End of Siege

At 9:20 on a misty morning the signal came. As the men moved out, they saw silhouetted the massive St. Isaac's Cathedral, the battered Admiralty, the grey ships on the Neva. On the broad, cold Nevski Prospect the passers-by guessed: the hour was near.

Then all of Leningrad listened breathlessly to the music of battle. Like moles the Germans had burrowed deep into the alien earth; now thousands of tons of explosives dug them out.

Victory's Pattern. The Russians struck from two points at once. One column drove south from the city. Another pushed out from the tiny beachhead at Oranienbaum, 25 miles from Leningrad. Before both columns a broom of TNT swept a clear path.

By the fourth day, the enemy's defenses had been breached, his men put to flight. Then the two wedges became iron jaws, crushing the thin German salient still left between them. By the eighth day, Red units had taken a railroad to Moscow, were headed for the second.

In the Pulkovo Hills and south Oranienbaum, the Germans fought their hardest: their trenches were deep, mine fields vast, artillery plentiful. Now little was left of these defenses, and the snowy road across the hills was blotched with dark, ragged craters. Over the rear German positions, pounded by Russian bombers, black ack-ack puffs spotted the milky sky.

This pitted, tortured soil was Russia's proudest. At Ropsha Peter the Great built a magnificent palace. At Krasnoye Selo Alexander Suvorov, the 18th century hero, trained his men and shouted: "Battles are not won in offices." At Peterhof the Czars kept their priceless works of art. Now the palaces and treasures had been wrecked, looted. But Russian soil was back in Russian hands.

Victory's Rewards. Black columns of weary, stunned prisoners straggled into Leningrad. The passers-by laughed and shouted. For this was a great victory: an 880-day siege had been lifted, 25,000 Germans (according to Moscow) had been killed in six days, 85 huge siege guns had been captured. The Baltic Fleet was free again to sail into the Gulf of Finland. Red columns were pressing toward Estonia 56 miles away.

Credit for victory went to the planner: General Leonid Govorov, plump, short, middleaged, with unruly hair and a Hitlerian mustache. In 1940 this artillery expert helped to open a corridor into Leningrad, broke the Germans' partial blockade but did not--as accounts at the time wrongly indicated--actually free the city. Until this month, German shells tore daily into Leningrad's brick-and-mortar flesh, and its defenders rode to the front in streetcars. More than a million had died of cold and hunger since Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb's army first besieged the city in 1941. Last week, after their long torture, the survivors of Leningrad could hardly believe that the siege had ended. Already there was talk of making the city beautiful again. But on many a wall a sign still warned: "Citizens, this side of the street is dangerous during shelling."

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