Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
Plunge to the Sea. Earlier in the week, bald and black-mustached General Ivan Bagramian-the onetime Armenian herdsman and train mechanic who first reached the Gulf of Riga last summer-reached the sea again, this time 15 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...
...near the nickel mines and the Norwegian frontier. Colonel General Lothar Rendulic had two divisions in the far north based on the Norwegian port of Kirkenes (35 miles northwest of Petsamo); three divisions were based farther south on the railroad town of Rovaniemi (65 miles north of the Gulf of Bothnia...
...Leroy ("Tex") Harris, escorting the bombers over Davao Gulf, reported by radio that they had spotted a Jap destroyer. Tex radioed blithely: "Wait about five minutes and I'll tell you where it was-repeat was." Less than five minutes later the bombers had sunk the destroyer...
...Russians claimed that they had 15 enemy divisions "on the verge" of entrapment between Memel and Riga. Allied observers took this with some salt, recalling that when Bagramian drove to the Gulf of Riga last summer, 20 to 30 German divisions were supposed to have been bottled up in the north. The net bag, when that region was finally cleaned up last month, was not much more than five divisions...