Word: baltic
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Founded in 1158 as a storehouse for Bremen merchants, later a Hanseatic League port, Riga is less valuable as a harbor than Tallinn to the north or Memel to the south-because the Gulf of Riga freezes over for four months. But Riga was the last Baltic capital in Nazi hands, and therefore a great symbolic prize for the Russians...
...miles north of Memel. The Germans trapped between Memel and Riga began trying to escape from Libau, Latvia's second-largest port, and from the port of Windau farther north, under a hail of fire from Red planes. At night people on Gotland Island, which lies in the Baltic west of Latvia, saw flashes from big naval guns...
...week for the Russians, but, according to Paul Winterton of the London News Chronicle, the people of Moscow seemed to expect something bigger still. Since the Red Armies were about as busy as they could possibly be on the Baltic and Balkan flanks, "something bigger" could only come in the center-in Poland. "What's coming," said Winterton, "will make what's gone by look like a sideshow...
Around the defense perimeter, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and back to the North Sea, the quality of German resistance was spotty...
...real significance of the new offensive was that it marked the impending close of the Baltic campaign. Soon the Russians would have eight whole army groups north of the Carpathians with nothing left to attack but East Prussia and the line from that province through Warsaw to the upper Vistula-sectors which seemed long overdue for attention...