Military Model Scene

Title: The Siege of Leningrad
Editor: Daniel Taylor
Publisher: After the Battle
ISBN: 978-1-39903-116-5

Another in the famous Then & Now series from After the Battle, now a part of Pen & Sword. A 96-page hard-cover book.
This starts with some background to the history of the city, and the various name changes over time. From St. Petersburg to Petrograd, to Leningrad and since the war, a return to St. Petersburg. Built across a number of islands, and with the Kronstadt naval base close by, it is sited between the Gulf of Finland to the west and Lake Ladoga to the east. Then came Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, there is the German plan for Army Group North to advance towards Leningrad. The citizens of the city had time to dig some impressive defences and when the German forces reached the city, they chose to put the city under siege rather than try to move in and capture it. The story then tells us how they managed to survive a siege that remained in place for 900 days! With Finnish forces approaching from the north, and Army Group North from the south, some 31/2 million people were bottled up. While artillery strikes and bombing caused many casualties, starvation was another major factor. It tells us of the challenges of trying to get supplies into the city, by ship when Lake Ladoga was navigable, but by horse-drawn or motor transport when ice roads could support such traffic. Reading what they did to provide food during the harsh winters, especially 1940/41, it doesn't make pleasant reading but no wonder around 1/3 of the population had died by the time the siege was finally lifted in 1944. The photos and their modern comparisons are first class. Some of the significant statues were boarded up to protect them, and these are still standing, shown in plenty of the modern comparisons. In addition to the main text, the pictures have extensive captions, and these provide much more detail for the story.
This is a new version of an article originally published in After the Battle magazine back in 2004m written by Karel Margry and Ron Hogg. That original feature has been edited by Daniel Taylor to create this new book, so if you have that original magazine in your collection, you may be content with that. However, if you want to find out more about this amazing story and how the people of Leningrad, or at least many of them, managed to survive in some terrible conditions. As the city was under siege, but not the scene of street fighting such as there was in Stalingrad, many of the buildings have survived, so the then and now comparisons are among the clearest you'll find I think.
Thanks to Pen & Sword for the review copy.

Robin