Hero City: Leningrad 1943–44
“Hero City is meticulously researched, descriptively written, and provides insightful analysis of German and Soviet military tactics, strategy, and most important, logistics on World War II’s crucial eastern front.”
Prit Buttar completes his masterful account of World War II Leningrad in Hero City: Leningrad 1943–44. Like his previous book To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941–42, which graphically detailed the brutal 900-day siege of the Russian city, Hero City is meticulously researched, descriptively written, and provides insightful analysis of German and Soviet military tactics, strategy, and most important, logistics on World War II’s crucial eastern front.
Buttar, a retired physician who previously served as a doctor in the British Army, has written extensively on warfare in Russia and Eastern Europe in both world wars of the 20th century. This is a geographical region that historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed the “Bloodlands,” due to the horrific nature of the fighting, slaughter and suffering that occurred there in the 20th century, and that continues to occur there today as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war.
In Hero City, Buttar focuses on the Soviet Army’s efforts to lift the siege of Leningrad, a city that, like Stalingrad, took on a symbolic importance for both Soviet and German leaders during the war. Leningrad was the former St. Petersburg, founded by Tsar Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva River. It was Russia’s “window on the West,” and Buttar notes that it “was seen both by its residents and by other Russians as different.” It was the cultural capital of Tsarist Russia, a European city noted for arts and especially literature.
During the siege, especially during the harsh winter of 1941–42, Leningrad’s citizens experienced hunger, starvation, extreme cold, cannibalism, and daily artillery fire from German forces that effectively blockaded the city. Hitler’s plan was to starve the city’s inhabitants behind a geographic line that extended from the Gulf of Finland to Leningrad’s suburbs to the Neva River and ending at Lake Ladoga. Hero City recounts Soviet military efforts to break through the German lines—efforts that repeatedly failed due to many factors, including the harsh weather, the terrain, the lack of experienced Soviet officers due to Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, and, most important in Buttar’s view, logistics.
The first sustained effort to break the siege was launched in January 1943 and was code named Iskra. It began with what Soviet General Georgy Zhukov described as a “fiery hurricane” of artillery over German positions. One German soldier remembered that “[f]or two hours and 20 minutes the hurricane of steel howled, flashed, and crashed” over their dugouts, foxholes, and trenches. The Soviet Army advanced along the front and opened a “narrow corridor” in the siege ring along the shore of Lake Ladoga. The cost was heavy: 115,000 Soviet casualties, while the Germans suffered somewhere between 12,000 and 22,000 casualties.
The Lake Ladoga corridor, however, was subject to German artillery fire from the Sinyavino Heights. So the next major Soviet effort, code named Polarnaya Zvezda, was aimed at taking that high ground. Buttar describes this effort and other battles launched before the spring of 1943, battles that cost the Soviet Army more than a half-million casualties. These were battles of attrition. Gen. Zhukov simply threw men at German positions. The German army suffered significant casualties, too, but on the Eastern Front the Soviets always won the game of numbers. And Hitler, despite repeated protests from his generals, refused to allow tactical retreats.
During the summer of 1943, the Soviets launched their third major offensive to break the siege code named Mginskaya Nastupatelnaya Operatsiya, which involved further assaults on the Sinyavino Heights. Buttar describes “wave after wave” of costly, unsuccessful assaults on German positions. The offensive involved more than 253,000 Soviet troops, and casualties numbered close to 80,000. These are similar to First World War numbers. The Red Army, Buttar writes, kept doing “the same thing again and again in the expectation of a different outcome.” Yet Stalin ordered more such attacks.
The autumn of 1943, Buttar writes, was marked by “blood and attrition” around Leningrad, which included partisan activities behind German lines. Hitler stubbornly refused to follow his generals’ advice to pull out from the siege. The battle of attrition started having its effect on the Wehrmacht. The German army all along the Eastern Front was now “badly overstretched.” The German surrender at Stalingrad and its defeat at Kursk meant that the tide of the war had shifted against Germany in the east. And Germany expected an Anglo-American invasion in the west in the spring of 1944.
The final offensive that broke the siege of Leningrad was launched in January 1944, and was code named Yanvarskiiy Grom. This offensive drove the Germans out of their fortifications on the outskirts of the city. The Germans were forced to retreat to Estonia. Leningrad was saved. The human cost was immense. So, too, was the physical cost to the city, whose infrastructure and buildings had been decimated by nearly four years of war.
Soviet failures to swiftly break the siege, Buttar writes, had much to do with neglect of logistics. Buttar traces this neglect to Russia’s military culture that did not, and does not, emphasize the importance of logistics. That same neglect of logistics, Buttar writes, is evident today in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Buttar notes that Leningrad became part of Soviet myth making about the “Great Patriotic War.” Leningrad was saved, according to official pronouncements, by Stalin and the Communist Party. Stalin’s blindness to Hitler’s aggression in 1941 was conveniently forgotten. Stalin even unleashed a new wave of oppression against local party officials. After Stalin’s death, the official position changed to recognize the heroic nature of the people and soldiers who withstood and ultimately broke the siege.