The Spark Ended the Siege
After more than 800 days under siege and two separate attempts to end it, the Red Army finally felt that they had a way to break through the German blockade and save the city. In 1944 the plan to end the blockade was called the “Spark.” It was carefully planned and it took what the Soviets had learned from their Lyubavinskaya and Sinyavinskaya operations and applied it to the latest operation. The operation planned two fronts at Volkhov and Leningrad and then a move forward to the Mga train station to try and restore communication with Leningrad. Intelligence operations had pieced together a very accurate idea of the Nazi army at Leningrad and the plan was to strike at a narrow stretch of land between Mga and Lake Ladoga.
This was the Nazi bottleneck and there were 5 Wehrmacht divisions of more than 10,000 men each, 50 tanks and over 700 guns. All this was supported from the air with 250 combat planes. When the Red Army marched on the bottleneck, they outnumbered the Nazis. They had 20 divisions, 5,000 guns, 540 tanks and more than 800 planes, this time they were determined to free Leningrad. On January 12th, the Red Army hit the Germans on all sides. Planes dropped bombs and protected the infantry from the air, tanks crossed the neck with a goal of pushing the Germans back 2 to 4 km a day. It was slow progress but the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts continued moving toward each other. Then on January 18th, the two fronts met and by the end of the day the south coast of Lake Ladoga was free of enemy troops. The Red Army continued to push back the Germans and even put down a 30 km long railroad in just 17 days. On February 7th, the first train filled with food arrived in Leningrad.