In the former Soviet Union, in addition to the capital Moscow, there are two cities known as the "red heart" of the Soviets, one is Stalingrad on the Volga River, and the other is Leningrad, the old capital of Tsarist Russia in the north.
These two cities are important not only because they are named after their leaders, but also because during the Great Patriotic War, both cities fought fierce battles and millions of soldiers and civilians died here to defend their homeland.
The fierce Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II, where the Soviets wiped out a million German troops and the Soviet-German war began to be defeated and won. But what is less known is that the Battle of Leningrad, which broke out in September 1941, was not under the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted for three years, was the longest battle of World War II, and the siege of the city with the greatest casualties in human history.
As the number one operational target of Operation Barbarossa, Leningrad was attacked by the German Army Group North, in which 3.5 million Soviets died, more than half of them civilians.
What was so special about Leningrad in the northwest, and why did the Germans consider it more important than Moscow? The German army besieged Leningrad for 900 days, why could it not be defeated? How fierce was this siege?
The Baltic Economic Belt of the USSR
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was the largest land invasion in human history. On June 22, 1941, the Nazis divided 5.5 million troops of Germany and Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria into three routes to Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev.
According to the law of war in Europe, if you invade a country, you will attack the capital, the capital will fall, and the country will basically disintegrate. But in the face of the Soviet Union, this set did not work. The Soviet Union was a frighteningly large country, with more than 22 million square kilometers of its area twice that of all of Europe. Even if the Soviet border was broken and the capital Moscow was laid, the Soviet Union may have only suffered a little skin trauma, and Napoleon made this mistake and was dragged to death by the Russians.
Therefore, the German soldiers divided into three routes, occupying the political center, industrial center, grain production area and ore production area of the Soviet Union, and trying to strangle the Soviet Union's resistance at the beginning of the war.
The "Army Group North" in the north attacked from the Baltic Sea and first occupied the three rich Baltic countries, which were not only an important agricultural production area in the Soviet Union, but also one of the three major industrial centers of the Soviet Union. The Germans continued to attack Leningrad, or "St. Petersburg," russia's northwestern transportation hub, an important maritime and river transportation center, and the seat of the Baltic Fleet.
At the same time, Leningrad was also a city of heavy industry, where the world-famous "Kirov Factory" was located, where tanks, artillery, tractors, light weapons, and ammunition were continuously produced from Kirov to arm the Soviet Red Army. This arsenal was an important patron of the Red Army, bearing one-fifth of the Soviet Union's armament production, and the Germans could not ignore it.
Politically, as a city named after Lenin and the old capital of Tsarist Russia, Leningrad was no less important than Moscow in the eyes of the Soviets. Taking this place would strike at the determination of the Soviet military and civilians to resist and reduce the prestige of the CPSU, which was essential for a socialist country.
Because the Soviets were unprepared for blitzkrieg, the Soviet Western Front lost Belarus with little resistance, and the Germans quickly occupied the three Baltic states, hitting Leningrad in just three months. Meanwhile in the north, the Finns attacked with the Germans, crossed the Karelian Isthmus, and encircled Leningrad to death.
The Hell of Hunger – The Battle of Leningrad
The Soviets in the summer of 1941 lost so quickly that the siege of Leningrad could not be organized.
By the end of August, Leningrad had nearly 2.5 million civilians, and the troops in charge of the defense had retreated from the front line with hundreds of thousands of remnants. The Soviets gathered all their forces in the northwest to defend Leningrad, and only 22 missing infantry divisions were able to reach the front.
Opposite Leningrad, the German Army Group North had 8 corps and 30 fully loaded German divisions, totaling 800,000 men. There were three German panzer divisions alone, as well as an elite SS division. This tiger and wolf division, placed on any continent in the world, could destroy a regime at will, and both the Soviet Union and Germany believed that the fall of Leningrad was basically a matter of time.
Before the Germans could attack, the Soviets were overwhelmed by fear, Leningrad panicked, and the city's top government officials, party representatives, skilled workers, and scientists left by plane or ship. Furious at the news, Comrade Stalin called Voroshilov, the military commander of Leningrad, and ordered him to organize a defense, forbid high-ranking people from fleeing the city, and must defend the city with 2.5 million citizens.
Voroshilov and the remnants of 22 divisions were defeated to lay out a defensive line outside the city, and the Leningrad municipal government mobilized 1 million citizens to build fortifications. All male citizens of Leningrad were incorporated into the militia and were thrown into the trenches after emergency military training. Although the soldiers were available, the Soviets were extremely short of heavy weapons and were powerless against the German armor and heavy artillery.
Leningrad is in danger! Stalin knew the importance of the city and sent Zhukov to Leningrad to take charge of the situation. Before leaving, Zhukov was also bottomless about the defense of the city, and was once afraid that he would never return.
On September 10, 1941, the German army began to attack Stalingrad, and the Leningrad militia lost 20,000 people in the first day of the attack, which was a huge blow to the morale of the Soviet army. The next day, Zhukov put all the Soviets and militia on the front line, and he moved all the anti-aircraft guns and anti-aircraft machine guns in the city to the outside of the city to shoot at the Germans. After two days of bitter fighting, the Germans were unable to break through the periphery of Leningrad.
In these two days of fighting alone, the Soviets paid the price of 120,000 casualties.
The reason why the Germans failed to defeat Leningrad with a single blow, in addition to the stubborn counterattack of the Soviet army, their own lack of firepower was also the main reason. Army Group North was the smallest of the three armies of Operation Barbarossa and had the weakest heavy firepower. Because the terrain in the northwest of the Soviet Union was extremely fragmented, the heavy regiment was inconvenient to deploy, so the group's heavy artillery and tanks were insufficient, and the number of bombers was small.
The Germans mobilized their troops to support after the failed siege, but Leningrad remained unmoved, and Soviet infantry and militia repeatedly formed death squads to attack German tanks, and after the weak armored forces were hit, Army Group North was forced to stop the attack. On September 19, 1941, the Last Offensive and Defensive Battle between the German and Soviet Armies, the Soviets held back the Germans at the cost of 70,000 casualties, and the Germans have since suspended the offensive.
In October 1941, the Battle of Leningrad entered the most brutal siege phase, the most famous of which was the "Leningrad Famine".
Leningrad had 2 million people in Leningrad, but only a waterway from Lake Ladoga could lead to the outside world, and the city's supplies were transported by boats. German planes flew on the lake every day and saw ships sink indiscriminately.
The Luftwaffe carried out precise bombing of Leningrad water plants, power plants, warehouses, hospitals, factories at the beginning of the siege, and after the bombing of the granaries, the 2 million citizens and hundreds of thousands of troops faced a food crisis.
In November 1941, Leningrad's grain reserves were only 30 days, and the city was forced to start supplying in quantities. Workers and soldiers are given priority, there are 500g of black bread a day, and although citizens also have to participate in labor, only 300g of bread can be eaten. After the food was reduced, the old, weak, sick and disabled in the city died one after another, and the wounded soldiers also died in large numbers due to lack of medicine and food.
At this time, the International Red Cross asked to enter the city to help the women and children, but the Germans not only refused to let them in, but also blew up the ships carrying the supplies.
In December 1941 and January 1942, the death god of the Soviet Union, winter, came.
Leningrad, without fuel and food, began to see a large number of unnatural deaths, and in December alone, 70,000 innocent civilians froze to death of starvation, and the bodies of some civilians were divided among the starving people. In January 1942, the number of deaths from famine doubled to 130,000, and "eating corpses" became an unspoken rule in the city, and the Soviet army desperately tried to transport grain into the city from the ice of Lake Ladoga, but to no avail.
In the spring of 1942, the Great Famine turned Leningrad into a hell, with corpses strewn across the streets and pedestrians looking around for fresh "food" like walking dead. At this time, even the leningrad municipal government, scientific research departments and the army were starving to death in large numbers, with the number of deaths reaching more than one hundred thousand every month. At the same time of the famine, the Germans were still attacking the city, but the Soviet reinforcements on the periphery fought desperately, and the Soviets withdrew from hunger to resist the German attack, relieving the pressure inside the city with the help of the siege relief troops.
By the summer of 1942, the Leningrad Famine had starved 700,000 civilians to death in the city, and hundreds of thousands more had died in flight and combat, reducing the city's population by 1.2 million, the largest siege in human history.
Leningrad: The nail in the flesh of the German army, the torch in the heart of the Soviet army
In the autumn of 1942, the encirclement of Leningrad was opened, soviet troops sent supplies to the cities, and the problem of the Great Famine was alleviated. After seeing the tragic situation in the city, the top level of the CPSU was also shaken, and Comrade Stalin personally made a self-examination to the Politburo.
In 1942-1944, the Siege of Leningrad reached an impasse, and the Germans outside the city dug up the outskirts of Leningrad into construction sites and besieged the city with multi-layered, high-density fortifications. At this time, the Soviet army was fighting in southern Ukraine, and there was no superior force to break the siege. There were few large-scale offensives between the Soviets and The Germans, and the two sides usually sent small units to reconnoiter operations or let aircraft bomb each other.
The siege lasted until January 1944, when the Soviets began a full-scale counteroffensive, and the first of the "Ten Stalin Assaults" was Leningrad. The Soviets besieged Army Group North on three sides with superior strength and drove it to the three Baltic states. During the more than 900-day siege, soviet soldiers and civilians suffered more than 3 million casualties, half of whom died in the famine.
Comrade Stalin praised Leningrad as "a city of steel belonging to the Soviets", a city that contained the German Army Group North and eased the pressure on Moscow, and her arduous battle greatly encouraged the confidence of the Soviet army and people to persevere in the war of resistance.
For Germany, the siege of Leningrad was a "decent defeat."
As early as 1941, the Nazi Fuehrer asked Army Group North to take the city, and after many failed sieges, the German army had to transfer the elite of Army Group North to the south to fight, leaving the remaining infantry to die here. After 1942, industry in Leningrad was largely restored to productivity, and a large number of weapons were still manufactured here and sent to the front through the Ladoga Lake Route, and the German strategic intention of strangling Soviet industrial capacity had long since collapsed.
The Battle of Leningrad was the epitome of the Soviet-German war, in which the resilient Soviet Union eventually killed Nazi Germany.
Text/Shogakuno
Resources:
1. "St. Petersburg, the Battle of Leningrad - Russia Commemorates Those Red Memories", Dong Xiao
2. "Hero City of Leningrad", Lee Sheng-kwon