The 900-day siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad by the combined forces of the Germans and the Finns is one of the most remarkable, and terrible, events of the Second World War, yet until recently it has not received the attention it deserves – it has been overshadowed by other massive confrontations on the Eastern Front, at Stalingrad and Kursk. And rarely has the compelling story of the siege been told through graphic wartime photographs like those that author Nik Cornish has collected for this book. Many of these images have not been published before, and they give an unflinching insight into the reality of the conditions of the siege as it was experienced by the soldiers on each side and by the civilians trapped in the city who were threatened by starvation, disease, shelling and assault. The entire course of the siege is covered, from the encirclement of September 1941, through the successive attempts by the Wehrmacht to break in and the dogged, sometimes desperate defence put up by the Red Army, to the withdrawal of the Germans and the lifting of the siege in January 1944.
Nik Cornish is a former head teacher whose passionate interest in the war on the Eastern Front and in the Red Army in particular has led to a series of important books on the subject including The Russian Army 1914-18, Images of Kursk, Stalingrad: Victory on the Volga and Berlin: Victory in Europe.