All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [199]
Cats, almost of all which had been eaten, suddenly became useful again, to dispel a plague of rats: an entire trainload of feline warriors was dispatched to the city. German shelling, now inspired by mere malice rather than military purpose, continued throughout 1943 – July witnessed the worst bombardment of the siege. Only in January 1944 did the Red Army launch the assault that finally pushed back the Germans beyond artillery range of the city. But Leningrad’s fate was decided in the spring of 1942, when it became plain that its surviving inhabitants could be fed. It was officially stated that 632,253 people died in the course of the siege, but the true figure is assumed to be at least a million. Soviet propaganda suppressed reporting of much that happened during the city’s agony. When Olga Bergholz visited Moscow to broadcast at the end of 1942, she was warned to say nothing about the siege’s horrors: ‘They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger.’
Strategically, the northern struggle was much less important than the battle for Stalingrad. Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham – or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.
Even as the defenders of Leningrad were experiencing a fragile revival of life and hope, further east and south the Stavka launched its strategic counterstrokes. Operation Mars, which began on 25 November 1942, is almost forgotten, because it failed. Some 667,000 men and 1,900 tanks attempted an envelopment of the German Ninth Army which cost 100,000 Russian lives, and was repulsed. A battle that elsewhere in the world would have been deemed immense was scarcely noticed amid the eastern slaughter. Some men found any alternative preferable to fighting on. ‘Just as I lay down to rest before breakfast,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, ‘a runner came from the Commissar, summoning me to HQ. It turned out that soldier Sharonov had shot himself. What a scoundrel! He left the drill parade pleading sickness and ran into me on the way to his quarters, all doubled up. I ordered him to stay in my dugout under guard, but finding it momentarily empty he took the opportunity to shoot himself.’
Fortunately for Stalin, Zhukov and the Allied cause in the Second World War, the other great Soviet operation of the winter, Uranus, was vastly more successful than Mars. The Germans lacked strength adequately to man their enormous front. There was a three-hundred-mile gap between Second Army at Voronezh on the upper Don, and Fourth and Sixth Panzer Armies south-eastwards at Stalingrad. Short of manpower, von Weichs, the army group commander, deployed Hungarian, Italian and Romanian formations to cover the flanks of Sixth Army. German intelligence failed to identify