After The Battle

The Siege of Leningrad

Then And Now

This volume is an expansion of an article first printed in After The Battle magazine issue 123, first published in 2004. That article was written by Karel Margry and Ron Hogg, with the then-current photographs of Leningrad sites by Vladimir Skvortsov and Tatiana Yeliseyeva. This current book has been edited by noted military historian and author Dan Taylor.

In a World War full of horrific events, the 900 day siege of Leningrad by the Germans ranked right there with the worst of them. During a deliberate attempt to starve the city and all within it into submission, roughly 1.5 million people were bombed, shelled and starved to death, reduced to boiling wallpaper to extract and eat the flour based glue it’d been stuck on walls with. This book examines the siege of the city, the military actions, and the effects on the residents of Leningrad, with period images taken during the siege compared with images taken in 2003.

Vital Statistics

Format - hardcover, portrait format

Page Count -  96 pages

Size - 7.0” x 10.25”

Photos - Black and White WWII period images, modern (circa 2003) images also in Black and White

Tables / drawings / diagrams - some maps of the Leningrad area

All text and photograph captions are in English.

What's between the Covers?

Above - the book’s chapters are laid out in a chronological manner, from the opening days of the German invasion, until the lifting of the siege in 1944.

The book opens with a well written examination of the June 22, 1941 German invasion of Soviet Russia, its goals and forces available. Above right is one of the good maps included in the book. 

The hallmark of the well known “Then And Now” series of books are the images of wartime scenes compared with similar photos taken years later, in this case, 2003. Above, a classic example of this; a militia unit crossing a bridge in what’s likely late 1941, compared to an image of the exact same spot years later.

The text and photo captions are crisply and cleanly written, making this volume a pleasure to thumb through.

Above - Leningrad was a major center for Soviet tank production, with two factories building tanks as the Germans advanced towards the city. Much of the vital factory machinery and tooling were evacuated further east to the Ural Mountains region just ahead of the Germans closing the the loop around the city. Above is an iconic then and now scene featuring a pair of what are likely locally produced KV-1 tanks. 

Above - an interesting map showing details of WWII Leningrad and it’s various points of interest, captioned so the reader can identify where significant buildings, bridges and factories were.

Above - this is a typical two page spread, showing the general layout of the “then and now” images with the text and captions. 

The images found throughout this volume are generally of good quality, with just a couple of the war time images being a bit dark or grainy. But the photos are all well selected for interest, which makes all images in this volume of value.

Above - the volume provides a very informative chapter on the tenuous lifeline the Soviets utilized for the bare minimum supplies that were able to reach the city during the siege; a winter time ice road across the frozen Lake Ladoga. This chapter is a fascinating look at what measures were employed in desperate times. A terrific map is included on the chapter’s opening page.

Above is the book’s closing paragraph. Interesting reading historically, and quite valid today.

Conclusions

I have been reading and enjoying the Then And Now books since the mid 1980’s, with my purchase of the massive Battle of the Bulge title. At just 96 pages, this volume is nowhere near as massive as many of those huge earlier titles, but is a very worthy successor to those iconic earlier books.

The “Now” photos contained in this volume are 20+ years old already, but are still of a good quality and interest. The sites where they were taken are very likely much the same in any case, I believe.

The text work and photograph captioning is very good, crisp, concise and quite readable. This book was a pleasure to examine.

Highly Recommended! 

Thanks to Casemate for the review copy

Reviewed by Chuck Aleshire, AMPS Chicagoland

AMPS 2nd Vice President, Midwest Region

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