Leningrad-Novgorod offensive, 1944: the end of the siege

For two and a half years the German Eighteenth Army had held Leningrad under siege. The offensive that opened on 14 January 1944 ended it in less than two weeks, and by early March brought Soviet troops to the approaches of Pskov and into Estonia. Our story of the siege of Leningrad tells what those 872 days meant inside the city; this is the story of how they ended.²

Who won the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive and why?

The Soviet Union won. The Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts, with more than 1,250,000 men against about 741,000 Germans, struck both flanks of the German Eighteenth Army at once, at Oranienbaum and at Novgorod, where it had least room. Within two weeks its front had collapsed, and by 1 March Army Group North had fallen back to the Panther line.³

Background: a front frozen for two years

The siege had begun in the autumn of 1941. In three battles south of Lake Ladoga, the last in January 1943, the Red Army had won back only a narrow strip along the lake shore, and the Germans still held the ground south and west of the city. Their long-range siege guns, some of them up to 406 mm by the Russian Historical Encyclopedia's count, could still shell almost all of Leningrad.⁴

Earl Ziemke, the US Army historian who wrote the standard American account from German records, describes the line from the Volkhov River to the Gulf of Finland as a front reminiscent of World War I: a lacework of trenches and shell holes, two and a half years of fighting in which gains and losses were measured in yards. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia speaks of German defenses up to 260 km deep, with concrete and timber strongpoints behind minefields and barbed wire. West of Leningrad the Soviets still held a pocket on the coast around Oranienbaum.⁵

Behind that front the Germans had built a fallback line, the Panther position, along the Narva River, Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov, and had planned a withdrawal to it. But at the end of 1943 the order to fall back had not been given.⁶

Armies and commanders

On the Soviet side the main effort fell to the Leningrad Front of General L. A. Govorov, with the 2nd Shock, 42nd and 67th Armies, and the Volkhov Front of General K. A. Meretskov, with the 8th, 54th and 59th Armies. Farther south the 2nd Baltic Front was to pin down the German Sixteenth Army.⁷

They faced Army Group North under Field Marshal Georg von Küchler, with the Eighteenth Army in front of Leningrad and Novgorod and the Sixteenth Army to the south. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia gives the three Soviet fronts more than 1,250,000 men and the two German armies 741,000. Ziemke, working from German records, puts the Soviet superiority over the Eighteenth Army at no less than three to one in divisions and artillery and six to one in tanks, self-propelled guns and aircraft: 55 rifle divisions, 9 rifle brigades and 8 tank brigades against 20 German divisions. The encyclopedia's own equipment figures tell the same story: about 1,600 Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns against 385 German tanks and assault guns, some 20,200 guns and mortars against just over 10,000, and about 1,400 combat aircraft against 370.⁸

The Soviet plan, as the Russian Historical Encyclopedia sets it out, was to strike both flanks of the Eighteenth Army at once, at Leningrad and at Novgorod, then drive on toward Kingisepp and Luga to destroy its main forces and reach the Luga River. Behind the German lines the partisans of the Leningrad region, which the encyclopedia counts at 13 brigades and up to 35,000 fighters, were to cut roads and railways; Ziemke records partisan roadblocks delaying German reinforcements on their way to Pskov.⁹

The commanders' decisions

The Soviet commanders prepared the blow for weeks. From November 1943 to January 1944, the Russian Historical Encyclopedia records, ships of the Baltic Fleet carried the whole 2nd Shock Army into the Oranienbaum pocket, and the Central Naval Museum describes the crossings as made in secret. When the attack opened, the guns of the fleet's ships and coastal batteries fired alongside the army artillery, both sources note.¹⁰

In Ziemke's judgment the decisive German choice came before the battle. Army Group North had prepared the Panther position and planned to fall back to it, but Hitler kept the Eighteenth Army in its old lines, and in Ziemke's reading the army then had to meet the offensive with too few troops to hold them. Once the front broke, he argues, every withdrawal was approved too late to save the units it was meant to save.¹¹

The change at the top did not change the outcome. Model, who replaced Küchler at the end of January by both the encyclopedia's and Ziemke's accounts, could slow the retreat but not stop it, and the army group still ended the campaign behind the Narva and the lakes.¹²

The battle in phases

14 to 20 January: the breakthrough

Soviet historians divide the first stage into two linked operations: the Krasnoye Selo and Ropsha operation of the Leningrad Front, which broke the siege ring southwest of the city, and the Novgorod and Luga operation of the Volkhov Front. The Encyclopaedia of Saint Petersburg dates this decisive opening phase to 14 to 20 January.¹³

On 14 January the Leningrad Front opened the attack. The 2nd Shock Army drove east out of the Oranienbaum pocket while the 42nd Army pushed west from the city's southwestern edge, and on the same day the Volkhov Front struck north and south of Novgorod. The Soviets had chosen the two places where the Germans had least room: Ziemke notes that the loop of front between Oranienbaum and Leningrad was only twenty miles wide at its base.¹⁴

After several days of hard fighting the German line gave way. The 42nd Army broke through at Krasnoye Selo, the old summer residence of the tsars, and on 19 January the two Soviet armies met in the area of Russko-Vysotskoye, trapping or destroying the German units left between them on the coast. Around Novgorod the Volkhov Front encircled the German garrison and retook the city in the first week of the offensive.¹⁵

21 to 30 January: the siege is lifted

Farther east the Soviet armies cleared the October Railway that linked Leningrad with Moscow, taking Lyuban, Tosno and Chudovo on the way. On 27 January a salute was fired in Leningrad and the siege was declared lifted. By the end of the month, the Russian Historical Encyclopedia reckons, the Leningrad Front had thrown the Germans back 60 to 100 km from the city and reached the Luga River.¹⁶

The salute that marked the end of the siege was fired in the evening of 27 January on the Field of Mars, along the Neva embankments and from the ships of the Baltic Fleet: twenty-four volleys from 324 guns, according to both the Presidential Library and the Central Naval Museum.¹⁷

On the German side the cost was a change of command. Küchler was relieved at the end of January and Colonel General Walter Model took over Army Group North.¹⁸

February to 1 March: to the Panther line

In February the Soviet fronts pushed on toward Narva in the west and through Luga toward Pskov in the south. The Leningrad Front reached the Narva River, seized a bridgehead on its western bank and entered Estonia. Model tried to slow the advance, but on 1 March Army Group North completed its withdrawal into the Panther position, and the same day the Stavka ordered its exhausted fronts over to the defensive.¹⁹

The weather helped the Germans at the end. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia writes that thaws, fog and blizzards slowed the last stage of the advance and that the fronts struggled to bring up ammunition and replacements. Ziemke describes an early spring thaw that left a foot of water on the ice of the lakes, with Soviet tanks sinking up to their turrets in mud.²⁰

Turning point

The offensive turned in its first week. Ziemke judges that the Soviets chose exactly the two places where the Eighteenth Army had the least room to maneuver, and that the German army's intelligence officers had convinced themselves the attack would be as modest as the three earlier ones around Leningrad. When the 2nd Shock and 42nd Armies met on 19 January and Novgorod fell soon after, both flanks of the Eighteenth Army had been torn away, and the Germans had no reserves left to close the gaps.²¹

Counting the losses

The victory was expensive. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia gives the three Soviet fronts about 76,700 killed and missing and more than 237,200 wounded and sick between 14 January and 1 March. The Immortal Regiment's history portal gives the same totals in exact form: 76,686 irrecoverable losses and 313,953 casualties in all.²²

German losses are known less precisely. The encyclopedia counts 3 German divisions destroyed and 23 badly beaten; the Immortal Regiment portal speaks of up to 30 German divisions defeated. Ziemke, working from the army group's records, describes an infantry force so worn down by the end of January that only scattered battalions and companies still held the line.²³

The offensive also ended a siege that had cost the city far more than the battle did. The Russian Historical Society puts the deaths of Leningrad's residents from hunger and shelling at more than 641,000, adding that other estimates reach at least a million; the Presidential Library gives a range from 632,253, the figure presented by the Soviet commission at Nuremberg, to 1.093 million.²⁴

Aftermath

The dates depend on how the operation is counted. The Encyclopaedia of Saint Petersburg dates the Leningrad-Novgorod operation itself to 14 to 20 January and treats what followed as its continuation, with offensive action lasting until the beginning of March. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia counts it in three stages from 14 January to 1 March. Both give 27 January 1944, the day of the salute, as the date the siege was lifted.²⁵

By the Russian Historical Encyclopedia's reckoning the Soviet fronts drove Army Group North back 220 to 280 km from Leningrad, destroyed 3 German divisions and badly beat 23 more, freed almost all of the Leningrad and Novgorod regions and began the liberation of Estonia. Ziemke describes a German army group fighting to save itself, its infantry bled white and its line held at last behind the Narva and the lakes.²⁶

The defeat also reached beyond the front. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia notes that it undermined Germany's position in Finland and Scandinavia, and Ziemke follows the "echo" in Finland, where at the end of January the German high command had to explain the collapse south of Leningrad to Marshal Mannerheim, and where Finnish and Soviet envoys soon met in Stockholm to talk about peace.²⁷

Legacy and memory

For Leningrad the offensive meant the end of the siege. The Presidential Library and the Russian Historical Society both date it from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, 872 days, and the Encyclopaedia of Saint Petersburg likewise treats the salute of 27 January as its end.²⁸

The city went on to cover the old front line with memorials. In 1975, for the thirtieth anniversary of victory, the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad was unveiled on Victory Square,, on 9 May in Delovoy Peterburg's account.²⁹ › Smolensk operation, 1943