Stalin's planners saw the Estonian shore as the fastest path to the German rear and to Finland. If the Red Army could break through Narva and reach Tallinn, German Army Group North would have to abandon Estonia entirely or risk being cut off, and the Baltic Fleet — bottled up in the eastern Gulf of Finland for years — would finally have an open exit to the sea. The Finns watched all of this nervously. Field Marshal Keitel wrote to Mannerheim on 31 January 1944 to insist that the German retreat to the Panther Line posed no threat. Mannerheim knew better. The Red Army was about to throw itself at the Narva isthmus, and what stood in the way was geography and people. The geography was unhelpful to attackers: low-lying ground, swamps, dense forest, and waterways that channeled movement onto narrow tracks the defenders could pre-register with artillery. The people were a more complicated problem.

The 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, often just called the Estonian Division, was raised from young Estonian men who had grown up free and lived through the first Soviet occupation. They had watched 10,000 of their countrymen — teachers, officers, farmers, children — loaded onto trains in June 1941 and shipped to Siberia. Most never came back. When the Germans offered uniforms and the chance to defend Estonian soil against the returning Red Army, many took them. The moral arithmetic was brutal and the men doing it were not philosophers. They were nineteen and twenty and they had seen what Soviet rule meant. Hitler ordered the division pulled from the Nevel front and sent to Narva in February 1944. They arrived to defend their own villages from across the Narva River.

Soviet General Govorov tried to break the line in three places at once. The 122nd Rifle Corps crossed the Narva south of town and dug into the Krivasoo swamp, ten kilometers behind German lines. On 14 February the 374th Soviet Rifle Regiment crossed Lake Peipus to the south, surprised the village of Meerapalu, and established a beachhead on the Estonian shore. The next day a battalion of Estonian SS grenadiers and an East Prussian battalion drove them back into the lake. Estonian sources counted Soviet dead in the thousands. To the north, Govorov ordered the 260th Independent Naval Infantry Brigade to land in the German rear at Mereküla on the Gulf of Finland. The amphibious force never had a chance: in seven and a half hours of fighting on a frozen beach, it was annihilated. None of the three thrusts broke through.

Frustrated by stalled ground operations, Soviet Long Range Aviation turned on the cities behind the front. The heaviest raid hit Tallinn on the night of 9 March 1944. Three hundred IL-4 bombers dropped 3,068 bombs, half of them incendiary. Soviet saboteurs had blown up the city's pumping station, so the fire brigades worked without water. By morning the medieval Estonia Theatre, St. Nicholas Church, the city synagogue, four cinemas, and the Tallinn City Archives had burned, taking most of the medieval document collection with them. The official count was 757 dead, of whom 586 were civilians; later searches found more, with estimates rising to 800. Tartu was bombed on the night of 25 March; sixty-seven civilians died. Military damage was minimal. The bombings were aimed at morale and they had the opposite of their intended effect. More Estonians decided to fight.

The fighting along the Narva line ran from February through April with neither side gaining decisive ground. German counterattacks under Strachwitz's tank battle group recovered some of the lost bridgeheads in early April. By 24 April both sides were exhausted. Then in late July came the Narva offensive proper, when the Red Army finally took the town and pushed the Germans back to the Tannenberg Line at the Sinimäed Hills. Estonian historian Mart Laar, working from Soviet documents, estimated that the Leningrad Front lost roughly 65,000 dead or missing and 235,000 wounded or sick in the Battle for Narva Bridgehead alone, without counting July's offensive. German losses were lighter but still measured in tens of thousands. For Estonia the cost was different: nearly every village along the line was destroyed, and the men who had fought in German uniforms faced a Soviet reckoning that would last for decades. The Red Army did break through eventually, in September 1944. Estonia would not be free again until 1991.