The Leningrad–Novgorod offensive

On 19 January 1944, after five days of heavy fighting in fog and snow, Soviet troops near Leningrad captured the two key points of the German defence: the village of Ropsha and the small town of Krasnoye Selo. That same evening the leading units of the armies attacking from two directions met south of Ropsha, and the next day, 20 January, troops of the Volkhov Front recaptured Veliky Novgorod. These were the first great successes of the Leningrad–Novgorod operation, which within a few weeks broke the last German grip on Leningrad and threw the enemy back more than 200 kilometres to the west – as far as the Narva river and the border of Estonia.

Chronologies sum up the day in a single sentence: Red Army units advance westwards towards the Baltic states. That is true in a general sense – such was the direction and aim of the whole offensive – but on 19 January the front still lay a few dozen kilometres from Leningrad, and Soviet soldiers reached the Estonian border on the Narva only at the beginning of February.

Background: two years outside Leningrad

Since the autumn of 1941, when the Germans reached Leningrad and the Finns closed the ring from the north, the city had lived under siege. The winter of 1941–1942 brought the great famine, which killed hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. In January 1943 Operation Iskra broke the blockade along a narrow strip on the shore of Lake Ladoga, through which a railway line was laid, but the Germans still stood in the suburbs. From the Pulkovo Heights and from around Strelna they could see the city’s streets, and their heavy artillery shelled them daily; according to Soviet figures the worst year was 1943, when shells fell on Leningrad more often than ever before.

Throughout 1943 the front outside the city was held by the German 18th Army under General of Cavalry Georg Lindemann, part of Field Marshal Georg von Küchler’s Army Group North. The army group was growing ever weaker. In the autumn of 1943 the Spanish Blue Division left it (all that remained was the Blue Legion, a volunteer force a few thousand strong), and several good divisions were taken away to the south, where Erich von Manstein was retreating behind the Dnieper. In exchange Küchler received Luftwaffe field divisions and SS formations made up partly of volunteers from Western countries, poorly trained for defensive fighting. According to German figures from October 1943, Army Group North numbered about 600,000 soldiers.

Küchler’s staff knew that it might not withstand another Soviet offensive. From September 1943 a new position had been under construction far in the rear – the so-called Panther Line – along the Narva river, Lake Peipus, Pskov and the Velikaya river. Withdrawing to it would have shortened the front by about a quarter, but it meant giving up the whole ring around Leningrad without a fight. Adolf Hitler refused. Lindemann assured him that his army would repel any attack, and Hitler wanted to keep the Red Army as far as possible from the Baltic and East Prussia, and did not want Finland, seeing the Germans retreat, to start seeking peace with the USSR.

The Neva plan and the Oranienbaum bridgehead

The Soviet plan, drawn up from September 1943 by the staff of General of the Army Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front, envisaged an attack from three directions. From the Oranienbaum bridgehead – a strip of the Gulf of Finland coast around the town of Oranienbaum (today Lomonosov), which the Germans had failed to take in 1941 – the 2nd Shock Army of Lieutenant General Ivan Fedyuninsky was to attack. Towards it, from the area of the Pulkovo Heights on the southern edge of the city, the 42nd Army of Colonel General Ivan Maslennikov was to strike. The two armies were to meet near Ropsha and trap in a pocket the German divisions standing on the gulf near Peterhof and Strelna. The third blow was being prepared by General of the Army Kirill Meretskov’s Volkhov Front: its 59th Army under Lieutenant General Ivan Korovnikov (PL) was to take Novgorod and advance on Luga. Further south the 2nd Baltic Front was to pin down the German 16th Army.

The hardest part of the preparations was moving the 2nd Shock Army to the bridgehead. From 5 November 1943 ships and barges of the Baltic Fleet carried soldiers, tanks, guns and ammunition by night from Leningrad and Lisy Nos across the Gulf of Finland, right under the Germans’ noses; when the gulf froze, some of the transports went over the ice. According to Russian studies, by 21 January five rifle divisions, more than a dozen artillery regiments and armoured units – several tens of thousands of men in all – had been moved in this way. When in mid-December the attention of both sides was focused on Ukraine and the fighting near Nevel, an apparent calm reigned outside Leningrad. The Germans noticed movement on the bridgehead but underestimated its scale.

The forces were unequal. Russian studies state that before the offensive the three fronts numbered about 1.25 million soldiers (according to other calculations about 900,000), more than 20,000 guns and mortars, about 1,600 tanks and self-propelled guns and nearly 1,400 aircraft. In addition, more than a dozen partisan brigades were active in the forests and swamps of the Leningrad region, with the task of destroying German railway lines in the rear.

The attack: 14–20 January

During the night of 13–14 January bombers of the long-range aviation and the Baltic Fleet struck German command posts. On the morning of 14 January, after an artillery preparation lasting more than an hour, in which the guns of warships and of the Kronstadt forts joined, the 2nd Shock Army attacked from the bridgehead. That same day the 59th Army attacked on the Volkhov north of Novgorod, and its auxiliary group crossed the ice of Lake Ilmen south of the city. The next day, 15 January, the 42nd Army struck from Pulkovo.

The first days brought no breakthrough. Thick fog and a thaw grounded the aircraft, and the German fortifications, developed over two years, had to be taken bunker by bunker. Near Novgorod the 59th Army made almost no progress for several days. Only towards the end of the third day did the 2nd Shock Army break through the main defensive belt on a front of more than 20 kilometres, and on the morning of 17 January Fedyuninsky threw forward his mobile group – a tank brigade with infantry riding on the tanks – with orders to take Ropsha. Meanwhile the 42nd Army was storming Krasnoye Selo and the Voronya Gora hill, which dominated the area and from which the Germans directed the fire of the guns shelling Leningrad.

19 and 20 January: Ropsha, Krasnoye Selo, Novgorod

The decision came on 19 January. The 2nd Shock Army’s mobile group took Ropsha, and in the morning units of the 63rd Guards Rifle Division, attacking from two sides, captured Voronya Gora; the 64th Guards Rifle Division and the 291st Rifle Division seized Krasnoye Selo. North of the town the heavy artillery that had been shelling Leningrad since 1941 fell into Soviet hands. In the evening, near the village of Russko-Vysotskoye, the leading detachment of the 2nd Shock Army met engineers from the 42nd Army’s mobile group. Because there was not yet a continuous front, however, a large part of the German force from around Peterhof and Strelna managed to slip away southwards that night, abandoning its heavy equipment. On the morning of 20 January the main forces of the two armies joined up south of Ropsha and destroyed the remnants of the encircled units. According to Russian studies, in six days of fighting two German divisions were destroyed, five more were badly mauled, about a thousand prisoners were taken and 265 guns captured, 85 of them heavy. These figures come from the Soviet side; the German losses given in the Sovinformburo communiqués of the time were much higher and cannot be verified.

On 20 January, when the weather at last allowed aircraft to operate, the 59th Army entered Veliky Novgorod. One of the oldest cities of Rus’ lay in ruins: of several thousand buildings, a few dozen reportedly survived, and the occupiers had plundered its monuments, including the Cathedral of St Sophia in the kremlin, and dismantled the nineteenth-century Millennium of Russia monument standing nearby, whose parts had been prepared for removal. That same day Meretskov’s troops closed a ring around some of the German units west of the city.

During the night of 20–21 January the Germans began withdrawing XXVI Army Corps from the salient around Mga and Sinyavino, which they had held since 1941. By 21 January Mga was in Soviet hands, and soon the whole railway line through the town, linking Leningrad with the rest of the country, was recovered. That same day Govorov and the member of the front’s military council Andrei Zhdanov asked Joseph Stalin for permission to announce the complete lifting of the siege and to fire artillery salutes in the city in its honour. Before that could happen, the Germans still had to be driven out of further suburbs. On 24 January Pushkin – the former Tsarskoye Selo – and Pavlovsk were recaptured, their famous palaces found burnt and looted, and on 26 January Gatchina, renamed Krasnogvardeysk by the Soviet authorities.

The retreat of the 18th Army

The loss of Krasnoye Selo and Novgorod shattered the 18th Army’s continuous front. Its main forces, more than a dozen divisions, fell back from the area of Mga, Tosno and Chudovo towards Luga, while the western group, broken into several parts, escaped towards the Narva. According to a report by the army’s command, by 29 January it had lost about 14,000 killed and 35,000 wounded in the fighting against the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts – approximate figures, since in the chaos of the retreat the staffs kept records only intermittently. On 30 January Küchler asked Hitler for permission to pull the 18th Army further back (according to some accounts straight to the Panther Line, according to others first to the line of the Luga river); Hitler accused him of letting the army retreat without orders and at the turn of January and February replaced him with Colonel General Walter Model, a specialist in defence in hopeless situations. Model introduced the “shield and sword” principle – every withdrawal was to be combined with a counter-attack – but in practice he still led the army in stages towards the Panther Line that Hitler had earlier rejected.

What followed: towards the Narva and Estonia

On 27 January 1944 Leningrad celebrated the lifting of the blockade with salvoes from 324 guns, symbolically ending the 872-day siege of the city. The offensive went on, however. On 1 February the 2nd Shock Army took Kingisepp, and on 3 February its corps reached the Narva river and seized bridgeheads on its western bank, already on the territory of pre-war Estonia. On 12 February Soviet troops took Luga, and the next day the Volkhov Front was disbanded, its armies passing to the Leningrad Front. On 1 March 1944 the Stavka declared the operation over. The front had moved 220–280 kilometres from Leningrad, and almost the whole of the Leningrad region and part of the Kalinin region had been liberated.

There, however, the successes ended. The 18th Army, though badly beaten, avoided encirclement and preserved a large part of its strength. On the Narva and near Pskov the Germans halted the Red Army on the Panther Line; Soviet attempts to break through it in February, March and April cost a great deal of blood and achieved almost nothing. Estonians also fought on the German side at Narva – in February 1944 the occupation authorities proclaimed general conscription in Estonia, and many Estonians joined up in the belief that they were defending their country against the return of the Soviet rule they had known in 1940–1941. Volunteers from Western countries in III SS Panzer Corps also paid a high price here. The front on the Narva held until the summer of 1944; the Germans left Estonia only in September.

The costs of the offensive were enormous. According to the Russian statistical study edited by Grigori Krivosheev, Soviet forces lost 313,953 men in the Leningrad–Novgorod operation, including 76,686 killed and missing; Russian historians regard these figures as incomplete. German losses can only be estimated approximately – Western studies give several tens of thousands killed, wounded and missing for the whole period of the offensive.

Significance

The Leningrad–Novgorod offensive ended the longest and most tragic siege of a great city in the Second World War. For the first time since the autumn of 1941 Leningrad ceased to be a front-line city: the artillery bombardments stopped, and the railways linking it with Moscow and the rest of the country ran unhindered again. In Soviet and later Russian memory January 1944 became one of the most important symbols of the war, and the operation itself opened the list of the so-called “ten Stalinist blows” of 1944.

Strategically the success was incomplete. The Red Army pushed Army Group North away from Leningrad but did not destroy it, and in the spring it came to a halt on the threshold of the Baltic states. At the same time, regaining the initiative in the north gave Stalin a strong argument in dealing with Finland: as early as February 1944 Helsinki began sounding out peace terms, and in June the Red Army attacked on the Karelian Isthmus. The way to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was opened only by the summer offensive of 1944, after the destruction of the German Army Group Centre in Belarus. For the three Baltic states, which the USSR had occupied in 1940, the arrival of the Red Army meant the end of the German occupation and at the same time the return of Soviet rule, with deportations and repression that continued long after the war.