On the frigid morning of Feb. 10, 1943, the 5,900 soldiers of the 250th “Blue” Infantry Division — Spanish volunteers fighting for the Axis on the Eastern Front of World War II — were sitting in their trenches and dugouts when the high-explosive shells fired from hundreds of Soviet artillery pieces fell from the sky. For those soldiers, the world turned into fire.
Two hours later, three Soviet infantry divisions stormed into the Axis defensive positions, marking the beginning of the battle of Krasny Bor, an obscure but significant battle near Leningrad — still under siege at this point — which culminated in an Axis victory at the cost of the Blue Division, which was virtually destroyed.
Krasny Bor was part of the larger Soviet offensive Operation Polar Star, the brainchild of Gen. Georgy Zhukov following the success two weeks earlier of Operation Iska, which opened a short land — and soon rail — corridor into Leningrad, bringing badly needed supplies into the city.
Polar Star was far more ambitious, however, and Zhukov tasked three Soviet fronts with doing no less than punching through to the Baltic states in another example of Soviet “deep operations,” trapping and annihilating Germany’s Army Group North in the forests south of Leningrad. A second objective was to cut off the nearby Demyansk salient, a thumb-shaped protrusion deep inside Soviet lines.
Krasny Bor, situated 20 miles southeast of Leningrad’s city center, was a strategic point near the highway connecting besieged Leningrad to Moscow. It was here that the Blue Division sat when the artillery of Gen. Vladimir Sviridov’s 55th Army — some 38,000 soldiers combined — rained down.
Above — Blue Division troops on the Eastern Front.
