Word: isthmus
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Southern Front. After two weeks of holding off repeated thrusts at their Mannerheim defenses in the Karelian Isthmus, the Finns last week began to retake ground previously lost to the Russians. By week's end detailed accounts of fighting became available. Trying to flank the Mannerheim Line, the Russians organized a big attack along the west bank of Lake Laatokka, where the Taipale River flows into the lake. First they had to cross the river, and a Finnish soldier told the United Press's Webb Miller what happened to 500 Russians there...
Isthmian Drive. Even more nastiness was in store for the Russians-especially in the Karelian Isthmus, historic gateway into Finland and the one Alexander I stormed with 17,000 men in 1808. Not only were roads, bridges and buildings mined-even a new bicycle left leaning against a fence was a detonator-but the Finns had utilized the geographical peculiarities of their country shrewdly...
Lowlands had been flooded, augmenting the chain of lakes across the isthmus and leaving only narrow strips of land between the lakes as passageway for invaders. This land, wooded and boulder-studded, was a natural anti-tank defense, to which the Finns had added long lines of jagged, diamond-shaped boulders, three deep, as their main lines of defense against tanks. Above the narrow roads other huge boulders had been poised, so that the mere cutting of a cord sent them hurtling into the road. Concrete pillboxes, sunk into the earth and covered with sod, guarded all main avenues...
...column reached Nurmes, cutting the railroad that runs diagonally across Finland from Tornio on the Swedish frontier to south Karelia and the isthmus. Farther north, another column took Suomussalmi and turned southward toward lisalmi, a rail junction in the centre of Finland. Still farther north, a third column bore down on the roadhead of Kuusamo. Most daring of all, the fourth division crossed the low mountains to Kuolajärvi and thence sped westward past Kemijärvi toward Rovaniemi, which lies on Finland's highway to the Arctic. From Rovaniemi this column might strike southward to Kemi...
Retired from active service, he still headed the national defense council which built a defense-in-depth system across the Karelian Isthmus. Fashionable, popular way for Finns to spend their vacation the past two years was to go dig on the Mannerheim Line. This stretches 55 miles across the lowlands and, besides pillboxes and blockhouses, it contains a maze of tank traps and barriers. The fields and fir forests here are studded with granite boulders, which the Finns arranged in serried ranks, buried deeply with their jagged points sticking six feet...