Read Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege Online
Authors: Alexander Werth
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Russia, #World, #Russia & Former Soviet Republics
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘It’s a fact. These sons of bitches want to perish, and they
WILL
perish.’ I asked if there was much air activity in the Leningrad area now. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not very much. The Germans have their main fighter airfields at Tosna and Siverskaya and Gatchina to the south of Leningrad. They haven’t any big bomber bases close by. We made it too hot for them. So, already long ago, they moved their bomber bases to Pskov and Vitebsk and further still; so there’s plenty of time to intercept them if they try to raid Leningrad. They can’t do it on an economic basis any more, so they have practically given up altogether. It’s fairly quiet now; they have had to shift a lot of their stuff from here to the Ukraine where things were getting much too hot for them. Comparatively speaking, life is simple now. I remember the days when Leningrad had to depend on the transport Douglases for a bare minimum of supplies. It was a job to keep their fighters away from the Douglases. I remember how Pilutov, Hero of the Soviet Union, took on a whole swarm of Messerschmitts and saved the Douglases. Those were hard days. Ramming had really become a necessity. It was here at the Leningrad front during the blackest days that ramming was invented – Haritonov, and Zhukov, and Zdorovtsev – these were the ramming pioneers. They have all been killed since.’ ‘Are there any signs of the Germans pulling out of Leningrad?’ I asked. ‘They won’t get a chance,’ said the major. ‘Some months ago they brought up one of their divisions to the Leningrad front. It was last July, when they thought they could try to storm Leningrad once more. We let our Stormoviks loose; they destroyed sixty per cent of the railway and motor transport that was bringing up their new divisions. We’ll destroy sixty per cent or more of them if they try to pull out.’
The colonel, tall and handsome, and looking younger than the major, now joined us, but declined the major’s offer of roast goose and potatoes and hot milk. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we have some aircraft the Allies sent us. Some Aerocobras and Kittyhawks. The Aerocobras are very good indeed. Also some British planes – Spitfire-3s and Hurricanes; the Spitfires are oldish models, and the Hurricanes are older still; they certainly aren’t very hot stuff. There’s one we had recently, and there was something written on the fuselage – said it had taken part in the Battle of Britain! Don’t know to this day how it got here. For night work we use Boston bombers – and they’re not bad.’ ‘Have you any Lancasters?’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said, ‘except those we see in the
Britansky Soyuznik!’
He added that he and all the airmen liked to read the
Britansky Soyuznik
– it gave them quite a lot of information about England, and was a very popular paper in Leningrad. You found it in all the soldiers’ clubs and reading-rooms.
Least of all did I enjoy the next quarter of an hour. The colonel and a whole crowd of airmen showed me the new Petlyakov divebomber, also widely used for reconnaissance work. It is remarkably well constructed for observation purposes since it gives the pilot an unusually good all-round view. Its speed, I was told, was 540 kilometres per hour. It makes me feel a bit of a fraud when, as a special privilege, I am shown such a thing as a new aeroplane. What made it worse was that the young pilot would rattle off a whole long series of technical details which were just Greek to me, but I kept nodding knowingly, afraid to ask any questions that would give away my abysmal ignorance of mechanics – which would have made, not only me, but much worse, my escorting officers, look a trifle foolish. And I even wrote down some notes, which I could neither decipher nor understand afterwards!
It was a relief when the inspection of the divebomber was over, and some of the pilots came up and talked to us, and at the colonel’s suggestion told of their various individual exploits. I can’t say that these make good reading, so I shall not record them one by one. But the gist of all the stories was that the Germans were now less strong, less bold and less skilled. In the past they used eight to ten planes for interception, where now they used only two or three. The Russians had definite superiority over the Germans in the Leningrad area now. And even when they didn’t have it, it didn’t always matter. The stories told by the various pilots were mostly to the effect that the Germans nowadays evaded battle. One to one the Germans hardly ever took on a fight. ‘I’ve known occasions,’ one of the pilots said, ‘when four Messerschmitts ran away from two Kittyhawks.’ And a young lad, with a pockmarked peasant face, said, ‘That’s just what happened to me one day at Siniavino. But yesterday it was even worse. We went on reconnaissance – two of us. And here were seven Messerschmitt 109-Gs, damn good machines, mind you. But no! They buzzed off. Honestly, made one feel ashamed of them. So we freely wandered around enemy territory as if it were our own.’ ‘Yes,’ said the colonel, ‘one may really say that as a rule the Germans take on a fight only if they’re in a very favourable position from the start. I don’t know what it is, shortage of stuff or lack of guts. Certainly they aren’t the same as they were in 1941 or even last year, and that’s not simply because we’ve got more planes. The quality of their men has clearly deteriorated. They’ve lost all their best men, and we’ve lost most of ours – there aren’t many fighter pilots left who have been at it since the 22nd of June – but we’ve been building up new cadres all the time.’
The colonel then took us round the officers’ quarters – a large well-scrubbed wooden hut. They had a billiard table, and a reading room with large numbers of papers and periodicals from Moscow and Leningrad and, true enough, the
Britansky Soyuznik
– a well-fingered copy too. The curious thing about the place, however, was the slogans on the walls. They were quotations from a text book on officers’ etiquette written by a teacher of the name of Kulchitsky of the school for guards’ officers, the Corps des Pages. In fact it was the colonel who told me exactly who Kulchitsky was. Here are a few of the slogans:
Back to the Tsarist Army? No. Why should they? But clearly it was realised that the Revolution, like all revolutions, had gone too far in certain directions and had, together with the undesirable things, discarded some desirable things, at least things which in certain conditions created by the war had become desirable again. Not a full swing-back of the pendulum but a slight return of the pendulum.
We drove through the Viborg District, past the Finland Station. Lenin had arrived here in 1917, and to commemorate that far-reaching event a statue of Lenin had been erected in the square outside the station. It was also from this station that so many Russian troops went north to storm the Mannerheim Line. One of my majors said, ‘Here in Leningrad the war against Finland is considered more than justified, not least justified by what has happened since. Long before the Finnish war, Mannerheim and his gang had been in closest contact with the German General Staff and an eventual German attack on Russia was clearly going to use Finland as one of its springboards. … And, with Beloostrov only twenty-six miles away it would have been suicide for Leningrad to allow the Germans and Finns to go on hatching their plans. We have very little use for the Finns,’ he continued, as we drove through the Viborg District – this, like the Narva district, had also been enormously modernised, and most of the wooden houses had been used up last winter for fuel – ‘and we find it a bit absurd all this American tender-heartedness for dear little Finland, chiefly because she paid her five dollars a month regularly – or whatever it was. And the sooner the Finns give in, the better will it be for them. The Germans are hanging on to Leningrad because they want to keep the Finns in the war – at least that’s one of the reasons – and as long as the Finns are in the war, the Germans will try to hang on.’
‘There is a theory among diplomats in Moscow,’ I said, ‘that the Finns are afraid of throwing in their hand, because while they are in the war they are still getting some food from Germany, and who is to feed them once they give up?’ ‘Oh,’ said the major, ‘there’ll be plenty of tender-hearted people in America to see to that. And meantime – until the American supplies arrive – well, I don’t think it would be unfair if Leningrad were to take charge of Finland’s food supplies – what about a couple of months during which they’d get the old Leningrad ration of 125 grammes a day? Didn’t their papers gloat in those days about our Leningrad famine when thousands died daily? We don’t gloat, but it couldn’t be a bad thing to give them a little of their own medicine and make them forget all their insolent rubbish about Greater Finland that they would set up with Hitler’s help, and about Leningrad being part of the hereditary Finnish
Lebensraum!
Superior race indeed! Superior to us who built Leningrad, one of the half-dozen greatest cultural centres of the world!’
We were now driving through the Okhta district, beyond the Neva, to the east of Leningrad. Okhta had been little more than a large village of little wooden houses before. Now many large factories and seven- and eight-storey apartment houses had sprung up here, and there seemed to be relatively less damage here than in other parts of Leningrad. As in the Viborg District, so here most of the smaller wooden buildings had been used up for fuel during the previous winter. We pulled up outside a large factory building, the outer brick walls of which were marked with shell-splinters. Comrade Semyonov, the director of the factory, with a strong hard face, and wearing a plain khaki tunic to which were pinned the Leningrad medal and the Order of Lenin, was a typical Soviet executive to look at and to listen to – very precise and to the point. He took us into his office; on the mantelpiece was a collection of various things the factory was now making – bayonets, detonators and large optical lenses, and on the wall were portraits of Stalin and Zhdanov, the picture of the man who conducted the defence of Leningrad being almost as usual here as that of the great chief in Moscow. Altogether, I had noticed in Leningrad a slight aloofness towards Moscow, a feeling that, although this was part of the whole show, it was also in a sense a separate show, one in which Leningrad had largely survived thanks to its own stupendous efforts and those of its local chiefs, Zhdanov and Popkov. In a way, it is part of that Leningrad ‘superiority complex’ which never died, not even after the capital had been moved to Moscow.
Comrade Semyonov began by giving an account of this factory which in wartime has no name but only a number. It was, he said, the largest factory in the Soviet Union for optical instruments, ranging from the most elaborate optical instruments used in the navy to cinema projectors and cheap cameras. Millions of cheap cameras had been made here before the war, and practically all the cinemas in the Soviet Union had received their projectors from here. ‘During the very first days of the war,’ said Comrade Semyonov, ‘the bulk of our optical equipment was evacuated east, because this was considered one of the key factories for defence. One couldn’t afford to take any risks with it. Early in 1942 we had a second evacuation, and those of the skilled optical workers who hadn’t gone in the first evacuation were sent away – that is, those who were still alive. Already in the first weeks of the war, when most of our equipment and skilled men had been sent away, we started here on an entirely new basis – we started working exclusively for the Leningrad front and had to make the things for which we had the equipment – and there wasn’t much of it. Our people had no experience in this kind of work. Nevertheless we started making the things our Leningrad front needed most – shells and hand grenades and especially detonators for anti-tank mines. We made hundreds of thousands of these. We had never made any of these things before. But Leningrad, as you may know, has a great industrial tradition, a great industrial culture, and our hand-grenades turned out to be the best of any made. Not very long ago we had a visit from a soldier who had formerly been a worker in this place, and he said ‘Congratulations! Didn’t know you went in for making this stuff. But I’ve now been using your grenades and they’re grand; thanks for keeping up the standard of the old firm!’ We also started making bayonets. That was chiefly during the blockade, when it had become terribly difficult to make more elaborate things.’ He picked up from the mantelpiece the flat, dagger-shaped bayonet. ‘The German hates the Russian bayonet,’ he said. ‘He’s not much good at hand-to-hand fighting. We should have liked to make the four-edged Suvorov bayonet, but we hadn’t the stuff. So we started making this thing, which has come to be known as the Leningrad bayonet. For some months now we have actually been exporting some of these bayonets to the mainland, and also very considerable quantities of our detonators. Throughout the blockade and since we have also been repairing the smaller arms, rifles and machine-guns; and in the last few weeks we have started working on optical instruments again, especially on polishing lenses and on repairing range-finders, periscopes – yes, submarine periscopes too, because our Baltic Navy isn’t idle you know, least of all under water.’
I asked Semyonov to tell me something about life at the factory during the hunger blockade. He was silent for a few seconds, as if collecting his thoughts. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I don’t like to talk about it. It’s a very bitter memory. However, I’ll tell you a few things. Perhaps your people in England should know what we Leningrad people have gone through. By the time the blockade started half of our workers had been evacuated or had gone into the army, so we were left here with about 5,000. I must say it was difficult at first to get used to the bombing, and if anyone says it doesn’t frighten him, don’t you believe it! Yet this bombing, though it frightened people, also aroused their frantic anger against the Germans. When they started bombing us in a big way in October 1941, our workers fought for the factory more than they fought for their own houses. There was one night when we had to deal with 300 incendiaries in the factory grounds alone. Our people were putting the fires out with a sort of concentrated rage and fury; like a thousand squirrels they rushed around, putting out the flames. They had realised by then that they were in the front line – and that was all. No more shelters. Only small children were taken to shelters, and old grannies. And then, one day in December, in twenty degrees of frost, we had all our windows blown out by a bomb, and I thought to myself: ‘No, we really can’t go on. Not till the spring. We can’t go on in this temperature, and without light, without water, and almost without food.’ And yet, somehow – we didn’t stop. A kind of instinct told us that we mustn’t – that it would be worse than suicide. That it would be a little like treason. And sure enough, within thirty-six hours we were working again – working in altogether hellish conditions, with eight degrees of frost in the workshops, and fourteen degrees of frost in this office where you are sitting now. Oh, we had stoves of sorts, little iron stoves or little brick stoves that warmed the air a couple of feet round them. The conditions of work were really incredible, but still our people worked, worked with a kind of frantic determination, with furious defiance. And, mind you, they were hungry, terribly hungry.’