On the north shore of Lake Laatokka lies the busy sawmill town of Sortavala, strategically as important a town as there is in all of Finland. Sortavala is the junction of two railroads, one leading north to Finland's waist, which the Russians have been trying to cut, the other going southwest to Viipuri and the Mannerheim Line, which the Russians have been trying to storm. Through this town pass Finnish troops withdrawn from one front to reinforce the other. If Russia had Sortavala, the mobility of the Finnish Army would be dangerously curtailed and Russia would have a railroad on which to drive toward Viipuri. For two months the Russians have been trying to take this town. Last week their effort had developed into one of the bitterest battles of the war.
All week long the Russians pounded at the Finnish lines along the Aittojoki and the Kollaanjoki (joki is Finnish for river), northeast of Sortavala. They fought valiantly, desperately, for behind them the Finns were beginning to close in, ahead of them the Finns had already trapped two divisions of their comrades. These two beleaguered Russian divisions were at Kitela, only 24 miles east of Sortavala, and had been there for weeks. Using the same tactics that had won at Suomussalmi (TIME, Jan. 22), the Finns had first retreated, then made a stand at Kitela, while encircling forces cut the Russian supply lines. Their food gone, the Russians had to live on provisions dropped by parachute. But last week help was no nearer than the Kollaan and Aitto rivers, and the two divisions at Kitela, their morale sapped by hunger and cold, could not even flee back to Russia.
Shells from the Finnish Fort Mantsi barred their retreat by road. And to the northeast, between the trapped divisions and their would-be rescuers, the woods were full of Finns. The relief forces, reported to be led by Russia's famed, swashbuckling Marshal Simeon Budenny, pounded the Finns' granite defense lines with artillery until the frozen earth was a morass of mud and slush, but every time they tried to break through they were caught in a murderous cross fire. As the Russian attacks grew weaker, the Finns took the offensive, capturing tanks and armored cars. Russian casualties mounted. The Finns, too, left many dead, but the Russian push was so disorganized that the Finns began to talk of the battle as the "biggest victory" of the war. Foreigners in Helsinki, who had doubted that the Finns could resist a determined drive to flank the Mannerheim Line, were amazed at the strength of the Finnish mobile defense. To the Finns it was just another example of the efficacy of their Commander in Chief's standing order to his Army: "Hit them in the belly." Well does Field Marshal Mannerheim know that supply is Russia's weakness in this war, as it has been in all of Russia's wars.