On 7 January 1942 the Soviet Volkhov Front attacked across the frozen Volkhov River. The aim was to break the German ring around Leningrad, where the population was starving through its first siege winter. The Lyuban offensive opened a deep gap in the German line, but the attackers could not widen it. By the summer the 2nd Shock Army had been cut off in the forests and swamps, and its last commander, Andrey Vlasov, had been taken prisoner.
A plan to relieve Leningrad
German Army Group North sealed off Leningrad on 8 September 1941. Its 18th Army held the front north of Lake Ilmen, along the Volkhov River and around the city. The Soviet plan was directed by the Volkhov Front under General Kirill Meretskov. The 2nd Shock Army was to break through across the Volkhov and advance northwest toward the town of Lyuban, southeast of Leningrad, with the 59th and 4th Armies supporting it on the right and the 52nd Army widening the breach on the left and taking Novgorod. The 54th Army of the Leningrad Front was to help destroy the Germans in the bottleneck south of Lake Ladoga. The wider story of the city is told in our article on the siege of Leningrad.1
The armies were not ready. Many of the 2nd Shock Army's units had not yet arrived, and Meretskov later wrote that it had only the strength of an infantry corps. The armies had small reserves of rations and fodder and only about a quarter of the ammunition they needed.2
7 January or 13 January?
The sources give two starting dates, and both are correct for different moments. The Soviet loss statistics edited by Grigori Krivosheev date the operation from 7 January 1942. The U.S. Army's official history of the campaign, by Earl Ziemke and Magna Bauer, agrees that the offensive started that day, in a somewhat loose order: the 4th and 52nd Armies led off, and the 59th and 2nd Shock Armies joined in over the following days. For five days the Germans held off attacks that seemed to them to lack determination and purpose.3
On the morning of 13 January the 2nd Shock Army, commanded by General Nikolai Klykov, made its first real effort. After a heavy artillery barrage it struck the boundary between two German infantry divisions south of the railroad and within a day opened a gap four miles wide, but it could not widen it. On 16 January Meretskov stopped to regroup. Because the real breakthrough came on 13 January, that date is also given as the start of the offensive.4
A narrow gap and a long pocket
The 2nd Shock Army attacked again from its bridgehead on 21 January and in five days pushed almost 25 miles (40 km) through the German front, into a vast stretch of swamps and peat bogs that was passable only in winter. The other armies made little progress, and the Germans held firm at Spasskaya Polist on the northern shoulder of the gap. On 25 February Soviet ski troops came within five miles of Lyuban, but the town was not taken. The mouth of the pocket was about six miles wide, and the army was supplied along two lanes cut through the forest, which the Germans named Erika and Dora.5
On 15 March the Germans began an operation to close the gap from north and south, and on 19 March their spearheads met on the Dora lane. On 27 March Soviet tanks and infantry broke through along the Erika lane and reopened it as a supply road, but the corridor was less than two miles wide, and by mid-April the thaw and constant air and artillery attack had turned the lanes into ribbons of mud. Krivosheev's statistics end the operation on 30 April 1942. On 23 April Moscow had removed Meretskov and abolished the Volkhov Front, placing its armies under the Leningrad Front.6
Destruction of the 2nd Shock Army and Vlasov
General Andrey Vlasov, one of the heroes of the Moscow counteroffensive, was sent to the Volkhov Front as Meretskov's deputy in early March 1942. On 21 March he went into the pocket to take command of the 2nd Shock Army. The army was neither strengthened nor allowed to withdraw in time. On 30 and 31 May German attacks closed the mouth of the pocket again, and in late June Soviet attempts to open a corridor at its eastern end brought out only some of the wounded and other men. By 28 June the battle was over for the German 18th Army, which counted 33,000 prisoners.7
Vlasov hid in the forests and was captured by a German patrol on 12 July 1942. In captivity he agreed to work with the Germans and lent his name to the so-called Russian Liberation Army. In 1945 he fell into Soviet hands, and he was tried in Moscow and hanged as a traitor in August 1946.8
The cost was very high. The statistical study of Soviet losses edited by Grigori Krivosheev gives 308,367 casualties for the Volkhov Front and the 54th Army in the operation, of which 95,064 were killed, missing or captured. The Red Army pierced the blockade of Leningrad only in January 1943, and the siege finally ended on 27 January 1944. The Eastern Front battles around the city are covered in our guide to the greatest battles of the Eastern Front.9
