Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (28 page)

At heart we knew what all this wealth meant; but it was no use brooding over it. These books came from the libraries of people who had been evacuated, or killed in the war, or who had died during the famine. ‘You just cannot imagine the kind of books that came our way during the winter of 1941, and to some extent, ever since,’ said the manager. ‘First editions of Pushkin, first editions of Lermontov, some inscribed by the author, valuable French first editions, manuscripts by great writers, the very existence of which was unknown. We made a point of putting the most valuable things aside – for the State Library. The State Library is going to gain tremendously from what has happened.’ He added that the other second-hand bookshops in Leningrad had pursued the same policy. Also that Leningrad was now exporting a lot of books to the whole Red Army.

We drove back to the hotel with our haul of five parcels, and then, for lack of anything better to do, we drove again to the Dramatic Theatre, where we saw an amusing American play about a dashing American reporter who eloped by mistake with a millionaire’s daughter. It was called
The Road to New York,
and was a stage adaptation of the film scenario called
It Happened One Night.
It was a play full of movement, and good fun, with its detectives and gangsters, all dressed like ‘real’ Americans, in the brightest light-blue and purple suits. There was also the irate but fundamentally decent millionaire papa, in his nickel-tubed office on top of the skyscraper, and with half a dozen telephones on his enormous desk. The play was full of slightly ‘risky’ situations, with the hero and heroine sleeping in the same boarding-house room with only a curtain between them; there was also the comic landlady who claimed that the room in question had been slept in by Jack London. At the bright moments the band played the
Lambeth Walk,
and at the sentimental moments
Sonny Boy.
The Leningrad audience greatly enjoyed it all.

In the first interval, as we stood smoking on the pavement outside the theatre with a crowd of officers and sailors, I had my last sight of Leningrad in daylight – the battered buildings and almost deserted quay on the other side of the Fontanka river.

After supper, Likharev said goodbye, while the others went and had a few hours’ sleep. I stayed up, trying to sort out my notes and thoughts. I had seen something that was very great, very moving and very tragic. I had seen human greatness before. I had seen it in Spain, and in the London blitz; I had seen it in that grim Arctic convoy that brought me to Russia in May 1942; I had seen the generals and the men who had won the battle of Stalingrad; I had seen Russian peasant girls in the devastated country round Voronezh tilling their fields again, with nothing more than shovels to work with; but the greatness of Leningrad had a quality of its own. It was hard to define; words like ‘solidarity’ or ‘patriotism’ or ‘self-sacrifice’ or ‘spirit of defence’ are only words; I felt that the spirit of Leningrad was a blend of all these, and of much else besides. I decided right then that only a detailed account of all I had seen could, by the cumulative effect of all the details, explain the substance of the Leningrad epic. Five days are not much to spend in a city; nor had I seen as many people as I might have seen in more normal circumstances, and in a place which was not a military zone, and where my movements would not have been limited by military rules. Yet I had every reason to be grateful and no cause for complaint. Moreover I had never felt lost; I knew Leningrad; it was, after all, my native city, though I often found it difficult to think of it in those terms. It meant to me both less and more. Finally, I had had over two years’ experience of the war in Russia; I could compare, and could observe things with reference to that experience.

We said a fond goodbye to Anna Andreievna, and left at three in the morning. Through the complete blackout we drove to some airfield, a long way out of town. The streets were empty and silent. Major Lozak, sitting next to the driver, kept humming
Sonny Boy
and tunes from
The Princess of the Circus.
It was very chilly when we arrived at the airfield. We had an hour to wait, and rather than wait in the car, Major Lozak took us to a wooden building among the pine trees, and knocked on the door for some time. An elderly woman, looking very sleepy, finally opened the door, and thereupon led us in with a show of genuine cordiality. It was the officers’ club. She made us hot tea, and Studyonov and Lozak played a game of billiards, while Dangulov and I played a less strenuous game of draughts. I was tired and lost every time.

At last we were called out, and a few minutes later the plane took off.

A sort of physical and nervous exhaustion then came over me. Once or twice I imagined that we were crashing and I started up with a feeling of acute fear. But it was nothing. The sun had risen, and below us were miles of dark-green forests, with the yellow fluffy patches of the birch trees among them, and I fell back into a restless slumber. This time we were flying non-stop to Moscow. Even before the usual breakfast time, I was back in my room at the Metropole.

After that I continued to watch the rather scanty news from Leningrad in the Russian press with even more than the usual eagerness. Immense events were occurring in the south. The Red Army was overrunning the Ukraine and pushing the Germans beyond the Dnieper. Melitopol was captured, and Zaporozh, and Dniepropetrovsk, and finally Kiev, and there seemed no limit to the Russian advance. The Moscow Conference was an enormous success; and later came the conference at Teheran. But still there was little news from Leningrad or the Leningrad front.

Then, one day in December, while I was on a short visit to Egypt, I saw in a local paper, dated December 7th:

Referring to the Leningrad sector, yesterday’s Soviet communiqué made the following significant declaration:

‘German and Finnish barbarians are destroying the habitations and non-military objectives in Leningrad.

‘The artillery of the German and Finnish invaders placed at the approaches to Leningrad has during many months been systematically destroying the habitations in the city.

‘During the past three weeks the shelling has been considerably increased. There are no military objectives in Leningrad at present.

‘The Finnish and German Governments think that if Finnish and German troops destroy Leningrad, the question of Leningrad’s security will not arise for the Soviet Union.

‘The German and Finnish invaders have, however, undoubtedly committed a grave mistake. The Soviet people and the Red Army have sufficient strength to defend Leningrad, to guarantee the future safety of the city, and to force the German and Finnish invaders to bear full responsibility for the crimes committed.’

It sounded very grim, especially in the light of what I read a few days later:

Stockholm, Sunday. – The
Svenska Dagbladet
today quotes travellers from Berlin as saying that the Germans recently used a new secret weapon to bombard Leningrad. They were unable to give details but said the weapon might be the rocket shell gun with which the Germans are now said to be experimenting.

A few days later still, a New York message told a lurid and, to all appearances, improbable story of a German rocket shell weighing fifteen tons, and with a range of 150 kilometres – not quite far enough to reach London. It added, however, that the Germans had already been using it against Leningrad.

Actually, this secret weapon story turned out to be just as unfounded as the numerous other secret weapon stories that Nazi propagandists had been hawking about the various neutral and semi-neutral capitals. I returned to Moscow at the beginning of January, and what I discovered from several people who had just come from Leningrad was this. It was quite true that Leningrad had been having, and was still having, a very difficult time. During the last two months shelling had increased in intensity, larger shells – including some 16-inch shells – were being used, and now shelling was going on not only during daytime as before but also during the night, with the result that physical and nervous strain on the people of Leningrad was correspondingly greater. On some days the Germans concentrated on the city with particular fury – those were the days when Hitler had received a great licking somewhere else. He was taking it out of Leningrad. Every great Russian victory in the Ukraine, or say the sinking of the
Scharnhorst,
was followed in Leningrad by a day of intensive shelling.

But then, when to the outside world the outlook in Leningrad seemed grimmer than it had been for a long time, the hour of revenge suddenly struck. Soldiers in Leningrad itself had known for some time that it was coming, but no one outside (except the Supreme Command) knew it – least of all the Germans. They, on the contrary, had been preparing to strike a blow at that very Oranienbaum bridgehead from which the Russians launched the attack on January 14th. The German plan was not only to eliminate this bridgehead, but perhaps even, ice conditions permitting, to strike at Kronstadt and perhaps at Leningrad itself across the ice of the Gulf of Finland. As General Gvozdkov declared some time later, two S.S. divisions, the Nordland and Niederland, had been concentrated against the Oranienbaum bridgehead shortly before the Russians attacked from there towards the east and south-east, thus forestalling the German attack. One of the most amazing episodes in this war is how the Russians managed to concentrate sufficiently large forces on the extremely precarious Oranienbaum bridgehead, to launch from there the attack which was to play such a decisive part in the liberation of Leningrad.

One of the disturbing factors in this winter of 1943–4 was the weather. There was very little snow, and throughout December the temperature had hovered round freezing point. Even in Leningrad, days of hard frost had been few – and January was no better. There was only a thin and uncontinuous crust of ice on the Gulf of Finland – just sufficient to allow infantry to walk carefully across it from Kronstadt and places on the north side of the Gulf. As for heavy equipment, there could be no question of taking it across the ice. Ships took guns, tanks and ammunition to Oranienbaum with the help of ice-breakers when necessary, and all this was done during the night under the very noses of the Germans and their Peterhof and Strelna batteries, which were busy at that time shelling Leningrad. Not a single Russian was lost in this extraordinary operation.

Oranienbaum struck out on the 14th. Leningrad struck out next morning – and how! One of the biggest artillery barrages of this war was set loose against the German positions at Ligovo, right on Leningrad’s south-west doorstep, and on a hill called Finskoye Koirovo, slightly west of Pulkovo. These two areas were what the Germans called ‘Leningrad’s padlock.’ Both represented a continuous labyrinth of trenches interlarded with minefields and barbed wire, the latter constituting, moreover, a complicated mechanism of booby-traps. To cut the wire was as dangerous as not to cut it. The trenches and underground passages connected hundreds of concrete pillboxes or, rather, ‘wells,’ from which in almost complete safety the Germans could use almost any kind of gun and machine gun. The barrage was intended to ‘plough up’ these two fortified zones which the Germans considered impregnable. Smashing the concrete wells with either bombing or shelling was almost impossible. There were only two solutions, since frontal attack was necessary and encirclement was impossible – so solid were these German defence lines. One was to ‘drive the Germans crazy’ inside the wells, with the intensity of the barrage demolishing everything around them. But that took time. The other was to attack the wells individually. Men had to be found who, after some hours of general shelling, would undertake the almost suicidal job of crawling up to the wells and hurling hand grenades into them. And such was the frenzy of Leningrad troops to finish with the blockade and the shelling once and for all that several of the wells were put out of action in precisely this way. That morning of January 15th was the most exciting moment in Leningrad’s life. The whole city shook with excitement and anticipation and the barrage of one thousand guns. These were front-line guns – just like those near the Putilov works I had seen that morning in September and smaller field guns still nearer the front line, and the powerful naval guns firing from the warships on the Neva right in the centre of Leningrad. And the same thought was in everybody’s mind: ‘No, they must not, they cannot fail this time.’

It was a damp muggy day that 15th of January, and it wasn’t until midday that the weather somewhat cleared up. It was then that hundreds of Russian planes roared over the city from airfields in the north to drop their bomb-loads on the Germans.

For about two days this battle went on. There were moments, as a young officer who had taken part in it later told me, when even the bravest were beginning to wonder and the troops were showing signs of nervousness. After the barrage had ploughed up everything around the German pillboxes, and guns had specially blasted passages in the minefields for the Russian tanks, the tanks went forward followed by infantry. ‘What, across the minefields?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said the officer, ‘the shells had ploughed up the terrain to such an extent that most of the mines had been buried deep underground or blown up. Of course, it was very dangerous, nevertheless. However, once we captured Ligovo and Finskoye Koirovo and the road was relatively clear to Krasnoye Selo, things became easier. From now on frontal attacks on this scale were no longer necessary. We could apply our well-tested envelopment tactics, and it was by envelopment that we liberated Pushkino and Krasnoye and Gatchina. The Germans, seized with panic at the thought of what had happened to their pals in the Ligovo–Strelna salient (the fierceness of the fighting was such that we didn’t take many prisoners), pulled out as fast as they could. Our job was to pursue them, and I will bet you that not very many of Hitler’s Leningrad troops got away to the Estonian border.’