Two Sieges

Last week at opposite ends of the Russian Front, the German Army besieged two Russian cities:

Lionhearted Leningrad. Rain and the first snow, driving Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb's northern forces like Hitler's fury, impeded German and Finnish efforts to close the ring around Leningrad (see map).

Admitting that "hunger and internal confusion as aids in breaking the Russian resistance" were unpredictable elements, the Germans undertook a heavy and lengthy bombardment of the city. All day long-range Nazi cannon, skulking in ash-colored Karelian soil, cracked high explosives into Leningrad's defenses. All night the Eighth Air Corps and the ugly "black beetles" of the Luftwaffe's smart Richthofen Squadron dealt out destruction, until the night glowed red with fire and death.

Besieged in Leningrad, Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, establishing active defense positions far forward of the main line, made good use of a low semicircle of heights 15 miles to the south of the city. "Still shooting from all barrels," as Nazi correspondents admitted, Marshall Voroshilov's defenders repeatedly counterattacked. He announced that his forces had beaten off a minor German sea raid on the Kronstadt naval base, and claimed the capture of three villages, destruction of over 200 German tanks, 10,000 soldiers, on the outskirts of the defense line.

Within Leningrad the population became, according to Izvestia, "a wall of steel and concrete barring the enemy at the entrance." Listening to the radio, the defenders heard a broadcast from London's conservative BBC:

"Lionhearted Leningrad, city of the Revolution. London is with you. . . . London salutes the heroes of Leningrad. . . . Victory is yours. Long live Leningrad!"

Bloody Odessa. For five weeks the Rumanians under General Ion Antonescu have laid siege to the Black Sea port of Odessa. Locked within the city, whose present population is 605,000, is part of bogey-mustachioed Marshal Semion Budenny's Southern Army which retreated there after being chased out of Bessarabia last month. They claim to have killed thousands of Antonescu's Rumanians. Every now & then, they say, a placard reading "Cease Fire and Take Away Your Dead" has to be hoisted.

Bloodletting is nothing new to Odessa. During the Crimean War it was unsuccessfully attacked by the Franco-British Allies in 1854; later it was muffed by the Turks in the Russo-Turkish troubles of 1876-77. In an unforgettable silent film, Director Sergei Eisenstein recorded the Cossack slaughter and pogroms which followed the mutinied battleship's landing (1905) at Odessa's port. After the Bolshevik Revolution the city was in turn occupied by Austrian, German and French forces, and the monstrous General Simon Petlure (whose murderer a French jury in 1926 acquitted and fined one franc) also had his whacks. Finally in 1920 the Reds took it from the Whites.

This time Odessa has dug in for another bloody event. For trench digging, 100,000 spades have been manufactured in the caviar and sturgeon canning factories within, the past six weeks. Its defenders have been busy manufacturing "Molotov cocktails" (impromptu bombs) out of jam and fish cans; hatchets; crowbars; homemade armored cars. A sign in the telegraph office reads: "We do not guarantee time of arrival."

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