The Sinyavino heights, which became the site of fierce hostilities in the period 1941-1944, played a decisive role in the battle for Leningrad. It was in the forests and swamps near the small village of Sinyavino that the fate of the heroic besieged city was decided.
By the beginning of the fall of the forty-first, the northern wing of the Soviet-German front was characterized by a rather alarming operational situation - the symbol of Soviet power, Leningrad, was under threat of capture. On September 8, after the loss of Shlisselburg, a dense suffocating ring closed around the country's second largest city and its strategic importance. Communication with the mainland was interrupted, which threatened Leningrad with the most serious consequences. Especially in light of the loss of the wooden Badayevsky warehouses with food burned by a German air bomb, which the party leadership of the city did not guess to disperse into well-fortified underground storage facilities.
In such a situation, the Sinyavino Heights were chosen quite reasonably as the direction of the main deblocking strike. On this territory, the distance between the two Soviet fronts - Volkhov andLeningradsky turned out to be the most minimal. Another important reason that the Sinyavin Heights were chosen as the main direction of breaking through the blockade ring is their dominance over the surrounding area from a tactical point of view. Consequently, the capture of a chain of these hills made it possible to seize the strategic initiative and take control of vast low-lying territories from Ladoga on the northern flank to the Mga River on the southern.
The brutal and bloody battles on the Sinyavino Heights can be divided into three stages. The first of them started on the night of September 20, the forty-first crossing of one of the battalions of the one hundred and fifteenth rifle division to the left bank of the Neva, held by the divisions of the commander-in-chief of the German army grouping "North", Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb. There was no stubborn resistance by the enemy, which made it possible to capture a small bridgehead, on which units of the first NKVD division, the fourth brigade of the marines and directly the main units of the 115th SD landed.
With such forces, they managed to cut the highway connecting Leningrad with Shlisselburg, and come close to the 8th GRES captured by the Germans. This legendary bridgehead went down in history under the name "Nevsky Piglet". In fact, this was the first success of our troops on the Leningrad front. Parts of the fifty-fourth army of Lieutenant General Ivan Fedyuninsky made their way from the Volkhov direction to the Nevsky Piglet. The offensive of our troops from two converging directions toThe Sinyavino Heights were gaining momentum. The advanced units were already separated by no more than 12-16 km, when the strike units of the 54th Army ran into stiff enemy resistance and, having suffered heavy losses, were forced to retreat. The impossibility of capturing the Sinyavinsky Heights eventually turned into a failure of the entire tactical plan.
The second stage of the Sinyavino operation began in August 1942 with a strike by troops from two Soviet fronts. At the same time, divisions of the Eleventh Army from the Crimea began to arrive in the rather battered Army Group North, already commanded by Karl Küchler, with its large-caliber siege artillery, which destroyed Sevastopol and its fortifications. The situation was complicated by the fact that Manstein's well-equipped and trained Crimean divisions took up positions along the Neva from Lake Ladoga to Leningrad.
Front intelligence managed to get information about the arrival of fresh German units in time. And in order to preempt the enemy assault on Leningrad, which was instructed to be led by Field Marshal Manstein by Hitler himself, two Soviet fronts launched an attack on the Sinyavin Heights. The memorial and the Walk of Fame, whose construction began in 1975, keep 64 marble slabs with the names of the fallen soldiers engraved on them.
Returning to August forty-second, it should be noted that in the first hours of the offensive, units of the Volkhov Front suffered heavy losses. Despite this, by the end of August, the gap with the encircled city was steadily shrinking, and Manstein had to throw his reserve into battle - the 170thCrimean division. In the battle on the Sinyavino Heights, German troops intended for the September assault on Leningrad were grinded up like in a meat grinder.
For two days of fighting (August 27 and 28) we managed to break through the powerful German defenses. Developing success, our troops continued the offensive towards the Neva. This time the chain of the Sinyavin Heights was taken. But Manstein managed to concentrate strike groups from his reserve in the place of the breakthrough. As a result, our units, deepening into the breakthrough, were surrounded. Part of the troops later still managed to escape from this trap, but the majority perished in the Sinyavinsky swamps. A successfully launched offensive again ended in failure.
The third stage of the Sinyavino operation, this time crowned with success, began in January 1943. The direction of the main blow was the peat mining area located north of Sinyavino. In this area, the Germans created a fairly powerful defensive line. In each of the eight workers' settlements located here, a well-fortified stronghold was created. On January 12, a well-planned offensive began. And already on the eighteenth day, the reunion of the advanced units of the two fronts - the Volkhov and Leningrad ones - took place. This operation was, in its essence, a generalization of the unsuccessful experience of previous offensives. Perhaps that is why it ended successfully.
