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No further convoys attempted this route. On 9 December, after a series of piecemeal attacks on the overextended German salient’s southern flank, the Fourth Army, taken over by General Meretskov a month earlier, finally retook Tikhvin in heavy fighting, leaving up to nine thousand German dead.5 Supply trains could now be unloaded at Tikhvin, and the truck route shortened to 160 kilometres — 130 kilometres overland by way of Novaya Ladoga and Kobona, and 30 over the lake. The liberation of two more railway towns, Voibokalo and Zhikharevo, allowed a further improvement: from 1 January supply trains were able to unload only thirteen kilometres from the lake shore, and the truck route was reduced to less than forty-five kilometres. Thereafter, deliveries over the Ice Road — in reality six different parallel routes — gradually improved. Though plagued by blizzards, bad management (the Road’s first head, a Colonel Zhmakin, was sacked for incompetence), German bombing and bottlenecks along the small, underequipped Osinovets — Leningrad railway, a total 270,900 tonnes of food and 90,000 of fuel and other supplies were delivered by the time the ice melted again at the end of April.6

Less successful were November and December’s attempts to lift the siege itself. On his departure for Moscow, Zhukov had bequeathed the Leningrad front a tiny, bloodily won bridgehead on the left bank of the Neva just to the south of Shlisselburg, the so-called ‘Nevsky pyatachok’, or ‘Neva five-kopek piece’. Only two kilometres long and less than a kilometre deep, it looked significant on the maps but was in reality far too small and exposed (the Germans held a fortress-like power station just along the river) to form the platform for a successful breakout. Successive attempts — on 2, 9, 11 and 13 November — all failed, at enormous cost.

A parallel breakout attempt, over lake ice to Shlisselburg’s north, was a fiasco. On 13 November the 80th Rifle Division was flown out of the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’ to Leningrad, force-marched to Ladoga and then ordered to charge entrenched German positions. A large number of men fell through the too-thin ice; others, emaciated and exhausted, dropped even before the attack began. Stalin was furious at not being informed of the disaster: ‘It’s very odd that Comrade Zhdanov seems to feel no need to come to the phone. . One supposes that in Comrade Zhdanov’s head Leningrad isn’t in the USSR, but on some island in the Pacific Ocean.’7 Zhdanov scapegoated the hapless officers in charge, Colonel Ivan Frolov and Commissar Konstantin Ivanov. Three hours before the attack began, their sentencing document records, Frolov had ‘declared to two Front representatives that he did not believe in the successful outcome of the operation’ — words underlined in the copy sent to Zhdanov. On 3 December both men were shot, for ‘cowardice and defeatism’.8 In total, of the roughly 300,000 Red Army troops employed in the battle for Tikhvin and its associated offensives, 110,000 were recorded as ill or wounded, and 80,000 as killed, captured or missing. On the German side, casualties were 45,000.

For the Eastern Front in general, the close of 1941 was nonetheless a genuine turning point. The Germans had encircled Leningrad but failed to take it, and were also being brought to a halt outside Moscow. In early November, slowed by slushy snow and Zhukov’s brilliantly organised resistance, Operation Typhoon had begun to peter out. The psychological turning point was 7 November — Revolution Day — on the eve of which Stalin gave a defiant speech in the Mayakovsky metro station, followed by the magnificent gamble of a full-scale military parade in Red Square. Faced with deepening cold and mounting casualties, Hitler’s generals asked permission to dig in for the winter. ‘The time for spectacular operational feats is past’, Halder wrote in his diary on the 11th: ‘Our troops can’t be moved around any more.’ Hitler disagreed, insisting that Moscow be taken by the end of the year. Reluctantly, his generals reanimated the offensive. ‘Field Marshal Bock has himself taken charge of the Battle of Moscow, from an advanced command post’, Halder noted on the 22nd. ‘With enormous energy he drives forward everything that can be brought to bear.’ Though the German divisions to the south were ‘finished’ — one regiment in his old 7th Division, Halder noted, was now commanded by a first lieutenant — in the north they still had a chance of success and were being ‘driven relentlessly to achieve it. Von Bock compares the situation to the battle of the Marne, where the last battalion that could be thrown in tipped the balance.’ A week later Bock telephoned Halder again. It was not the Marne that he compared the battle to now, but Verdun — ‘a brutish chest-to-chest struggle of attrition. . I emphasise that we too are concerned about the human sacrifice. But an effort must be made to bring the enemy to his knees by applying the last ounce of strength.’9