Tikhvin, November 1941: Leningrad's Last Artery

On the morning of 9 November 1941, the cold is already biting into the marshy forests southeast of Lake Ladoga. The day before, German divisions broke through the Soviet defense and captured Tikhvin, a small railway town whose vital importance no one, in Berlin or in Moscow, had suspected just a few weeks earlier. It was here that the rail line ran, carrying provisions and munitions to the wharves from which barges crossed Ladoga toward encircled Leningrad. By cutting this lifeline, the enemy threatens to suffocate a city of more than two million souls, where famine is already taking hold, ration after ration.

General Kirill Meretskov inherits a sector in tatters. His units, exhausted and thinly spread, have fallen back under the push of Army Group North; the roads are turning into frozen quagmires and the supply columns struggle to keep up. Yet the adversary is far from his bases, stretched along exposed flanks, ill-prepared for the Russian winter now descending. To the west, on the lake itself, a track is being improvised over the ice to make up for the lost rail line, but on its own it will never bear the weight of the siege. Every day counts: Leningrad's reserves are melting away before one's eyes.

Meretskov must decide quickly, under the anxious gaze of the Stavka.