* To the north, Hitler ordered the German Army and the Luftwaffe to pound Leningrad to rubble, rather than send German troops to be ground up in Soviet defenses. The Nazis bombarded the city relentlessly.
As the northern weather went cold and icy, Leningrad began to slowly die. Less than half the food needed to keep the citizenry alive was coming in. In mid-October, the authorities conducted a check of citizen's ration cards and tightened up control of the rationing. A woman who worked at a printing shop that produced ration cards was found with a hundred ration cards in her possession. She was immediately shot.
The citizens had no fuel. They burned all their possessions to stay warm. By late November, food rations had shrunk to what would prove to be an all-time low. A citizen received a handful of bread that tasted of sawdust. People ate paste, shoes, birds, mice, soups made from stinging nettles, anything they could find. Household pets disappeared quickly, their masters weeping as they killed the animals and then ate them.
The city had been flooded with refugees when the Germans closed in on it, and many had no papers. No papers meant no ration card. The refugees started starving in their camps outside the city as early as September, and all in the camps would eventually die. By the onset of winter, people were dropping in the streets, their frozen bodies left unattended until the authorities periodically picked them up and dumped them into mass graves all over the city. Eventually, the lack of resources to dig graves forced the authorities to begin cremating the bodies.
Although Soviet authorities kept it a secret for decades, some of the citizens turned to cannibalism, and a few of them murdered to obtain bodies when corpses were not conveniently available. Soldiers coming back from the front heard stories of some of their fellows being killed and eaten and began to travel in armed groups. The authorities recorded about 1,500 cannibals. Most were women who were trying to save their children.
The Soviets had been able to sneak some supplies across Lake Ladoga to the east, with the material delivered by train to a railhead at Tikhvin and then shuttled over the lake by barge in the dark. The Germans seized Tikhvin on 9 November, shutting down the last direct connection between the city and the outside world.
In late November, the ice on Lake Ladoga became thick enough to support sleds and then trucks, but without a railhead to the lake there was no way to provide the trucks with adequate loads of food. The Red Army recaptured Tikhvin on 9 December, as part of a general offensive of which more is said later, but of course the Germans thoroughly wrecked everything when they left. It most of the rest of the month to get the railroad back in working order. Supplies wouldn't start to flow until January and it would take several months to bring them up to the needed level.
In the meantime, the citizens continued to starve and die. Defiantly, the people went on with their lives as best they could. Historians performed their studies, architects designed new structures, and composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the LENINGRAD SYMPHONY. The symphony was
performed in the city, with musicians recalled from the front to play. The conductor was faced with a difficult rehearsals, as musicians died of starvation every day. A quarter of a century later, the first night performance was reenacted by the survivors of the orchestra and the audience. Musical instruments were placed in the empty chairs of the dead of the symphony.
Even children made their own contribution to this great and appalling story. A young girl, Tania Savicheva, kept a diary to record life and death under the siege, listing calamities in a simple fashion: "Grandmother died, 25 January 1942, at 3:00 PM." Following pages list death after death, and conclude: "The Savichevas have died. All died. Only Tania is left." The girl was evacuated, but was too malnourished to survive. Her diary was read by Soviet prosecutors at the Nurenburg trials of Nazi leaders after the war.
Leningrad would suffer siege for 900 days in all, but the first winter was the worst. It wasn't until March that the supply line was fully operational. The boats brought in food and took out
noncombatants, dealing with Luftwaffe attacks as best they could. A pipeline and power line were laid across Lake Ladoga to keep the city operational. Survivors planted crops anyplace there was to plant them, and by the summer rations wouldn't be a particular problem. Nobody knows exactly how many people died in that hideous winter in Leningrad, but estimates are on the order of two million.
[5.3] COUNTERSTROKE
* As the Germans pushed through the snow towards Moscow in early December, the Soviets were preparing a counterstroke. Red agent Richard Sorge at the German embassy in Tokyo provided intelligence that the Japanese were not preparing to attack the Soviet Union from Manchukuo. Sorge had reported German preparations for BARBAROSSA back in June and had been ignored, but now Stalin believed him. Stalin withdrew more than half of the USSR's combat strength from Siberia, shuttling 40 divisions west to deal with the Nazis. These divisions were well trained, experienced, well equipped, and their officer corps had not been badly damaged by the purges. They had a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft. They had already given Guderian a taste of what they were capable of on 27 November. Now they were ready to be used in earnest.
There were half a million men available for the assault. On 5 December the Red Army launched limited counteroffensives against German positions, and found that the Germans surprisingly gave up their positions easily. Encouraged, the Soviets decided to push harder. Rokossovsky's forces to the southwest of the city and Konev's in the north led the push. The front was almost a thousand kilometers (600 miles) wide. The Soviets were now committing massive reserves that German intelligence had never really accounted for; Red artillery had plenty of ammunition and was close to supply bases; and the Red Air Force was out in strength.
Indeed, although the Red Air Force had lost immense numbers of planes in the early days of the war, most of the planes destroyed were obsolescent anyway, and since the aircraft had been mostly shot and bombed while sitting on an airfield, losses of trained pilots had been relatively light. The Red Air Force was now beginning to obtain quantities of modern aircraft, such as the formidable, heavily- armored Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik close-support aircraft, or "Flying Tank", and the fast Petlyakov Pe- 2 light bomber. The Soviets were well able to operate these aircraft in otherwise intolerable winter weather. For example, ground crews would drain all the oil from an aircraft when it landed, and keep the oil heated with a field stove until it was poured back in to ready the aircraft for combat again. The Soviet T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans had and designed with winter operations in mind, was now becoming available in quantity. The new "Katyusha (Sweet Little Katy)" barrage rocket launcher was capable of pouring a wall of explosive on German positions with munitions whose shrill screams shattered the nerve of those who survived the attacks. Well-trained Soviet ski troops moved quickly through German positions. Within 48 hours, the Soviet juggernaut was in full motion.
The Red Army drove forward from Moscow in the center and attacked to open a lifeline to Leningrad in the north, while Soviet forces pushed towards Kursk in the Ukraine. Hitler ordered Army Group Center to stand its ground, but it was impossible. On 20 December, Heinz Guderian told Hitler that his troops could no longer fight. The Soviet Union had seemed on the edge of defeat, and instead had inflicted an undeniable defeat on the Germans.
Soviet propaganda paraded pictures of German soldiers captured wearing women's winter coats or other ridiculous gear, calling them "Winter Fritzes". Films showed the numb and frightened faces of German prisoners, herded off to prison camps. Most would not return. There were not great numbers of German prisoners; although the German Army had taken a beating, there were few more
professional armies in the world, and the Germans had managed to fall back in order and avoid encirclement. However, Hitler was not happy with commanders that gave ground and sacked dozens of generals. Runstedt had been one of the first to leave, with those following prominently including Guderian, who would never hold a major field command again. Von Brauchitsch suffered a heart attack and was forced to retire on 19 December, with the Fuehrer having little kindly to say about him and then assigning himself, Hitler, the role of Commander in Chief of the German Army.
Some historians claim that Hitler's insistence on standing fast kept the German Army from collapsing in the face of the Red Army's offensive, while others suggest that it only increased suffering and losses, since the Soviet drive would have run out of steam as it outstretched its supply lines anyway. Hitler might well have considered the lesson that Stalin had shown such trouble grasping -- that it was better to abandon terrain to preserve forces that could be used later to give the enemy a real blow under much more favorable conditions. Whatever the reality of the situation, it is clear that Hitler thought that his stubbornness had saved the day, and came to an unambiguous conclusion that would have major consequences later: Hold ground at all costs.
* The Germans had been forced to abandon piles of equipment. The Soviets proudly displayed these discards to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when he arrived on a diplomatic visit on the evening of 15 December. The British and the United States had doubted the Soviet Union would survive, and the Soviets displayed the results of their victory with great pride. Eden was properly impressed, in fact seeming to become somewhat overly taken with Stalin, though when Stalin proposed to Eden that the British recognize the Soviet seizure of the Baltics and eastern Poland -- even suggesting that after the war the British could balance these appropriations by taking over bits of France and the Low Countries with Soviet acceptance -- Koba found the British distinctly cool to the idea.
Eden wired Churchill from the British embassy to report on Stalin's proposals, with the prime minister replying that "we are bound to the United States not to enter into secret and special pacts." Churchill saw no sense in a pointed rejection of Soviet territorial ambitions, however, telling Eden that such questions would have to wait on "the peace conference when we had won the war." Stalin did not like that answer at all and pressed Eden on the matter.
* In the newly-liberated territories, Russian soldiers were greeted ecstatically by liberated villagers, and Muscovites celebrated Christmas and New Years' with exuberance that had bubbled up through the gloom. Still, as Red troops moved into territories held by the Nazis, they were appalled by the destruction and desolation. The Germans wrecked everything with their characteristic efficiency as they withdrew, and their rule over the occupied lands had not been gentle in the first place.
The Nazis took particular pleasure in defacing the treasures of Slavic culture. In the town of Klim, they burned the house of the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and destroyed the score of his Sixth Symphony. Count Leo Tolstoy's house in Yasnaya Polyana was razed to the chimneys, and his gravesite was dug up to allow German soldiers to be buried there instead. Russian Orthodox churches were often burned and their icons destroyed.
The churches were also often sites of executions. The Germans killed Soviet civilians with little provocation or hesitation. Soviet propaganda films caught the savagery with heart-wrenching
vividness, showing the corpses of the hanged swinging in rows in the falling snow; the burned bodies of victims in shattered houses; a mother weeping, arranging the hair of her dead daughter, a pretty young woman killed by the Nazis.
[5.4] AMERICA ENTERS THE WAR
* In the meantime, the United States had come into the war in full force. On 7 December, Maxim Litvinov arrived in Washington DC as the ambassador to the USA, to replace the detested Oumansky. Even as Litvinov was arriving at the airport, the news was flying around like a whirlwind that Japan had just attacked the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, inflicting massive damage. America was now a full combatant in the conflict. There was the difficulty that the Japanese attack did not give Roosevelt an option for declaring war on Germany, but Hitler declared war on the USA on 11
December.
The full entry of the US into the war had enormous consequences, but it was not entirely good news to the Kremlin in the short term, since it meant diversion of American military aid for the USSR. On the other side of the coin, the Japanese had committed themselves to a fight with the Americans and there was no way they could present a threat to the Soviet Union in the meantime. Indeed, given the massive imbalance of power between Japan and the USA, over the long run Japan might well be eliminated as a threat, period.
On 22 December, Churchill arrived in Washington DC along with British government and military staff to discuss war planning. It seemed appropriate at the time to produce a statement of common purpose for those at war with the Axis. The statement was released on 1 January 1942, with the signatories including the USA, Britain, the USSR, and all the other co-belligerents from China down to Albania, described simply as the "United Nations". The term was used because Roosevelt was cautious about calling it an "alliance", which had legal implications that might have caused problems with the US Congress, but the concept of the "United Nations" had been born and would take on greater importance in the future. In any case, the document stated: