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Prit Buttar, "To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42" (Osprey, 2023)
01:41:09
An interview with Prit Buttar
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C
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. My next guest is Prit Putar and we will be discussing his book To Besiege a City, Leningrad, 1941-1942 that has been published by Osprey Publishing in 2023. Prit Putar is the author of ten critically acclaimed books. His most recent publication was Meat Grinder the Battles for the R salient, 1942-1943 that were also published by Osprey Publishing in 2022. Prit originally studied medicine at Oxford and London before joining the British army as a doctor. He has later worked as a general practitioner for several years. He now writes exclusively from his home in rural Scotland, where he also indulges his hobbies for wildlife and astrophotography. Prit Guttar, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:32]
A
Thank you very much for having me.
- [02:34]
C
So we always like to begin our interviews by asking our guests, tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the backstory behind writing this book.
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A
Leningrad is always an episode of the war that I've wanted to write about. It's been quite a long path getting here via other battlefields, but it's a unique thing in the war. You know, the island of Malta was, if you like, besieged for a considerable period of the war. And there were briefer sieges around cities like Konigsberg and Sevastopol, Berlin ultimately, but nothing on this scale. This was a colossal siege that lasted well over two years. More Soviet citizens, soldiers and civilians died in and around the city than British Empire war dead from both world wars combined. And it was a siege that's almost unique in history in that unlike most sieges where the intention of the invader or the attacker is to starve the garrison to a point where they will lay down their arms or that they can be overwhelmed, the intention, in the case of Lenin from the outset was much more in keeping with the entire genocidal nature of much of the war in the East. It was a deliberate attempt to destroy a city and its people and to wipe them from the face of the earth. So all of this combined to make it a uniquely terrible event, particularly in the light of more recent sieges that we have seen in the Middle east and Ukraine. It seemed to me something that needed to be revisited.
- [04:27]
C
Now, what type of sources were you able to consult for this book? Because I know due to recent events in Ukraine, Soviet archives can be a little difficult to have access to.
- [04:41]
A
To put it mildly, they can be a little bit difficult. Most of my routes into these have now been closed off. Fortunately, over the years, I've accumulated about half a disk full of files that I' I've saved from previous times when I had better access. I was also helped a great deal by some friends in Russia who were happy to exchange information they could get for information that I could get for them. So there was a sort of mutually beneficial trade going on there. But it has been a very, very difficult issue with reduced access. In terms of books. David Glantz's Super, A Very, Very Thick Account is a very good roadmap to the siege and goes through certainly the military aspect, with much more emphasis on the Russian side than perhaps many other accounts. And there's a very rich literature on the siege. Lots of memoirs written by civilians who were in the city at the time. If anything, the challenge was culling it and trimming it down to a more manageable a body of work that I could then consult and deciding what angles I was going to pursue in writing the books.
- [06:05]
C
Now, you begin the book by talking about the significance that Leningrad, or as it originally was called, St. Petersburg, some people book, for those who speak Russian, to the significance of the city in Russian history. Could you probably give us a little bit of a summary of kind of its history and its significance in Russian and later Soviet history?
- [06:27]
A
Yes, of course. The city was built by Peter the Great, very deliberately to be a window to the West. He had traveled extensively across Europe, particularly to Amsterdam, and he was absolutely fascinated by the technological progress being made in Western Europe, which just showed him how backward Russia was. So he believed that if he could create a port that faced west, this would serve many purposes. Obviously there were trade advantages in this. In an era where most trade was done by shipping, there were benefits in that he believed it would encourage Russians to become seafarers. And he was a great admirer of the growing power at sea of both the Dutch and the English and the French. And also it was an opportunity to create a new modern neoclassical capital away from the Asiatic and backward looking Moscow as he saw it. The result was the creation of this city out of almost nothing in the middle of the swamps and forests of the north. People were encouraged, well, when I say encouraged to go there, I don't think he left much choice for his courtiers. They had to move there. He provided money on reasonable terms so they could then build their palaces, etc. And his successors, particularly Catherine the Great, embellished this city even further, bringing in some of the finest architects and artists from all over Europe. The result was a city that's always been very different from other Russian cities. Any of your listeners who have visited Russia will recognize that it has a very different feel from, say, Moscow or other places in Russia. And this then eventually led it to become, if you like, distrusted by Stalin. Even though it was being the capital at the time, it was the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was where the Romanovs were overthrown. This was where the Bolsheviks came to power. But this attitude of independent thought, of being a bit difficult and rather unruly, made it challenging for an authoritarian regime. And when Stalin's purges ripped through all aspects of Soviet society, in many respects, Leningrad, as it was by then, suffered even worse than other places simply because so many intellectuals were based there, so many of the great military thinkers of the era were based in the Leningrad military district or have connections there. So inevitably, the city suffered a great deal from the purges and the mass arrests.
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C
Now, getting into the purges, one institution that was really deeply affected was the Soviet military. What was the effect of the purges on the military? Especially like with the execution of Dukhachevsky and other major Soviet commanders, the effects were absolutely devastating.
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A
Huge swathes of the officer class of the army were eliminated or arrested or demoted or discharged from the military. Many were sentenced to long imprisonment, others were eventually released without charge, but they had been very badly treated or demoted. Most important perhaps was firstly the loss of expertise. The result that with an army the size of the Red army, it became necessary to promote people well above their level of experience or training in order to fill the gaps. Another consequence was when war came, in many respects, there was no sense that the purges are now history. There was a sense that the purges are here to stay. And although there may be a bit of a lull at the moment, they could come back tomorrow. As a result, nobody was remotely inclined to question orders, to challenge orders, to say, look, this is a stupid thing, we shouldn't be doing this, because the consequences could be the NKVD would arrive and you would just disappear. The result was that far too many officers at every single level of the red army in 1941 behaved in a manner that was more attuned to their own personal survival than it was to the needs of the military and to the needs of a nation at war. That directly contributed to the appalling casualties that the Red army suffered in the opening year or more of the war. And those casualties, of course, etch still further into the limited pool of experienced and trained junior and middle ranking officers. And it's then very difficult to replace that officer class in the middle of an existential war where you're fighting for your very existence. You don't have the time to be able to send people off on extended training courses, etc. You've just got to make do with what you have. And as I've said in other interviews, even as it starts to win the war, the Red army remains very much a blunt instrument. It's not a sword. This is not a weapon with a cutting edge. This is a cudgel. And the Red army gets better at how to swing that cudgel. And in some respects, the cudgel itself gets, becomes a more effective cudgel. But it's not a sword. It'll still be the weapon that you use to Beat your opponent to death, and there's a price to be paid in that in terms of your own casualties. So the legacy of the purges rolled on and on throughout the war. And in many respects, you can make a very strong case for saying that every organization inherits certain traits from its predecessor. So the Soviet army of the Cold War era inherited a lot of Red army thinking, a lot of Red army discipline, complete failure to understand the importance of a cadre or a class of experienced, highly trained professional NCOs, you know, the glue that holds any Western army together. Soviet and Russian armies have never had that. And here we are again. They are now facing exactly the same problems.
- [13:16]
C
Yeah, it's interesting you bring up that point, because actually during the war, the Red army actually tried to tap into old Czarist traditions to try to at least galvanize the men and the officer corps to fight for Mother Russia as much for the. The Communist revolution. So it was kind of like that, that tension there. Now, for any of our listeners who aren't familiar with it, the purges in the military, those were like, 1937, 1938, about. But with the outbreak of war in 1939, well, first off, the Soviet Union intervenes against Poland in late September 1939, but then later on, in 1939, they launched the Winter War against Finland, which is right on the border of Leningrad. So how did the Winter War affect Leningrad? And also, if you will, how did the purges affect the Red Arm performance in that conflict?
- [14:15]
A
The Soviet military organization, and indeed, to some extent, modern Russian military organization, was based on military districts. And each district, when it mobilized for war, would form one or more fronts. Each of those fronts would be made up of separate armies. Each army would be made up of corps and divisions, et cetera, et cetera. So the Leningrad military district was known as the Leningrad Special Military District. It had a tradition for being a very desirable posting. This was an area where a lot of Soviet military innovation went on. They carried out some of the first major military exercises by any service on the use of paratroopers in mass landings, etc. They practiced and rehearsed armoured warfare on a scale that nobody else did, not least because nobody had that many troops and tanks. So Leningrad Military District was mobilized specifically for the war with Finland, and its commander was himself a survivor of the purges. He had been arrested, etc. So he was very anxious to show how well he could perform in order to. Not to draw too much untoward attention to himself, or rather draw the right sort of attention to himself. Having said that, he warned Stavka, the Soviet high command, that the plan didn't look very intelligent. It was attacking on too many different fronts into Finland. The logic of this was, the Finns will have to spread themselves so thinly that we'll be able to break through at one point or another. But the converse was also true. By diluting their effort on several different axes, none of which supported each other, the Red Army's forces were also vulnerable to being beaten one by one, particularly in very, very difficult terrain, which favoured the defenders. They could actually afford to neglect dealing with some of the Soviet attacks and concentrate on the others. So all of the advantages lay with the defender. Ultimately, in 1940, the Finns were ground down. The Soviets achieved their intention, which was essentially to push the frontier further away from Leningrad, to make the Leningrad district more defensible. But the cost was enormous in terms of casualties, in terms of equipment. Equally important, though, was the effect that the war had on German military thinking. The Germans had done a lot of clandestine training with the Soviets in the 1930s, so they had some understanding of the scale and the strengths and weaknesses of the Red Army. But they were stunned, firstly by the relatively poor performance of the Soviet units that entered Poland at the same time that they entered from the west, but then by the manner in which the Finns managed to hold them at bay for so long. This then fed directly into German thinking about a war with the Soviet Union and was one of the foundations that led Hitler and his planners to believe that we can win this and we can win it quite easily. The Soviets are really not good at this. Look how badly they did against Little Finland. This isn't going to be difficult. We will win this war without any real difficulty.
- [17:46]
C
Yeah. Hitler famously said when commenting, the performance of the Red army, you only have to kick in the door and then the whole rotten structure will come crash down. So. But of course, then he tried it and we kind of know how that story ends, but we're not quite there yet. So, yeah, the poor performance of the Red army in Finland and then also later on in 1940, the stunning German success against France and the Low Countries really kind of galvanized, or at least is a shock to the Soviet high command that, well, we really need to get our act together because of the. The effects of the purges and prepare for a possible war with Germany. So what were some major steps taken in this time, 1940, 1941, before the German invasion, that the Soviet Union did take to try to prepare for war.
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A
They started reorganizing pretty much every aspect of the Red Army. Troop structures were changed. Equipment was recognized to be obsolete. They had a huge fleet of tanks that were actually, even by the standards of 1939, were pretty useless, really. Already there had been developments that would culminate in the creation of the T34. In fact, the prototypes made their appearance in 1939. There was a lot of argument about whether this tank should be developed by the standards of the very cheap, very small tanks it was replacing. It was quite expensive. Even worse, there were people like Semyon Budyoni, who was an old Civil War comrade of Stalin, who felt the entire tank project was a complete waste of money. His logic was that the Red army is largely an army of peasants, many of whom are still illiterate. But look, the bottom line is most of them know how to ride a horse. Let's just raise cavalry. Cavalry can do the job for us. So, you know, there were people, there were these sort of conservative minds, if you like, still really reluctant to face up to reality. There were those who recognized, actually we need tanks and we need better tanks. There was also a lot of rethinking about the use of air forces, as indeed there was with everybody. And I think sometimes people forget that the Luftwaffe, for example, enters the war with an air force that's based very much on 1930s thinking and in many respects is not an ideal air force for the conflict that's coming. They still talk about fleets of what they call destroyers or fast fighter aircraft. Twin engined aircraft that will operate ahead of a bomber force, clear away the defending fighters, and then the bombers will deploy forward without any regard for the fact that, you know, something like a Messerschmitt 110 may well be very heavily armed, but it's nowhere near as maneuverable as a single engined aircraft. And in a dogfight, it's a sitting duck for any small agile fighter. The same applied to Soviet air forces. They also had complete failures due to doctrine. For example, most Soviet aircraft in 1939 that had radios were equipped only with radio receivers. They were unable to transmit. And the logic of this was they just need to be told what to do. We don't need to hear anything from them. There was no sense that there was going to be any two way communication of setbacks or problems or whatever. We'll just tell them what to do and that'll be fine. But even as the new tanks and planes started arriving in greater numbers than before, the legacy of the purges continued, not least because it was official Red army policy, for example, that any air crash was to be treated as sabotage until proven otherwise. This meant that particularly with new types of aircraft, particularly with young pilots, there was great reluctance to embark on training programs where, of course, there was going to be a higher rate of minor and major crashes. So you end up with armed forces by 1940-41, which are getting better equipment, but they're really not very good at using them. They haven't really had an opportunity to train properly on them. Many of them are still poorly equipped. Many of the tanks do not have radios. The whole of the Soviet mobilization plan, in terms of the huge numbers of artillery and wagons required for the artillery, was dependent upon mobilizing pretty much every agricultural tractor across the entire Soviet Union. And yet, because logistics was something that the Red army, much like the Tsarist Russian army before it and much like the modern Russian army, had completely neglected the importance of logistics. So it was one thing to mobilize all of these things, it was quite another to get them to where they were needed. And during the First World War, the Russian mobilization was crippled because troops, conscripts, who were meant to be going, for example, to railway battalions and logistic units were given the lowest possible priority when it came to mobilization, which was crazy. They should have been the first people you mobilised because they're going to move everybody else. But they were lowly. We want to mobilize the infantry and artillery and cavalry. The result was you ended up mobilizing huge numbers of troops who then sat around waiting for transport. And, you know, similar things happened in 1941. And indeed, logistics has been an enormous weakness of. Of current Russian operations.
- [23:43]
C
Now, how did Leningrad specifically feature in these plans for the Soviet plans for the upcoming war?
- [23:51]
A
The entire plan strategy of the Soviet Union in the event of a war, and in fairness, it should be pointed out, they had prepared extensively for a war. They knew that a war with Germany was likely, if not inevitable, and they had anticipated that at some point the wicked fascists will invade the Soviet Union. We will fight a battle, a series of defensive battles in the border regions, which will eventually bring the German advance to a halt. At that point, mobilization having been completed, we will be able to unleash sufficient forces to launch deep operations, firstly to recover any lost territory and then to carry the war into the enemy's homeland, where, of course, the political side then becomes a factor. They were still talking in terms of, we will encourage the workers of Europe to rise up against the fascists and the capitalists and the Consequence will be the overthrow of the enemy. So it was, if you like, a strategy based upon a defensive phase by necessity. But this was to be kept as short as possible before transitioning to offensive operations to drive the enemy back over and beyond the frontier. One of the problems that the Red army faced in 1941 was that in 1939, the occupation first of Poland and then the Baltic States had moved the frontier further to the west. Now, this was a good thing in that it gave Soviet forces more territory over which to retreat before key locations like Leningrad were going to be thrown threatened. But on the other hand, it also made all the defensive preparations that had been built prior to 1939 obsolete. So the old Stalin line fortifications along the Russian frontier were stripped of their weapons. Many of those weapons were earmarked for new defensive lines in the Baltic States, which hadn't actually been built when the conflict began. The role of Leningrad Special Military District was seen as bolstering the Baltic district. So the Baltic district was going to provide the armies that would stop this German advance into northwest Soviet Union. And then the Leningrad district armies would be unleashed in the big counterattack that would follow. The only practical discussions around defence of Leningrad really involved consideration of protecting the city against air attack in 1939, 1940, even 41. They weren't really thinking in terms of the Germans getting anywhere near that far into the Soviet Union.
- [26:42]
C
And they didn't consider that Finland joining the war on Germany's side was a consideration, did they?
- [26:48]
A
I imagine they must have, because, you know, there was no secret that the Finns were very close to the Germans. After all, they'd used a lot of German equipment in there in the Winter War. But I. I suspect they thought, well, we've already beaten the Finns once, much like any army that wins a victory. The difficulties they had suffered from during achieving that victory were forgotten almost in the sense of relief that they had won. There was a key battle in the war between Russia and Japan in 1905, 1906, at a place called Mutkin, where the Japanese attacks entrenched Russian positions. They suffered casualties, which actually were a forerunner of what happened in the First World War. But they won the battle. And a British military attache who visited the battlefield, he wrote rather poetically that the truth of modern warfare was lying naked and dead all over the battlefield for everyone to see. But within days it had got up and started putting on its old uniform. And the only lesson that people took from Mudkin was an attacking army won. They completely failed to acknowledge that. Actually, it suffered catastrophic casualties in winning. So I guess the Red army thought we beat the Finns full stop and didn't really look beyond that.
- [28:17]
C
So now we move to the Germans and they're planning Operation Barbarossa, that is the invasion of the Soviet Union that will commence in eventually June 1941. Now, what significance did Leningrad have in the German planning for Operation Barbarossa?
- [28:37]
A
Most accounts, most sort of short accounts of Barbarossa talk about the advance into the Soviet Union culminating in the Battle of Moscow in November, December 1941. It gives a misleading picture because it suggests that Moscow was the culmination of the operation that was the ultimate objective in the original plans for Barbarossa. In fact, the plans as they existed. When the invasion began, Moscow was regarded as a secondary target. The primary objectives were on either flank. In the north, the Leningrad region, and in the south, Ukraine. These were firstly for economic purposes. Seizure of Ukraine would. Would deprive the Soviet Union of an enormous amount of agricultural produce and the capture of. In those days, the Donbas region was very heavily industrialised and it was felt that knocking this out would be a major blow to the Soviet Union. It would also open the way for a future German advance into the Caucasus region to capture the vital oil fields there. When it came to Leningrad, the economic benefit of it was it was the second city of the Soviet Union, it was the home of most of the Soviet Union's very heavy industry of shipbuilding, etc. It was the home of the Baltic Fleet. You knock out Leningrad and the entire Baltic Sea is then a German lake. But it was also a political objective in that Hitler recognized it was the cradle of the revolution. This is where the Bolsheviks had come to power. The capture and deliberate destruction of Leningrad, he argued, would strike a catastrophic blow to Soviet morale and would help demoralize the Soviet people and thus accelerate their collapse. But the thing is, if you're going to attack towards the north to get to Leningrad and you're going to attack east and southeast into Ukraine, basically you're advancing on two diverging axes. That's only possible if you've eliminated the ability of the Red army to intervene against you. So these primary objectives were based upon an assumption that the Red army could be destroyed within a couple of hundred kilometers of the frontier. And Hitler's belief was, given how useless the performance of the Red army had been in Finland, given the dazzling speed of the Panzer divisions, we can get behind them. You know, the Soviet Union is vast. Historically, it's been a very difficult place to attack and invade. But we have tanks, we have panzer divisions. We will get these armies before they can withdraw into the. Into the depths of the interior. Once they're destroyed, we have freedom of operation. We can allow our main axes to diverge with impunity. And then once the northern and southern objectives have been achieved, then we concentrate on Moscow. But Moscow was very much only to be a target when both northern and southern objectives had been achieved. And in order to achieve those, first you had to destroy the Red Army. And this destruction was based on all sorts of miscalculations. We've already talked about this assumption that the Red army was rotten to the core, but also German intelligence of the actual strength of the Red army was. Was woefully poor. It was based on little more than a bit of speculation, a bit of wishful thinking. They really lacked very much hard intelligence. They estimated that at a push, the Soviet Union could mobilize maybe 200 divisions. By 1945, the Red army had put over 380 divisions into the field. So even if they had succeeded in killing 200 divisions, it wouldn't have been anywhere near enough. And, of course, in doing that, they would have taken such losses that the remaining Red army divisions would have been more than enough to overwhelm them in turn.
- [32:40]
C
Yeah, I read that at the end of the war, the Red army strength was like 12, 12 and a half million men. And also, it reminds me of one of those sayings that Hitler made in that secret conversation with Mannerheim that got recorded that, well, if you would have told me they had 40, 40,000 tanks, I would have said you were crazy. And he almost even admits that he would have rethought invaders at that point.
- [33:08]
A
Yes. When discussions were held about tank production, he said, well, if I genuinely believed these figures in the past, I wouldn't have started this war, which is just so. That suggests he had actually been told at some point that they have this capacity to manufacture tanks. People who read about Stalingrad may well be familiar with the fighting for the tractor factory in the north of Stalingrad. These tractor factories were built in many places. Kharkov, Stalingrad, Leningrad, too. And they were built specifically with the intention of switching production from civilian tractors to tanks in wartime. And this was explicitly built into the design of the factories. And given that German engineers had helped construct some of these factories, they couldn't help but know the scale at which the Soviet industry could produce tanks if it was fully mobilized to that purpose. But the Germans believed, we can capture those factories before they can really go into production. They completely failed to recognize the ability and indeed ruthlessness of the Soviet Union in moving those factories off to Siberia, relocating them in these desolate cities along the railways of the eastern parts of the Soviet Union, where workers worked in unheated, often incomplete factories with no roofs until they could be built, and thus managed to keep enough munitions and weapons being produced to keep the Red army in the fight for long enough for the tide to turn.
- [34:44]
C
Yeah, what you said about the tractor factories, that reminds me of some of the local history, because I'm from Detroit, and we and our autumn automotive factories, those got switched over very quickly to war production for tanks and what have you here. In fact, that's why we were called the Arsenal Democracy. So it just reminded me there's like that parallel from here, but also to what was going on in the Soviet Union. And in fact, even engineers from the Ford Company even went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to help build tractors.
- [35:17]
A
Yes. And when these factories were all evacuated to the east, a large number of the tank factories ended up around the city of Chelyabinsk. And those of your listeners who know a bit of Russian geography, if you imagine where the Ural Mountains run across as the boundary, if you like, between European Russia and Asian Russia, Chelyabinsk lies at the southern end of those mountains. Mountains. And it became such a center of tank production. It was known in the Soviet Union as Tankograd. And one of the sort of bitter ironies of Soviet tank production is people in the tank units got quite skilled at recognizing which factory had built the particular tank they were in. And throughout the Second World War, and indeed during the Cold War, Soviet tank crews knew that the best Soviet tanks were built in Kharkov, which adds another nuance to the current conflict.
- [36:24]
C
Yes, indeed. It's just kind of interesting how history just seems interrelated, like both present, past, and future, supposedly. Now, one aspect of the German planning for Bar Barbarossa was the Commissar Order. And that often gets discussed a lot when talking about the Eastern Front. Can you kind of explain what the Commissar Order was and what was its significance? Sure.
- [36:50]
A
I think it's important to see the Commissar Order in context. It was one of a series of orders about how the German military were to behave in the Soviet Union as they advanced, advanced. There is an American writer and academic, Weightman Bjorn, who's written extensively on the Holocaust, and Weightman makes a very good point. He says the Holocaust in the Soviet Union was not because the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. You have to think of it the other way around. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in order to carry out the Holocaust. Barbarossa was from the outset, a genocidal project. Its intention was to kill millions of Soviet citizens, the Jews, but also other Slavs, to depopulate the cities in order to create the agricultural surplus upon which Hitler depended to feed the rest of Europe. And the consequence of this approach to this new phase of the Second World War was that all of the rules under which most armies had operated up to that stage were going to be abandoned. There was a statement by the Germans that because the Soviet Union has not signed up to the Hague Conventions, which are the precursors of the Geneva Conventions, we therefore do not need to abide by those rules in the Soviet Union, which kind of ignores one of the clauses of the Hague Conventions, which is, you have to abide by these regardless of the status of your opponent. And that had been introduced in the Hague Conventions to cover wars by European powers in their colonies in Africa and Asia, where they might well be fighting people who had not had the opportunity to sign up to the these conventions. So the same applied to the German army, but this was ignored. And the Commissar Order was one of these orders where the German military was told that, if you like, the core of resistance will be around these political officers, these commissars, who will motivate the enemy to all forms of bestial and cruel warfare against the invading German forces. And therefore, anybody who is suspected of being a commissar must be separated from other Soviet troops and handed over to the appropriate authorities at the earliest possible opportunity. And if it isn't possible to hand them over because of mobile operations or whatever, it is the responsibility of the capturing unit just to shoot them on the spot. So there were other orders too, around seizing hostages in order to enforce cooperation among civilians. As the fighting progressed, Reichenau, who was commanding 6th army in the south, issued an order under his own name known as the Severity Order, reminding Germans that they were fighting in a struggle between two mutually incompatible systems. And in order to ensure that Germany triumphed, there could be no mercy and no pity shown to the enemy. This was a weakness, and people had to be reminded of this, of the unfortunate necessity of having to be cruel and harsh. And Hitler was so impressed by Reichenau's order, he ordered all other army commanders to issue identical orders over their own signatures. So this was very much part and parcel of the manner in which Hitler wanted this particular conflict to be conducted. This was not a war that was going to be bound by the conventions and rules that had applied to fighting elsewhere.
- [40:55]
C
So now we get to the actual start of the war, June 22, 1941. Now, the German forces that are tasked with capturing Leningrad is Army Group north, which was under Wilhelm Van Leeb, I believe. Correct?
- [41:10]
A
Yeah.
- [41:10]
C
So in the early stages of the Operation Barbarossa, how does Army Group north proceed? How is its operations proceed?
- [41:21]
A
The main problem that Army Group north faces in its assault to get north is that there's a multitude of small and medium sized rivers running across Latvia and Lithuania. So capturing crossings over these becomes, if you like, the first priority leap has a Panzer group, which these were later renamed as Panzer armies, at his disposal. And the two Panzer corps in the Panzer group are led by figures who had become very famous as the war progressed. One was Manstein and one was Reinhardt. So he was fortunate in having some of the best panzer commanders available to the Wehrmacht at the time. The early phase of the operation was an astonishingly fast advance across Lithuania and into southern London. Latvia. There's a river that runs across Latvia up to the city of Riga on the Baltic. The Latvians refer it to as the Daugava. The Russians and Soviets refer to it as the Western Dvina. And this is actually a very major river. Capturing crossings over this river was of great importance. And the German 8th Panzer Division demonstrated, if you like, the absolute quintessence of German military doctrine and panzer warfare. It broke through the German lines on the first day with one of its battle groups. Immediately, the commander, Brandenburger, switched his axis of advance to that one battle group and gave it all the reinforcements he could and ordered the other battle groups to follow it, with the result that this division basically disappears off Soviet situation maps by the end of the first day. They have no idea where this Panzer division is and what it's doing. And then it turns up on the Daugava and captures the vital crossings at Daugaf Bils. So this initial surge up to that river line was very, very fast. Utterly bewildering for the Red Army. There was one nasty moment for the Wehrmacht when a mechanized brigade and a Soviet tank division counterattacked and caught two German Panzer divisions in a difficult moment. This was the moment of horror for the Germans when they realized that the Red army not only had heavy tanks, but it had a heck of a lot of heavy tanks. And moreover, these things were pretty much immune to German anti tank guns. The armored division that attacked them was equipped with heavyweight KV1 tanks which just motored straight through the German positions. With shells bouncing off them, they crushed the German anti tank guns under their tracks, kept on going and then stopped. And the Germans progressively knocked them out one by one with demolition charges by bringing their big artillery closer, bringing 88mm anti tank guns to the front line. They discovered then that the reason that the Red army had stopped was many of the tanks had run out of fuel, many weren't carrying any ammunition. Those that were carrying ammunition were so new that the gun sights had not been adjusted properly, so the gunners couldn't trust the accuracy of their guns. The training of the crews was almost non existent. And lacking radios, these tanks had no way of communicating with each other. So ultimately, this battle at a place called Raseiniae, swung decisively in favor of the Germans and resulted in the destruction of much of the German armor in that part of the Eastern front. But it was a moment which just gives a little hint as to how easily Barbarossa could have been derailed if the Red army had been even remotely well prepared for modern warfare.
- [45:33]
C
Yeah, and what were some other challenges that the Red army was facing in trying to counter the German advance because they were caught completely off guard.
- [45:43]
A
Yeah, they lost pretty much most or all of their frontline aviation. In the opening phase of the war. Planes were destroyed in large numbers on the ground. The Luftwaffe's fighter squadrons, which may have been bloodied in the Battle of Britain, had nonetheless acquired enormous amounts of combat experience there. And these guys really cut the Soviet aircraft to pieces whenever they encountered them. So the Luftwaffe was very much controlling the skies and was able to bomb with impunity. And this is part of a trend that continues all the way through into the end of the war that because of the sheer scale of the Eastern Front and the fact that even quite late in the war, the Germans were able to achieve at least, they were at least able to contest air superiority, if not achieve their superiority. It allowed them to operate fairly obsolete aircraft on the Eastern Front, which they could never have done in the West. West. So, you know, Stukas barely make an appearance in the west after 1940, and yet they're still being used in the east all the way through. Until 1945, the German aviators bombed with impunity. They smashed railway junctions, they hit columns of Soviet vehicles moving up. And the Red army is on the one hand, trying to regroup and organize for counterattacks. And on the other hand, it's trying to move up mobilized forces to bring its frontline armies up to strength. And it's also feeding the newly mobilized armies into its battle order in a very chaotic manner whilst struggling with losses and setbacks on a scale that it had never imagined would ever occur. So it's having to, you know, this dream of stopping an invasion within, you know, within a relatively short distance of the frontier. Even by the end of June, in the first week of July, that dream has long gone. Now they're realizing they're going to have to fight the Germans much further into the interior and they haven't really planned for this. There have been no map exercises, there have been no discussions of if we had to defend a line roughly running in this area, how are we going to do this? So they're having to do that basic staff work while the Germans are very much breathing down their necks.
- [48:03]
C
Now, as the Germans proceed closer to Leningrad, they got to go through the Baltic States and these areas had just been occupied by the red army in 1940. So in some ways the local populations are not. They don't have any real sense of being Soviet. They had just thrown off the Russian czars in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. So how did they react to the German invaders? Were they more positive or did they kind of see them all? Another foreigners coming to take over us?
- [48:36]
A
There was initially great enthusiasm when the Germans arrived. And the context of this was that the Soviet Union had stationed troops in the Baltic states shortly after the fall of Poland. They then forced the governments of the three states to resign and hold elections which were heavily rigged. One election official, Soviet election official in Lithuania, for example, proudly reported that turnout in his area had been 130%. This was seen as a good thing. All of the deputies who were returned in the elections were Communist party politicians. The three Baltic state governments that were formed had only one item of business which was to apply to the Soviet Union for membership. So in 1940 all three had become part of the USSR. Immediately, mass deportations of people who were deemed to be either actually or potentially hostile to the Soviet Union began. Tens of thousands of former soldiers, police officers, politicians, intellectuals, lawyers, etc. Were shipped off to Siberia or were imprisoned. Most of the industry, well, all of the industry of the Baltic states was nationalized. People lost there their possessions very, very quickly. The Jewish population of the area found themselves in an impossible situation. In Lithuania in particular, their numbers had been swollen by tens of thousands of Jews fleeing from Poland. Many of these Jews were, like Jews elsewhere in Europe, relatively well educated. Many of them were fairly wealthy and had either owned or had been fairly high ranking in a lot of the industrial and Business concerns across the region. So when these were nationalized, these people lost their jobs and they needed work in order to, you know, to feed their families. So an awful lot of Jews ended up working for the Soviet authorities. When the repression of non or anti Soviet or suspected anti Soviet people in the region began in 1940, the Jews were seen by Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians as cooperating with the hated Soviets. The terrible irony is that actually as a percentage, the Jewish population of the Baltic states suffered more from those deportations than ethnic Estonian or Lithuanian or Latvian populations. But of course that was overlooked. This was very fertile ground for the Germans. They had prepared the resistance movements in the area prior to the invasion. As soon as the invasion began, they armed these resistance organizations with captured Soviet weaponry. There were a whole series of pogroms against the Jews, mass killing, particularly in places like Kaunas. And the Germans worked very hard to ensure that their hand was not seen to be behind this. They instigated nearly all of these killings. But the SS units involved were under strict orders to make sure it looked as much as possible as if it was local revenge taking upon the Jews. So these three states were quite jubilant at the arrival of the Germans. They expected the Germans to restore their national independence and were then dismayed when the Germans started treating them really as an extended colony. True to their rather odd racial thinking, the Germans classified the three Baltic states in different ways. The Estonians in the north, because of their Nordic and Finnish links, were seen as not bad at all. They were pretty close to being Aryan and they will do the Lithuanians in the south, well, you know, they were felt to be far too close to the Poles, far too Catholic and also actually a little bit too Slavic. So they were regarded as only a little bit better than Russian Slavs and the Latvians were somewhere in between. All of this just sort of fed into the way that the Germans administered these areas once they had taken control. It was a very high handed approach which ultimately Latvia would raise two SS divisions, Estonia would raise one. Lithuania raised several flak units for the Luftwaffe, but no ground troops. But all three Baltic states mobilized large numbers of military police battalions that were heavily involved in the Holocaust both in this region and across the rest of the Soviet Union.
- [53:36]
C
Now, as the Germans are approaching Leningrad closely, as they're going through the Baltic states in northern Russia, how are the local. How is like the Leningrad military district preparing for a possible assault by the Germans and also by the Finns who are eating the Germans.
- [53:53]
A
This is now, now a, a really desperate catch up by the Red Army. As the Germans are advancing across the Baltic States, tens of thousands of workers in the city, civilians are mobilized, including women and teenagers, to start digging fortifications around the city. Not only around the city, but also across that stretch of the Soviet Union between Leningrad and the border with Estonia and Latvia. It's a region which has historically been known as Ingermanland or Ingria, and there are a couple of river lines there which are. Are potentially defendable. One of the striking features of this region is that even now, it's not exactly covered in roads and railways. A lot of this area is very densely forested. There are only a number of avenues through these forests and swamps. And even today, the roads and railways follow those avenues. So actually, in many respects, defending this region is not too difficult. You can concentrate your resources on these particular key avenues, and you can pretty much ignore the forests in between. You're not going to be able to push large numbers of troops through those forested and swampy regions. So the Red army is busily digging fortifications in the open areas and along these particular axes of advance in order again, to hold the Germans about 100 km or 60 km from Leningrad itself. It's not, at this stage, still thinking about a close siege. They're thinking, well, we can hold them at arm's length if we can just get our breath, if we can just bring them to a halt. One of the extraordinary things about this campaign in the north is that even though Leningrad was the primary objective of Army Group north, the Germans hadn't actually finalized their thinking about what was going to happen when they reached the city, when the invasion began. And this continued to evolve as the campaign unfolded. So you have the officers in the Panzer divisions in particular, who are jubilant at the rate at which they're advancing as August and September pass, or particularly through August. And there is really no sign of any end to Red army resistance. Some of that jubilation is beginning to be replaced by growing concern and anxiety of, you know, just how bottomless are Soviet resources. But nonetheless, you know, they feel that they've covered huge distances, they've taken substantial losses, but, hey, the other side has too. We must be close to finishing off the Red Army. And even at the level of corps commanders and division commanders, people are thinking about, we're going to be the guys who capture Leningrad. Meanwhile, orders have come down from above that Hitler's thinking has now changed. The city is not to be captured, it's to be sealed off, because the Germans do not want to have responsibility for feeding two and a half million people. The intention is to establish a tight siege perimeter and then to allow starvation and the winter to do its work and to kill as many people as possible so that in the spring, the Wehrmacht can seize the area almost without a fight. And in these battles, through August and into early September, as the Germans edge closer and closer to the city, the soldiers are still filled with the sense of, you know, a couple more surges and we're going to be the conquerors of Leningrad. We'll be the people who seize the city without any real awareness that the high command has absolutely no intention of following this through. This leads to some really interesting issues in German memoirs. When you read the accounts left by the commanders and officers and soldiers who fought in Army Group north, many of them will say it was a terrible mistake by got to press on and capture the city that autumn before the winter. You know, we could have done it. We had them on the run. That's technically true. They did have them on the run. But firstly, it kind of underestimates the difficulty of seizing an urban area the size of Leningrad. And secondly, it completely ignores the fact that Hitler had already decided that wasn't going to happen.
- [58:30]
C
Yeah. This also coincides with the debate about whether or not they should push on the Moscow and Hitler wanted to finish off Kiev and the flanks first. Is that true?
- [58:42]
A
Well, yes. And again, the. The German military were obsessed with, if you like, the military prestige that would come from being the conquerors of Leningrad and Moscow. And many of them also believed that actually knocking out Moscow was militarily very important, because even today, the Russian railway and road network is very much centered on Moscow. If you disable Moscow, you actually disable a lot of the ability of the Soviet Union to transfer forces north and south and all along the front. But Hitler had always intended from the outset the northern and southern objectives come first. We only move against the center when we have achieved, when we have knocked those out. The tension between what the military wanted to do, which was give priority to the center, and what Hitler wanted to do, which was give priority to the flanks, was never resolved. And Halder, who was the chief general staff during the invasion, he even wrote in his diary that he was confident that once the battle began, it would be sufficiently fluid that. That the military would be able to get its own way and Hitler wouldn't be able to intervene. So the military had never really bought into Hitler's vision of this attack on diverging axes to the north and southeast, and then combining an attack on Moscow. From the outset, they were always determined to go to Moscow. And if you like, their failure to impress that idea on Hitler at an early stage. And Strokor Hitler's failure to impose his vision of the campaign on the Wehrmacht meant that they ended up trying to do everything at the same time, and they just didn't have remotely the resources needed to do that.
- [60:39]
C
Yeah, that's almost a continuation of what happened with the French campaign in 1940, where the German High Command kind of wanted a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan from 1940, 1914. But then Hitler kind of. He wanted an attack in the center. And then eventually Monstein came up with the. The sickle cut approach, and that's. He adopted that. And then he kind of thought, well, I was right and the generals were wrong. So it kind of got to his head. And that kind of sets up the stage for what you just mentioned later on in the war. And it never really gets resolved for the rest of the war, really doesn't.
- [61:17]
A
Well, you know, there is a statement, this thing isn't there, that even a broken clock is right twice a day. And you can argue that Hitler got lucky in that he backed a winner in the Belgian campaign of May 1940, but because he had done that, and, you know, Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs that one of the unusual features of Hitler was, like many people who had not had a formal training in a subject in this context, he hadn't been to the German staff college or anything like this, because if you like, he was approaching it as an outsider and as an amateur. He could think outside the box. He could see things at other people who were too bound by the doctrine that they had been taught, etc. Etc. That other people didn't see. So when he backed Manstein's plan and it was a dazzling success, a lot of the military just thought, hey, this guy really is a genius. And none of them even remotely stop, or most of them didn't really stop to consider maybe he just got lucky. You know, he backed a winner. It could have gone disastrously wrong and we would have lost the war there and then. But because he backed a winner on that occasion through a mixture of good judgment, good luck, whatever you want to call it, by 1941, the generals are kind of prepared to give him a lot more leeway than they might have otherwise. But also they are still bound by their own traditional thinking that they still believe, ultimately, we're the experts at this and we will be able to impose our will on the campaign. As it unfolds.
- [63:01]
C
Yeah. And in a similar way, or there's a parallel of sorts with the Soviet high command because Stalin was not a formally trained officer, but of course he's the one in charge of military operations.
- [63:14]
A
Well, I think in fairness, it's worth pointing out that Stalin led large formations in the Russian Civil War. So he had some practical experience of high command and had been heavily involved in the fighting against the czarist for the White Russian forces in the Civil War. Hitler had been a corporal. You know, there was a gulf in their military experience really. And many of Stalin's closest associates, people like Voroshilov and Budyonny, these were like him. These were veterans of the first world, of the First World War and of the Russian Civil War. They had all led major formations. But there is this very curious. It's like a graph with two lines heading in opposite directions. As the war progresses, Hitler removes progressively the ability of German officers at every level to think for themselves and to act in an innovative and improvised manner in the face of developments and imposes increasingly tight top down control. And the Red army is moving in exactly the opposite direction in that Stalin attempts to micromanage everything in the opening phases. And once he's got over his shock of the war starting and then gradually as the war progresses and he learns to trust his generals and marshals, he gives them much more leeway, not only in the planning phase, but certainly in the execution phase of the operations. And just doesn't even, doesn't interfere none of the Hitler like control of where is this division going or where is that corps going? He just lets them get on with it. So the Germans write about. I was translating a piece this morning. One German writes about. In 1945, the Red army had learned very well the, the tactics that we had used in 1941. And I'm thinking, well, you're kind of claiming credit for actually what had happened was the Red army had learned how to fight in, in the mechanized era. You guys thought of it first, but it wasn't an exclusively German invention. You know, the British and American armies at about the same time were also evolving and learning how to fight in the mechanized war era. Yes, they drew on German lessons, but also a lot of it was just because that is how you fight a mechanized war. There was nothing uniquely German about that.
- [65:41]
C
Yeah, that's referencing to deep battle doctrine, which in some ways kind of originates from some of the debates in the 1920s when mechanized warfare is emerging. But of course because of the fight against the Germans, they developed that. Which is why sometimes I get irritated when I still hear this claim that, oh, the Red army only won because they did these huge human wave attacks. And it's like, well, no, they did develop their own version of mechanized warfare in deep battle docks veterans to counter the Germans and also eventually fight them back. But of course, this is like 1945. 19 or 44, not 45. Excuse me.
- [66:24]
A
Yeah.
- [66:25]
C
And also. And also during the plane for progression, I remember Rosakowski, who almost got executed during the purges, but he was part of the planning for that. And Stalin kept saying, well, okay, I want this huge, huge, like, single thrust into the German line. But Rozakovsky kept saying, no, we need, like, two flank attacks. So he kept telling Rosakowski, well, go into the other room and think about what you've done, and we'll consider it. And this is a guy who almost got executed back just a few years before. But Rosokowski kept insisting, no, it's far better to do these two flank attacks and attack the Germans this way. And eventually Stalin said, you know, I like a commander who really sticks to his convictions. So that also kind of shows a little bit of Stalin's evolution as a. As a commander in chief, so to speak, which is a contrast to Hitler.
- [67:21]
A
Yes, that's a. That's a very amusing story, not least because so much of it is based, again, this is a. This is a nuance of Second World War history. A lot of that debate about whether to use a single attack or a pincer attack on Bobruisk is based on Rokossovsky's memoirs. And Zhukov, in his memoirs, went out of his way to say that didn't happen. So who knows? But you're right. Stalin does learn to trust his commanders and give them a lot more leeway. Whereas, you know, even as the Red army is bursting across the Vistula in 1945, even as the British and Americans were going ashore in Normandy in summer of 44, no one's allowed to move a Panzer division unless the Fuhrer says so, you know, and it's absurd that your field decisions are being determined by somebody at a headquarters thousands of kilometers away. And you have to wait for the message to get there and to come back again. By which time the situation has changed beyond recognition.
- [68:29]
C
Exactly. Now, how does Stalin and Stavka, the Soviet high command, assess the situation for Leningrad as the Germans are approaching?
- [68:39]
A
There's a real difficulty for the Soviet Union as the Germans march ever closer to Leningrad because we're back to railways again. There's a limited railway capacity. You can only push so many trains along these railways, not least because the Luftwaffe is bombing anything that that tries to move. So you have different requirements. You need to feed reinforcements to the army in the field to keep it fighting. You need to supply that army with ammunition, with food, with replacement equipment, etc. At the same time, by now it's becoming clear that there is a risk that Leningrad is going to get cut off. So there are some thoughts about should we be stockpiling food and supplies within the city, fuel, etc. The winter is coming at the same time, should we be evacuating industry and civilians out of the city? All three of these require railway capacity, so you don't have enough trains to do everything. And they have to decide how they're going to allocate this. The result is they end up doing bits and pieces of all three. But the priority is given to keeping the Red army fighting in the field. Field. Because the logic of this is if that bit works, if we can succeed in holding the Germans at arm's length, the other two become much less important. So achieving that has to be the priority. The result is that, contrary to German expectations, the Red army just refuses to die. It just keeps on going, despite the Germans continuing to bite off big chunks of the Soviet forces and chew them up and spit them out and force them into surrender or into fleeing, abandoning all their equipment. They just keep on coming. So every time they break through, they surge forward a little bit and then they stop. Because like we said earlier on, the avenues of advance are fairly narrow. If you push down one, you've got to wait for the neighboring avenues to be cleared to achieve a new coherent front before you can move on. In the meantime, the Red army just keeps on producing these new divisions. Militia divisions raised in Leningrad start appearing in the front line and actually engaging the Germans. Their casualties are horrific because none of these guys have anything more than the most rudimentary training. And they're fighting seasoned veteran German units by now. And all the time the Germans are just edging closer and closer, closer to the city. But they're paying for this in enormous losses. Proportionately, German losses are very, very heavy. The infantry divisions are now barely at half strength. The Panzer divisions are actually very badly depleted, not necessarily because of huge numbers of casualties, but just because of the practicalities of mechanized warfare across such such primitive landscape, huge numbers of German tanks and trucks have broken down and are awaiting repairs. An interesting difference in the approach to industrial warfare between Germany on the one hand and The Western powers. On another, just to digress a little bit, British and American aircraft manufacturers providing aircraft for the RAF or the usaaf, they generally manufactured a little over two engines for every engine mount. So if you're building Mustang fighters, for example, P51s, you'd be building 2.1 engines for every plane that you deliver. Same with RAF Spitfires and Lancaster bombers etc, etc. By contrast, German aircraft industry produced 1.4 engines. So that means you start running out of spare parts much sooner. And the same applies to tanks, the same applies to trucks. And in fact the Wehrmacht had mobilized fleets of civilian trucks for Barbarossa from all over Europe. It operated several hundred different types of truck. So just imagine the logistic nightmare of replacement parts for those trucks. And particularly on the very primitive roads of the Soviet Union where these things are breaking down, getting stuck in ditches, you can't, you know, you just can't fix them. So the Germans are becoming weaker and weaker as they edge forward, even though they have consumed huge numbers of Soviet troops and they feel we're just one surge away. But now actually putting together a surge is getting increasingly difficult built. And of course you're operating on increasingly long supply lines. And although the population of the Baltic states may firstly have been quite favorable to the Germans, and then after a while settled down to a sort of resentful coexistence, now that the Germans were operating within Russian territory, they have a problem with the partisans behind the front line who are blowing up bridges, but attacking trains, etc. Which just adds to the complications and difficulties that the Germans face.
- [73:58]
C
Yeah, you talk a lot about the partisans and what role they play in the siege of Leningrad. And also furthermore, just because of the huge swaths of territory that the Germans have captured and need to hold, and also just the huge population to control, that's just another headache for the Germans to try to handle. And they're also still trying to beat back the Red Army. So in some ways it's almost like Barbarossa was a little bit more than they could chew. As, as the saying goes, yes, it.
- [74:29]
A
Was very much based on what you said earlier, on Hitler's belief that just, we just kick the door in and everything collapses. So the logic was, if the Soviet Union has effectively ceased to exist as a functioning state by the end of 1941, who cares? The partisans have no one to fight for. They have nothing to believe in. So we'll be able to suppress it over a period of time. And moreover, if we're not having to commit so many troops to the front line. That allows us to release more forces for rear area security, etc. So everything then goes back to this failure actually to deliver that killer blow. And the unexpected resilience of the Red army and therefore of the Soviet Union, its ability to survive casualties on an almost unimaginable scale and stay in the fight. And that again, just gives the partisans something to fight for. It gives them a reason to keep on going.
- [75:22]
C
Yeah, so now we're reaching the winter of 1941, and the role of Lake Lagoda is very important to the survival of Leningman. Lake Lagoda is right next to. Yeah, right next to Leningrad. And because Leningrad is between the Baltic Sea and Lake Lagoda, we don't have a map to show our listeners. But that's the basic geography. Yes, but could you explain the significance of Lake Lagoda to the survival. Yeah, during the siege?
- [75:52]
A
Absolutely. So Lake Ladoga is the largest freshwater lake in Europe. It's huge. It's comparable in scale to the great Lakes of North America. It's a huge body of water. In winter there are, you know, in early winter there are enormous storms on this lake, but it's far enough north that in the winter it freezes. Now the geography is really important here. So Leningrad lies at the very tip of the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea runs between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. And then there is this narrow bit of the Baltic Sea known as the Gulf of Finland, which runs towards the east. And at that eastern tip sits Leningrad, about 40 kilometers away. So a little over 25 miles away to the east is this enormous lake. And the river Neva flows out of the bottom left hand corner of the lake and then reaches Leningrad where it exits into the Baltic Sea. In September 1941, the Germans reach the line of the Neva between Leningrad and the lake and they reach a place called Schlisselburg on the southern shore of the lake. So they have now cut the land link between Leningrad and the rest of the Soviet Union. So those vital railways that we mentioned earlier on, they're now cut. At first the Germans plan to push on to occupy the entire southern shore of Lake Ladoga. And briefly they manage to advance as far as a place called Tikfin further east before they're driven back, because it's just overstretched really. But nevertheless, the land corridor has been cut and the city now faces a terrible period of, of siege. Because airlift capacity is very, very limited. You can probably fly in a few tens of tons of supplies a day, which is not going to keep a city of two and a half million alive for very long. So you've got to get food in from somewhere else. Not least because the Soviets had not been able to provision the city in any meaningful way prior to the siege commencing. So the lake became really important. And at first it was possible to run some barges across the lake, towed barges. There was a flotilla of small gunboats operating on the lake which provided them with anti aircraft protection against the Luftwaffe. And a series of piers were constructed on the western shore next to Leningrad, and a new railway line was set up there in order to then transfer stores into the city there. Then came a period as the lake began to freeze that it became too dangerous to operate shipping, but the ice wasn't firm enough to support traffic across it. So this was a period when the city was entirely dependent upon the stores that it had built up, which were almost non existent. And the first cases of starvation began to appear. Russian and Soviet engineers had a long experience of building roads and even railways across frozen lakes and rivers during the winter. Because so much of the Soviet Union does freeze quite hard during the winter. I don't know, you may be able to tell me. I don't think the Great Lakes in North America do freeze in the winter. Or if they do, it's probably only the coastal regions that freeze. Would I be right?
- [79:36]
C
Yeah, it's kind of the coastal region quite a bit.
- [79:40]
A
Sure. So most of Lake Ladoga, if not all of it, does freeze, or certainly did freeze before the climate generally began to warm. And as soon as it was firm enough to support traffic, engineers from both the Soviet Union side and the Leningrad side started venturing out onto the ice to try to establish a route. And eventually this route became known as the road of life. And it was largely through the trucks that ran across this ice and the tractors pulling loads that Leningrad survived that first winter. Because the winter of 4142 was also one of the worst winters on record. It was bitterly cold. People are familiar with the stories of the terrible suffering outside Moscow during that winter. Well, exactly the same was happening in Leningrad, only this was a city under siege, where there was no coal. Very rapidly firewood began to run out. The Germans knocked out electricity generation in the city, they knocked out water pumping facilities, etc. All of which made the plight of the population far, far worse. And just about enough food managed to arrive across the lake to keep the city alive. Zhdanov, who was the Communist party chairman in the city, was responsible for organizing rationing. He rationalized the rationing, to coin a phrase. Because at first different parts of the city had different rationing systems, he imposed a single system where highest priority was given to factory workers, then to ordinary adults, and lowest to children. Unfortunately for the children, teenagers were expected to put in full shifts of work, either in the factories or clearing bomb damage or clearing ice or corpses in the city. So their calorific requirement was probably at least as high as the adults, and yet they were on a child's rations. And in fact, the death rate amongst teenagers in the city that winter was shockingly high. Well over three quarters of them died from starvation very rapidly. There started to be cases of death from starvation within the city. There were all sorts of improvisations. A huge warehouse had been hit by the Luftwaffe early on in the siege and a train load of sugar had gone up in flames. And as the winter progressed, people started digging out the burned sugar from the wreckage, mixed with soil, etc. Because it was still a source of calories, it could still help eke out people's rations. Sawdust was mixed with flour in order to make the bread go further. Scientists in the medical institutes in the city devised a means of extracting vitamin C from pine needles, which, interestingly enough, was first discovered by Western scientists who learned it from native North Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries. And fortunately, various scientists in Leningrad had read the relevant scientific papers and managed to devise a means of. Of doing this. So by the barest possible margin, the city was just about kept alive during that winter. As with many lakes that freeze, Lake Ladoga was quite often obscured by dense banks of fog, which was an absolute blessing for the road of life because it made it much harder for the Luftwaffe to interfere here with traffic along the lake. Nonetheless, there were bombing raids or attempts to break the ice, etc. But largely quite ineffective. And the Soviets managed to carry on running supplies into the city all the way through the winter.
- [83:50]
C
Now, one interesting story that comes up with Siege of Leningrad involves the Soviet composer Dmitry Sashtakovich, who I believe composed the seventh Symphony during the siege and also had it publicly performed as a way of trying to keep morale up. Could you kind of explain this story to our listeners?
- [84:13]
A
This is something that's. That, for me, is absolutely fascinating because it gives you a slight insight into how different cultures approach different things. The popularization of what in the west we might regard as high culture was very much part of the Bolshevik system. System that everybody was to be given access to classical music, to ballet, to opera, to great works of art. This was no longer to be reserved for the privileged, for the aristocracy, et cetera. So there was an involvement in cultural affairs, in music, in literature and poetry, but that, you know, in. In working class parts of the Soviet Union, which really doesn't have any comparison in North America or in Western Europe. And people like Shostakovich, people like the poet Olga Bergholtz, these were household names. Everybody knew these people, everybody knew their music. So the fact that Shostakovich, a son of. Well, originally of St Petersburg and then Petrograd and now Leningrad, the fact that at first he stayed in the city until halfway through the first winter when he was evacuated and he continued to work on his manuscript for this symphony, the fact that he talked about it on Leningrad radio, telling his fellow citizens about how work was progressing, was an important symbol for the people of the city that despite this very deliberate attempt to starve them to death, normal life continued. And, you know, it went. Went on unchecked, despite everything that the Germans were throwing at them. His manuscript, some of which is on display in the museum to the siege of Leningrad in modern day St Petersburg, includes little notes in the margin where he left. Left a couple of initials from time to time, and those initials stand for the Russian words for air raid. So he would actually stop work when there was an air raid, go down into the basement and then patiently resume his work. He completed the symphony outside Leningrad in early 1942. It was first performed in Siberia. The score was then taken via Cairo to the west, with great lengths being taken to make sure it reached both the United States and Britain, where it was performed that summer. And in August 1942, it was performed in Leningrad itself, which proved to be an extraordinary challenge because people still hadn't recovered from the first winter. The musicians were starving when they started rehearsal. The brass section in particular lacked the strength to blow their horns and trumpets for long periods, and they had to build up their stamina over a period of time. A lot of musicians had been evacuated, they were brought back to the city. Military musicians were released from the city perimeter to take part. And then when tickets were made available for the concert in August 42, there were concerns that the Germans would shell the theater where it was being played. So Gevorov, who by then was commanding the defences, ensured that that night the artillery of the Red army carried out a heavy bombardment of all German artillery positions in order to try to suppress the artillery fire. So the creation of the symphony, it became an international symbol of the resilience of this city that just absolutely refused to die.
- [88:06]
C
Now, throughout 1942, what significance did Leningrad hold for the Eastern Front? Because, of course, this is the year where we see Kharkov, the first battle of Kharkiv, and then Stalingrad and battles towards the Caucuses, but Leningrad is still being besieged. What significance does it hold for the eastern front throughout 1942?
- [88:32]
A
Well, for Hitler, Plan A has failed, which was to starve the city into defeat and destruction by the end of the winter of 41. 42. So during 42, for much of the year, it's now given a low priority, it's isolated, it's not really producing munitions for the rest of the Soviet Union. So we're going to concentrate on reaching the Volga at Stalingrad and then turning south into the Caucasus to get the oil field fields. But in the summer of 42, when Manstein completes the conquest of Crimea, in particular, when his 11th army storms Sevastopol, Hitler's mind returns to Leningrad and 11th army is sent north with Manstein, because these are now the acknowledged experts storming Soviet fortifications. So there is a plan to conduct an operation codenamed Northern Light, or Nordlicht, to push north from the existing perimeter between Leningrad and Lake Ladoga and link up with the Finns, so that for a second winter a tighter siege will be established around the city. And even if the Soviets attempt to move stuff across a frozen Lake Ladoga, there'll be nowhere to land it because the Germans will control that particular shoreline. During that year, the Red army makes several failed attempts to break the siege ring. The geography pretty much dictates where these attacks are going to come. The narrowest point of the siege ring is right on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, where the Germans hold about a 12 mile strip of the lake. Lake. So there are several exceedingly bloody battles over that area where the Red army tries to batter its way through the German lines. And of course, the Germans know they're coming and are able to erect very formidable defence networks in that region. Pretty much the entire coastal strip of the lake is one continuous set of defences facing both ways. There's another route from a little bit further south, where the Red army could conceivably strike northwest to reach Leningrad along one of these road and rail highways that we talked about before, through the forests. But again, the Germans know where that's going to be, it's obvious. So they're able to concentrate forces and defeat the Red army on those. When Manstein's 11th army starts to assemble in preparation for Operation Northern Light, this coincides with a renewed attempt by the Red army to break the siege, and ultimately all of Manstein's troops get sucked into stopping this new Soviet offensive. And then, of course, the crisis around Stalingrad assumes greater importance and troops are transferred off down there to reinforce the south and Manstein himself disappears off to Ukraine to take command of Army Group B. So Nordlich never happens. And it's, if you like, the last practical plan that the Germans have. If they had attempted the operation, I suspect it would have failed because much like the Germans had built these multiple lines of defence against the Red army breaking the siege ring in the south. So by now the city garrison had built multiple defence lines around the city and they had recognized the importance of this corridor to the east of the city and they weren't going to give it up lightly. And I suspect that the divisions of 11th army would have failed in that operation if it had actually been carried out. During these attempts to break the Siege, the Soviet 2nd Shock army was encircled and destroyed twice. On the first occasion, its commander, General Vlasov, was ultimately captured by the Germans. And he became a figure of extraordinary importance in the rest of the war and the years after the war, because ultimately he went over to the German side and he led former Soviet soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Germans and had then formed a national army of liberation to fight on behalf of the Germans against the Soviet system. He was captured by the Red army at the end of the war and was executed. And he became a figure of enormous hate for the Soviets because he was a traitor. He was a man who had gone over to the other side. It's a complicated story and we could disappear down along a deep rabbit hole about that. Well, we'll just leave it there.
- [93:22]
C
Yeah, we're kind of entering said during the end of our interview, but this has been a very interesting discussion. But yeah, it also sounds like Leningrad also took on for the Soviets a very symbolic importance. Not only is it the birthplace of the, of the Soviet Union, but also the fact that it's been able to hold out. It's almost like sending a message to the rest of the country that, hey, we, we can hold out and we can, we can win. We just need to Absolutely hold.
- [93:49]
A
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And if we just think back a few months, really, the euphoria that swept across Ukraine when the original Russian invasion of Ukraine was turned back, and the ability of places like Kharkiv to survive and not fall to the Russian forces, the prolonged siege of Mariupol in the south, etc. You can see how symbolic the defiance of places like this can be and how it can be so inspirational. And of course, you know, the Soviets were very, very good at propagandizing things like this, as indeed most nations. You know, in these moments of duress, broadcasts from Leningrad Radio were played all around the world and became part and parcel of just the symbolism of resistance to the Germans. When spoken voice or music was off the air on Leningrad Radio, they would play the sound of a metronome. This was the still beating heart of the city. It was still there. It just became this sort of huge symbol, as you say, of resistance. And they were just not going to. The fact that this city just refused to die in the west, it became recognized. I remember, I think Churchill referred to the four great fortresses that had stood out against The Germans, the two Ls and the two Ms, London and Leningrad, Moscow and Malta. So it became a universal symbol of resistance. The book that is released this month covers the siege up to the end of 1942. There is a second volume called Hero City that takes a story on from there, but that'll be released next year.
- [95:54]
C
Yeah, I was about to say, because this goes up to 1942, but the siege doesn't technically get lifted until 1944, when they really start pushing the German months back.
- [96:07]
A
Yes. So that's a story for another book. And it's a story of, if you like. You know, people talk about the awful casualties the Red army suffered and the attritional war that dominated so many parts of the Eastern Front for so long. But the story of Leningrad shows that ultimately victory was only possible when the German army had been ground down over a long period of time. So if you like those. Those long periods of costly attritional battles, much like the fighting in Flanders in 1914-1917, were essential in order to weaken the enemy to the point where a final victory became possible.
- [96:50]
C
Exactly. Do you have any final thoughts? Maybe cover anything mentioned in the book that we weren't able to get to in this interview?
- [97:00]
A
I don't think so. I guess one of the bits that I found most astonishing and that I came upon Spotcross almost by chance. Well, two bits. Firstly, that there was a volunteer division of Spanish troops fighting in this far frozen north. If you could think of a least appropriate place to send a bunch of Spanish fascists recruited in Barcelona and Madrid and Cadiz, you know, the far northern part of the Eastern Front has to be about the most inappropriate place to send these Mediterranean soldiers. The other was the story of a football match that took place in Leningrad in 1942 in an attempt by the city authorities to show that even in the siege, normal life continued. And again, just the extraordinary lengths they went to to mount this football match with players who were half starved playing two 15 minute halves because they could not physically play any longer. But again, it was just part of, part of the mythology that grew up around Leningrad and around its defiance.
- [98:08]
C
Yeah, the blue division. I was reading that part in the book. But yeah, of course one thing difficult about these interviews is trying to pick what to talk about, what not to, because otherwise we could be here all day. Not that I would be complaining about that.
- [98:23]
A
But yeah, buy the book. It's all in the book.
- [98:27]
C
Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah. If you want more details, read the book. So we usually like to end our interviews by asking our guests, what are you working on now? And you did kind of give us a little bit of a, of a preview by mentioning that you're working on a second volume.
- [98:44]
A
Well, volume two has been written and is currently in preparation for publication. It'll be called Hero City and it will be released sometime next year. Beyond that, there are two projects that I'm working on. I've written the first draft, at least, of an account of Operation Bagration, which is summer 1944 and its aftermath all the way up to the Warsaw Uprising and the Soviet advance into the Baltic states. And at the moment, my desk is covered with open books and other material as I start the work on researching the Soviet advance from the vistula to the ODA in January, February 1945.
- [99:31]
C
Well, maybe when you complete a lot of those books, we can have you back on the podcast.
- [99:36]
A
I would love to. That would be great.
- [99:38]
C
Britar, thank you for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [99:41]
A
Thank you very much for having me, Sam.