Word: leningraders
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...word "Hiroshima" does not appear in Time's history of the Pacific war and is only mentioned in the article on the war in Europe, where its 100,000 dead are compared favorably to the 600,000 who starved to death in Leningrad. Time's "master historian" seems to have forgotten that the Pacific war ended the way it started: in fire and blood, the air filled with the debris of lives, blasted apart from above. America "proved invincible," he says: its methods are left to the readers to puzzle out, if we can remember them...
Like Moscow, the city had been surprised by the speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Three weeks after the invasion, German forces were already 125 miles south of Leningrad. But where many Muscovites panicked, residents of the old imperial capital resolutely began building a network of barricades outside the city -- a million volunteers in a city of almost 3 million; many died as they labored, killed by Nazi bombs and machine-gun attacks. But in July and August they produced 340 miles of antitank ditches, 15,875 miles of open trenches, 400 miles of barbed-wire fences, 5,000 pillboxes...
...other major city in the war would suffer as many civilian deaths as Leningrad. Not Dresden, which was virtually flattened by bombers and where 30,000 died in one night of air raids. Not even Hiroshima, where about 100,000 were killed by a single bomb. In Leningrad the official Soviet death toll for the two-winter-long siege was 632,253, mostly of starvation. Other sources put the figure at more than 1 million...
...Leningrad was almost completely isolated: to the west was the Baltic Sea, to the east Lake Ladoga, to the south the advancing Wehrmacht, to the north the Finns, who, while not formally allied with Germany, were fighting their own war with the Soviet Union. But the city's defenders kept the enemy at bay and, again, winter helped. Lake Ladoga froze to a thickness that would support an escape route for hundreds of thousands of refugees -- and a way in for food. The Russian counteroffensive that began on Dec. 5, 1941, also relieved pressure on the city. By early...
Death came in many guises in the war. Soldiers were slaughtered at the battlefront. Guerrillas perished in ambushes. Civilians were killed by bullets, bombs and artillery shells, disease and, as in Leningrad, starvation. But Europe was afflicted with an even greater evil. Hitler and his toadies, obsessed with purity and genealogies and with nurturing a superior race, set out to realize their nightmare vision with murderous efficiency...