Ever since German fascists and their allies launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Axis mechanized forces have swept through Belarus and western Ukraine like a torrent, destroying and crushing nearly 2 million Soviet troops. The Soviet army, which was caught off guard, was gradually defeated by the commander's misjudgment and indiscriminate command, and the German Army Group North also invaded the Leningrad Military District within 2 months, and the peak of the army pointed to the birthplace of the Soviet revolution.
For the Soviets, Leningrad is the birthplace and symbol of the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat, and it is also the most important railway and water transport and maritime transportation hub in the northwest region of the Soviet Union, which has both spiritual and economic significance for the Soviet Union. In the face of the fascist aggressors, the people of Leningrad and even the people of the Soviet Union were ready to defend Leningrad to the death.
For the German fascists, as long as Leningrad was captured, it was equivalent to destroying the Soviets' will to resist, and at the same time opening up the shipping, shipping and railway hubs in the northern part of the Soviet Union for the German Army Group North, so that the German army could use the Soviet German transportation system to directly project troops and supplies to the central battlefield of the Soviet Union, attack the Moscow flank, and then force the Soviet Union to surrender. However, neither Hitler nor his generals expected that Leningrad, which was supposed to be captured before October, would have been under siege by the German army for 872 days, firmly holding the German Army Group North.
<h1>I. The Strategic Value of Leningrad</h1>
Leningrad is an ancient Russian city, called Petrograd long before the founding of the Soviet Union, and even earlier called St. Petersburg, which was founded by the order of Peter the Great and was also the capital of Tsarist Russia. The city is the largest maritime trade center in northwestern Russia and home to the Baltic Fleet's home port. After the establishment of the Soviet Union, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad, becoming the cultural birthplace and economic and industrial center of the Soviet Union, where the railway and water transport system connected the entire western Soviet union traffic artery, and the railway and waterway could go all the way south to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which had extremely important economic and strategic value.
When Nazi Germany formulated the Barbarossa Plan, Leningrad was the core strategic goal of Army Group North, Hitler was delusional to erase Leningrad from the earth, to strike at the will of resistance of the Soviet military and people, to use the important railway and land and water transportation hub in the northwest of the Soviet Union, to strengthen the German offensive, to force the Soviet Union to surrender, and then to turn the Baltic Sea into Germany's inland sea, thus firmly controlling the rare metal resources of the Nordic region, and using the Soviet heavy industry base as Germany's war machine, thus conquering the whole world!
Therefore, Hitler planned that after the start of the war, the main force of the Northern Army Group, with a total of forty divisions, 11,000 artillery of various types, more than a thousand warplanes and more than a thousand tanks, would launch a surprise attack on Leningrad at the first time, capture and occupy Leningrad, hang all the local Soviets and traitors who betrayed the nation, the Russian Germans. Hitler also publicly threatened that before winter came, he would arrive in Leningrad on a German warship and hold a victory parade here to celebrate Germany's great victory over the Soviet Union.
<h1>Second, the German lightning attack</h1>
Since the beginning of the war, the Germans have spent a short time breaking through the Riga and Pskov lines, and the troops are directed at Leningrad. In order to defend Leningrad, Marshal Voroshilov, commander of the Northern Front, Lieutenant General Makian Miyaylovich Popov, deputy commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral Vladimir Filipovich Tribbutz, the new commander of the Northwestern Front, Lieutenant General Peter Petrovich Sobennikov, and the new deputy commander of the Northwest Front, Lieutenant General Pavel Alexevich Kurozikin, jointly formed the Leningrad Theater Defense Command to command the entire defense work.
(Unfortunately, Lieutenant General Sobennikov was arrested by Beria for treason in October, but after an investigation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it was determined that Lieutenant General Sobennikov had not committed a crime and intended to release him, but the unfortunate lieutenant general was sent to Siberia by Beria for hard labor until the spring of 1942, when Stalin personally rescued Sobennikov and appointed him as political commissar of the Bryansk Front.) ）
The Leningrad Theater of operations in the USSR consisted of the Northwestern and Northern Fronts, with a total of 46 infantry divisions and 2 mechanized corps. However, the Northwestern Front lost about half of its strength and technical equipment in the first two months of the war, and the Leningrad Theater had to defend against the Finnish Legion from the north, so it could not concentrate on the Germans. In addition, many units were urgently formed, training was less than a month, and insufficient combat training could not be used against the Germans, so the Soviets were forced to retreat in the fight against the Germans. Until Voroshilov ordered that no further retreats should be taken after the troops had retreated into the Luga Line, and that in order to build a new defensive line in Leningrad, everyone must hold out until the last soldier, one shot at a time.
Twenty divisions of the Soviet army were reduced by nearly 50% by the Germans, and they were unable to directly respond to the German offensive, in order to reduce the disadvantage caused by the gap in strength, the Soviet army could only throw the militia units urgently formed into the Luga Line, which could cope with the German offensive as much as possible. However, the situation was not ideal, the German army under the command of Marshal Loeb launched a three-way assault on the Luga Line, and the Soviet outlying positions were defeated without organizing effective resistance, and finally relied on the Luga Line to barely withstand the first round of german attacks.
But the Luga Line did not drag on the Germans for long, and the armored forces led by the famous German generals Manstein and General Reinhardt advanced at a speed of 80 kilometers a day like a mad bison, and in a short time broke through the Luga Line and ran all the way to Leningrad. Stalin was furious when he heard the news, and immediately decided to send Zhukov to the Leningrad Theater of Operations to investigate what caused the Luga Line, which had been in operation for several months before the war, to be as brittle as a pancake.
<h1>Three. Brutal 872 days</h1>
By the time Zhukov arrived in Leningrad, the city was almost surrounded by German and Finnish troops, and Voroshilov had no better way to break the siege, but to form more militia divisions for simple training and then fill them in the trenches to delay the Nazi offensive. The mobilized citizens built a reserve line behind the line in case of emergency, and millions of Leningrads built three lines of defense and countless field fortifications in a short time. Marshal Voroshilov's ability to mobilize and organize did give Zhukov a thumbs up, but his military strategic prowess did not dare to compliment Zhukov.
It turned out that the reason why the Luga Line had been breached before was that Beria was repressing and arresting people everywhere, causing the officers and soldiers to endanger themselves, so that the German army had an opportunity to take advantage of it. In the headquarters, Voroshilov was actually focused on the organization and mobilization, and did not find that Beria had almost all the main commanders of the Luga Line Command under his own eyes, and the Soviet troops on the defense line were like headless flies without command. He also did not place heavy garrisons at Mga Railway Station and the Neva estuary, resulting in Leningrad being cut off by the Germans in September.
Zhukov then reported to Stalin and took over command of the Leningrad Theater, while Voroshilov was demoted to production and army mobilization in the theater. The tenacious Soviet Red Army launched one fierce counterattack after another under Zhukov's command, although many troops were buried in the meantime, and even the friendly assault of the Second Army was lost, but Zhukov's ruthless tactic of constantly fighting back and expanding the defensive circle at the expense of Zhukov did withstand the German attack.
Seeing that they could not capture Leningrad, the Germans could only choose to continue the siege of the city, intending to starve the Soviet soldiers and civilians to death in the city. During the defensive battles of the Soviet army and civilians in the winter of 1941, soldiers could get 130 grams of bread per day, workers and peasants could get 90 grams of bread, and civilians could get 75 grams of bread. However, the Soviet Ladoga Lake Squadron undertook the task of transporting supplies from Volkhov to the city of Leningrad, and the Leningrad Theater Air Force took off to meet 160,000 sorties in the 872-day campaign, ensuring the safety of the last lifeline of Leningrad.
When winter came and the snow froze Lake Ladoga, truck convoys and sled teams took on the task of transporting supplies across the lake to the city. During this period, the Soviet army organized several operations to break the siege, but all of them ended in failure, and the most tragic failure led to the almost total annihilation of the 320,000 troops of the Assault Second Army, including friendly forces, with a total loss of up to 400,000 troops. Until January 1944, the Soviet army firmly grasped the war initiative in the battlefields of Belarus and Ukraine. Marshal Zhukov, who saw that the time had come, ordered Melezkov, commander of the Volkhov Front, to launch a counterattack and crush the German Army Group North, which led to Leningrad's final victory after 872 days of siege.
<h1>epilogue</h1>
During the 872-day siege, the Soviet military and civilian casualties in the Leningrad and Volkhov theaters amounted to 3.5 million, of which half of the troops were lost in several failed siege operations, about 1 million civilians died of battle or starvation, and about 1.4 million people died of German air raids or disease and starvation during the evacuation, that is, direct and indirect losses of up to 4.9 million people. The losses at the Battle of Leningrad exceeded the losses at the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Combined Losses of the U.S. War in the Pacific. The total Axis casualties in the Battle of Leningrad were about 570,000, of whom about 80,000 were Finnish, Spanish, and Italian minions.
<h1>bibliography:</h1>
A Brief History of the Second World War
1941-1944: The Terrible Siege of Leningrad
Leningrad under Siege