World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: 515 Days

Russian trains loaded with food, clothing and fuel chugged across a nine-mile corridor of destruction into Leningrad last week. The corridor had once bristled with steel and concrete pillboxes; it had been manned by crack German troops. Now it was littered with German dead (13,000 by Russian accounts) and dead thousands of heroic Reds who had lifted the siege of Russia’s second city.

The 515-day siege of Leningrad was not the longest in history,* but it was far & away the longest in World War II. The Nazis termed Leningrad “a doomed city” on Aug. 21, 1941, when Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb captured the fortress of Schlüsselburg on the southern tip of Lake Ladoga, thus completing a 40-mile semicircular chain south of the city. The Finns pressed down the Karelian Isthmus from the north, leaving the Russians only Lake Ladoga as a link with the rest of the Soviet Union.

Before the Red Army had a chance to dig in, Leeb sent 300,000 men against the city’s outer defenses. They were repelled by Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, whose forces included thousands of women and factory workers. During the next year the Germans hammered the city with 52 infantry, four motorized and four tank divisions, some 6,000 heavy guns, not counting thousands of machine guns, mortars and planes. Shells were lobbed into the city almost daily; hardly a day or night was free of air raids. Destroyed early in the siege were warehouses packed with a three-year supply of food, hundreds of apartment houses, a mammoth modern library and scores of factories. Outside of Leningrad the Germans demolished the famous Palace of Peterhof, Russian symbol of the best in European art.

The plight of the Red Army defenders and the civilian population, which at first had swelled to 9,000,000 (three times normal), was desperate. During much of last winter there was no regular water, gas or electricity supply. After the dogs and horses (all but a few saved for transport) were eaten, the people had to get along on a few slices of bread a day. Up to last summer 1,750,000 died of starvation, epidemics and air raids.

But for the thin line of communication across Lake Ladoga the city almost certainly would have fallen. In the summer tugs, fishing boats and other vessels ran the gantlet of German bombers to bring food, munitions and raw materials to the city, to take wounded, women & children and war products out. One of the Soviet Union’s biggest aluminum plants functioned continually during the siege. In the winter communications were maintained by road and rail across Lake Ladoga’s ice.

Early last autumn the Red Army regained enough strength to try to free Leningrad. Under General Kiryl Meretskov an army crossed the Volkhov River, drove west against the German corridor running to Schlüsselberg, kept going until the corridor was narrowed to nine miles. On Jan. 11 General Meretskov resumed the offensive. Simultaneously another drive struck east out of Leningrad under Major General Leonid A. Govorov. When the two armies met, seven days later, Leningrad was free.

* Longest in history: Troy, which, according to none-too-reliable Correspondent Homer, fell to the Greeks after nine years. Longest other sieges of World War II: Tobruk, 252 days; Sevastopol, 230 days.