A parallel breakout attempt, over lake ice to Shlisselburg’s north, was a fiasco. On 13 November the 80th Rifle Division was flown out of the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ to Leningrad, force-marched to Ladoga and then ordered to charge entrenched German positions. A large number of men fell through the too-thin ice; others, emaciated and exhausted, dropped even before the attack began. Stalin was furious at not being informed of the disaster: ‘It’s very odd that Comrade Zhdanov seems to feel no need to come to the phone… One supposes that in Comrade Zhdanov’s head Leningrad isn’t in the USSR, but on some island in the Pacific Ocean.’{7} Zhdanov scapegoated the hapless officers in charge, Colonel Ivan Frolov and Commissar Konstantin Ivanov. Three hours before the attack began, their sentencing document records, Frolov had ‘declared to two Front representatives that he did not believe in the successful outcome of the operation’—words underlined in the copy sent to Zhdanov. On 3 December both men were shot, for ‘cowardice and defeatism’.{8} In total, of the roughly 300,000 Red Army troops employed in the battle for Tikhvin and its associated offensives, 110,000 were recorded as ill or wounded, and 80,000 as killed, captured or missing. On the German side, casualties were 45,000.
For the Eastern Front in general, the close of 1941 was nonetheless a genuine turning point. The Germans had encircled Leningrad but failed to take it, and were also being brought to a halt outside Moscow. In early November, slowed by slushy snow and Zhukov’s brilliantly organised resistance, Operation Typhoon had begun to peter out. The psychological turning point was 7 November—Revolution Day—on the eve of which Stalin gave a defiant speech in the Mayakovsky metro station, followed by the magnificent gamble of a full-scale military parade in Red Square. Faced with deepening cold and mounting casualties, Hitler’s generals asked permission to dig in for the winter. ‘The time for spectacular operational feats is past’, Halder wrote in his diary on the 11th: ‘Our troops can’t be moved around any more.’ Hitler disagreed, insisting that Moscow be taken by the end of the year. Reluctantly, his generals reanimated the offensive. ‘Field Marshal Bock has himself taken charge of the Battle of Moscow, from an advanced command post’, Halder noted on the 22nd. ‘With enormous energy he drives forward everything that can be brought to bear.’ Though the German divisions to the south were ‘finished’—one regiment in his old 7th Division, Halder noted, was now commanded by a first lieutenant—in the north they still had a chance of success and were being ‘driven relentlessly to achieve it. Von Bock compares the situation to the battle of the Marne, where the last battalion that could be thrown in tipped the balance.’ A week later Bock telephoned Halder again. It was not the Marne that he compared the battle to now, but Verdun—‘a brutish chest-to-chest struggle of attrition… I emphasise that we too are concerned about the human sacrifice. But an effort must be made to bring the enemy to his knees by applying the last ounce of strength.’{9}
On 16 December—with his forward units tantalisingly within sight of the flash of Moscow’s anti-aircraft guns—Hitler finally called a halt. Typhoon was over, but the eastern armies should hold their positions all along the line. More ‘stormy discussions’, ‘mad outbursts’ and ‘dramatic scenes’ followed, as his generals argued for withdrawal to firmer defence lines.{10} Three days later—twelve days after Pearl Harbor and eight after suicidally declaring war on the United States—Hitler sacked von Bock as head of Army Group Centre and Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief, and announced that he was taking over High Command himself. After another furious meeting at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 13 January, von Leeb asked to be relieved as well, and was replaced by the more pliable von Küchler. In the south, Runstedt was replaced by Reichenau, who promptly died of a heart attack. Altogether about forty senior officers resigned or were dismissed. From now on, Hitler’s propensity to micromanage military operations would have full rein, with ultimately disastrous results.{11}
This was the point, most military historians agree, at which the whole war turned, not because it was when Germany started to retreat, but in the sense that from then on she stood no further chance of winning. With three great powers ranged against her, she had simply bitten off more than she could chew. In London, Churchill had no doubt. Nothing, he declared to his War Cabinet on 10 December, could compare to the US in warfare, and the Russian front would ‘break Germany’s heart’. From Leningrad to the Crimea, the Wehrmacht was in ‘a frightful condition: mechanised units frozen, prisoners taken in rags, armies trying to stabilise… Russian air superiority.’ On the state of the Wehrmacht he exaggerated, but his general point was sound: ‘Germany is busted as far as knocking out Russia is concerned. The tide has turned and the phase which now begins will have gathering results… There should be no anxiety about the eventual outcome of the war. The finger of God is with us.’{12}
Tikhvin having been lost again, Fritz Hockenjos’s Radfahrzug was ordered to retreat back behind the Volkhov. On 21 December they left their poverty-stricken billet in Rakhmysha, not before setting fire to barns and slaughtering sheep and chickens for the road. ‘Women’s wailing’, Hockenjos wrote, ‘followed us out of the village.’ Again they pushed their bicycles along choked, snow-covered roads, past broken-down motorised columns and a stream of overladen peasant sleds, cows and goats in tow. The following afternoon they ran into fighting—shouts of ‘oorah’ up ahead, a burning lorry, injured horses standing in the middle of the road, heads drooping. When darkness fell they crept forwards in the shelter of roadside ditches: ‘We came to lots of dead Russians, and then we were through, and ran as fast as we could. When we got to Glad we found the staff of the 2nd Battalion just sitting there, completely oblivious. I could have wept.’ At 3 a.m. they set off again, firing blindly into the woods either side of the road in reply to shots from invisible Russians. With daylight they came under heavy fire while passing a supply column:
Bangs and whistles everywhere. The injured are brought in, coats and boots cut off. Open wounds leak dark blood. And next to all that people stand about, smoking and munching Knäckebrot. Only when there was lots of whizzing in the air did they take cover behind their vehicles or horses for a moment. I couldn’t decide whether this was admirable equanimity or stupid indifference.
They were among the last troops back over the Volkhov at Gruzino, crossing as darkness fell. Behind, the skyline glowed red where villages burned. On Christmas Eve they reached Chudovo, a town on the main Leningrad—Moscow railway line, and settled for the night in an empty-windowed glassworks. ‘We huddle with our cigarettes in front of the great glass ovens’, Hockenjos wrote. ‘In one corner a Christmas tree is being set up; in another some engineers are building tables and benches. Someone is bashfully practising carols on a harmonica. I have my notebook open on my knees and am writing a Christmas letter to Els by the light of the flames. I have never felt further from my love, nor closer to her, than this evening.’ In the distance he could hear the thump of shells, as the Russians ‘threw suitcases’ at the railway station—it was amazing how fast they had brought up their heavy artillery. When he and his men toasted Christ’s birth at midnight, it was with looted armagnac that they had brought with them all the way from the Loire.