80 years since the breaking of the siege of Leningrad

karimamarika654

It had barely begun when almost two thousand pieces of artillery lit up the horizon west of Leningrad . , Soviet troops launched an assault on the German positions in the Shlisselburg salient, the small spit of land that separated the city from the rest of the Soviet Union. Six days later, on January 18 , eighty years ago this week, vanguard elements of the 67th Army's 123rd Rifle Division from the east and troops from the 2nd Army's 327th Rifle Division Shock coming from the surrounded city itself came into contact just east of the Colonia Obrera No. 1. In the following hours and despite the German counterattacks, new units joined together to widen this corridor. The siege of Leningrad had been broken .

Cradle of the Revolution and a first-rate political and industrial center, the city had been one of the German objectives from the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa on 1. Destination point of Army Group BTC Users Number Data North, the intention Hitler's plan was not, however, to engage his soldiers in a bloody street fight, but to link up with the Finnish troops coming from the Karelian Isthmus and surround the Soviet city to crush it under bombs while it was dying of hunger. He was going to be about to get it.

The first artillery shells fell on the city on September 4, the enemy had arrived, and four days later the Germans captured Shlisselburg , completely isolating it by land, the siege began. That same day, the Luftwaffe began its destruction work, but without excessive effort. By then the offensive that was to bring down the Soviet regime as if it were a giant with feet of clay was creaking at all its seams and the German air forces would never be able to use large groups of aircraft on an objective that they already believed had been won.



The same reasons that prompted the Germans to establish the siege of Leningrad encouraged the Soviet authorities to do everything possible to preserve it. To achieve this, the first measure was to send General Georgi Zhukov there , the laureate victor of the Japanese threat in Khalkhin Gol, who got to work immediately. New trenches were dug, the fortifications were improved and during the siege – already under the command of other leaders – numerous offensives were to be carried out in order to break the German corridor that reached the shore of Lake Ladoga. The Siniavino Hills, in the center of the Wehrmacht position, would soon become the focal point of numerous battles.