Stalin's General (22 page)

On September 9, Shlisselburg, on the banks of Lake Ladoga northeast of Leningrad, fell to the Germans, thus cutting the last land link to the city. Spurred to action, Stalin placed the trusted Zhukov in command of the Leningrad Front. According to Zhukov, on September 9 he was recalled urgently to Moscow and when he arrived that evening at the Kremlin he was ushered not to Stalin's office but into the dictator's private apartment. After a discussion about the situation in Leningrad Zhukov was ordered to fly to the city and take command. “You must be aware,” Stalin told him “that in Leningrad you will have to fly over the front line or over Lake Ladoga which is controlled
by the German air force.” Stalin then gave Zhukov a note for Voroshilov—on which was written: “turn over command of the Front to Zhukov, and immediately fly to Moscow”—and told him that the order on his appointment would be issued when he arrived in Leningrad. “I realized,” wrote Zhukov, “that these words reflected concern that our flight might end badly.” Zhukov also discussed the impending fall of Kiev with Stalin and suggested that Timoshenko be appointed the new commander of the Southwestern Front and that General Konev should take over his Western Front command. Stalin “telephoned Shaposhnikov (Zhukov's successor as chief of the General Staff) right away and instructed him to summon Marshal Timoshenko and transmit the order to Konev.”
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Zhukov's flight to Leningrad the next day proved almost as dangerous as Stalin feared: when his plane reached Lake Ladoga it had to dive and fly low over the water pursued by two Messerschmitts.
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While his flight to Leningrad may well have been as dramatic as Zhukov remembered, the rest of the story seems to be yet another colorful but inaccurate anecdote. According to the official record Zhukov met Stalin on September 11 in the dictator's office, not in his apartment. The meeting began at 5:10
P.M
. and lasted four hours. Shaposhnikov was present, as was Timoshenko.
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In the middle of the meeting—at 7:10—a directive was sent to the Leningrad Front on the change of command, as was the norm when announcing such decisions. A few minutes later the directives on the Konev and Timoshenko appointments were also issued.
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Accompanying Zhukov to Leningrad were Generals I. I. Feduninskii, M. S. Khozin, and P. I. Kokorev. According to Feduninskii the plane took off for Leningrad on the morning of September 13 protected by fighters. He doesn't mention being chased by Messerschmitts but then Feduninskii's memoir was published during the Khrushchev era when Zhukov was in disgrace and his portrait of the new commander of the Leningrad Front was not very flattering. Indeed, Zhukov came across as rather vague and ill-informed, having no idea, for example, of what job he would give Feduninskii when they got to Leningrad. Even more negative was another Khrushchev era memoir, by General B. V. Bychevskii, chief of the Red Army's engineering section
in Leningrad. Bychevskii depicted Zhukov as a martinet, barking out orders and throwing his weight around to little effect.
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It is not difficult to imagine Zhukov behaving boorishly. This was his favored way of asserting his authority when he took over a new command. Whether he was as ineffective as the Feduninskii and Bychevskii accounts suggest is another question. When Zhukov arrived in Leningrad the situation had taken a new turn for the worse. Having closed their encirclement of the city on September 9 the Germans were now probing for weaknesses in its defenses. Zhukov responded by ordering counterattacks. His general operational order on September 15 was:

Two days later, on September 17, Zhukov and his Military Council issued an order on the defense of Leningrad's vital southern sector: “all commanders, political workers and soldiers who abandon the indicated line without a written order from the front or army military council will be shot immediately.” Stalin wholeheartedly endorsed both the spirit and letter of Zhukov's threat. On September 21 he wrote to Zhukov and the Military Council ordering them to pass on this message to local commanders:

When Zhukov took command in Leningrad he had about 450,000 troops at his disposal, deployed in the 8th, 23rd, 42nd, and 55th Armies. Facing him were an equivalent number of German troops, although the Germans had two tank divisions, whereas Zhukov had none, and the Luftwaffe had complete air supremacy. In addition, fourteen Finnish divisions were attacking Leningrad and Soviet Karelia in the north. The main battle, however, centered on the southern approaches to Leningrad, where the Germans attained positions just a few miles from the city limits. The fighting ebbed and flowed throughout September but by the end of the month the Soviets had stabilized their defenses and the German attacks had petered out. (See
Map 10
: The Battle for Leningrad, September 1941
.)

As the battle raged Zhukov found time to write to daughters Era and Ella:

Historians have differing opinions about Zhukov's performance at Leningrad. According to David Glantz, “Zhukov's iron will … produced a ‘Miracle on the Neva.' ” In a similar vein John Erickson wrote, “in less than a month, Zhukov had mastered the gravest crisis, organised an effective defence and repaired morale, as well as restoring discipline which had crumpled disastrously before his arrival.” Evan Mawdsley was not so sure Zhukov achieved such striking success at Leningrad. Even before Zhukov's arrival in Leningrad Hitler had begun to redeploy forces from Army Group North to support the coming attack on Moscow. The Germans may well have been able to take Leningrad had they persisted with a full-force attack deploying all Army Group North's armor, argues Mawdsley, while the Russian historian Vladimir Beshanov points out that Zhukov was sent to Leningrad to lift the blockade—a task he came nowhere near to achieving.
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One thing was certain: Zhukov's reputation was growing. Khalkhin-Gol, Yel'nya, and now Leningrad—maybe not as great a success as the Zhukov legend came to suggest but relatively successful nevertheless. Zhukov was proving to be Stalin's lucky general; wherever he went there was success, or at least the absence of defeat, and Zhukov's achievements compared well with the disasters suffered elsewhere by the Red Army. Kiev fell in mid-September and the Germans marched on toward the Crimea and Rostov-on-Don—gateway to the Caucasus and the Soviet oilfields at Baku. In early October the Germans resumed their march on Moscow and achieved immediate results with massive encirclements of Soviet forces at Viazma and Briansk that resulted in the Red Army losses of another half million troops. Faced with yet another emergency, Stalin decided to recall Zhukov to Moscow. On October 5 Stalin phoned Zhukov in Leningrad and the following conversation took place:

As Zhukov left Leningrad the city's ordeal was just beginning. Leningrad was to remain encircled and besieged by German and Finnish forces for three more years. During the siege 640,000 civilians died of starvation while another 400,000 perished or disappeared during the course of forced evacuations, many into the icy waters of Lake Ladoga during the winter of 1941–1942. More than a million Soviet soldiers lost their lives fighting in the Leningrad region. The Germans tried on many occasions to breach the city's defenses and to break the defenders' resistance but never again came as close to success as in September 1941. In November–December 1941 the Red Army conducted a successful counteroffensive at Tikhvin east of Leningrad, which secured Moscow against a German encirclement maneuver from the northwest. Thereafter, Leningrad lost its strategic importance, except for the large numbers of enemy forces it pinned down (a third of the Wehrmacht in 1941).
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With his recall to Moscow Zhukov's moment had arrived. The impending battle for the Soviet capital would either bolster or demolish his reputation; much more importantly it would determine the fate of Operation Barbarossa—Hitler's attempt to conquer Russia in a Blitzkrieg invasion designed to avoid a costly war of attrition on the Eastern Front.

Hitler's plan had worked well so far, except that the Red Army exacted a heavier than expected toll on the Wehrmacht as it marched across Russia. In summer 1941 alone the Germans suffered twice as many casualties as they had in conquering France in 1940. But the cost to the Soviets was even greater. Although the Red Army had an available personnel pool of millions of former conscripts who had already served in its ranks for a year or two, it would take time to mobilize, retrain, and reequip this massive reserve. The Red Army was beginning
to run out of equipment as well as trained troops. The German occupation of a big chunk of European Russia denied the Soviets access to a significant portion of their industrial resources. As the Germans advanced the Soviets had performed little short of a miracle in dismantling and shipping eastward hundreds of factories together with hundreds of thousands of industrial workers. But it would take time to get the relocated factories up and running to produce desperately needed tanks, planes, and munitions. The Soviet Union's western allies—Britain, the United States, and other countries—were beginning to send aid, but this did not begin arriving in significant amounts until 1942. In the meantime the Soviets faced Operation Typhoon—an attack on Moscow by seventy divisions, consisting of a million men, 1,700 tanks, 14,000 artillery pieces, and almost 1,000 planes. If Hitler could capture the Soviet capital it would be the death knell for Stalin's regime. The Soviets might have been able to survive the loss of their capital for a while but it is difficult to imagine the Red Army coming back from such a devastating defeat, particularly if Hitler's ally Japan had decided to launch an attack on the Soviet Far East rather than on the United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.