These dreadful battles were terrible, drawn out affairs in which many combatants and civilians died.
During the Second World War, the Soviet city of Leningrad endured a siege for more than two years and four months. It was blockaded in the south by the German Army Group North and from the north by the Finnish Army. The siege began on September 8, 1941 and it was not lifted until January 27, 1944 872 days later.
It was one of the costliest sieges in history as nearly 800,000 civilians were killed, nearly as many as there were World War II deaths of the United States and Great Britain combined! So great was the loss of life that historians have classified the siege as a genocide due to the systematic starvation and intentional destruction of the city’s civilian population.