out of the forest with the bodies of the seven scouts we met yesterday. Their heads have been crushed and their noses and ears cut off.’ Hockenjos also heard the news, two days late, of Japan’s attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. ‘If that’s not a world war’, he wrote with uncharacteristic acerbity in his diary, ‘I don’t know what is. It seems that I might make captain after all.’
Hockenjos was in the rear of the second battle for Tikhvin, a town 175 kilometres to the south-east of Leningrad and the easternmost point of the German salient over the River Volkhov. It was important because of its location, on the railway line along which supplies were delivered for transport across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. The Wehrmacht’s hold on Ladoga’s southern shore, established when it took Shlisselburg on 8 September, was tenacious but only thirty kilometres wide. Passing through Tikhvin, trains were able to unload at Volkhov, twenty kilometres from the small port of Novaya Ladoga, whence barges sailed, braving German air attack, to Osinovets, on the lake’s Soviet-held western shore. A small suburban railway line covered the final forty-five kilometres into Leningrad. Twenty days’ worth of rations had thus run the blockade during the autumn.
On 8 November — at the height of the Battle of Moscow — Tikhvin fell to the Germans, together with 20,000 troops, 96 tanks, 179 guns and an armoured train.2 Its loss cut Leningrad’s lifeline in two. The closest supply trains could now get to Novaya Ladoga was Zaborye, 170 kilometres to its east. Leningrad’s Military Council immediately ordered the construction, through almost virgin forest and using conscripted peasant labour, of a new 200-kilometre road, to be completed within a fortnight. The Council also ordered that front-line troops’ bread rations be cut for the first time, from 800 grams per day down to 600 grams. The allocation for rear units fell from 600 to 400 grams. Another three ration cuts — one more for the military, two for civilians — quickly followed. At the same time, ice brought navigation across Ladoga to a close, the last barges reaching Osinovets on 15 November. Until the new road was completed and the lake ice grew thick enough to carry trucks, no food could now reach Leningrad except by air. Though sixty-four planes, at Zhdanov’s angry insistence, were eventually assigned to the route, only a third or fewer were operational at any one time, and they daily delivered only forty to fifty tonnes, mostly blocks of pressed and frozen meat.3
Watched with desperate attention by hydrologists, the ice thickened agonisingly slowly. (To estimate its likely rate of spread, one man consulted medieval records kept by the monks of Valaam, who each winter recorded the date on which pilgrims were first able to reach their island monastery on foot.) Ten centimetres of ice, it was calculated, was needed for a horse and rider, eighteen centimetres for a horse pulling a sled, twenty for a loaded two-ton truck. A road from Osinovets to the village of Kobona, on the nearest stretch of Soviet-held ‘mainland’ lake shore, would need a minimum of twenty centimetres of ice along the whole of its thirty-kilometre length.
On 17 November, when the ice was only ten centimetres thick, the first scouts ventured on to the lake, wearing life belts and carrying long poles. The following day the wind began to blow from the north, the temperature dropped and work began on clearing the route of snow, marking it and building bridges over crevasses. By the 20th the ice was eighteen centimetres thick, and the first transports — 300 horse-drawn sledges — set off, followed two days later by the first trucks, widely spaced. On the return journey, though carrying only a few sacks of grain each, several went through the ice. To spread weight, the next convoy towed sleds. To no avail: by 1 December only about 800 tons of flour — less than two days’ requirements — had been delivered, and forty trucks had got stuck or broken down. The rough and narrow new overland road to Zaborye was even worse: the first convoy to set out along it, on 6 December, took fourteen days to make the round trip, and more than 350 trucks had to be towed or abandoned. Vasili Churkin, the artilleryman caught up in the chaotic flight from Volosovo back in August, was ordered to march across the ice on the windy, pitch-black night of 7 December. Slowed by frostbitten feet, he fell behind his unit and would have become completely lost if it had not been for red flashes from a lighthouse on the ‘mainland’ shore. He reached Kobona at 1 p.m. the next day, having passed ten flour-laden lorries with their back axles sunk through the ice, and a young soldier dying of exposure.4
