Lake Ilmen
Lake Ilmen is a large lake in the Novgorod Oblast of Russia. It's a important lake, which formed a vital part of the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks; the city of Novgorod -, a major trade center of the route - lies six kilometers below the lake's outflow. According to the Max Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary, the name of the lake originates from the Finnic "Ilmajärvi", which means "air lake". There are many lakes in Russia with their names being derivative from Lake Ilmen; the average surface area is 982 square kilometres. The lake is fed by 52 inflowing rivers, the four main ones being the Msta, the Pola, the Lovat, the Shelon, it is drained through a single outlet, the Volkhov, into Lake Ladoga, subsequently via the Neva into the Gulf of Finland. The source of the Volkhov is marked by the Peryn Chapel built in the 1220s; the basin of Lake Ilmen contains vast areas in Novgorod and Tver Oblasts of Russia, as well as minor areas in the north of Vitebsk Region in Belarus. The water level is regulated by the Volkhov hydroelectric plant situated downstream the Volkhov River.
Water temperature in July is 19-20 °C. The bathing season is about 90 days. Lake Ilmen is navigable. Shipping lines are Veliky Novgorod – Staraya Russa and Veliky Novgorod – Shimsk. There is a fishery in the lake; the lake area was the location of an important battle during the Demyansk Pocket. Media related to Ilmen Lake at Wikimedia Commons
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, with 5 million inhabitants in 2012, part of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration with a population of 6.2 million. An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject. Situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703. During the periods 1713–1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia. In 1918, the central government bodies moved to Moscow, about 625 km to the south-east. Saint Petersburg is one of the most modern cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital; the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. Many foreign consulates, international corporations and businesses have offices in Saint Petersburg. An admirer of everything German, Peter the Great named the city, Sankt-Peterburg.
On 1 September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city Petrograd, meaning "Peter's city", in order to expunge the German name Sankt and Burg. On 26 January 1924, shortly after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was renamed to Leningrad, meaning "Lenin's City". On 6 September 1991, Sankt-Peterburg, was returned. Today, in English the city is known as "Saint Petersburg". Local residents refer to the city by its shortened nickname, Piter; the city's traditional nicknames among Russians are the Window to Europe. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in what was called Ingermanland, inhabited by Finnic tribe of Ingrians; the small town of Nyen grew up around it. At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great, interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, wanted Russia to gain a seaport in order to trade with the rest of Europe, he needed a better seaport than the country's main one at the time, on the White Sea in the far north and closed to shipping during the winter.
On 12 May 1703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans and soon replaced the fortress. On 27 May 1703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city; the city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia. Tens of thousands of serfs died building the city; the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, 9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan. By 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals; the project is evident in the layout of the streets.
In 1716, Peter the Great appointed Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. The style of Petrine Baroque, developed by Trezzini and other architects and exemplified by such buildings as the Menshikov Palace, Kunstkamera and Paul Cathedral, Twelve Collegia, became prominent in the city architecture of the early 18th century. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great. In 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two, his endeavours to modernize Russia had met with opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life and a treason case involving his son. In 1728, Peter II of Russia moved his seat back to Moscow, but four years in 1732, under Empress Anna of Russia, Saint Petersburg was again designated as the capital of the Russian Empire. It remained the seat of the Romanov dynasty and the Imperial Court of the Russian Tsars, as well as the seat of the Russian government, for another 186 years until the communist revolution of 1917.
In 1736–1737 the city suffered from catastrophic fires. To rebuild the damaged boroughs, a committee under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich commissioned a new plan in 1737; the city was divided into five boroughs, the city centre was moved to the Admiralty borough, situated on the east bank between the Neva and Fontanka. It developed along three radial streets, which meet at the Admiralty building and are now one street known as Nevsky Prospekt, Gorokhovaya Street and Voznesensky Prospekt. Baroque architecture became dominant in the city during the first sixty years, culminating in the Elizabethan Baroque, represented most notably by Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli with such buildings as the Winter Palace. In the 1760s, Baroque architecture was succeeded by neoclassical architecture. Established in 1762, the Commission of Stone Buildings of Moscow and Saint Petersburg ruled that no structure in the
Line of communication
A line of communication is the route that connects an operating military unit with its supply base. Supplies and reinforcements are transported along the line of communication. Therefore, a secure and open line of communication is vital for any military force to continue to operate effectively. Prior to the advent of the use of telegraph and radio in warfare, lines of communication were the routes used by despatch riders on horseback and runners to convey and deliver orders and battle updates to and from unit commanders and headquarters. Thus, a unit whose lines of communication were compromised was vulnerable to becoming isolated and defeated, as the means for requesting reinforcements and resupply is lost; the standard military abbreviation is LOC, or SLOC for Sea line of communication or ALOC for air line of communication. The interdiction of supplies and reinforcements to units closer to the front lines is therefore an important strategic goal for opposing forces; some notable examples: The Siege of Vicksburg in the American Civil War, in which Ulysses S. Grant encircled the city, leading to its eventual surrender in July 1863 The Battle of France in World War II, in which the Germans cut off the French and British armies in Belgium The encirclement of German 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II United States attacks on the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War Aerial refueling Airlift Army engineering maintenance Expeditionary maneuver warfare Integrated logistics support Logistician Logistics Officer Military logistics Military supply chain management NATO Stock Number Performance-based logistics Seabasing Sealift Train Underway replenishment Battle of Pusan Perimeter logistics British logistics in the Falklands War British logistics in the Second Boer War a line of communication can refers to a civilian management The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.
S. Military. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press
Ordnungspolizei
The Ordnungspolizei, abbreviated Orpo, were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1945. The Orpo organization was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdiction was removed in favor of the central Nazi government; the Orpo was under the administration of the Interior Ministry, but led by members of the Schutzstaffel until the end of World War II. Owing to their green uniforms, Orpo were referred to as Grüne Polizei; the force was first established as a centralized organisation uniting the municipal and rural uniformed police, organised on a state-by-state basis. The Ordnungspolizei encompassed all of Nazi Germany's law-enforcement and emergency response organizations, including fire brigades, coast guard, civil defense. In the prewar period, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Kurt Daluege, chief of the Order Police, cooperated in transforming the police force of the Weimar Republic into militarised formations ready to serve the regime's aims of conquest and racial annihilation.
Police troops were first formed into battalion-sized formations for the invasion of Poland, where they were deployed for security and policing purposes taking part in executions and mass deportations. During World War II, the force had the task of policing the civilian population of the conquered and colonized countries beginning in spring 1940. Orpo's activities escalated to genocide with the invasion of Operation Barbarossa. Twenty-three police battalions, formed into independent regiments or attached to Wehrmacht security divisions and Einsatzgruppen, perpetrated mass murder in the Holocaust and were responsible for widespread crimes against humanity and genocide targeting the civilian population. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was named Chief of German Police in the Interior Ministry on 17 June 1936 after Hitler announced a decree, to "unify the control of police duties in the Reich". Traditionally, law enforcement in Germany had been a state and local matter. In this role, Himmler was nominally subordinate to Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick.
However, the decree subordinated the police to the SS. Himmler gained authority as all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei, whose main office became populated by officers of the SS; the police were divided into the Ordnungspolizei and the Sicherheitspolizei, established in June 1936. The Orpo assumed duties of regular uniformed law enforcement while the SiPo consisted of the secret state police and criminal investigation police; the Kriminalpolizei was a corps of professional detectives involved in fighting crime and the task of the Gestapo was combating espionage and political dissent. On 27 September 1939, the SS security service, the Sicherheitsdienst and the SiPo were folded into the Reich Main Security Office; the RSHA symbolized the close connection between the police. The Order Police played a central role in carrying out the Holocaust. By "both career professionals and reservists, in both battalion formations and precinct service" through providing men for the tasks involved.
The German Order Police had grown to 244,500 men by mid-1940. The Orpo was under the overall control of Reichsführer-SS Himmler as Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior, it was commanded by SS-Oberstgruppenführer und Generaloberst der Polizei Kurt Daluege. In May 1943, Daluege was removed from duty, he was replaced by SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS und der Polizei Alfred Wünnenberg, who served until the end of the war. By 1941, the Orpo had been divided into the following offices covering every aspect of German law enforcement; the central command office known as the Ordnungspolizei Hauptamt was located in Berlin. From 1943 was considered a full SS-Headquarters command; the Orpo main office consisted of Command Department, responsible for finance and medical. Administration was the administrative branch of the Orpo and had overall command authority for all Orpo police stations; the Verwaltungspolizei was the central office for record keeping and was the command authority for civilian law enforcement groups, which included the Gesundheitspolizei and the Baupolizei.
In the main towns, Verwaltungspolizei and Kriminalpolizei would be organised into a police administration known as the Polizeipraesidium or Polizeidirektion, which had authority over these police forces in the urban district. State protection police, state uniformed police in cities and most large towns, which included police-station duties and barracked police units for riots and public safety. Municipal protection police, municipal uniformed police in smaller and some large towns. Although integrated into the Ordnungspolizei-system, its police officers were municipal civil servants; the civilian law enforcement in towns with a municipal protection police was not done by the Verwal
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II, ended three and a half months with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940; the League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation. The conflict began after the Soviets sought to obtain some Finnish territory, demanding among other concessions that Finland cede substantial border territories in exchange for land elsewhere, claiming security reasons—primarily the protection of Leningrad, 32 km from the Finnish border. Finland refused, the USSR invaded the country. Many sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland, use the establishment of the puppet Finnish Communist government and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols as evidence of this, while other sources argue against the idea of the full Soviet conquest. Finland repelled Soviet attacks for more than two months and inflicted substantial losses on the invaders while temperatures ranged as low as −43 °C.
After the Soviet military reorganised and adopted different tactics, they renewed their offensive in February and overcame Finnish defences. Hostilities ceased in March 1940 with the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty. Finland ceded 11 percent of its territory representing 30 percent of its economy to the Soviet Union. Soviet losses were heavy, the country's international reputation suffered. Soviet gains exceeded their pre-war demands and the USSR received substantial territory along Lake Ladoga and in Northern Finland. Finland enhanced its international reputation; the poor performance of the Red Army encouraged Adolf Hitler to think that an attack on the Soviet Union would be successful and confirmed negative Western opinions of the Soviet military. After 15 months of Interim Peace, in June 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa and the Continuation War between Finland and the USSR began; until the beginning of the 19th century, Finland constituted the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden.
In 1809, to protect its imperial capital, Saint Petersburg, the Russian Empire conquered Finland and converted it into an autonomous buffer state. The resulting Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed wide autonomy within the Empire until the end of the 19th century, when Russia began attempts to assimilate Finland as part of a general policy to strengthen the central government and unify the Empire through russification; these attempts were aborted because of Russia's internal strife, but they ruined Russia's relations with the Finns and increased support for Finnish self-determination movements. World War I led to the collapse of the Russian Empire during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1917–1920, giving Finland a window of opportunity; the new Bolshevik Russian Government was fragile, civil war had broken out in Russia in November 1917. Thus, Soviet Russia recognised the new Finnish Government just three weeks after the declaration. Finland achieved full sovereignty in May 1918 after a 4-month civil war, with the conservative Whites winning over the socialist Reds, the expulsion of Bolshevik troops.
Finland joined the League of Nations in 1920, from which it sought security guarantees, but Finland's primary goal was co-operation with the Scandinavian countries. The Finnish and Swedish militaries engaged in wide-ranging co-operation, but focused on the exchange of information and on defence planning for the Åland Islands rather than on military exercises or on stockpiling and deployment of materiel; the Government of Sweden avoided committing itself to Finnish foreign policy. Finland's military policy included clandestine defence co-operation with Estonia; the period after the Finnish Civil War till the early 1930s proved a politically unstable time in Finland due to the continued rivalry between the conservative and socialist parties. The Communist Party of Finland was declared illegal in 1931, the nationalist Lapua Movement organised anti-communist violence, which culminated in a failed coup attempt in 1932; the successor of the Lapua Movement, the Patriotic People's Movement, only had a minor presence in national politics with at most 14 seats out of 200 in the Finnish parliament.
By the late 1930s, the export-oriented Finnish economy was growing and the nation's extreme political movements had diminished. After Soviet involvement in the Finnish Civil War in 1918, no formal peace treaty was signed. In 1918 and 1919, Finnish volunteers conducted two unsuccessful military incursions across the Soviet border, the Viena and Aunus expeditions, to annex Karelian areas according to the Greater Finland ideology of combining all Finnic peoples into a single state. In 1920, Finnish communists based in the USSR attempted to assassinate the former Finnish White Guard Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. On 14 October 1920, Finland and Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Tartu, confirming the old border between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and Imperial Russia proper as the new Finnish–Soviet border. Finland received Petsamo, with its ice-free harbour on the Arctic Ocean. Despite the signing of the treaty, relations between the two countries remained strained.
The Finnish Government allowed volunteers to cross the border to support the East Karelian uprising in Russia in 1921, Finnish communists in the Soviet Union continued to prepare for a revanche and staged a cross-border raid into Finland, called the Pork mutiny, in 1922. In 1
Valdai Hills
The Valdai Hills are an upland region in the north-west of central Russia running north-south, about midway between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, spanning Leningrad, Tver and Smolensk Oblasts. The Valdai Hills are a popular tourist destination for fishing; the towns of Ostashkov and Valday are remarkable for their historical associations. Valdaysky National Park was established in 1990 in the southern part of Novgorod Oblast to protect the landscapes of the highest part of the hills; the park includes Lake Valdayskoye and the northern section of Lake Seliger, as well as the town of Valday. Since 2004, the National Park has the status of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; the hills are a northward extension of the Central Russian Upland. The ridge is overlain by deposited glacial materials in the form of terminal moraines and other detritus; the Valdai Hills reach their maximum height of 346.9 m near Vyshny Volochyok. The Volga, the Daugava, the Lovat, the Msta, the Dnieper, the Syas, other rivers originate in the Valdai Hills.
The region thus is divided between the drainage basins of the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea. It is a place of many lakes, among them Lake Volgo, Lake Peno, Lake Seliger, Lake Brosno, Lake Valdayskoye. During the last glacial period the Valdai Hills with its hard rocks posed an obstacle to the glacier ice that advances from northwest diverting the ice into the lowlands
Demyansk Pocket
The Demyansk Pocket was the name given to the pocket of German troops encircled by the Red Army around Demyansk, south of Leningrad, during World War II on the Eastern Front. The pocket existed from 8 February to 21 April 1942. A much smaller force was surrounded in the Kholm Pocket at the town of Kholm, about 100 km to the southwest. Both resulted from the German retreat following their defeat during the Battle of Moscow; the successful defence of Demyansk, achieved through the use of an airbridge, was a significant development in modern warfare. Its success was a major contributor to the decision by the Army High Command to try the same tactic during the Battle of Stalingrad where it failed to save the 6th Army under Paulus; the encirclement began as the Demyansk Offensive Operation, the first phase being carried out from 7 January-20 May 1942 on the initiative of General Lieutenant Pavel Kurochkin, commander of Northwestern Front. The intention was to sever the link between the German Demyansk positions, the Staraya Russa railway that formed the lines of communication of the German 16th Army.
However, owing to the difficult wooded and swampy terrain, heavy snow cover, the initial advance by the Front was modest against stubborn opposition. On 8 January, a new offensive called the Rzhev–Vyazma Strategic Offensive Operation started; this incorporated the previous Front's planning into the Toropets–Kholm Offensive Operation between 9 January and 6 February 1942 which formed the southern pincer of the attack that, beginning the second phase of the northern pincer Demyansk Offensive Operation between 7 January and 20 May, which encircled the German 16th Army's II Army Corps, parts of the X Army Corps during winter 1941/1942. German forces inside the pocket consisted of 12th, 30th, 32nd, 123rd and 290th infantry divisions, the SS Division Totenkopf, as well as Reich Labour Service, Organisation Todt, other auxiliary units, for a total of about 90,000 German troops and around 10,000 auxiliaries, their commander was commander of the II Army Corps. The intent of the Northwestern Front offensive was to encircle the entire northern flank of the 16th Army's forces, of which the 2nd Army Corps was only a small part, the Soviet command was desperate to keep the Front moving after this success.
The first thrust was made by the 11th Army, 1st Shock Army and the 1st and 2nd Guards Rifle Corps released for the operation from Stavka reserve. A second thrust was executed on 12 February by the 3rd and 4th Shock Armies of the Kalinin Front, with the additional plan of directly attacking the encircled German forces by inserting two airborne brigades to support the advance of the 34th Army; the front soon settled as the Soviet offensive petered out bad weather. After being assured that the pocket could be supplied with its daily requirement of 300 short tons of supplies by Luftflotte 1, Hitler ordered that the surrounded divisions hold their positions until relieved; the pocket contained two viable airfields at Demyansk and Peski capable of receiving transport aircraft. From the middle of February, the weather improved and while there was still considerable snow on the ground at this time, resupply operations were very successful due to inactivity of the VVS in the area. However, the operation did use up all of Luftflotte 1's transport capability, as well as elements of its bomber force.
Over the winter and spring, the Northwestern Front launched a number of attacks on the "Ramushevo corridor" that formed the tenuous link between Demyansk and Staraya Russa but was unable to reduce the pocket. On 21 March 1942, German forces under the command of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach attempted to manoevre through the "Ramushevo corridor". Soviet resistance on the Lovat River delayed II Corps' attack until April 14. Over the next several weeks, this corridor was widened. A battle group was able to break the siege on 22 April. Out of the 100,000 men in the pocket, there were 3,335 lost and over 10,000 wounded. Between the forming of the pocket in early February to the abandonment of Demyansk in May, the two pockets received 65,000 short tons of supplies, 31,000 replacement troops, 36,000 wounded were evacuated; the supplies were delivered through over 100 flights of whitewashed Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft per day. However, the cost was significant; the Luftwaffe lost 265 aircraft, including 106 Junkers Ju 52, 17 Heinkel He 111 and two Junkers Ju 86 aircraft.
In addition, 387 airmen were lost. Richard Overy argues that the Demyansk airlift was a Pyrrhic victory, citing the loss of over 200 aircraft and their crew "when annual production of transports was running at only 500. Fighting in the area continued until 28 February 1943; the Soviet forces did not retake Demyansk until 1 March 1943, with the organized withdrawl of the German troops. The success of the Luftwaffe convinced Reich Marschall Hermann Göring and Hitler that they could conduct effective airlift operations on the Eastern front. Furthermore, it "determined Hitler in his belief that encircled troops should automatically hold on to their territory. After the German 6th Army was encircled in the Battle of Stalingrad, Göring convinced Hitler to resupply the besieged forces by airlift until a relief effort could reach them.
