With the Soviet 1944 attack on Finland coming several days after both D-Day and the fall of Rome, the western press can be forgiven that they glossed over the battle in the news reports of the day. In between its coverage of Normandy, Italy Saipan, and a Canadian paratrooper with the unfortunate name of Donald Duck, TIME: The Weekly News Magazine, in its June 19, 1944 issue, managed this story on the war in Finland. Remember that this was news, not a history text. You may find that TIME's reporters made a couple of "mistakes."

BATTLE OF RUSSIA

Summer Opening

In Moscow, bursting rockets told of the reopening of the Russian Front. Over the radio the familiar voice of Announcer Yuri Levitan read Stalin's order on the breach of Finland's Mannerheim Line. The day was D plus five of the invasion western Europe.

Two days earlier batteries of 8-inch guns, massed thickly on the narrow Karelian corridor into Finland, had opened fire. From the Gulf of Finland came the roar of supporting guns of the Red Baltic Fleet. The Red air force plowed the enemy defenses. At the end of three hours, Soviet infantry and tanks plunged forward into the gaps.

By second night fall, the breach was 25 miles wide and 15 to 25 miles deep. The gulf fortress of Viipuri now lay only 40 miles away.

Surprise.

General Leonid Govorov's blow last week caught the Finns and their German allies by surprise. In next-door Sweden, observers predicted Finland's collapse within three months, voiced doubt that Nazi General Eduard Dietl would rush his nine divisions from the north to help the hard-pressed Finns.

This week the Russians made sure of Died's preoccupation by probing his defenses far above the Arctic Circle. Thirty miles from the Red lines lay the border of Norway and beyond, the rich nickel mines that are an essential part of the German war economy. Dietl had better hold fast at Norway's back door. The Finnish troops on the Karelian Isthmus were likely to have to shift for themselves."

Next Issue: June 26, 1944

In its next issue of June 26, 1944, TIME continued its coverage of the offensive in Finland with this:

In the Soup

...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. 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 the 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 Loivisto, 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."

TIME, in this second story from the June 26 issue, combined politics and society in covering diplomatic relations:

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Hot & Cold Brush-Offs

At 5 p.m. Hjalmar Johan Procope entered a side door of the gloomy old State Department, was ushered into the office the protocol chief, bald, urbane George T. Summerlin. Fifteen minutes later Mr. Procope hurried out, brusque and ruffled. The Finnish Minister to the U.S. had been handed his passport, had been told to get out of the country as soon as he could arrange it. Thus, in a way almost unprecedented in U. S. history, ended the Washington career of the man who only a few years ago was the capital's most lionized diplomat.

Exit Finns.

Handsome, clever and soon divorced, Minister Procope became the ideal extra man at dinner almost as soon as he arrived in 1939. When he finally eloped with the niece of a British countess (He was 50, she 29), hearts broke all over Washington, from Chevy Chase to Georgetown. Minister Procope's popularity was more than personal. He represented the one country that continued to pay back its World War I debt to the U.S. (he paid an installment just 24 hours before he was expelled). Finland, too, was then the brave little nation which, in 1939-40, stood up and slugged it out with what was then known as Red Russia...

At week's end the rigid rules applied to Minister Procope were relaxed a little when the Department learned that Mme. Procope will have a child in the next fortnight. And the move did not clarify U.S.-Finnish relations, it turned out; the official announcement said: "This action does not constitute a rupture of diplomatic relations."

We found it interesting to conpare these excerpts from, historical coverage of the event with the style and content of the after-the-fact accounts by historians with which we are now more familiar.