre of
Russia, had been made clear to him, and he must have realised that
their committal to a frontal attack on a major enemy fortress could
only result—whatever the outcome of the operation—in the
tank force being handed over to Army Group Centre in a thoroughly
wornout and depleted condition.

In fairness to Leeb, it must be remembered that every senior
German officer regarded the war against Russia as won. It was no
longer "whether," but "how?" And, still more
important, "who?" Who is going to get the credit for this
prodigious feat of arms? Even Guderian, who was one of the first to
feel the cutting edge of the Russian military revival, had believed
at the time of his own "independent" leadership no more
than that it was his policy which would bring victory that year—it
can never have occurred to him that the alternative was total defeat
and the sacking of Berlin. It was this conviction that made the
intrigues at OKH, the disregard and "mislaying" of
unwelcome instructions, such a personal affair in the first summer's
campaign. After the fall of France, Manstein had complained:

Hitler's appointment of a dozen Field-Marshals simultaneously
was bound to detract from the prestige of a rank which had previously
been considered the most distinguished in Germany. Hitherto . . . one
needed to have led a campaign in person, to have won a battle
or
taken a fortress
to qualify for this dignity.

[Manstein was decorated Field Marshal the following year, after
both "leading a campaign in person" (the Crimea) and
"taking a fortress" (Sevastopol). Neither task was of
outstanding difficulty or importance. The real services he was to
render the Reich were to come in the spring of 1943. (See Ch. 14.)]

It was certainly human—to put it no higher—that Leeb,
who had been an army commander of no particular distinction during
the battle of France, should wish to win his promotion twice over by
taking the most important "fortress" of the Eastern
campaign. And indeed, just as in Bock's command the previous month, a
disregard of Hitler's orders, and those from OKW, seemed at first to
be justified. By the evening of the second day (10th September) the
Germans had penetrated as far as the last line of Russian defences,
which ran along the crest of some shallow eminences—known as
the Dudergof heights—about six miles southeast of Leningrad.
During the night many of the tanks of the leading division, the 1st
Panzer, lay out on the battlefield, forward of the main German
positions, and fought throughout the hours of darkness to beat off
the succession of counterattacks which the Russians always put in
during the night. By the lurid glare of blazing gasoline bottles and
sodium flares they broke up one Russian formation after another as
these assembled to charge the Germans established in the positions
captured during the day. At first light the Stukas returned to the
battlefield, and the 41st Panzer Corps braced itself (and how many
times hereafter is this phrase to recur!) for "one last heave."
The 1st Panzer had lost so many tanks that there was only one
battalion left with over 50 percent effective strength, yet it
gradually inched its way forward during the day, and by 4 P.M. had
scaled "Height 167," a hill of about 450 feet and the
highest point in the Dudergof ridge.

In front of the victorious troops stood the City of Leningrad
in the sunlight, only twelve kilometres away, with its golden cupolas
and towers and its port with warships that tried with their heaviest
guns to deny us possession of the heights.

On the left flank of the Panzer corps the infantry was slowly
edging its way forward, and once the Russian guns and observers had
been cleared off Height 167 it was able to make better progress,
entering the suburban districts of Slutsk and Pushkin, and on the
evening of 11th September, Krasnoye Selo.

By 12th September, the fourth day of the assault, it was not so
much apparent as embarrassingly obvious to OKH that a full-blooded
engagement was raging in a theatre from which it was trying to draw
reinforcement. Halder teleprinted Leeb that the city "was not to
be taken, but merely encircled. The attack should not go beyond the
Petergof-Pushkin road" (a line which had already been passed).
However, the following day Hitler issued a new directive.

Whether this was at the prompting of Keitel, who was himself a
proponent of the Leningrad school and a friend of Leeb's, or whether
because the idea of a spectacular victory there had caught his fancy
anew, the Führer now declared:

In order not to weaken the attack . . . [the air and Panzer
forces] must not be withdrawn before a close envelopment is achieved.
Therefore the date set by Directive 35 for the withdrawal can be set
back by a few days.

As the definition of "a close envelopment" in this
latest directive was "within artillery range," and as no
field piece in the German Army could shoot from one end of Leningrad
to the other, this amounted, in effect, to an order to break into the
city itself. In the next four days the German grip slowly tightened.
Pulkovo was captured in the centre; Uritsk, close to the gulf coast,
connected to the centre of the town by a four-mile-long "promenade";
and Alexandrovka, where the tram line from the Nevsky prospect
reached its terminus. But in the ebb and flow of close combat that
delicate point had been reached, which so often eludes perception by
either side, when the attacker is expending force in a diminishing
ratio to the successes he gains. An attack from three sides on the
Russian positions at Kolpino, by the 6th Panzer and two infantry
divisions, was repulsed, and the same day OKW seems to have tired of
the whole affair, for it ordered the withdrawal "forthwith"
of the 41st Panzer Corps and the 8th Air Corps. During the night of
17th September the 1st Panzer began to load its surviving tanks onto
rail cars south of Krasnogvardeisk and the 36th Motorised took to the
road for Pskov. Only the stricken 6th Panzer was left for a few days
to extricate itself and lick its wounds. Gloomily Halder noted that
evening:

The ring around Leningrad has not yet been drawn as tightly as
might be desired, and further progress after the departure of 1st
Panzer and 36th Motorised from that front is doubtful. Considering
the drain on our forces on the Leningrad front, where the enemy has
concentrated large forces and great quantities of material, the
situation will remain critical
until such time as hunger takes
effect as our ally.

The attack by the 41st Panzer Corps is another example of the way
in which the army commanders played fast and loose with Hitler's
directives when it suited them and they thought that they could get
away with it. Leeb nearly did get away with it—in the sense
that he forced the hand of the Supreme Command and then led it around
(however briefly) to support him.

But the effect on the campaign as a whole was unfavourable. There
was a delay of nearly ten days in moving Hoepner's
Gruppe
south—and this at a time when days were already beginning to
assume a vital importance. And when the Panzers finally left
Leningrad they were in no state to fight another battle. They needed
refit, replacements, rest. They needed, in essence, still more time.

This attack was the first and the only occasion on which the
Germans attempted to take the city by storm. The leading Western
authority on the siege takes the view that ". . . by withdrawing
the armoured divisions just at the moment when the capture of the
City seemed certain, Hitler had saved Leningrad." But is this
really a valid assertion? Only hindsight reveals that the city was
"saved" by factors operating in the autumn of 1941. At that
time every reasoned approach must have led to the conclusion that a
long siege would be successful in the end. And, in fact, the plight
of Leningrad did worsen steadily until it was relieved in 1943—at
a time when the whole strategic initiative had passed to the
Russians.

Furthermore, to argue that Leningrad was "saved" in 1941
begs the question that its capture "seemed certain" by the
41st Panzer Corps. This, too, is highly doubtful. Although the
Germans were gradually constricting the fieldworks on its outskirts
and had penetrated them with a few tanks in places, there still lay
before them the prospect of a long and savage street battle in a town
of immensely strong stone buildings, intersected by a maze of canals
and small water-ways. On ground of this kind a mass of irregulars
armed with gasoline bottles and sticks of dynamite can, as the siege
of Madrid had already demonstrated, swallow up corps of
professionals.

[Although the main effort of the labour battalions had been put
into the outer fieldworks, work had been in train on fortifying the
city itself since the middle of August. Fadeev quotes one of the
workers at the Kirov factory: "We decided on a circular defence.
We fortified the whole area so that if necessary we could defend
ourselves. In addition to the
Opolchenye
we formed other
volunteers' units. The others could do as they pleased but we, the
Kirov workers, were not going to give up our plant."]

If the insolent enemy tries to break through to our City he
will find his grave here. We Leningraders, men and women, all the
patriots of the City, acting as one—from the smallest to the
biggest—will throw ourselves into the deadly fight with the
Fascist robbers. We will fearlessly and unselfishly defend each
street, each house, each stone of our great City.

No army which rests its quality on training, technology, and
firepower—as the German Army did—should ever allow itself
to be drawn into terrain where this quality is at a discount. Whether
from an appreciation of this fundamental law of tactics (which he was
to ignore, with such disastrous consequences, the following autumn)
or whether from less rational motives, Hitler's basic inclination was
against a direct assault on Leningrad.

The general simplification that Hitler's decisions were always at
fault, and its converse, that the alternative courses of action would
always have succeeded, is as fallacious as its companion
generality—that all differences of opinion found Hitler on one
side and the whole body of the generals unanimous on the other.

From the German point of view, the real irony of the Russian
campaign is that the time when Hitler's grasp of military affairs was
at its surest and his powers of judgment were at their most rational
was the period when he had the greatest difficulty in getting full
obedience from his commanders. It was only after he had disciplined
them and was a master unto himself down even to battalion level that
the Führer's military intuition became really unbalanced—and
then, to justify his iron grip, he could always point to that moment
in the campaign when his own plans were constantly thwarted by the
personal pride and ambition of his "Eastern marshals."