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 Leningraders1 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.
There was some truth in the call which von Leeb broadcast to his troops as they crashed forward across the Luga line:
“Soldiers! You see before you not only the remains of the Bolshevik Army but the last inhabitants of Leningrad. The city is empty. One last push and the Army Group Nord will celebrate victory!
“Soon the battle with Russia will be ended!”
But as von Leeb rallied his troops with these ringing words, he was using quite different ones in his desperate appeals for reinforcement and aid to the German Supreme Command. Haider reported grimly on August 15 that because of the punishment von Leeb was taking “there will be no way of getting around issuing the order for transfer to Army Group Nord of the motorized corps. To my mind it is a grave mistake.” He noted further that “wild requests by Army Group Nord for engineering troops, artillery, antiaircraft, antitank units (on top of three armored divisions) are turned down.”
Day by day, hour by hour, the options open to the Leningrad Command diminished.
Tallinn, the Baltic Fleet base, had been left to the rear, fighting in close encirclement. How long it might hold on was questionable. The Karelian front was coming apart as Voroshilov and Zhdanov bled it of troops to reinforce the line just outside Leningrad. At any moment the Finns and Germans might break through north of the city.
There were no reserves left. As Leningrad’s Chief of Staff, General Nikishev, reported to Marshal B. M. Shaposhnikov, Chief of Staff of the High Command, August 13: “The difficulty in the present situation is that neither the commanders of divisions, the commanders of armies, nor the commanders of fronts have any reserves whatever. Even the smallest breakthrough can be halted only by hurried improvisations of one unit or another.”
Nikishev told Shaposhnikov that the Leningrad front had little left with which to oppose von Leeb beyond the untrained People’s Volunteers and the battered units which had fallen back all the way from Lithuania and Latvia.
These forces, Nikishev declared, simply could not be expected to stop the Germans, who continued to throw into battle relatively intact motorized and armored units.
His request to the General Staff was staggering: “a minimum” of 12 divisions, 400 planes and 250 tanks.
Nikishev told Bychevsky about his letter to the General Staff sometime between 5 and 6 A.M. on the morning of August 14 when Bychevsky called to get the latest information. This was the only quiet hour of twenty-four at Nikishev’s headquarters. The General had the habit of snatching an hour or two of sleep, his head buried in the papers on his desk and his hand still grasping his pen.
Tired and bitter, Nikishev asked Bychevsky whether he thought the General Staff would provide the troops to save Leningrad. Nikishev glanced at the wall where the map of the front showed the blue arrows of Nazi columns penetrating deeply into the front. He did not wait for an answer.
“Well, of course,” Nikishev said. “They won’t give us the troops. But we had to send the request just the same.”
Nikishev was bitter at Voroshilov, Chief of the Leningrad High Command, whom he blamed for siphoning off troops from the northern sector to the Northwest Front of the Leningrad region.
Three days later orders came from Moscow, responding to Nikishev’s plea. Three divisions were transferred from the Northwest Front to the Northern Front (the main Leningrad front) and on the nineteenth the Forty-eighth Army was shifted from the Northwest to the Northern Front.
The military value of the move was dubious. In fact, it may have opened the path to German encirclement of Leningrad.
The Northwest Front had launched a fairly successful counterattack in the region of Staraya Russa and had driven the Nazis back thirty or thirty-five miles. To counter the blow, von Leeb had been compelled to put his 56th Motorized Corps and his SS Death’s Head Division into action in the Staraya Russa area. He also committed the 39th Motorized Corps, which had been shifted up from Smolensk. The Germans described their plight as a “temporary crisis.”
The Soviet Eleventh and Thirty-fourth armies were holding off this Nazi counterattack, although they were no real match for such a powerful striking force. Moreover, the Thirty-fourth Soviet Army, in particular, was badly directed.
Just at this moment these armies were weakened by the command shifts, requested by Nikishev. As Nikishev himself commented bitterly: “Now we can get them with a whole German corps on their tail!”
The shift of the Forty-eighth Army was a fatal move. This bedraggled outfit, nothing but a hulk, chanced to be the only unit in the path of four fast-moving German divisions, heading for the Moscow-Leningrad railroad.
The Nazi divisions struck at the hinge between the two Leningrad fronts, the Northern and the Northwest. They shouldered aside the wreck of the Forty-eighth Army, pushing it east. General Dukhanov was on the scene. When he learned that the Forty-eighth was retreating to the east along with units of the Northwest Front, it was, he said, “like a terrible, stupid dream.” The movement of the Soviet forces east (rather than falling back to the north) uncovered the whole approach to Leningrad.
This error, Dukhanov believed, enabled the Germans to encircle the city. True, the over-all strength of Leningrad might still have been unable to prevent the Germans from closing the ring. But by withdrawing to the east the Soviet troops left a gap of a dozen miles open, unprotected. The Nazis paraded right into it.
“The army in that period was on wheels,” Lieutenant General A. V. Sukhomlin, Chief of Staff of the Fifty-fourth Army, recalled. Moscow was trying valiantly to shuffle units north to Leningrad from the reserve echelons which had been created to the east of Moscow. Troops were constantly being moved from the Karelian peninsula to the south and west of Leningrad. They were shuffled around between west, southwest and east day and night.
It was a never-ending task, like trying to keep a sieve full of water. As fast as units were pulled from the north to strengthen the south or southwest, there was new deterioration to the southeast.
Nothing which Leningrad tried to do in those fateful August days could halt the hemorrhage of manpower or the irresistible tide which swept the Nazi Panzers closer and closer to the city’s gates.
1 The figure was “up to 500,000” by the end of July or early August. (N.Z., p. 80.)
2 On July 25 the Military Council had ordered the formation of four more divisions of People’s Volunteers from the 34,000 enrollees still in the city. They were to be called Guards Volunteers. The 1st went into the lines at Volosovo August 11, the 2nd at Gatchina on the seventeenth, the 3rd at Ropsha. The 4th was reorganized as the 5th before ever going into service. It went into the Pulkovo line September 12–13. The 6th went into action at the Rybatskoye meat plant September 16 and the 7th at Avtovo September 30.