It is also said that amongst Leningrad’s Bolsheviks people can be found who do not consider it possible to use force against such individuals. .
My answer is — No sentimentality. Instead smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth. War is inexorable, and those who show weakness and allow wavering are the first to suffer defeat. Whoever in our ranks permits wavering, will be responsible for the fall of Leningrad.
Beat the Germans and their creatures, whoever they are. . It makes no difference whether they are willing or unwilling enemies. No mercy to the German scoundrels or their accomplices. .
Request you inform commanders and division and regimental commissars, also the military council of the Baltic Fleet and the commanders and commissars of ships.
[Signed] I. Stalin12
Finally the line held. On 24 September, when his forward units were only fifteen kilometres from the Hermitage — as far as the London suburb of Richmond is from Piccadilly Circus, or the Jersey turnpike from the Empire State Building — von Leeb finally acknowledged that his now exhausted and overextended armies could advance no further, and requested permission to move on to the defensive. Fighting petered out as the two sides retired to count their staggering losses. Within Germany’s Army Group North, 190,000 men had been killed or wounded since the start of the invasion, and 500 guns and 700 tanks lost.13 Soviet casualties were even heavier. In the same period the Baltic Fleet and Northwestern Army Group had together lost 214,078 men killed, missing or taken prisoner (POWs probably comprising 70–80 per cent of the total), and another 130,848 wounded — two-thirds of their original troop numbers. They had also lost 4,000 tanks, about 5,400 guns, and 2,700 aircraft.14
In traditional siege histories, these days in mid- to late September, with their exhausting battles and ruthless displays of military will, were when the tide turned in the defence of Leningrad. But newer interpretations put the emphasis less on Zhukov’s (still undoubted) tactical brilliance, more on an earlier change of strategy on the German side. In this version, the Red Army did not so much beat off the Germans, as the Germans decide to focus elsewhere.
Since Barbarossa’s inception, Hitler and his generals had nursed a simmering disagreement over whether Moscow or Leningrad was the more important strategic objective. Hitler’s original directive of December 1940, which laid out the broad scheme for Barbarossa, had been clear: only once the Baltics, Leningrad and Kronshtadt had been taken, knocking out the Baltic Red Fleet and securing Leningrad’s arms manufacturers, was the advance to begin on Moscow. The service chiefs, led by Chief of General Staff Franz Halder, disagreed. Russia’s capital and biggest city should come first, they argued, and Leningrad second.
Put aside with Barbarossa’s launch, the disagreement broke into the open again in mid-July, as von Leeb asked for more troops and equipment for his Army Group North. A parallel argument over whether to bypass surrounded Russian towns or capture them before advancing further was resolved in the generals’ favour, but on Leningrad Hitler held firm. ‘My representations stressing the importance of Moscow’, Halder grumbled to his diary on 26 July, ‘are brushed aside with no valid counter-evidence.’ Ten days later, as the Wehrmacht approached Novgorod, Halder tried again, this time via General Paulus: ‘At my request the commander of Army Group South raised points of high strategy, emphasising the importance of Moscow. The Führer again showed himself absolutely deaf to these arguments. He still harps on his old themes: 1. Leningrad, with Hoth [commander of Army Group Centre’s 3rd Panzer Group] brought into the picture. 2. Eastern Ukraine. . 3. Moscow last.’ The following day Halder tried to recruit Chief of Operations Staff General Alfred Jodl to the cause. ‘I put it to him that Leningrad can be taken with the forces already at [von Leeb’s] disposal. We need not and must not divert to the Leningrad front anything that we might need for Moscow. Von Leeb’s flank is not threatened in any way. . Von Bock must drive with all his forces on Moscow. (Ask the Führer: Can he afford not to reduce Moscow before winter sets in?)’15
Increasingly irritated by von Leeb’s pleas for more resources — ‘Wild requests by Army Group North for engineers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns’ — Halder was driven to consider resignation by a Führer Directive of 21 August, which flatly contradicted Army High Command. ‘OKH’s [High Command’s] proposals’, Hitler declared, ‘do not conform with my intentions. . The principal object still to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather, in the South, the occupation of the Crimea and the Donets coal basin. . and in the North, the encirclement of Leningrad and junction with the Finns.’ Not until these objectives were met would forces be freed up to advance on the capital.
Halder was furious. Hitler’s interference was unendurable, and the Führer had only himself to blame for ‘the zigzag course caused by his successive orders’. High Command, now in its fourth victorious campaign, should not ‘tarnish its reputation’ with his latest demands, and Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, was being treated ‘absolutely outrageously’. He suggested to Brauchitsch that they both tender their resignations, but Brauchitsch refused ‘on the grounds that the resignations would not be accepted, so nothing would change’.16 The row was patched up (‘Bliss and harmony’, Halder noted sarcastically on 30 August, ‘Everything just lovely again’) but not resolved until 5 September, when Hitler finally agreed that if von Leeb had not captured Leningrad within ten days, Hoepner’s Panzer Group Four would be transferred south to join von Bock’s push for Moscow.17 In the event, von Leeb’s protests and promises of imminent victory meant that the transfer started three days late, but Halder’s point was won. ‘The ring around Leningrad’, he wrote on the day the panzers swung south, ‘has not yet been drawn as closely as might be desired, and further progress after the departure of the 1st Armoured and 36th Motorised Divisions is doubtful. . The situation will remain tight until such time as hunger takes effect as our ally.’18
The redeployment did not seem overwhelmingly significant at the time. On the German side it was seen as a temporary compromise; on the Russian, the sense of looming catastrophe only intensified. In retrospect, however, it was the point at which Germany missed her best chance of taking Leningrad. Never again, despite more than two years of near-continuous fighting, did Army Group North amass the mobility and firepower for a full-scale frontal assault on the city. Instead, it became the Eastern Front’s poor relation, starved of reinforcements and unable to move troops into reserve for fear that they would immediately be redeployed elsewhere. While in the south and centre armies swept back and forth across the map, round Leningrad the front congealed — exactly as Hitler had planned that Barbarossa should not — into the mud and blood of positional trench warfare, during which neither side, despite repeated offensives, ever mustered the strength decisively to beat the other.
The Wehrmacht’s change of strategy — from ground assault to starvation and air raids — was made official in a memo circulated to Army Group North under Halder’s name on 28 September:
According to the directive of the High Command it is ordered that:
1. The city of Leningrad is to be sealed off, the ring being drawn as tightly as possible so as to spare our forces unnecessary effort. Surrender terms will not be offered.
2. So as to eliminate the city as a last centre of Red resistance on the Ostsee [the Baltic] as quickly as possible, without major sacrifice of our own blood, it will not be subjected to infantry assault . . Destruction of waterworks, warehouses and power stations will strip it of its vital services and defence capability. All military objects and enemy defence forces are to be destroyed by firebombing and bombardment. Civilians are to be prevented from bypassing the besieging troops, if necessary by force of arms.19