by the sizes of the divisions assumed by the Estonian historian Mart Laar. The order of battle of the Leningrad Front, as of 1 March 1944: 2nd Shock Army – Lieutenant General Ivan Fedyuninsky 43rd Rifle Corps – Major General Anatoli Andreyev 109th Rifle Corps – Major General Ivan Alferov 124th Rifle Corps – Major General Voldemar Damberg 8th Army – Lieutenant General Filip Starikov 6th Rifle Corps – Major General Semyon Mikulski 112th Rifle Corps – Major General Filip Solovev 59th Army – Lieutenant General Ivan Korovnikov 117th Rifle Corps – Major General Vasili Trubachev 122nd Rifle Corps – Major General Panteleimon Zaitsev Separate detachments: 8th Estonian Rifle Corps – Lieutenant General Lembit Pärn 14th Rifle Corps – Major General Pavel Artyushenko 124th Rifle Division – Colonel Mikhail Papchenko 30th Guards Rifle Corps – Lieutenant General Nikolai Simonyak 46th, 260th and 261st Separate Guards Heavy Tank and 1902nd Separate Self-propelled Artillery regiments 3rd Breakthrough Artillery Corps – Major General N. N. Zhdanov 3rd Guards Tank Corps – Major General I. A. Vovchenko At the start of the Narva Offensive (July 1944), the Leningrad Front deployed 136,830 troops, 150 tanks, 2,500 assault guns and 800+ aircraft. German and Finnish aims The German High Command (OKH) believed it was crucial to stabilize the front on the Narva River. A Soviet breakthrough here would have meant the loss of the northern coast of Estonia and with it loss of control of the Gulf of Finland, giving the Soviet Baltic Fleet access to the Baltic Sea. A breakthrough by the fleet would have threatened German control of the entire Baltic Sea and the shipment of iron ore imports from Sweden. The loss of Narva would have meant fuel derived from the adjacent Kohtla-Järve oil shale deposits (32 kilometers west of Narva on the coast) would be denied to the German war machine. As Colonel General Georg Lindemann said in his daily order to the 11th Infantry Division: As Finland was negotiating with the Soviet Union for peace, the OKH concentrated on the Narva front, using every means to convince the Finnish Defence Command that the German defences were going to hold. The German command informed their Finnish colleagues in detail about the events on the Narva front while a delegation of the Finnish Defence Command visited Narva in spring 1944. Besides being a narrow corridor well suited for defence, the terrain in the