Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (44 page)

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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‘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.
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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?
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.