World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY (East): Something Bigger

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.

The 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.

Memel and Memel territory (a narrow strip of land along the Niemen’s north bank) are old East Prussian land. They were given to Lithuania after World War I; Hitler took them back by a bloodless coup in the spring of 1939. Fighting for Memel as desperately as they fought for Aachen on the west front, the Germans last week threw in four reinforcement divisions, launched 30 counterattacks in one day. They even attempted, vainly, an amphibious attack behind the Russian lines. At week’s end Bagramian isolated the post by a drive south of it which reached the Kurisches Haff, the 50-mile lagoon into which the Niemen empties.

Drive to East Prussia. Tauroggen, where the treasonable Convention of Tauroggen was signed in 1812, lies just outside the modern border of East Prussia. The Germans admitted evacuating Tauroggen last week, as General Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s army, which had long threatened the province from the east, now crowded close in the north. Red bombs rained on the East Prussian junction town of Tilsit, whose railroads lead to Insterburg and Königsberg.

It was a big week for the Russians, but, according to Paul Winterton of the London News Chronicle, the people of Moscow seemed to expect something bigger still. Since the Red Armies were about as busy as they could possibly be on the Baltic and Balkan flanks, “something bigger” could only come in the center—in Poland. “What’s coming,” said Winterton, “will make what’s gone by look like a sideshow.”