Responsibility for breaking the German lines around Leningrad was to lie chiefly with General Meretskov’s Volkhov Front, which faced Army Group North’s Eighteenth Army along a line running south-east from Lake Ladoga, then south along the Volkhov River to Novgorod. While the armies within the siege ring did what they could to push south and east, those of the Volkhov front were to break westwards across the river, cutting off the German forces around Lyuban, Tosno and Mga. Altogether, 326,000 troops were initially to be committed to the operation, giving a theoretical 50 per cent advantage in manpower, 60 per cent in guns and mortars and 30 per cent in aircraft.
Ignoring Meretskov’s pleas for more artillery, reserves and time in which to concentrate his troops and arrange his logistics, Stalin insisted that the offensive be launched in the first week of January. To keep (presumably terrified) Meretskov up to the mark, he despatched to Leningrad the loathsome Lev Mekhlis, head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate and one of the organisers of the 1937–8 army purges.14 Things went badly from the outset: on the 4th and 5th forty-eight hours of heavy fighting near Kirishi won a mere five kilometres of ground; on the 6th an assault across the Volkhov ice in the face of machine guns lost over three thousand men in its first thirty minutes. ‘Continued enemy attacks’, General Halder wrote dismissively in his diary, ‘but nothing on a major scale.’15 Uncoordinated and intermittent, the offensive continued in piecemeal fashion on into February. Hockenjos, returning to Zvanka on the twentieth, found the monastery half destroyed by shelling from the opposite bank of the Volkhov — the cloister full of craters, the chapel vaulting stove in, and the pines and oaks on the slopes leading down to the river reduced to ‘miserable broomsticks’. A week later a second Soviet attack was beaten off with ease:
Ivan plastered the buildings and their surroundings with a potpourri of greetings from artillery, anti-tank guns, bang-booms and grenade-throwers. The high point came at bright midday, when fifteen Russians in ski parkas, apparently fired up with vodka, crept out into the open. Artillery Lieutenant Vogt and I watched them from a communications trench on the forward slope. First they approached a group of dark lumps which have been sitting there in the middle of the Volkhov since the last Russian attack, and searched them for something to eat. Through our binoculars we could see them taking tin cans out of the dead men’s backpacks. Next they wandered over the snow towards our edge of the woods, which sticks out from the northern side of the monastery hill towards the river. Two hundred metres short we hit them with our big guns. Our aim was good — most of the fifteen stayed lying down. I would have liked to let the fellows get closer to my sentries, so as to pick them off with rifles, or even to the edge of the forest where my men have been lying in wait for quite a while. But the heavy weapons men didn’t want to miss an easy meal.
In the evening two of the dead Russians tried to come to life, but my sentry was paying attention and shot them down. Another seven [sic] Russ the fewer.16
A few kilometres upstream, opposite the village of Myasnoi Bor (‘Meat Wood’) the Soviet offensive made better progress. Its striking force was the newly formed Second Shock Army, which despite being led by a militarily inept henchman of Beria’s and manned by draftees from the treeless Volga steppe, broke through the German lines on 17 January and penetrated deep into the German rear. By the end of February 100,000 men held a ‘pocket’ roughly fifty kilometres square, its northern edge only ten kilometres away from one of the offensive’s key objectives, the railway town of Lyuban.
The gains, however, were more impressive on paper than in reality. Efforts to widen the gap in the enemy line foundered against swift reinforcement, Lyuban remained just out of reach, and the ground won consisted — a scattering of place names notwithstanding — of flat and virtually uninhabited forest, peat-workings and bog. Realising the Second Shock Army’s vulnerability, on 2 March Hitler ordered Georg von Küchler (who had taken over command of Army Group North from von Leeb in January) to mount an Operation Predator to cut it off from the rest of the Volkhov front. ‘Concentration of air force in that sector’, Halder wrote in his diary, ‘is requested for the period 7–14 March. . After elimination of the Volkhov salient, no blood is to be wasted on reducing the enemy in the marshes; he can be left to starve to death.’17 The ground attack was launched at daybreak on the fifteenth, and within five days had severed both roads — nicknamed ‘Erika’ and ‘Dora’ — into the pocket. By the end of the month, after desperate seesaw fighting round Myasnoi Bor, the Soviets held a corridor into the pocket only a kilometre and a half wide, along which supplies had to be hauled on sleds by night.
In April it began to thaw, glittering silence replaced by drizzle and the sound of running water. Still quartered at Zvanka, Hockenjos watched the landscape change, photographing the first small patch of earth — dark and strewn with wisps of straw — to emerge, and sitting for hours at the top of the monastery bell tower:
Reed beds, wide bodies of water between stretches of yellowed grass, black moorland and the sparse remains of the snow. Over it all a high spring sky with fine lamb’s wool clouds: a sea of larks’ jubilations and lapwings’ cries. In the marshy forest to the right, goldfinches in every bush. . Everywhere, the men sit in front of their bunkers with their shirts off, their torsos pale. . They are whistling and singing. The cheerful noise must carry as far as the Russians, but I am not going to forbid it.18
For the trapped Second Shock Army, the thaw brought only new misery. The corridor connecting it to the rest of the Russian front became impassable, halting delivery of supplies and evacuation of the wounded. Horses died and were eaten; dugouts flooded and shells had to be carried by hand, the men wading up to their waists or jumping from tussock to tussock ‘like rabbits’, to derisive German shouts of ‘Rus, kup-kup!’ For daytime cover they built ‘breastworks’ of branches, moss and dead leaves; at night they slept in the open around fires, scorching their sodden felt boots and quilted jackets. To reanimate the offensive, Stalin reshuffled his generals, recalling Meretskov and subordinating the Leningrad to the Volkhov Front under Zhukov’s protégé Mikhail Khozin. Andrei Vlasov, a tall, spectacled professional soldier who had led the 37th Army out of encirclement at Kiev and spearheaded the December counter-attack in front of Moscow, was flown in to take over the Second Shock Army. On 12 May, having received intelligence that the Germans were bringing up reinforcements, Khozin ordered Vlasov to break out of encirclement and rejoin the rest of the Volkhov Front. Though five divisions and four brigades made it back through the Myasnoi Bor corridor, and at least two thousand men, according to German records, deserted, that left another seven divisions and six brigades — about 20,000 men in total — still trapped inside the German ‘cauldron’.19 ‘The enemy would first surround a unit’, a survivor remembered, ‘wait for it to weaken for lack of supplies and then start pounding’:
We were completely helpless, since we had no ammunition, no petrol, no bread, no tobacco, not even salt. Worst of all was having no medical help. No medicine, no bandages. You want to help the wounded, but how? All our underwear has gone for bandages long ago; all we have left is moss and cotton wool. The field hospitals are overflowing, and the few medical staff in despair. Many hundreds of non-walking wounded simply lie under bushes. Around them mosquitoes and flies buzz like bees in a hive. Come near and the whole swarm comes after you, covers you all over, gets into your mouth, eyes, ears — unbearable. Mosquitoes, flies and lice — our hated enemies. . Nothing new about lice — but in such quantities. . The grey devils eat us alive, with gusto, completely covering our clothes and bodies. You don’t even try to squash them; all you can do, if you have a free moment, is shake them off on to the ground. You find six or seven on a single button. .