Word: riga
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shavli, cut the railroad from Riga to Tilsit in East Prussia, and left only a one-track line through Memel as an escape route for some 30 German divisions on the Baltic fronts. Bagramian then blocked even this forlorn loophole by broadening his salient northward to the junction at Jelgava...
Until that happened, the Germans seemed to be making some belated efforts to evacuate southward; Red pilots reported bombing southbound troop trains. But the railroads were lost now. At Jelgava, the Russians were only 25 miles from the sea. The Germans were thus caught in two pockets-one between Riga and the Gulf of Finland, the other between Riga and East Prussia...
...long as the Red Armies delayed an attack on East Prussia, the exit gate for the German Armies in the Baltic provinces stood open. But the Nazis were in dire peril. Having carved a huge salient in Lithuania, General Bagramian was closer last week to Riga than General Chernyakhovsky, at the Suwalki triangle, was to Konigsberg. Yet a breakthrough to Riga would bring in only part of the bag. Pulling the drawstring at Konigsberg might be more difficult, but it would pay off more handsomely...
General Zakharov's army overran Volkovysk, a junction on the railroad to Bialystok. General Ivan Bagramian reached far to the west of Dvinsk (still in Wehrmacht hands last week), found himself about 100 miles from the Gulf of Riga...
Already reports this week spoke of a wholesale, panicky flight of Germans and home-grown Nazis from the Baltic States to the Reich. Refugees clung to the roofs of overcrowded trains. In Riga, ships were packed with evacuees...