#39 w/Tijvin 1941

The game simulates the German offensive and the Soviet counteroffensive that took place in the autumn and early winter of 1941 in the Leningrad region. This was part of the German attempt to further isolate the city by contacting the Finns descending on the Karelian region, and to bring down the city of Lenin.

The Germans launched the offensive with an unrealistic plan, in terrain unsuitable for mechanized movement, in weather that was going from bad to worse, and against an enemy that was recovering from the summer’s border battles. Even so they managed to capture their first, and ultimately furthest, objective when they took the town of Tijvin. After that, seeing that it was impossible to advance further to join up with the Finns, who had in any case stopped advancing south, they redirected their efforts to take the city of Volkhov. This would cut the “highway of life” for good, which was the umbilical cord that kept the city of Leningrad barely supplied and on which its survival depended.

With the arrival of Soviet reinforcements and German exhaustion cam the Soviet counteroffensive, which pushed the Germans, after more than two months since the start of their offensive, back to their starting positions in what was a smaller-scale repeat of what had happened further south during Operation Typhoon.