The Soltsy counter-attack

In mid-July 1941, more than 200 kilometres south of Leningrad, the German advance on the city ran for the first time into a counter-stroke that forced it to halt. On 14 July the Soviet 11th Army attacked from two sides General Erich von Manstein’s LVI Motorised Corps, which had pushed far ahead of the rest of the army towards Novgorod. By 15 July the German 8th Panzer Division was cut off near the small town of Soltsy on the Shelon river, and on 16 July Red Army troops retook the town itself. The Germans broke out of the encirclement but had to fall back about 40 kilometres, and on 19 July the command of Army Group North halted the armoured advance on Leningrad until the infantry came up.

Popular chronologies record under 15 July that the Red Army launched a counter-attack “near Leningrad”. This needs to be made more precise. The attack began on the morning of 14 July, and 15 July brought its greatest success: the cutting of the roads behind the German panzer division. Nor was the fighting near Leningrad itself; it took place south-west of Lake Ilmen, on the city’s distant approaches, where the Germans were trying to bypass the fortifications on the Luga river.

The road to Leningrad

Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North was to advance through the Baltic states and take Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution and the second city of the Soviet Union. In the first weeks of the war it moved faster than any other. As early as 26 June, the fifth day of the attack on the USSR, Manstein’s corps seized the bridges over the Dvina at Daugavpils (Dvinsk); on 1 July the Germans entered Riga, and the 18th Army marched into Estonia, where some Estonians were already fighting the Red Army. General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 took Ostrov on 5 July and on 8 and 9 July Pskov, the first large town within the USSR’s pre-war borders in this direction. According to Russian calculations, the Germans had so far been advancing an average of about 26 kilometres a day.

Beyond Pskov Hoepner did not wait for the infantry of the 16th and 18th Armies, and he split his two corps. General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Corps was to take the shortest route to Leningrad, through the town of Luga. On 12 July, however, it got bogged down in fighting on the Plyussa river, so it turned north-west and by 14 July had seized two bridgeheads on the right bank of the Luga near Kingisepp. Manstein’s LVI Corps, with the 8th Panzer Division, the 3rd Motorised Division and the SS Division “Totenkopf”, was to advance through Porkhov and Novgorod on Chudovo, to cut the Moscow–Leningrad railway. Between the two corps a gap opened more than a hundred kilometres wide, of forests and marshes in which the tanks could not support one another.

On 10 July the 3rd Motorised Division took Porkhov, and General Erich Brandenberger’s 8th Panzer Division set off along the road beside the Shelon towards Shimsk on Lake Ilmen. It pushed before it the remnants of Soviet divisions falling back from one line to the next. On 14 July its spearheads passed Soltsy and reached the Mshaga river. German air reconnaissance reported large concentrations of Soviet troops to the north, but the division was ordered to seize the bridge over the Mshaga before the defenders could blow it. According to Russian studies, the corps’s exposed right flank was by then some 70 kilometres long, and its left flank about 40. Manstein was relying on speed to protect him.

Leningrad arms itself

In Moscow and Leningrad it was already understood that the city was in danger. On 4 July the Chief of the General Staff, General Georgy Zhukov, instructed the Northern Front to build a defence line from Narva through Luga to Staraya Russa. Since the end of June tens of thousands of inhabitants of Leningrad and the surrounding villages, mostly women and young people, had been digging anti-tank ditches and building shelters along the Luga. On 6 July the defence of this line, which stretched for some 250 kilometres from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ilmen, was entrusted to General Konstantin Pyadyshev’s Luga Operational Group. Divisions were brought in from the Karelian Isthmus and Karelia, even though this weakened the defences against the Finns, who had entered the war at the end of June.

In the city itself, from 30 June the party committee led by Andrei Zhdanov formed people’s militia (opolchenie) divisions. Workers, students, scientists and clerks volunteered for them, often without any military training. According to Russian figures, by 6 July almost 97,000 volunteers had signed up, and on 10 July the first division set off for the front. The volunteers were poorly armed and hardly trained, and on the Luga they suffered very heavy losses. Joseph Stalin’s appeal of 3 July, calling for the defence of every inch of soil and the formation of a people’s militia, was taken literally in Leningrad.

On 10 July Stalin created three high commands of strategic directions. The North-Western Direction, comprising the Northern Front, the North-Western Front and the Baltic Fleet, was placed under Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, with Zhdanov as a member of his military council. The North-Western Front, whose troops had been retreating through the Baltic states since the first day of the war, had been commanded since 4 July by General Pyotr Sobennikov, with General Nikolai Vatutin, until then Deputy Chief of the General Staff, as his chief of staff.

A blow from two sides

Vatutin saw that Manstein’s forward corps had exposed flanks. According to Soviet accounts, he was helped by a captured German map showing the positions of all six divisions of Hoepner’s panzer group. On 13 July Sobennikov issued the order for a counter-stroke by General Vasily Morozov (PL)’s 11th Army, reinforced by three divisions sent from the Northern Front. The northern group – the 21st Tank Division, the 237th Rifle Division and General Andrei Fedyunin’s well-equipped 70th Rifle Division, considered one of the best in the Leningrad Military District – was to strike from the Mshaga southwards and south-westwards, and the 1st Independent Mountain Rifle Brigade from the east towards Soltsy. From the south, from the Sitnya river, the 183rd Rifle Division of the 27th Army attacked. The two groups were to meet in the rear of the German panzer division.

On the morning of 14 July, supported, according to Russian figures, by 235 aircraft, the Soviet troops went over to the attack. According to the same studies, they had 72 tanks against some 210 in Manstein’s corps, but they struck where the enemy did not expect them. The attack took the Germans completely by surprise. On 15 July the Soviet pincers cut the road behind the 8th Panzer Division, whose main body was encircled around Soltsy, while the 3rd Motorised Division, standing further north, had to beat off attacks from several sides. On 16 July the 70th Rifle Division took Soltsy.

In his post-war memoirs Manstein wrote that the corps’s position “was not exactly enviable” and wondered whether, under the influence of earlier successes, he had underestimated the enemy. He ordered the 8th Panzer Division to fight its way west through Soltsy and the 3rd Motorised Division to disengage from the enemy. By his account the panzer division broke through and reunited its forces, but for a time it had to be supplied from the air, and the motorised division managed to disengage only after beating off 17 attacks. On 16 July the corps got back the SS Division “Totenkopf”, which stabilised the front on the Shelon. The Germans fell back about 40 kilometres.

The advance halts

Manstein’s corps was not destroyed. The Soviet divisions, thrown into the attack straight off the march, suffered heavy losses in successive assaults, and on 19 July they went over to the defensive. The Germans quickly regained the initiative on the flanks: on 16 July Panzer Group 4 was given I Army Corps, which on 18 July took the railway junction of Dno, and on 22 July the Germans retook Soltsy. On the same day, however, Soviet troops repulsed an attack by the German 21st Infantry Division on Shimsk.

More important than the ground won and lost was what the counter-stroke did to the German command’s plans. The 8th Panzer Division suffered heavy losses and was withdrawn to the rear. According to German figures, a month passed before it was again fully fit for combat. On 19 July Leeb decided to halt the armoured advance on Leningrad until the infantry divisions of the 16th and 18th Armies reached the Luga. The front between Narva and Lake Ilmen stabilised by 27 July. Army Group North began its new offensive only on 8 August.

The success had a bitter side. General Pyadyshev, whose troops defended the Luga line for many weeks, was arrested on 22 July, sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for alleged anti-Soviet agitation, and died in a camp in 1944. The commander of the 34th Army, which attacked ineptly near Staraya Russa in August, General Kuzma Kachanov, was shot, and Sobennikov lost command of the front and was sentenced, though his sentence was commuted to reduction in rank. Stalin, who in July had the command of the Western Front, headed by General Dmitry Pavlov, arrested and on 22 July shot, punished commanders even for defeats for which the system itself bore much of the responsibility.

Significance

The counter-stroke at Soltsy was one of the first in this war to succeed even partially, and one of the first occasions on which a German panzer corps had to defend itself in an encirclement. Soviet and Russian historiography credits it, together with the defence of the Luga line, with delaying the attack on Leningrad by almost a month. Western historians assess its effects more cautiously, pointing out that Army Group North would in any case have had to wait for the infantry, which could not keep up with the tanks. They agree that the pause, though bought with very heavy Soviet losses, gave the defenders time to fortify the approaches to Leningrad and evacuate part of the population and industry. It also exposed a weakness in the German way of waging war in the east: in the forests and marshes of northern Russia, armoured spearheads pushed far ahead of the infantry were vulnerable to blows against their flanks.

The delay did not save the city from siege. In August the Germans broke through the Luga line, in mid-August they took Novgorod, and on 8 September they captured Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga and cut Leningrad off from the rest of the country. The siege began; it lasted almost nine hundred days and, according to various estimates, claimed the lives of between about 650,000 and more than a million inhabitants. In September Zhukov replaced Voroshilov in Leningrad. Vatutin, who had prepared the Soltsy counter-stroke, became one of the ablest Soviet front commanders, and in September 1941 Manstein took command of an army on the southern wing of the Eastern Front.