Leningrad, 1941

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Leningrad, 1941:
Manstein’s Truly “Lost Victory”
T
he German siege of Leningrad
tied down an entire army group
from late 1941 until 1944; the
roots of that situation stretch back to
the decisions made in the opening
stages of Operation Barbarossa, the
initial German lunge into the Soviet
Union. Reading contemporary accounts
of it, one gets the sense the German
high command assumed they had all
the time they needed to complete all
subsidiary operations. Thus they could
choose to besiege Leningrad rather than
assault it, concentrate almost all their
armor to pocket and then take Kiev, and
somehow still make a final and decisive
plunge for Moscow. That switching
of priorities laid the groundwork for
their overall failure in the east.
The initial plan for Barbarossa
precluded making Moscow a major
objective; rather, Leningrad, the Ukraine
and the Don Basin were the primary
targets. Hitler chose the former for its
political significance and the latter for
its economic resources. He considered
Moscow merely a geographic location,
and perhaps a trap in the same manner
its capture had led to the doom of
Napoleon and his Grande Armee in 1812.
The dilemma worsened when the
invaders couldn’t bring themselves to
stick to any single objective. Over the
summer of 1941 in the midst of the
greatest challenge the Wehrmacht had
yet faced, the German high command
was divided by acrimonious debate over
objectives. The result was Hitler decided
to first divert Army Group Center’s
panzers to supporting operations in the
north and south, and then switching
them back for a drive on Moscow.
The reasons for those changes in the
plan have been debated endlessly since
World War II, but whether Moscow was a
viable (or singly decisive) German objective in 1941 isn’t the issue here. What’s
critical is: at the moment the Germans
had an opportunity to take Leningrad
via a concerted panzer drive in late summer, Army Group North’s mobile forces
were switched elsewhere. The indecision
in front of Leningrad was symptomatic of that overall German shortfall in
Barbarossa: lack of a consistent strategy.
The actual decision to turn to
Moscow was implemented on 16
September, over the objections of
Army Group North’s commander,
Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb. Four
days earlier, von Manstein himself
had been transferred to command
Eleventh Army in Army Group South,
with the mission of taking the Soviet
fortress-city of Sevastopol. With the
panzers as well as Manstein gone,
all opportunity to take Leningrad by
coup de main was effectively ended.
In execution, the kind of operations
run by the Germans relied on the
panzer corps commanders to move on
their own initiative to take advantage
of opportunities as they presented
themselves, sometimes in defiance of
higher echelon directives to wait for
the infantry to come up in support. But
the situation on the eastern front in
1941 saw a trend toward over-control
by OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres,
the Army High Command, which
was responsible for conducting
operations). Objectives deep within the
USSR were assigned to panzer group
commanders but then switched.
Corps commanders found themselves
in turn being ordered to switch their
axes of advance back and forth across
the front, causing increased wear on
vehicles and dissipating momentum.
Added to that was the decision
by Hitler to withhold the output of
Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb
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WORLD at WAR 17 | APR−MAY 2011
by Joseph Miranda
German armored fighting vehicle
(AFV) production. Instead of being
used to replace losses suffered in the
Soviet Union, the new tanks were to be
used to create a new group of panzer
divisions that were to be committed
to post-Barbarossa campaigns. That
decision was predicated on defeating
the Soviet Union by the end of 1941, yet
such a solution required concentrating all panzer forces in the east.
At the same time, the German generals and field marshals failed to form a
united front in terms of presenting Hitler
with reasonable objectives for the 1941
campaign. Thus, without consistent
leadership, the invasion was bound to
achieve less than optimal results both
generally and in its particulars. The decision-making process of the German high
command for Leningrad demonstrates
that phenomenon. The idea for a siege
of Leningrad, rather than an all-out
attack, was discussed as if it were going
to take place in a strategic vacuum, one
in which it would be the only major
operation occurring on the front.
There were still other factors
involved. The German high command, including Hitler, wanted to
avoid the mass casualties that had
been typical of the battles of World
War I. The underlying fear was large
casualty returns would lead to the
kind of home front collapse — and
revolution — which had knocked
Erich von Manstein
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Home
the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and
German Empires out of the Great War.
Hitler also had geo-strategic considerations for wanting to avoid a major
fight inside Leningrad. Such a contest
could’ve easily burned out numerous
divisions in house-to-house fighting in
a city where the communists were sure
to fight fanatically. Moreover, Leningrad
would be difficult to maneuver past
and around. Unlike other Soviet cities
captured in 1941, such as Smolensk
and Kiev, enveloping Leningrad
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would’ve been difficult to impossible.
The Finns, co-belligerents with the
Germans in the war against the USSR,
had reaffirmed their refusal to move
against the city, due to their 20-year-old
pledge to the Soviet government never
to threaten it. That secured the city’s
northern flank for the defense, though
the Soviets still deployed some forces
there to keep an eye things. To the east
and southeast, Lake Ladoga, the Valdai
Hills, and the marshes between them
further restricted deep maneuver. Any
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fight for the city would therefore have
inevitably come down to a frontal
assault, the very type of operation the
blitzkrieg was intended to avoid.
War & Psychological War
The quick and relatively inexpensive
German victories prior to Barbarossa
had an immense psychological impact
around the world, one that was further
played up in their propaganda. Perhaps,
though, its most decisive effect was
on those in the German high command itself, who came to believe the
Wehrmacht could undertake virtually
any task that could be set for it.
Transcripts of conversations at
Fuehrer headquarters record Hitler’s
astonishment at how quickly and
cheaply the campaigns in Poland,
France and the Balkans were won.
The French campaign was the crucial
turning point. Many in the German high
command, including Hitler, had been at
least guardedly pessimistic about gaining a decision in the west in 1940. When
the Wehrmacht subsequently overran
France in a few weeks, it came as almost
as much of a surprise to the German
high command as it did to that of the
Allies. If the armies of France and Britain
could be defeated so handily — armies
that had held out so stubbornly for
four years in 1914-1918 — then surely
the Red Army — heir to the defeated
army of the Czar, and which had
displayed such incompetence in the
recent Winter War with Finland — could
be expected to be easily trounced.
Much of the power of the Wehrmacht
came from projecting itself as a force
capable of winning quick victories,
thereby overturning the experiences of
1914-18 and, for that matter, of other
such protracted contests as the Russian
and Spanish Civil Wars. One symptom of
that belief was revealed in Hitler’s reaction to the large numbers of casualties
the German airborne arm suffered in
taking the island of Crete a few weeks
before Barbarossa opened. They were
sufficient to cause him to suspend
airborne operations indefinitely. Thus
the elite German paratroopers would
fight in the Soviet Union only as regular
infantry, with some units showing
up in front of Leningrad in that role
late in 1941. Had Hitler not made that
decision, we might here be evaluating
the impact of a German airborne
force seizing objectives ahead of the
panzers advancing into the USSR.
Indeed, the Soviet fear of just such an
assault led them to construct many
anti-paratrooper defenses behind the
lines of their Leningrad position.
That cancellation goes to Hitler viewing the airborne arm as a psychological
as much as a military instrument: in
1940 it had been especially useful in
spreading panic in the Allied rear areas,
with rumors of massive numbers of
paratroopers descending sometimes
reaching hysteric proportions. Crete
showed that psychological effect was
no longer there, and Hitler therefore
lost interest in the airborne. What
that also indicates is the Wehrmacht
needed to go through a fundamental
change in its doctrine in 1941, though
it wasn’t all that evident at the time.
Hitler also saw Leningrad as a
politico-psychological objective. It
was the spiritual home of bolshevism,
and in that regard Leningrad’s capture
might prove to be a catastrophic blow
to Stalin’s regime. At the same time,
though, there was no certainty that
would occur. For one, the Soviets had
moved their capital from Petrograd
(as Leningrad was called until 1924) to
Moscow. They did so precisely because
they could see the old capital was
militarily vulnerable. Moscow, with its
far inland location and central position
at the nexus of rail lines from all over
the country, was more defensible and
better situated to dominate the vast
expanse of the communist realm.
Of course, the German problem
wasn’t simply their failure to prosecute
a consistent strategy in their 1941
campaign. For any strategy to have
worked, the Soviets would’ve had
to have been incapable of offering
sustained resistance. Unfortunately for
the Germans, that wasn’t the situation.
The Soviets
The shortfalls of the Workers and
Peasants Red Army (as the Soviet
armed forces were known at the time)
have been analyzed many times
before in these pages. Briefly, Soviet
military leadership had been wrecked
by Stalin’s pre-war purges. Those killed
or imprisoned included innovative
thinkers who’d attempted to lay the
groundwork for a Red Army mobile
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warfare doctrine in the mid-30s. On top
of that, the Soviets were going through a
reorganization when Barbarossa began.
Mechanized corps, which looked like
powerful armored formations on paper,
were actually still in the early stages of
being built up from small tank units.
They lacked trained staffs, combinedarms training, and even the most
rudimentary logistics. Conditions in the
other combat arms were little better.
Red Air Force crews generally
lacked more than five hours in their
planes, and there was no doctrine for
independent air operations. Added
to that were the initial Luftwaffe air
strikes that devastated the Soviet
air force on the ground. Indeed, the
initial reports to Berlin about enemy
aircraft destroyed were considered to
be exaggerations and weren’t believed
until the Luftwaffe sent observers to
captured airfields to count the wreckage.
Yet the Red Army had strengths.
One was it had an effective system
for mobilizing reserves. That allowed
the Soviets to send new armies to the
front to replace formations that had
been shattered or destroyed. Quality of
training was certainly an issue among
those hastily assembled reserves, but
the Soviets had the advantage insofar
as the Germans were overextending
their own lines of communication
as they advanced; meanwhile the
Soviets were falling back on their own
sources of logistics and replacements.
Soviet deception measures prior
to Barbarossa had also kept German
intelligence in the dark about the true
size of the Red Army. The Germans had
expected to engage 200 Soviet divisions
during 1941. By the time they began
the drive on Moscow they had indeed
met that number of divisions and
defeated them; however, the Soviets
simply added newly mobilized units to
the front. They would have some 360
divisions available throughout 1941.
Added to that were the large numbers of
Soviet armored vehicles, another thing
the Germans didn’t anticipate, as well
as the high quality of the new models
among those tanks, such as the T-34.
Nor did the Red Army defend passively. Throughout the 1941 campaign
it launched numerous counterattacks.
At one time during Army Group North’s
drive on Leningrad (15-18 July), von
Manstein’s 56th Motorized (Panzer) Corps
found itself cut off by counterattacking
Soviet forces, and only deft maneuver
and hard fighting retrieved the situation.
That led to a steady attrition of German
manpower and materiel. As early as 26
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July, von Manstein had reported to Gen.
Friedrich Paulus, the OKH quartermaster, that losses were critical enough to
warrant his units being pulled out of the
line for refit. Manstein recommended
the foot-mobile infantry be used to
push the Reds back in the meantime,
and then recommit his replenished
panzers to exploit to Leningrad.
The campaign was thus already
degenerating into an infantry battle.
Bringing up the Rear
The Germans are popularly pictured
as having fought a mechanized war. In
reality, though, of the 130 or so German
divisions involved in Barbarossa, only 34
were mechanized insofar as their entire
establishment was lifted via tracked or
wheeled vehicles: 19 panzer divisions
and another 15 motorized infantry.
Fourth Panzer Group, the mechanized
formation assigned to Army Group
North, had in its order of battle for 22
June 1941 three panzer and four motorized infantry divisions. The motorized
divisions lacked organic armor; so, in
effect, the army group had about half
the strength the Germans used for
their much shorter 1940 drive through
the Ardennes, yet they were expected
to race all the way to Leningrad.
As the Germans drove east, then,
vehicles were lost to wear and tear, the
abysmal state of the Soviet roads and
enemy action. The trucks, which were
vital for hauling men, guns and supplies,
were perhaps hardest hit by wear
and tear. German industry lacked the
capacity to quickly replace those losses,
and that meant the army was losing its
mobility, even if tank and infantry casualties weren’t as yet necessarily crippling.
With the loss of trucks, the
logistical organization that supported
the army — and which isn’t usually
shown on order of battle charts — was
also being lost. Each panzer and
motorized division had some 3,000
motor vehicles, and they required
several hundred more trucks at army
and theater levels to bring up supplies
and replacement parts while returning
casualties and damaged equipment.
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The Rise & Rise of Manstein
Following the conquest of Poland in October 1939, the
Germans turned their attention to the war in the west against
France and Britain. To deal with that situation, Franz Halder, chief
of staff of OKH, came up with a scheme that amounted to little
more than a reworked version of World War I’s Schlieffen Plan.
The idea was the Germans would advance through the north of
the Low Countries, capture the Channel ports, and then engage
the main Allied armies somewhere near the Somme River.
Unlike the Schlieffen Plan, Halder’s idea wasn’t intended
to produce a decisive victory. Germany lacked the element of
strategic surprise that it had in 1914; the Allies in 1940 were
planning to counter-move into Belgium the moment the Germans
advanced. Rather, the 1940 plan’s objective was to cheaply
establish a viable front in northern France and then gain a favorable negotiated peace from that position of strength.
That plan was dropped for two reasons, one of which was a staff
officer carrying a copy of it was in an aircraft that strayed over Allied
lines. The plane went down, and the officer was captured along with
the plan. The real problem, though, came from the fact Hitler and
several of his generals weren’t happy moving ahead with any scheme
that didn’t at least allow for decisive victory in the field. They wanted
to win before the Reich ran out of resources to run its war machine.
The needed alternative was provided by Erich von Manstein,
chief of staff in Army Group South during the Polish campaign and
by then with Army Group A in the west. The Manstein Plan, as
it came to be known, was to concentrate the bulk of the panzer
divisions in the center (instead of the far right), and drive through
the Ardennes. Since the Allies were expected to move into
Belgium as soon as operations began in earnest, those panzers
would be able to attack into their flank, break through there, and
cut them off. Hitler liked that, since it coincided with his own
ideas about the mass use of panzers. (Manstein credited his plan
to a team effort between himself and various staff officers.)
The plan proved a runaway success. The drive through the
Ardennes, supported by the Luftwaffe, outflanked the Allied
armies in Belgium. That led to their falling back to the Channel and
evacuating via Dunkirk. The French forces outside the deflating
coastal enclave fell back toward Paris. The Germans entered the
French capital on 14 June and France surrendered on the 22nd.
Oddly, von Manstein himself commanded only an
infantry corps during the 1940 campaign. After Hitler had
accepted his plan, Halder transferred him out of pique. Even
so, Manstein’s operational vision had been vindicated, and he
also proved effective as a corps commander, moving quickly
and hitting hard even while commanding foot soldiers.
Hitler rewarded him with command of 56th Motorized (Panzer)
Corps for Barbarossa in 1941. He moved aggressively at first,
but Leningrad proved to be beyond his grasp, though potentially
not his reach. That is, had he continued to drive forward on his
own initiative when he reached a position just a few miles
outside the city in mid-July, there’s little doubt he would’ve
thereby inescapably pulled the rest of the army group along
with him, thus short-cutting the higher level indecision over
the matter that ultimately led to the historic siege.
Hitler nevertheless continued to believe in Manstein, and
promoted him to head Eleventh Army for its assault into the Crimea
and against the fortress of Sevastopol within it, which he captured
only after months of hard fighting. Later in 1942 he took Eleventh
Army north for a renewed assault on Leningrad, but that operation
(Nordlicht) was canceled when those divisions ended up being
committed piecemeal to counter a Soviet offensive on that front.
The Soviet encirclement of Stalingrad in late 1942 saw
Manstein back in the south, this time commanding the hurriedly
organized Army Group Don. With it, he made a desperate attempt
to relieve the trapped Sixth Army, which failed but succeeded in
retaking Kharkov in March 1943. He was at Kursk commanding the
southern German pincer, and his panzers may have been on the
verge of achieving the needed breakthrough (depending on who you
believe) just before the overall operation was called off by Hitler.
In the ensuing Soviet offensives, he advocated trading space for
time while building up reserves to launch flanking counterattacks
into the Red Army spearheads. That approach more and more
conflicted with Hitler’s “no retreat” outlook, eventually leading
to Manstein’s forced retirement on 30 March 1944. He sat out
the rest of the war, though Hitler recognized his service with
a Knight’s Cross. While aware of the Stauffenberg bomb plot
against Hitler, Manstein decided to neither join it nor reveal it to
Himmler. At the end of the war he surrendered to the British.
After World War II he did a few years in prison for war crimes:
as a high-level commander, he was held responsible for scorched
earth policies and the mistreatment of civilians in the Soviet Union.
Even so, never having been a member of the Nazi Party, he was
more politically acceptable in the postwar world than other senior
officers, and he became a military advisor to the West German
government. He is also famous for his book, Lost Victories, which
gives his view on his role in the war. The book became popular
among military readers, as Manstein not surprisingly advocated
wars should be run by professional soldiers and not politically
oriented amateurs — such as his former chief, Hitler. ★
Erich von Manstein
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As those trucks were being shot up,
wrecked and burned out, it meant
the overall ability to conduct mobile
operations was being undermined.
The attrition also impacted the
Luftwaffe, which was a vital part of the
blitzkrieg. The German Air Force high
command hadn’t planned for a long war.
One aspect of that was a failure to build
up adequate stockpiles of replacement
parts to keep aircraft flying during long
and intensive operations. By the end of
1941 the spare parts situation was at a
crisis. Among other things it reduced
the operational rate of Luftwaffe
aircraft. That rate is the percentage of
aircraft that can, on average, fly at any
given time. Aircraft down for overhaul,
maintenance or repair obviously
aren’t going to be flying missions.
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One of the factors that had given
the Luftwaffe an impact beyond its
numbers came from the fact it had
previously been able to maintain a
high operational rate. It also had a high
sortie rate, meaning each German
aircraft could fly several missions in the
time a single opposing Red Air Force
plane could fly one. That produced, to
use the modern term for it, a “combat
multiplier,” but the Luftwaffe couldn’t
maintain that operational tempo in
the USSR. Wear and tear on aircraft,
combat losses, and then the effects of
the Russian winter, reduced the number
of planes ready to fly. Operational rates
went from 70 percent down to 40.
What all that meant was the
Germans had to win a decisive victory
in late 1941 or — as the events of the
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next four years demonstrated — they
likely wouldn’t be able to do so at
all. They therefore really couldn’t
afford not to take Leningrad, or any
other major objective for that matter,
as quickly as possible. The actual
outcome of the war emphasized the
irony: the Germans suffered far more
casualties in the ensuing years of
combat on the eastern front than they
would’ve risked by a direct assault on
Leningrad when they had the chance.
Conclusions
By the time the Germans reached
Leningrad, a certain amount of inertia
had already crept into their operations.
Their strength had begun to be dissipated by logistical and operational
issues as well as by the Soviet resistance.
Still, despite all that, the Germans likely
could’ve taken Leningrad in 1941. They
still had several advantages. There were
some logistical factors working in favor
of Army Group North. The distance from
the East Prussian frontier to Leningrad
was less than that to Moscow. That
reduced the length supply lines would’ve
had to run. The Germans also used
shipping in the Baltic Sea to supplement
their land-based logistics. At the same
time the people of the Baltic States
were generally pro-German, which
provided a secure rear area compared
to the growing menace from partisans
elsewhere in the occupied USSR.
While Hitler stated his aversion
to urban warfare when it came to
Leningrad, he proved willing to order
just such operations on other parts
of the front. The siege of Sevastopol,
begun in late 1941, turned into a
protracted series of assaults in which,
ironically enough, the transferred
von Manstein commanded the Axis
forces. Later, in 1942, Hitler was more
than willing to order a massive fight
for Stalingrad in a battle at the end of
German lines of communication.
In the end, of course, the Germans
chose to not assault Leningrad in 1941
when they might’ve been able to take it.
Instead, they tied down an entire army
group besieging the city for the next
two and a half years. An early seizure
of Leningrad would’ve freed those
divisions for operations elsewhere. That
still might not have meant a German
capture of Moscow in 1941; however,
since that operation failed to take the
Soviet capital in the actual event, the
Germans would still likely have ended
Barbarossa with a much more viable
line than they got historically. ✪
SOURCES
Home
Conner, Albert & Robert Poirier. Red Army Order of Battle.
Novata, CA: Presidio, 1985.
Van Creveld, Martin.
Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton.
London: Cambridge University, 1977.
Davies, W. J. K. German Army Handbook.
New York: Arco, 1977.
Dear, I.C.B., ed. The Oxford Companion to World War II.
Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1995.
Glantz, David. The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-45.
Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas: 2002.
Goure, Leon. The Siege of Leningrad.
Stanford: Stanford University, 1962.
Kislitsyn, N. & V. Zukbakov. Leningrad Does Not Surrender.
Moscow: Progress, 1989.
Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von. Lost Victories.
Chicago: Regnery, 1955.
Murray, Williamson.
Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933-1945.
Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell: 1986.
Salisbury, Harrison. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad.
DeCapo: 2003.
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