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T he German siege of Leningrad tied down an entire army group from late 1941 until 1944; the

roots of that situation stretch back to the decisions made in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, the initial German lunge into the Soviet Union. Reading contemporary accounts of it, one gets the sense the German high command assumed they had all the time they needed to complete all subsidiary operations. Thus they could choose to besiege Leningrad rather than assault it, concentrate almost all their armor to pocket and then take Kiev, and somehow still make a final and decisive plunge for Moscow. That switching of priorities laid the groundwork for their overall failure in the east.

The initial plan for Barbarossa precluded making Moscow a major objective; rather, Leningrad, the Ukraine and the Don Basin were the primary targets. Hitler chose the former for its political significance and the latter for its economic resources. He considered Moscow merely a geographic location, and perhaps a trap in the same manner its capture had led to the doom of Napoleon and his Grande Armee in 1812.

The dilemma worsened when the invaders couldn’t bring themselves to stick to any single objective. Over the summer of 1941 in the midst of the greatest challenge the Wehrmacht had yet faced, the German high command

was divided by acrimonious debate over objectives. The result was Hitler decided to first divert Army Group Center’s panzers to supporting operations in the north and south, and then switching them back for a drive on Moscow.

The reasons for those changes in the plan have been debated endlessly since World War II, but whether Moscow was a viable (or singly decisive) German objec-tive in 1941 isn’t the issue here. What’s critical is: at the moment the Germans had an opportunity to take Leningrad via a concerted panzer drive in late sum-mer, Army Group North’s mobile forces were switched elsewhere. The indecision in front of Leningrad was symptom-atic of that overall German shortfall in Barbarossa: lack of a consistent strategy.

The actual decision to turn to Moscow was implemented on 16 September, over the objections of Army Group North’s commander, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb. Four days earlier, von Manstein himself had been transferred to command Eleventh Army in Army Group South, with the mission of taking the Soviet fortress-city of Sevastopol. With the panzers as well as Manstein gone, all opportunity to take Leningrad by coup de main was effectively ended.

In execution, the kind of operations run by the Germans relied on the panzer corps commanders to move on their own initiative to take advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves, sometimes in defiance of higher echelon directives to wait for the infantry to come up in support. But the situation on the eastern front in 1941 saw a trend toward over-control by OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, the Army High Command, which was responsible for conducting operations). Objectives deep within the USSR were assigned to panzer group commanders but then switched. Corps commanders found themselves in turn being ordered to switch their axes of advance back and forth across the front, causing increased wear on vehicles and dissipating momentum.

Added to that was the decision by Hitler to withhold the output of

German armored fighting vehicle (AFV) production. Instead of being used to replace losses suffered in the Soviet Union, the new tanks were to be used to create a new group of panzer divisions that were to be committed to post-Barbarossa campaigns. That decision was predicated on defeating the Soviet Union by the end of 1941, yet such a solution required concentrat-ing all panzer forces in the east.

At the same time, the German gener-als and field marshals failed to form a united front in terms of presenting Hitler with reasonable objectives for the 1941 campaign. Thus, without consistent leadership, the invasion was bound to achieve less than optimal results both generally and in its particulars. The deci-sion-making process of the German high command for Leningrad demonstrates that phenomenon. The idea for a siege of Leningrad, rather than an all-out attack, was discussed as if it were going to take place in a strategic vacuum, one in which it would be the only major operation occurring on the front.

There were still other factors involved. The German high com-mand, including Hitler, wanted to avoid the mass casualties that had been typical of the battles of World War I. The underlying fear was large casualty returns would lead to the kind of home front collapse — and revolution — which had knocked

Leningrad, 1941:Manstein’s Truly “Lost Victory”

Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb Erich von Manstein

by Joseph Miranda

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the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German Empires out of the Great War.

Hitler also had geo-strategic consid-erations for wanting to avoid a major fight inside Leningrad. Such a contest could’ve easily burned out numerous divisions in house-to-house fighting in a city where the communists were sure to fight fanatically. Moreover, Leningrad would be difficult to maneuver past and around. Unlike other Soviet cities captured in 1941, such as Smolensk and Kiev, enveloping Leningrad

would’ve been difficult to impossible. The Finns, co-belligerents with the

Germans in the war against the USSR, had reaffirmed their refusal to move against the city, due to their 20-year-old pledge to the Soviet government never to threaten it. That secured the city’s northern flank for the defense, though the Soviets still deployed some forces there to keep an eye things. To the east and southeast, Lake Ladoga, the Valdai Hills, and the marshes between them further restricted deep maneuver. Any

fight for the city would therefore have inevitably come down to a frontal assault, the very type of operation the blitzkrieg was intended to avoid.

War & Psychological War

The quick and relatively inexpensive German victories prior to Barbarossa had an immense psychological impact around the world, one that was further played up in their propaganda. Perhaps, though, its most decisive effect was

on those in the German high com-mand itself, who came to believe the Wehrmacht could undertake virtually any task that could be set for it.

Transcripts of conversations at Fuehrer headquarters record Hitler’s astonishment at how quickly and cheaply the campaigns in Poland, France and the Balkans were won. The French campaign was the crucial turning point. Many in the German high command, including Hitler, had been at least guardedly pessimistic about gain-ing a decision in the west in 1940. When the Wehrmacht subsequently overran France in a few weeks, it came as almost as much of a surprise to the German high command as it did to that of the Allies. If the armies of France and Britain could be defeated so handily — armies that had held out so stubbornly for four years in 1914-1918 — then surely the Red Army — heir to the defeated army of the Czar, and which had displayed such incompetence in the recent Winter War with Finland — could be expected to be easily trounced.

Much of the power of the Wehrmacht came from projecting itself as a force capable of winning quick victories, thereby overturning the experiences of 1914-18 and, for that matter, of other such protracted contests as the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars. One symptom of that belief was revealed in Hitler’s reac-tion to the large numbers of casualties the German airborne arm suffered in taking the island of Crete a few weeks before Barbarossa opened. They were sufficient to cause him to suspend airborne operations indefinitely. Thus the elite German paratroopers would fight in the Soviet Union only as regular infantry, with some units showing up in front of Leningrad in that role late in 1941. Had Hitler not made that decision, we might here be evaluating the impact of a German airborne force seizing objectives ahead of the panzers advancing into the USSR. Indeed, the Soviet fear of just such an assault led them to construct many anti-paratrooper defenses behind the lines of their Leningrad position.

That cancellation goes to Hitler view-ing the airborne arm as a psychological as much as a military instrument: in 1940 it had been especially useful in spreading panic in the Allied rear areas, with rumors of massive numbers of paratroopers descending sometimes reaching hysteric proportions. Crete showed that psychological effect was no longer there, and Hitler therefore lost interest in the airborne. What

that also indicates is the Wehrmacht needed to go through a fundamental change in its doctrine in 1941, though it wasn’t all that evident at the time.

Hitler also saw Leningrad as a politico-psychological objective. It was the spiritual home of bolshevism, and in that regard Leningrad’s capture might prove to be a catastrophic blow to Stalin’s regime. At the same time, though, there was no certainty that would occur. For one, the Soviets had moved their capital from Petrograd (as Leningrad was called until 1924) to Moscow. They did so precisely because they could see the old capital was militarily vulnerable. Moscow, with its far inland location and central position at the nexus of rail lines from all over the country, was more defensible and better situated to dominate the vast expanse of the communist realm.

Of course, the German problem wasn’t simply their failure to prosecute a consistent strategy in their 1941 campaign. For any strategy to have worked, the Soviets would’ve had to have been incapable of offering sustained resistance. Unfortunately for the Germans, that wasn’t the situation.

The Soviets

The shortfalls of the Workers and Peasants Red Army (as the Soviet armed forces were known at the time) have been analyzed many times before in these pages. Briefly, Soviet military leadership had been wrecked by Stalin’s pre-war purges. Those killed or imprisoned included innovative thinkers who’d attempted to lay the groundwork for a Red Army mobile

warfare doctrine in the mid-30s. On top of that, the Soviets were going through a reorganization when Barbarossa began. Mechanized corps, which looked like powerful armored formations on paper, were actually still in the early stages of being built up from small tank units. They lacked trained staffs, combined-arms training, and even the most rudimentary logistics. Conditions in the other combat arms were little better.

Red Air Force crews generally lacked more than five hours in their planes, and there was no doctrine for independent air operations. Added to that were the initial Luftwaffe air strikes that devastated the Soviet air force on the ground. Indeed, the initial reports to Berlin about enemy aircraft destroyed were considered to be exaggerations and weren’t believed until the Luftwaffe sent observers to captured airfields to count the wreckage.

Yet the Red Army had strengths. One was it had an effective system for mobilizing reserves. That allowed the Soviets to send new armies to the front to replace formations that had been shattered or destroyed. Quality of training was certainly an issue among those hastily assembled reserves, but the Soviets had the advantage insofar as the Germans were overextending their own lines of communication as they advanced; meanwhile the Soviets were falling back on their own sources of logistics and replacements.

Soviet deception measures prior to Barbarossa had also kept German intelligence in the dark about the true size of the Red Army. The Germans had expected to engage 200 Soviet divisions during 1941. By the time they began the drive on Moscow they had indeed met that number of divisions and defeated them; however, the Soviets simply added newly mobilized units to the front. They would have some 360 divisions available throughout 1941. Added to that were the large numbers of Soviet armored vehicles, another thing the Germans didn’t anticipate, as well as the high quality of the new models among those tanks, such as the T-34.

Nor did the Red Army defend pas-sively. Throughout the 1941 campaign it launched numerous counterattacks. At one time during Army Group North’s drive on Leningrad (15-18 July), von Manstein’s 56th Motorized (Panzer) Corps found itself cut off by counterattacking Soviet forces, and only deft maneuver and hard fighting retrieved the situation. That led to a steady attrition of German manpower and materiel. As early as 26

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July, von Manstein had reported to Gen. Friedrich Paulus, the OKH quartermas-ter, that losses were critical enough to warrant his units being pulled out of the line for refit. Manstein recommended the foot-mobile infantry be used to push the Reds back in the meantime, and then recommit his replenished panzers to exploit to Leningrad. The campaign was thus already degenerating into an infantry battle.

Bringing up the Rear

The Germans are popularly pictured as having fought a mechanized war. In reality, though, of the 130 or so German divisions involved in Barbarossa, only 34 were mechanized insofar as their entire establishment was lifted via tracked or wheeled vehicles: 19 panzer divisions and another 15 motorized infantry. Fourth Panzer Group, the mechanized formation assigned to Army Group North, had in its order of battle for 22 June 1941 three panzer and four motor-ized infantry divisions. The motorized divisions lacked organic armor; so, in effect, the army group had about half the strength the Germans used for their much shorter 1940 drive through the Ardennes, yet they were expected to race all the way to Leningrad.

As the Germans drove east, then, vehicles were lost to wear and tear, the abysmal state of the Soviet roads and enemy action. The trucks, which were vital for hauling men, guns and supplies, were perhaps hardest hit by wear and tear. German industry lacked the capacity to quickly replace those losses, and that meant the army was losing its mobility, even if tank and infantry casu-alties weren’t as yet necessarily crippling.

With the loss of trucks, the logistical organization that supported the army — and which isn’t usually shown on order of battle charts — was also being lost. Each panzer and motorized division had some 3,000 motor vehicles, and they required several hundred more trucks at army and theater levels to bring up supplies and replacement parts while returning casualties and damaged equipment.

The Rise & Rise of Manstein

Following the conquest of Poland in October 1939, the Germans turned their attention to the war in the west against France and Britain. To deal with that situation, Franz Halder, chief of staff of OKH, came up with a scheme that amounted to little more than a reworked version of World War I’s Schlieffen Plan. The idea was the Germans would advance through the north of the Low Countries, capture the Channel ports, and then engage the main Allied armies somewhere near the Somme River.

Unlike the Schlieffen Plan, Halder’s idea wasn’t intended to produce a decisive victory. Germany lacked the element of strategic surprise that it had in 1914; the Allies in 1940 were planning to counter-move into Belgium the moment the Germans advanced. Rather, the 1940 plan’s objective was to cheaply establish a viable front in northern France and then gain a favor-able negotiated peace from that position of strength.

That plan was dropped for two reasons, one of which was a staff officer carrying a copy of it was in an aircraft that strayed over Allied lines. The plane went down, and the officer was captured along with the plan. The real problem, though, came from the fact Hitler and several of his generals weren’t happy moving ahead with any scheme that didn’t at least allow for decisive victory in the field. They wanted to win before the Reich ran out of resources to run its war machine.

The needed alternative was provided by Erich von Manstein, chief of staff in Army Group South during the Polish campaign and by then with Army Group A in the west. The Manstein Plan, as it came to be known, was to concentrate the bulk of the panzer divisions in the center (instead of the far right), and drive through the Ardennes. Since the Allies were expected to move into Belgium as soon as operations began in earnest, those panzers would be able to attack into their flank, break through there, and cut them off. Hitler liked that, since it coincided with his own ideas about the mass use of panzers. (Manstein credited his plan to a team effort between himself and various staff officers.)

The plan proved a runaway success. The drive through the Ardennes, supported by the Luftwaffe, outflanked the Allied armies in Belgium. That led to their falling back to the Channel and evacuating via Dunkirk. The French forces outside the deflating coastal enclave fell back toward Paris. The Germans entered the French capital on 14 June and France surrendered on the 22nd.

Oddly, von Manstein himself commanded only an infantry corps during the 1940 campaign. After Hitler had accepted his plan, Halder transferred him out of pique. Even so, Manstein’s operational vision had been vindicated, and he also proved effective as a corps commander, moving quickly and hitting hard even while commanding foot soldiers.

Hitler rewarded him with command of 56th Motorized (Panzer) Corps for Barbarossa in 1941. He moved aggressively at first, but Leningrad proved to be beyond his grasp, though potentially not his reach. That is, had he continued to drive forward on his own initiative when he reached a position just a few miles outside the city in mid-July, there’s little doubt he would’ve thereby inescapably pulled the rest of the army group along with him, thus short-cutting the higher level indecision over the matter that ultimately led to the historic siege.

Hitler nevertheless continued to believe in Manstein, and promoted him to head Eleventh Army for its assault into the Crimea and against the fortress of Sevastopol within it, which he captured only after months of hard fighting. Later in 1942 he took Eleventh Army north for a renewed assault on Leningrad, but that operation (Nordlicht) was canceled when those divisions ended up being

committed piecemeal to counter a Soviet offensive on that front.

The Soviet encirclement of Stalingrad in late 1942 saw Manstein back in the south, this time commanding the hurriedly organized Army Group Don. With it, he made a desperate attempt to relieve the trapped Sixth Army, which failed but succeeded in retaking Kharkov in March 1943. He was at Kursk commanding the southern German pincer, and his panzers may have been on the verge of achieving the needed breakthrough (depending on who you believe) just before the overall operation was called off by Hitler.

In the ensuing Soviet offensives, he advocated trading space for time while building up reserves to launch flanking counterattacks into the Red Army spearheads. That approach more and more conflicted with Hitler’s “no retreat” outlook, eventually leading to Manstein’s forced retirement on 30 March 1944. He sat out the rest of the war, though Hitler recognized his service with a Knight’s Cross. While aware of the Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler, Manstein decided to neither join it nor reveal it to Himmler. At the end of the war he surrendered to the British.

After World War II he did a few years in prison for war crimes: as a high-level commander, he was held responsible for scorched earth policies and the mistreatment of civilians in the Soviet Union. Even so, never having been a member of the Nazi Party, he was more politically acceptable in the postwar world than other senior officers, and he became a military advisor to the West German government. He is also famous for his book, Lost Victories, which gives his view on his role in the war. The book became popular among military readers, as Manstein not surprisingly advocated wars should be run by professional soldiers and not politically oriented amateurs — such as his former chief, Hitler. ★

Erich von MansteinErich von Manstein

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Leningrad, he proved willing to order just such operations on other parts of the front. The siege of Sevastopol, begun in late 1941, turned into a protracted series of assaults in which, ironically enough, the transferred von Manstein commanded the Axis forces. Later, in 1942, Hitler was more than willing to order a massive fight for Stalingrad in a battle at the end of German lines of communication.

In the end, of course, the Germans chose to not assault Leningrad in 1941 when they might’ve been able to take it. Instead, they tied down an entire army group besieging the city for the next two and a half years. An early seizure of Leningrad would’ve freed those divisions for operations elsewhere. That still might not have meant a German capture of Moscow in 1941; however, since that operation failed to take the Soviet capital in the actual event, the Germans would still likely have ended Barbarossa with a much more viable line than they got historically. ✪

SOURCES

Conner, Albert & Robert Poirier. Red Army Order of Battle. Novata, CA: Presidio, 1985.

Van Creveld, Martin. Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. London: Cambridge University, 1977.

Davies, W. J. K. German Army Handbook. New York: Arco, 1977.

Dear, I.C.B., ed. The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1995.

Glantz, David. The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-45. Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas: 2002.

Goure, Leon. The Siege of Leningrad. Stanford: Stanford University, 1962.

Kislitsyn, N. & V. Zukbakov. Leningrad Does Not Surrender. Moscow: Progress, 1989.

Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von. Lost Victories. Chicago: Regnery, 1955.

Murray, Williamson. Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933-1945. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell: 1986.

Salisbury, Harrison. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. DeCapo: 2003.

As those trucks were being shot up, wrecked and burned out, it meant the overall ability to conduct mobile operations was being undermined.

The attrition also impacted the Luftwaffe, which was a vital part of the blitzkrieg. The German Air Force high command hadn’t planned for a long war. One aspect of that was a failure to build up adequate stockpiles of replacement parts to keep aircraft flying during long and intensive operations. By the end of 1941 the spare parts situation was at a crisis. Among other things it reduced the operational rate of Luftwaffe aircraft. That rate is the percentage of aircraft that can, on average, fly at any given time. Aircraft down for overhaul, maintenance or repair obviously aren’t going to be flying missions.

One of the factors that had given the Luftwaffe an impact beyond its numbers came from the fact it had previously been able to maintain a high operational rate. It also had a high sortie rate, meaning each German aircraft could fly several missions in the time a single opposing Red Air Force plane could fly one. That produced, to use the modern term for it, a “combat multiplier,” but the Luftwaffe couldn’t maintain that operational tempo in the USSR. Wear and tear on aircraft, combat losses, and then the effects of the Russian winter, reduced the number of planes ready to fly. Operational rates went from 70 percent down to 40.

What all that meant was the Germans had to win a decisive victory in late 1941 or — as the events of the

next four years demonstrated — they likely wouldn’t be able to do so at all. They therefore really couldn’t afford not to take Leningrad, or any other major objective for that matter, as quickly as possible. The actual outcome of the war emphasized the irony: the Germans suffered far more casualties in the ensuing years of combat on the eastern front than they would’ve risked by a direct assault on Leningrad when they had the chance.

Conclusions

By the time the Germans reached Leningrad, a certain amount of inertia had already crept into their operations. Their strength had begun to be dis-sipated by logistical and operational issues as well as by the Soviet resistance. Still, despite all that, the Germans likely could’ve taken Leningrad in 1941. They still had several advantages. There were some logistical factors working in favor of Army Group North. The distance from the East Prussian frontier to Leningrad was less than that to Moscow. That reduced the length supply lines would’ve had to run. The Germans also used shipping in the Baltic Sea to supplement their land-based logistics. At the same time the people of the Baltic States were generally pro-German, which provided a secure rear area compared to the growing menace from partisans elsewhere in the occupied USSR.

While Hitler stated his aversion to urban warfare when it came to

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