Captions

  1. 22 June 1941: Operation Barbarossa begins. Before dawn, German aircraft crossed the frontier with the Soviet Union in large numbers. Gunners commenced bombardment of Soviet border positions as infantry and armour prepared to advance.
  2. 26th June 1941: the Germans reached Daugavpils early on 26 June, just four days after crossing the frontier and seized the bridge at Zarasai in a surprise attack
  3. 28th June 1941: Heavy fighting for the city of Daugavpils. The battles checked the German advance. However in less than a week, they had covered perhaps a third of the distance to their ultimate objective
  4. 2nd July 1941: Manstein and his subordinates were given permission to resume their advance. They were to advance first to Rēzekne, and then on to Ostrov and Pskov, an overall distance of 150 miles.
  5. Manstein’s march to outflank the presumed Soviet defences around Pskov made almost no progress and on 9 July Hoepner ordered him to abandon the attempt. Reinhardt’s XLI Motorised Corps was to advance directly on Leningrad with LXVI Motorised Corps to its east, aiming to cut road and rail links between Leningrad and Moscow.
  6. July 1941 Hitler reaffirmed his orders for Leningrad to be taken before any advance on Moscow
  7. July 1941 Stalin ordered the creation of a new command group designated the Main Command of the Northwest Direction, with Voroshilov in overall command; he immediately assigned Eighth Army and part of Eleventh Army from Northwest Front to Northern Front.
  8. On 11 July, Reinhardt advanced beyond Pskov and ordered a thrust to the Luga River at Poreche, about ten miles to the southeast of Kingisepp – if this town could be captured rapidly, the Soviet defences on the Luga Line would be compromised even before they were in place.
  9. On 15 and 16 July Red Army counterattacks took control of a ten-mile stretch of the road being used by 8th Panzer Division and numerous corps-level units. Rear area personnel found themselves pressed into action as makeshift infantry as the Soviet Eleventh Army applied ever greater pressure; by 16 July, Manstein’s entire corps was fighting on three fronts facing north, east, and south. But Berzarin’s attack failed with the Germans turning the tables on their opponents, encircling and destroying much of Twenty-Seventh Army, and the German infantry finally began to arrive on Manstein’s southern flank.
  10. Towards the end of July, Stalin and Stavka moved to address the numerical weakness of Leningrad’s defenders. A new Forty-Eighth Army was formed commanded by Lieutenant General Stepan Dmitriyevich Akimov consisting of 1st Militia Division, three regular rifle divisions, and 21st Tank Division.
  11. Despite the attempts by Halder and others to keep up momentum towards Moscow, Hitler continued to insist on giving Leningrad a greater priority. Before the end of July, he ordered Third Panzer Group to be transferred from Army Group Centre to Army Group North to expedite the attack on Leningrad; once the city was taken, the panzer group would be reassigned to Army Group Centre.
  12. By 1 August, the Germans had destroyed 46 Red Army divisions and severely damaged many more, but despite this the scale of Soviet mobilisation was such that the Red Army now fielded a staggering 401 divisions.
  13. On 15 August Manstein was ordered to move his corps headquarters and 3rd Motorised Division to an area southeast of Narva. The redeployment was difficult due to few good roads through the swampy, forested terrain. Manstein was ordered to deploy his corps to counterattack into the exposed flank of Vatutin’s drive. After two days of preparation, the two German divisions began their thrust. Rapidly gaining pace, the German units were too nimble for their opponents and in a week drove the Soviet forces back to their start line along the Lovat River to the east of Staraya Russa. But whilst Vatutin’s operation failed the result was the diversion of LVI Motorised Corps from the Leningrad axis to the south, forcing a further delay in the planned advance towards Leningrad.
  14. While Manstein was defeating Vatutin’s counterattack, Reinhardt’s XLI Motorised Corps attempted to advance from its small bridgeheads over the Luga. On 8 August, 1st and 6th Panzer Divisions commenced their attack in heavy rain. Although a battlegroup from 1st Panzer Division made some progress, the attacks on either flank – by 6th Panzer Division and 36th Motorised Division – foundered in the face of determined resistance and difficult terrain. Reinhardt ordered the isolated battlegroup to return to its start line.
  15. After a day of defensive fighting, 1st Panzer Division attempted to resume its advance on 10 August, seeking to cut the railway line running from Leningrad through Krasnogvardeisk to Kingisepp and Narva.
  16. The drive to the east reached the communication links between Krasnogvardeisk and Luga on 20 August and 1st Panzer Division shot up a train carrying supplies south to Luga; its tanks were now just seven miles from the southern outskirts of Krasnogvardeisk and 25 miles from the southern edge of Leningrad
  17. Finally on 22 August, the long anticipated attack of Third Panzer Group from the south began.
  18. As soon as the thrust had dislocated the Soviet defences, ultimately leading to the destruction of much of Twenty-Second Army, 19th Panzer Division was withdrawn from the attack and moved northwest to Kholm to attack on 31 August towards the northeast in conjunction with II Corps.
  19. To the west of Leningrad, Eighth Army had been driven out of Estonia and abandoned Narva on 25 August.
  20. The threadbare defensive line collapsed at the first blow on 25 August, when XXXIX Motorised Corps – transferred from Third Panzer Group – broke through Forty-Eighth Army’s lines with help from XXVIII Corps on its left flank and captured Lyuban on the Leningrad–Moscow highway, 45 miles from the southern edge of Leningrad. Without pausing, the German divisions pushed onwards towards Kirishi and Volkhov to the northeast and north along the highway towards Leningrad.
  21. The town of Mga was keenly contested; the Germans took it on 26 August but Voroshilov ordered an immediate counterattack, which succeeded in expelling the Germans a day later. On the last day of August, the German 20th Motorised Division recaptured Mga and drove off the Soviet forces.
  22. Supported by elements of 12th Panzer Division, 20th Motorised Division pushed on northwards and reached the shore of Lake Ladoga on 7 September, capturing Sinyavino and Shlisselburg: all land connections between Leningrad and the rest of the Soviet Union were cut. The only contact was over Lake Ladoga.
  23. When the German drive to Shlisselburg began, Red Army units were still holding Luga, far to the south. The Wehrmacht commenced attacks on the town on 24 August with the relatively fresh SS-Polizei Division leading.
  24. As August drew to a close, the Germans completed a tenuous encirclement of the Soviet forces pulling back from Luga, but their line was porous and although large numbers of Red Army soldiers were killed or captured, others slipped through to the north in confused fighting that continued for several days. Many stragglers remained in the forests and late on 4 September, 8th Panzer Division was ordered to make anti-partisan sweeps through the woodland in an attempt to clear the area.
  25. As the Red Army pulled back, the German advance slowed and on 9 September halted along the Izhora River, between Krasnogvardeisk and the Leningrad–Moscow highway, just 13 miles from the southern edge of Leningrad. To complete the isolation of Leningrad, Leeb ordered his forces to secure the southern shore of Lake Ladoga.
  26. German artillery began to bombard Leningrad on 1 September, and the first scattered shelling was replaced by more intense, better targeted fire over the following days.
  27. With German plans having changed from capturing Leningrad to isolating the city and starving the population, senior Wehrmacht officers met Professor Wilhelm Ziegelmayer, the head of the Munich Institute of Nutrition, on 8 September. Ziegelmeyer was given documents providing details of the population of Leningrad, the estimated food stocks within the city, and normal winter temperatures in the area; he was asked to calculate how long the Wehrmacht would have to blockade Leningrad before a significant proportion of the population starved to death.
  28. Luftwaffe attacks had taken place sporadically for several weeks, and on 8 September a major raid struck the Badayev warehouses in the eastern part of the city. There are differing accounts of just how much of Leningrad’s food supply was lost in the raid; for example, one account suggests that the total city stockpiles were sufficient for about 35 days, and the warehouses contained only a little over 4 per cent of this total. Other accounts portrayed the destruction of the warehouses as a major disaster.
  29. Reinhardt had intended to commit 6th Panzer Division alongside 1st Panzer Division but was unable to extract it from fighting near Krasnogvardeisk; the Red Army succeeded in holding this town until 13 September, disrupting German plans and preventing the concentration of forces as originally planned.

You can read more in To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941–42 by Prit Buttar.