In the Soup

German troops, dug in along the 900-mile front from Narva to Galati, awaited the opening of the Red Army's main summer offensive. They were informed by Colonel Ernst von Hammer, via DNB, that the Russians were massing for attack 1) on the lower Dniester, 2) around Brody and Tarnopol in old Poland, 3) at Gomel, facing central Poland, 4) in the Narva gap between Lake Peipus and the Gulf of Finland. The Germans seemed (with sound reason) to be expecting a lot of trouble from the east.

But the Russians had some unfinished business to attend to before they would be ready to unleash their 1944 drive to the west. Hitler's Finnish satellites, said Pravda, "have become entangled in the dirty Fascist game." The Finns must first be pushed out of the Karelian Isthmus and preferably out of the war. The diplomatic offensive had failed (see U.S. AT WAR). Now the Finns and their German allies were facing the real storm.

Clearing the Flank. This was more than a grudge fight, in revenge for Finnish aid in the shelling and starvation of Leningrad. It was a full-dress offensive designed to clear the flank of the Soviet armies already poised for the drive into the Baltic states.

As long as the Finns held the northeastern shore of ten-mile-wide Kronstadt Bay (easternmost projection of the Gulf of Finland), the Soviet Baltic Fleet was in no position to give full support to land operations along the southern, Estonian shore of the Gulf. But with the Karelian shore of the Bay in Russian hands, with Viipuri's batteries silenced, the Red Fleet could move along the Estonian coast, safe from enfilading fire, in support of advancing ground troops, or even as part of an amphibious offensive to flank Riga.

Priming Charge. As newly promoted Marshal Leonid A. Govorov's armies fought along four parallel lines toward Viipuri, even the unhappy Finns seemed to realize that they would be blasted out of the war. (It was Govorov's capture of Viipuri, Finland's second port, which had ended the Finnish War in 1940.) To penetrate three layers of the Mannerheim Line, Artillery Specialist Govorov used the Russian generals' favorite weapon: a series of withering artillery barrages. By week's end the Russians had cracked through the line on the west to capture the fortress city of Koivisto, were reported nearing Viipuri.

The Finns, without help from the seven German divisions farther north (who were pinned down by other Russian assaults), fought stubbornly. But heavy bombers blasted ambush parties out of the forest. The Red Navy's ancient battleship Oktiabrskaya-Revolutia and modern cruiser Kirov helped to clear the coast which would give them freedom of maneuver. The Finns were in the soup and the fire was getting hot.

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