The 900 Days (30 page)

It had been thanks to his initiative, in the absence of Zhdanov and of Popov, that work had got under way so rapidly on the Luga line. He it was who organized the special Luga artillery group and the units from the military schools. Bychevsky’s high opinion of Pyadyshev was not unique. General Mikhail Dukhanov, another Leningrad veteran, called him one of the best officers in the command, a man of wisdom, experience and vigor, exceptionally able at preparing troops for battle and directing them, even in a situation in which blunder and confusion were inescapable.

Neither the reason nor the circumstances of Pyadyshev’s arrest were ever made known. Even today no public explanation has been given.
⁵

However, Pyadyshev’s removal was only one of a series of moves taken on July 23. A unified antiaircraft command was created, covering not only the fighting fronts but also Leningrad itself. The direction of defense construction in the Luga zone was lodged in a troika headed by Party Secretary Kuznetsov, and the fortifications work was divided into five sectors.

One other event may have been connected with this shake-up. On July 23, Vyacheslav A. Malyshev, Commissar of Heavy Machine Building, telephoned the great Kirov factory and gave the plant director personal instructions for the organization of antiaircraft defense and fire-protection activities.

The impression left by these moves is one of frenetic activity, bordering on hysteria if not panic.

Perhaps Pyadyshev was shot to show his fellow officers that the warning in the Voroshilov-Zhdanov decree of July 14 meant business. Or perhaps he fell victim to a secret police plot, too confused, too complex, ever to be sorted out.

Later on, after the war, when Soviet military historians began to examine the Leningrad battle, they tended to give more and more credit to the Luga line for saving the city from total disaster. The Germans were held up on the Luga front from July 9 or 10 to August 8—close to a month. The blitzkrieg was thrown off pace, the Nazi timetable out of balance. The date for Hitler’s victory parade on Palace Square had to be postponed and then postponed again. During the month, despite fierce fighting, despite unconscionable Soviet losses, only minor German penetrations were made from Kingisepp to Lake Ilmen and old Novgorod. The line held. It held in spite of casualties that almost wiped out the units of the People’s Volunteers—losses which an experienced officer like Dmitri Konstantinov regarded as sheer scandal. Even F. I. Sirota, a patriotic historian of the Leningrad epic, conceded the “very low military capability of the People’s Volunteers.” The officers were no more experienced than the men. Brigadier Commander Malinnikov of the 1st Volunteers, the highly regarded Kirov division, had to be removed for what was euphemistically called “losing direction of his troops.” The fact was that many Volunteers broke and fled, and no one could have halted them. The men had no training and few arms. Often they did not even remember to fire their guns at the enemy. So many lost their weapons in their first engagements that army propagandists launched a special campaign of slogans: “The weapon is the power of the soldier.” “To lose your gun is a crime against the Motherland.”

After disastrous experiences with the 2nd People’s Volunteers, steps were ordered to try to give these units a more experienced officer cadre, When the 2nd Guards Division of People’s Volunteers was formed, its officers and commissars were called to Smolny and then sent out to towns near Leningrad to try to enlist volunteers with some military experience. Some were found in Novgorod, and one hundred were brought in from the Urals. Despite all this Voroshilov and Zhdanov found the division poorly organized, trained and led.

Nor was it only the wanton sacrifice of the Volunteers. General Dukhanov never was able to reconcile himself to the use of the infantry school cadets as a line regiment. These were fifteen hundred infantry officers, veterans of the Finnish war, who had been taking advanced training courses when war broke out. Almost all had battle experience and command experience. There was nothing—nothing—the Leningrad forces needed more than battle-trained, command-experienced officers. To use these men as cannon fodder to halt the Nazi battering ram with the naked bayonet—this was military insanity. General Pyadyshev agreed with Dukhanov. At the first opportunity he planned to take them out of the line. Before the chance came, Pyadyshev had been dismissed and shot; most of the infantry school men had died in battle.

In the end, of course, the lines could not be held. Under the conditions which Dukhanov found when he himself was directed on July 19 to take over command of the Sabsk-Ivanovskoye sector of the Luga line, it was a miracle they had held so long. This was the section of the line manned by the cadet officers and the 2nd Volunteers* When Dukhanov arrived at Volosovo, the point where he was to meet his troops, he found only Commandant (now Colonel General) A. D. Tsirlin of the Engineers Academy, an adjutant, a driver, and an engineers detachment. The other units were in the lines. There was no means of communicating with them.

“This is like a fairy tale,” Tsirlin said. “There isn’t enough of anything. There is a staff of three men and a command post on wheels. For means of communication, you have yourself. And the units are scattered like seeds in a field.”

While hunting the command post of the infantry school unit Dukhanov met a communications unit. He asked the commander whose it was. “We’re assigned to General Dukhanov,” the officer replied.

“Where is he to be found?” Dukhanov asked.

“Who knows?” the commander said. “I was told to come to Sabsk and I’d find him there. We’re looking right now.”

Dukhanov told him his search had ended. But he still had to find the Kirov infantry command post. Hearing the rumble of artillery fire, he ordered his driver to put on speed. They met a truck driver, who motioned them to halt.

“What’s the matter?” the General asked.

“Tanks. German tanks have broken through the infantry school front.” The soldier spoke quickly and in panic. Dukhanov hurried forward and found that, true enough, two tanks had broken through, but both had been destroyed. They lay afire in an antitank ditch.

In these days the writer Dmitri Shcheglov was still training in the officers’ short course of the People’s Volunteers. His unit was quartered in the Pavlovsky Barracks where the Czar’s Life Guards once made their headquarters. The Pavlovsky corridors were filled with iron cots for the Volunteers. They drilled on the Champs de Mars amid rows of AA guns manned by solemn-faced girls, installed in dugouts and earthen huts, dug into the ancient czarist parade grounds. Every evening Shcheglov went for a walk in the old gardens next to the Russian Museum. It was a secluded spot, an historic one.

Shcheglov’s spirits were buoyant. He had heard of the success of the counteroffensive near Shimsk in which the 56th German Panzers were bloodied. At last the Nazis were being held up. Soon, it might be, the Russians would have their day. But quickly the news was bad again. The Germans had broken through to the river Plyussa.

The Volunteers had a concert on the evening of July 26. Yelena Rubina, a poetess, gave an imitation of Hitler: “Everything’s fine, I swear,
mein FuhrerT
It was a great success. Then Nikolai Cherkasov recited the monologue of old Professor Polezhayev in the great patriotic film,
Deputy of the Baltic
, winding up with the line: “Happy journey to you, you Red fighters.”

On July 30 the Volunteers were called together. The next day they were to leave for the front.

Shcheglov spoke.

“Comrades,” he said, “many of us here are fathers. Each of us must face the future—our children to whom we must give an answer. Our sons and daughters someday will ask, ‘What did you do to beat the enemy?’ And not only our children will ask—their mothers and our wives will ask, ‘What did you do to destroy the invaders?’ How and what our answers shall be soon will be clear.”

The men cheered. The next day most of them were assigned to units, but Shcheglov was held up in Leningrad. He was still in Leningrad four days later when his daughter returned from digging trenches at Kingisepp. She had walked nearly thirty-five miles and caught the last train from Izhorsk, fighting her way onto the car and clinging to the hand grasp and the lower step.

“The enemy is near,” Shcheglov noted in his diary.

He was, indeed. And soon he would be much nearer.

¹
The removal from command of Generals Pavlov, Klimovsky and V. Ya. Semenov, Pavlov’s Chief of Operations, had a grave effect on morale. General Shtemenko, an officer in Stavka, reports the action was not explained, that no one dared mention the names of the generals aloud. Stavka officers were badly affected. Suspicions and suspicious allegations began to be made within the Stavka but, he contends, were quelled by the Party Secretary at headquarters. (Shtemenko,
op, cit
., p. 31.)

²
N.Z
., p. 63. The date of the Voroshilov-Zhdanov visit is mistakenly given as July 14 by A. N. Tsamumali
(Na Beregakh Volkhova
, Leningrad, 1967, p. 7).

³
Actually, the Volunteers assumed they were going to a quiet sector of the lines where they would be able to complete their scanty training before going into action. Many had never fired a gun or thrown a grenade. (Vissarion Sayanov,
Leningradskii Dnevnik
, Leningrad, 1958, p. 25.)

⁴
General Fedyunin committed suicide. He shot himself rather than fall captive to the Nazis. However, some of his troops escaped and brought his body out with them. (Sayanov,
op. cit
., p. 36.)

⁵
After the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 Pyadyshev was publicly “rehabilitated.”

ON HIS CEASELESS, NEVER COMPLETED EFFORT TO BUILD some kind of barrier that would slow the German advance Colonel Bychev-sky found himself spending the night of August 7-8 with Colonel G. V. Mukhin and the remnants of the infantry cadet school. At eight in the morning the dugout where he sat with Mukhin shook as though an earthquake had struck. Every timber quivered and earth trickled down between the planks like rivulets of water. The German offensive to crush the Luga line had started.

Von Leeb had been reshuffling his forces. Operating under a new directive from the Supreme Command, Directive No. 34, issued July 30, his two armies and the redoubtable 4th Panzers had been strengthened by the assignment of the 8th Air Corps of attack bombers. Von Leeb’s task was to break through the Soviet defenses on the Luga, encircle Leningrad and make contact with the Finnish armies on the Karelian peninsula.

Von Leeb now had at his disposal twenty-nine divisions of 80 to 90 percent muster strength. Against him were fifteen weak Soviet divisions. Haider noted in his diary for August 3 that in view of the disparity “Army Group Nord obviously should not meet with irresistible difficulties.”

Von Leeb had divided his armies into three groups. The 41st Motorized and 38th Army Corps of the 4th Panzer Group were assigned to strike at Ivanovskoye and Sabsk, aiming for Leningrad via the Koporsky Plateau. To the north and west von Leeb had placed the 58th Nazi Infantry which covered the territory from the source of the river Plyussa to Peipus Lake.

Just to the south was what von Leeb called his Luga group—three divisions and the 56th Motorized Corps of the 4th Panzers. This was to strike for Leningrad via Luga city and the direct Luga-Leningrad highway. The 8th Panzer Division was held in reserve here.

The southernmost group comprised the 28th and 1st Army Corps, aimed at the Novgorod-Chudovo front held by the Forty-eighth Soviet Army.

Von Leeb hoped soon to have the five divisions of his Eighteenth Army, now occupied in the investment of Tallinn, available to add punch to his offensive. Further south his Sixteenth Army was pushing around Lake Ilmen against the Soviet Eleventh and Twenty-seventh armies.

The thunderous cannonading which shook the timbers of the dugout in which Bychevsky sat with Mukhin marked the launching of von Leeb’s attack.

An adjutant shouted to Bychevsky: “Last night one of our scouts went to Redkino. He counted about sixty Nazi tanks there. And we haven’t much artillery.”

Mukhin and Bychevsky slithered along a lateral trench to an observation point in the forward line. They saw a flight of thirty Junkers-88’s roaring in low over the lines. Nine peeled off and dropped their bombs as the officers slid for cover into a sandbagged dugout.

After a half-hour preparation the German artillery halted. Mukhin was on the field telephone to Captain Volkhov of his 2nd Battalion. Twenty-five tanks were bearing down on Volkhov’s position. Five minutes later Volkhov reported three tanks afire and German infantry attacking. Mukhin called a bit later. The attack had been beaten off.

Vsevolod Kochetov, the fledgling war correspondent, and his companion Mikhalev spent the night of August 7-8 camping among the gravestones in a churchyard at Opolye. It was a dry, warm night. Kochetov had managed to acquire a carbine to add to his TT revolver. His pockets were filled with grenades, and he was using a field knapsack for a pillow. It was stuffed with his battered notebooks, towels, soap and a razor.

The reason Kochetov was spending the night in such a high degree of military preparedness, as he later explained, was that there were so many signs of an imminent German offensive.

He was awakened by what sounded to him like a volcanic eruption. A blinding light flashed over the horizon. The earth shook. Kochetov guessed that railroad artillery must be in action.

He started out for the 2nd People’s Volunteers but found the roads jammed with ambulances, communications cars, motorcyclists, refugees driving cows, goats and pigs, and peasants pulling cartloads of household goods. Alongside the mob ran dozens of mongrel dogs, howling and barking. Kochetov decided to make for the infantry cadet school sector instead. Reaching the village of Yablonitsy, he and Mikhalev encountered a full-scale retreat— Red Army trucks, heavy guns, mobile radio transmitters, crowds of soldiers, tired, dirty-faced, bandaged, some with glazed eyes, many without weapons. Behind them could be heard the sound of heavy guns.

Kochetov had never seen a retreat before. It was a terrifying sight— soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, hopelessly slogging along the road. No one in chargé, no one to direct the men, no way to halt the hopeless tide of humanity. Finally he saw a lieutenant and asked where the infantry school men were.

“They are still there,” the lieutenant said, waving back toward the battlefield.

Kochetov talked to some of the retreating men. They told of the overwhelming German fire, of the terrible tanks, of the paratroops, of the encircling movements. The Germans, it appeared, were all-powerful, merciless, unconquerable. Their army was an irresistible machine. They were raining down leaflets conveying the (false) claim that Leningrad and Kiev had already fallen.

The situation was not quite so terrifying as it seemed to the inexperienced Kochetov. But it was difficult. He decided to abandon his search for the infantry school outfit.

In reality, bad as things looked from the Russian side, they looked none too good from the German. Haider noted in his diary for August 10 that von Leeb’s gains had been “very insignificant.”

“What we are doing now,” he wrote, “is the last desperate attempt to prevent our front line becoming frozen in positional warfare.. .. The critical situation makes it increasingly plain that we underestimated the Russian colossus.”

The front was devouring Soviet manpower voraciously. On July 23 Zhdanov ordered 105,000 persons mobilized for work on the Luga fortified line and 87,000 for work in the Gatchina fortified area. Local Party secretaries got the order shortly before noon and were instructed to have the cadres ready with equipment, shovels, picks and field rations by 5
P.M.

Party workers were sent out on mission after mission to spur the work, for in some places morale was bad and crews were influenced by German leaflets emphasizing the futility of resistance. Three secretaries, V. S. Yef-remov, A. M. Grigoryev and P. A. Ivanov, were sent to the Kingisepp region. They arrived about 8
A.M.
, July 28.

“The residents had already fled,” Ivanov recalled. “The city was burning. The only force remaining was a unit of railroad troops defending the station and getting ready to blow up the bridge across the river.

“The next morning we went to Veimarn, where there were still some echelons at work on fortifications. We had only begun to assign the people to their tasks when a flight of Junkers came over the station. Some of the people took cover in the woods. But there were many casualties. Hundreds of them went on to their tasks, working first under air attack and then under mortar fire. They performed no worse than experienced army sappers.”

Although between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Leningraders
¹
had been mobilized for work on trenches and fortifications—even children of fourteen and fifteen were laboring in the field—there were never enough hands. Thirty thousand were put to work on the Koporsky Plateau, between Kingisepp and Leningrad. Nearly 100,000 worked in the Gatchina area.

Notice after notice appeared on factory and office bulletin boards. The board at the Hermitage Museum was covered with calls: “To the trenches!” “At Luga—to the trenches!” “At Kingisepp—to the trenches!” Ada Vilm, the scientific secretary of the Hermitage, went with a group of workers near Tolmachevo. It was a place she had known since childhood. Here she had picked berries and gathered mushrooms. Here she had strolled through the long summer nights. Now she and her comrades dug trenches.

“When we arrived with spades, picks and shovels,” she recalled, “the constant sound of the artillery cannonade was still distant. Then we became accustomed to the whine of shells, to nearby explosions.

“We went on digging until the Fascist tanks approached our sector. That evening we were prepared to return to Leningrad.”

By that time Tolmachevo had fallen and the flames of burning Luga reached toward the sky. The Hermitage workers struggled all night through the forest and at dawn came to a station where they caught the last train back to Leningrad.

Dirty, dusty, exhausted, their clothes torn and grimy, packsacks on their backs, shovels in hand, they arrived back at the Hermitage and were called immediately to a meeting addressed by Militsa Mate, deputy director, in chargé of packing the third trainload of Hermitage treasures. No time must be lost. To work! To work!

General Popov and Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov were constantly on the move to try to stiffen the front. Now they were with Mukhin and the infantry cadets; now with the 2nd People’s Volunteers; now with Major General V. V. Semashko, commander of this whole sector, including Kingisepp.

They threw into the lines another People’s Volunteer Division, the 4th, and attempted to carry out a counterattack together with the Kirov men. The 4th Division numbered 10,815 men, including 2,850 Communists and Young Communists. But it had only 270 machine guns, 32 cannon and 78 mortars. Only one out of 10 officers had had army experience.
²

The task was hopeless. The Soviets ran up against five German divisions, including two Panzers. The attack fell apart, its direction confused, its communications shot to bits.

Bychevsky walked into Semashko’s headquarters toward the end of an ugly post-mortem on the night of August 11.

Kuznetsov was upbraiding Semashko for faulty direction of the 4th Volunteers. “Remember,” Kuznetsov said sharply, “these are the workers of Leningrad.”

“Aleksei Aleksandrovich,” protested Semashko. “I don’t want to throw the tiniest shadow of doubt on the working people. But this division was formed three days ago. It hasn’t had a drop of fighting experience. The men have never even fired a gun. They marched twenty-five miles to take up their position, and I had already been ordered to carry out the counterattack. And they immediately ran into tanks. . . .”

“Untrained, never under fire,” Kuznetsov snapped. “And who held up the enemy for a whole month on the Luga line but the People’s Volunteers? Who on this very day set fire to half a hundred tanks? The brothers Ivanov and other workers from the Meat Combine! They hadn’t been under fire either, but they fought back with Molotov cocktails. . . . Comrade Semashko, we haven’t any other division to send you. You are going to have to do with what you have.

“And the road from Kingisepp to Volosovo is not to be cut by the enemy. That is the categorical order of the Military Council.”

“Yes, sir,” said Semashko, looking at his watch. “It will soon be dawn.” He left the dugout to do what he could.

General Popov remained in the shelter, pacing like a tiger from corner to corner. He nervously snapped his finger joints.

“The whole 4th Panzers is hitting here, the bastards,” he said. “There’ll be two times two hundred tanks here before long.”

Semashko had less than fifty tanks left.

His lines did not hold despite the categorical orders of the Military Council, despite the fighting qualities of the Leningrad workers, despite the threats of Kuznetsov. The line from Kingisepp to Volosovo was cut—and within twenty-four hours. No orders, no heroism, no blood could halt the Nazi Panzers. Thousands of men and women worked on antitank ditches and trenches. They dug and dug and dug. But the lines could not hold. Von Leeb threw in his reserve Panzer division—the 8th. It cut the Kingisepp-Gatchina railroad August 12 and captured Veimarn. Kingisepp was doomed. But the Red Army fought on. It was almost driven out of the city August 13 but fought back in. On August 16 the defenders, exhausted, dirty, wounded, slipped out and fell back toward the Gatchina fortified zone. But the battle was still not over. On the twentieth the 1 ith Soviet Rifles stormed Kingisepp from the west and briefly liberated it. They were thrown out in less than twenty-four hours.

Once the line started to crumble, it crumbled almost everywhere. It fell apart along the Luga. The Novgorod position disintegrated almost at the same moment. Novgorod fell August 13 despite valiant counterattacks by the Forty-eighth and Eleventh Soviet armies. Faulty staff work by the Thirty-fourth Soviet Army, which was supposed to join the operation, bungled the desperate Soviet effort. The Germans won control of the whole Lake Ilmen-Staraya Russa position and drove the Russians back of the river Lovat by August 25.

The cost to the Russians of this kind of fighting may be judged from the roster of the Forty-eighth Soviet Army, commanded by Major General S. D. Akimov, after it had retired north where it tried to hold a thirty-mile front around Lake Peipus. As of August 24 this army—so called—had a total strength of 6,235 men. It had 5,043 rifles, or a ratio of five rifles to every six men. It had 31 heavy weapons—three 45-mm’s, ten 76-mm’s, twelve antiaircraft 76-mm field guns, four 122-mm mortars and two 152-mm mortars. It had 104 machine guns and 75 submachine guns.

In fact, the Forty-eighth Army was the equal in numbers (but not in arms) to a half-strength peacetime Soviet division.

The Forty-eighth Army was more badly mauled than some units defending Leningrad. But not much. Nor were the German losses light. One Nazi officer called the Luga offensive “the road of death.” General Hopp-ner, commanding the German 4th Panzers, noted that his men had to fight their way through 1,236 field fortified points and 26,588 mines.