Word: karelians
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...helped prevent the German from shattering Russia's Murmansk supply route and enabled Russia to keep Kronstadt, its last base in the Baltic. From Kronstadt Russian submarines and other survivors of the Red Fleet last week were still harassing Axis ships in the Gulf of Finland. On the Karelian Isthmus Russian soldiers were still holding off Finnish assaults. Leeb's armies, which once had plunged 125 miles east, now had been pushed back 100 miles and were holding a corridor only eight miles wide stretching north to Lake Ladoga (see map). Against both sides of the corridor...
Reindeer and horses still pulled sleighs through the haphazard streets of Murmansk. From that fine, deep-water Arctic harbor all the way to Leningrad, 650 miles south, winter snows still blanketed the land. Moving across the solidly frozen earth of the Karelian Isthmus, the Red Army smashed again & again at the tough Finnish defenders, drove a trio of wedges into the Finnish lines despite desperate tank and infantry counterattacks. East of beleaguered Leningrad Red troops lately transported from Siberia hacked away at Finnish positions on the Aunus Isthmus between Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega...
...Prince and his escort moved on. They had passed from Finnish soil to soil the Russians had stolen from Finland; now they moved on to soil the Finns had just stolen from Russia-ancient Karelian soil, not Russian, said the Finns. As they went the Finnish officers explained why Finns keep on fighting Russia...
Admitting that "hunger and internal confusion as aids in breaking the Russian resistance" were unpredictable elements, the Germans undertook a heavy and lengthy bombardment of the city. All day long-range Nazi cannon, skulking in ash-colored Karelian soil, cracked high explosives into Leningrad's defenses. All night the Eighth Air Corps and the ugly "black beetles" of the Luftwaffe's smart Richthofen Squadron dealt out destruction, until the night glowed red with fire and death...
...week's end, despite denials from Helsinki and Berlin, Uncle Joe Stalin appeared to be trying to maneuver Finland out of the war. He withdrew 15 divisions from the Karelian Isthmus. Having recaptured Viipuri, which the Russians took from them in 1940, the Finns, by the Russians' withdrawal, will now have virtually all their pre-1940 territory back again. Stalin evidently hoped that the Finns, anxious to retain the friendship of the U.S. and embarrassed by their alliance with Hitler, might now pile arms and pull out of the campaign...