The Siege of Leningrad by David M. Glantz
Cassell 2004, 334 pages
This book outlines the campaigns around Leningrad, from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa through to roughly the middle of 1944, when the last German units were pushed out of the region.
It is predominantly a detailed account of the thrusts and counterthrusts by the opponents. There is much talk of left flanks and slow progress and lack of command and control.
The numbers are probably the most impactful thing about it. Around 2 million Russians (roughly half civilians and half soldiers) perished around the Leningrad region, which made up only a relatively small fraction of the front. For comparison, the USA lost about 300,000 soldiers on all fronts combined for the whole war. WWII has been described as ‘the eastern front plus sideshows’, and in terms of men and machinery, this is not too far from the truth. Of course, other campaigns were of enormous strategic significance — a quick victory over Britain in 1940 could well have been the catalyst that made everything else turn out differently — but none ranged over such vast areas or cost so much blood and iron. Russia was always Hitler’s primary enemy. His actions elsewhere were more about securing his back before he plunged east. He would happily have left western Europe alone had it promised him a free hand in the east. As such, the battle between Germany and Russia was existential. Hitler conceived of it as Aryan versus Slav. There could be no peace.
The book does not look at those issues. Its focus is narrow. It evaluates the military decisions made, critiques them, looks at lessons learned and at what ramifications the Leningrad fight had for the rest for the front.
There is relatively little about life in the blockaded city. It is not clear from the cover or the blurb, but this is really a book for fans of military strategy and, particularly, tactics.
As such, it has one glaring flaw.
The maps and the text do not mesh well. Repeatedly, pages would be expended describing offensives; the methods, the commanders, the cities and regions they were to fight for. Yet the places mentioned can often not be found on the corresponding maps. I was sometimes able to find them on a map elsewhere in the book, but some locations were just missing and I had to guess or look in an atlas or a map from the interwebs. Or just skip it. It was very frustrating hunting through the various maps looking for one that showed me where somewhere — where a very important action happened — was.
Perhaps it was just about limited space on the page, but it was a distinct annoyance.
Apart from that, I think I am perhaps just not enough interested in the arrows showing the marches of the troops and the details of how many miles they advanced and where. My eyes started to glaze over and in a few places I started to skip ahead.
The proofreading is not great, either.
In short, this is probably very interesting to the fan of military tactics who wants to see a whole major campaign laid out and critiqued. Such a reader would see how the Red Army’s techniques and tactics evolved over the years and how the tide was stopped and then turned by a combination of persistence, weight of numbers and, eventually, tactical skill. For the rest of us, the book lacks context and the human story. But, I suspect the rest of us is not the audience it is aiming at. At times it sounds like a lecture to officer cadets.
Verdict: Good, but for the aficionados.
DSPACE 