Leningrad

hand.25

Stalin’s response to the disasters was a furious telegraph to Zhdanov and Voroshilov. If the German armies won more victories around Novgorod, he thundered, they might be able to outflank Leningrad to the east, breaking communications with Moscow and meeting the Finns on the far shore of Lake Ladoga:

It appears to us that the High Command of the Northwestern Army Group fails to see this mortal danger and therefore takes no special measures to liquidate it. German strength in the area is not great, so all we need to do is throw in three fresh divisions under skilful leadership. Stavka cannot be reconciled to this mood of fatalism, of the impossibility of taking decisive steps, and with arguments that everything’s being done that can be done.26

Three days later Stalin’s fears came to pass when Chudovo, a town on the main Moscow — Leningrad railway line, was taken. On 22 August Zhdanov begged Stalin for reinforcements. The twenty-two rifle divisions of the Northwestern Army Group, he pointed out, were now fighting along a 400-kilometre front, and seven of them had almost no heavy weapons or radios. Another five divisions he did not include in his calculations, since their ‘remaining fighting capacity’ was ‘low’ — in other words, they had been wiped out. He needed forty-five to fifty fresh battalions, and new weapons for five divisions.27

On the evening of 25 August Lyuban, thirty kilometres north of Chudovo on the Moscow — Leningrad line, fell too. The following day Stalin telephoned, asking for a report. Voroshilov’s second-in-command, General Popov, took the call, admitting that Lyuban had been abandoned and again requesting more troops — ‘since the ones sent to us don’t cover even half of our losses’; semi-automatic weapons for the infantry — ‘who only have rifles’; and that Leningrad be allowed to keep rather than send to other fronts its own armoured vehicle production. Unwillingly, Stalin agreed:

We’ve already let you have three days’ worth of production, you can have another three or four days. . We’ll send you more infantry battalions, but I can’t say how many. . In a couple of weeks, perhaps, we’ll be able to scrape together two divisions for you. If your people knew how to work to a plan, and had asked us for two or three divisions a fortnight ago, they would be ready for you now. The whole trouble is that you people prefer to live and work like gypsies, from one day to the next, not looking ahead. I demand that you bring some order back to the 48th Army, especially to those divisions whose cowardly officers disappeared the devil knows where from Lyuban yesterday. . I demand that you clear the Lyuban and Chudovo regions of the enemy at any price and by any means. I entrust you with this personally. . Tell me briefly, is Klim [Voroshilov] helping, or hindering?

‘He’s helping. We’re sincerely grateful,’ Popov prudently replied.28

On 26 August, also, Stalin finally allowed a retreat by sea from Tallinn, two hundred miles due west of Leningrad and the capital of Estonia. This operation — a ‘kind of Dunkirk, but without the air cover’ as Werth put it — was one of the biggest (and is one of the least remembered) of the military disasters that befell the Soviet Union in the first few months of the war. The man in charge was Admiral Vladimir Tributs, commander-in-chief of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. Realising early on that the newly established Soviet naval base of Libau (now Liepaja), on the Latvian coast, was vulnerable in case of German attack, he had (bravely) sought and won permission to transfer his largest ships east to Estonia shortly before the war began. It was a prescient move: Libau fell two days into the war, and five days after that his flagship, the 7,000-ton cruiser Kirov, was lucky to escape Riga for Tallinn. To defend Tallinn, Tributs had at his disposal 14,000 sailors, a thousand or so police and the battered remnants, about four thousand-strong, of the frontier troops who had fled there from Riga, among them the 5th Motorised Rifle Regiment, now down to ‘150 bayonets’. Though Tributs conscripted 25,000 Estonian civilians into trench digging, most, like the Latvians, did not want to be ‘defended’. Bursts of gunfire sounded around the city at night, anonymous hands pasted up pro-German flyers and a Russian officer was murdered coming out of a restaurant. The NKVD responded with its usual round of arrests, firing squads and tribunals.

On 8 August — the same day von Leeb began his attack on the Luga Line — Tallinn was surrounded by land, as the Wehrmacht reached the coast to its east. Tributs suggested two equally unpalatable ways out of the trap. Either he could mass his forces for a breakout eastwards towards still-unoccupied Narva, on the Estonian — Russian border, or he could sail them across the Gulf to the Finnish shore and fight back through Finnish lines to Leningrad. Stalin rejected both proposals: Tallinn was to be held at all costs.

The Eighteenth Army launched its attack on the evening of 19 August. Shells crashed among the cobbled alleys and steep red-tiled roofs of the old city, and among the clapboard summer houses and canvas bathing machines of Pirita beach. The Kirov’s guns replied, flashing orange from her anchorage in the harbour. The city’s civilians watched and waited behind shuttered shops and barricaded doors. A week into the bombardment Tributs’s second-in-command, Admiral Yuri Panteleyev, described the situation in his journal:

Beat off strong attack on city during the night. Enemy has changed tactics, infiltrating in small groups. . All airfields captured by the enemy. Our planes flew off to the east. Fleet and city under bombing and shelling. Lovely Pirita burning. . Other suburbs also burning. Big fires in the city. Barricades being built at the approaches to the harbour. Smoke everywhere. . Fire of ships and shore batteries has not slackened. Our command post at Minna Harbour constantly under fire.29

Later that morning Stalin finally gave permission to evacuate the fleet to Kronshtadt, Russia’s historic island naval base at the head of the Gulf of Finland. While the defenders fell slowly back towards the harbour, setting fire to a power station, grain elevators and warehouses on the way, embarkation began of the Fleet’s civilian entourage — officers’ wives, Party officials, a theatrical troupe and senior Estonian Communists, including the president of the puppet Estonian Republic. The flamboyant war correspondent Vsevelod Vishnevsky, grandstanding at the quayside, insisted that his driver not simply remove his car’s carburettor, but blow up the vehicle with a hand grenade. Loading of troops began the following day, and by the small hours of 28 August nearly 23,000 people and 66,000 tons of munitions had gone aboard a motley collection of 228 vessels, which formed up into four convoys outside the harbour mouth.30

Through the morning of the 28th the ships lay in the roads, rolling at their anchors in a force seven gale. By noon the wind had eased, and the signal went out to get underway. Stretched out over fifteen miles of sea, the convoys had an unenviable task ahead. Their equivalents at Dunkirk fourteen months earlier had had to cover fifty miles, through waters controlled by the Royal Navy. Tributs’s ships had to travel 220 miles, over the first 150 of which they would be subject to attack by shore batteries, submarines and Finnish torpedo boats. The route was also thick with enemy mines — ‘like dumplings in borscht’. At least a hundred minesweepers, Red Fleet commander Admiral Kuznetsov later calculated, would have been needed to clear a safe path; Tributs had thirty- eight, mostly converted trawlers. Nor, despite a last-minute plea to Zhdanov for air cover, did the fleet have any protection from the Luftwaffe, Zhdanov’s orders having been issued ‘with great delay’.

Under attack from Junkers 88 dive-bombers from departure, the convoys hit their first major minefield at six o’clock in the evening, off Point Juminda, forty miles east of Tallinn. The first ship to go down, at 6.05 p.m., was Ella, an Estonian merchantman. While rescuing survivors, a tug from the fourth convoy also hit a mine, and sank fifteen minutes later. Ten minutes after that an ice-breaker, the Kristjanis Voldemars, was sunk by bombs. Vironia, carrying civilians, was damaged in the same air attack and taken in tow by the Saturn. Less orderly now, the convoys steamed on eastwards, zigzagging to avoid the Junkers and fire from batteries on the point. The warships were too preoccupied with dodging or disentangling themselves from mines to give much protection to the transports, most of which had no anti-aircraft guns. The minefield’s next victims, as dusk began to fall, were the sweeper Krab, then a submarine, which disappeared beneath the waves in less than a minute, then the Saturn, still towing the Vironia. A gunboat went down at 8.30 p.m., as the sun was setting, and another submarine at 8.48 p.m. Two minutes later