Word: rigas
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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...
...Nazi commander at Riga, a colonel general named Schemer, seemed bent on holding it all winter, ice or no ice. The town was girdled by a 25-mile belt of ferroconcrete pillboxes, tank traps and barbed wire. According to Soviet reporters, Schemer executed German troops who showed signs of wavering; eleven soldiers found skulking in a movie house were shot in the streets. Izvestia made the statement that 800 German tanks were hurled into the defense of Riga, that 500 of them were knocked out by Red fire...
Last week the armies of Generals Ivan Masslenikov and Andrei Yeremenko crashed through the defense belt from the northeast and southeast, fought their way into the wide boulevards of the suburbs, into the narrow, winding streets of the town. Riga fell. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin ordered the maximum victory salute: 24 salvos from 324 guns...
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...
...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...