Word: leningraders
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...crisis for Leningrad was pointed to by Moscow's announcement last week that a Nazi battleship* and a 9,000-ton transport had been sunk by the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. Perhaps all-out R.A.F. attacks on Lübeck and Rostock, German Baltic supply bases, indicated the same thing...
Besieged since Aug. 8, Leningrad is still ringed some 30 miles away by Nazi guns. Capture of Leningrad would 1) isolate the Kronstadt naval base, opening the Baltic as a German supply line to the northern front; 2) clear direct communications to Finland; 3) penetrate the Russian right flank, making the menace to Moscow even graver than last year's; 4) prepare for supplying and manning a major offensive to cut Russia's vital, northern supply line via Murmansk...
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...
There was urgency about this, the only significant action on the Russian front last week. Only by shoving the Finns back could the Russians free the southern end of the Murmansk-Leningrad railroad and ensure the swift flow of goods from the Arctic port to the Baltic battlefront...
...Russians were putting on one last effort to take the German key points; they were attacking all along the line, but especially in the central part of the front, around Smolensk. In the far north, where winter still gripped the land, they were said to be sending reinforcements into Leningrad on a double-track railway over the ice of Lake Ladoga; in the far south also they were moving up reinforcements. There the land was thawing into the same awful gumbo that had sucked at hub caps back in the autumn, before the winter leave...