Word: govorov
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...units pierced an intricate system of defenses anchored on lakes and swamps; then crossed the Volkhov River over shattered ice and the flotsam & jetsam of a bridge the Germans blew up. Moscow's claim: 15,000 Germans killed, 3,000 captured. Last week the armies of Meretzkov and Govorov threatened to make mincemeat of Marshal von Küchler's battered forces...
Credit for victory went to the planner: General Leonid Govorov, plump, short, middleaged, with unruly hair and a Hitlerian mustache. In 1940 this artillery expert helped to open a corridor into Leningrad, broke the Germans' partial blockade but did not-as accounts at the time wrongly indicated-actually free the city. Until this month, German shells tore daily into Leningrad's brick-and-mortar flesh, and its defenders rode to the front in streetcars. More than a million had died of cold and hunger since Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb's army first besieged the city...
...Meretskov an army crossed the Volkhov River, drove west against the German corridor running to Schlüsselberg, kept going until the corridor was narrowed to nine miles. On Jan. 11 General Meretskov resumed the offensive. Simultaneously another drive struck east out of Leningrad under Major General Leonid A. Govorov. When the two armies met, seven days later, Leningrad was free...
...news spread through the city. Mozhaisk had been recaptured. The last German stronghold near the capital was again in Russian hands. Smoking Russian cold and smoking Russian artillery (under heavy-jawed Major General Leonid Alek-sandrovich Govorov, hero of World War I and the Finnish War) had at last shattered the carefully prepared German positions in the city...