BATTLE OF RUSSIA: A Million Have Died

Sorrow for Stalingrad tempered Russia’s somber pride in Leningrad. The tsar-made city on the Baltic, entering its second year of siege, presented to Russia and the world an epic of agony and heroism which in its duration and sustained intensity exceeded even the siege of Sevastopol.

One year ago, Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb threw three armies around the city. He failed to take it by storm. He then settled down to reduce it by attrition. Early in the siege, warehouses chocked with food enough for three years were destroyed by German bombers. The air was acrid with burning wheat. Gutters ran with melted chocolate.

A terrible decision had to be made—who should eat? From limited food stocks, soldiers and defense workers were fed enough to keep them going. The rest of the city’s 3,000,000 men, women & children were given only 125 grams of bread a day —about a slice and a half. From starvation, cold, disease and German bombs more than 1,000,000 died. The rest fought on.

The major part of its vast machine-tool, precision-instrument and other industries had been moved beyond the Urals. So Leningrad, to produce its own guns and shells, had to depend on the remaining fraction of its industries.

The sacrifice helped prevent the German from shattering Russia’s Murmansk supply route and enabled Russia to keep Kronstadt, its last base in the Baltic. From Kronstadt Russian submarines and other survivors of the Red Fleet last week were still harassing Axis ships in the Gulf of Finland. On the Karelian Isthmus Russian soldiers were still holding off Finnish assaults. Leeb’s armies, which once had plunged 125 miles east, now had been pushed back 100 miles and were holding a corridor only eight miles wide stretching north to Lake Ladoga (see map). Against both sides of the corridor the Russians were pressing hard.

A talisman in time of Russia’s distress, Leningrad stood firm.