Between Giants (50 page)

Late on 9 October, Bagramian finally received word from Volskii. A shortage of fuel, he wrote, was preventing him from advancing. General Nikolai Papivin, commander of 3rd Air Army, advised that he had transport aircraft available, and fuel was immediately flown out to the armoured spearheads. Finally, Volskii confirmed that all was ready for a final push to the coast on 10 October.
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On the northern flank of the advance, Soviet forces bypassed the German battlegroup in Viekšniai, and only a determined counter-attack by the Panther tanks, supported by a company of panzergrenadiers, salvaged the situation. A little to the west, other Soviet forces attempted to secure crossings over the River Venta, and the heavy Tiger tanks of
Schwere Panzer Abteilung 510
went into action near Mazeikiai. Reinforced by
Sperrgruppe Schäfer
from III SS Panzer Corps, the Tigers, supported by a battalion of 4th Panzer Division’s panzergrenadiers, fought their way along the road from Mazeikiai to Viekšniai, eliminating three more Soviet bridgeheads. Interrogation of Soviet prisoners suggested that elements of at least three Soviet divisions had been involved. Other elements of 4th Panzer Division moved to secure Leckava; an attempt to advance onto the left bank of the Venta and push west failed in the face of Soviet anti-tank defences, but contact was established with 61st Infantry Division, which was deploying to the north-west.
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The German line along the northern side of the Soviet breakthrough was therefore stabilising, but the westward advance of Bagramian’s armies seemed unstoppable. Here, it seemed the further they advanced, the greater the impact of their success on the Germans:

From the very start of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, the brutality of the fighting exceeded that of any other European theatre. The Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Hague Conventions, and from the outset of the war, Hitler had urged his troops to show no mercy to the conquered. Millions of Soviet citizens died during the German occupation, some as a result of acts of violence and others as the inevitable consequence of starvation after German occupation authorities seized food and shipped it back to Germany. Many Soviet regiments had a policy of sharing their stories of family members who had died during the war, and the appetite for revenge was therefore strong, from the lowest infantryman to the highest general. Throughout the long campaigns, both sides showed great inconsistency in the treatment of those taken prisoner, often executing them out of hand. Soviet soldiers were also often used as slave labour or – in the early phases of the war, before worker shortages forced Germany to rethink its policies – deliberately starved. Whilst food supplies for German soldiers taken prisoner by the Red Army were also hopelessly inadequate, this reflected the general shortage of food throughout the Soviet Union; many Soviet citizens received little better.

10 October would prove to be the decisive day of the campaign. After a heavy artillery bombardment, the tanks of 5th Guards Tank Army finally surged forward. 29th Tank Corps reached and took Kretinga in a pincer attack from north and south. To the north of Kretinga, in Dimitravas and Darbėnai, there were work camps full of concentration camp prisoners. It was normal policy for the SS to evacuate such camps before the arrival of Soviet soldiers, and if such an evacuation were impossible, the inmates of the camps were often simply shot. On this occasion, the speed of the Soviet advance appears to have made any such measures impossible. The sight of so many malnourished prisoners shocked many of the battle-hardened Soviet soldiers, further feeding the implacable desire for revenge.
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The Soviet 3rd Guards Tank Corps found itself heavily engaged with the retreating battlegroups of
Grossdeutschland
. Fighting continued all day as the battlegroups conducted a fighting withdrawal, slowly falling back through Plikiai towards Klaipėda. Elements of 31st Tank Brigade pushed on and reached the Baltic coast near Palanga, effectively severing the link between the German 16th and 18th Armies and the rest of the Reich. In a gesture that would be repeated several times as Soviet forces pushed to the Baltic coast in the closing months of the war, the soldiers marked their arrival by filling water bottles with sea water and sending them back to higher commands.
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Elsewhere, Beloborodov’s 43rd Army approached Klaipėda from the south-east, and despite increasing German resistance, succeeded in reaching the coast south of the city. The initial aim of the Soviet operation – to separate Army Group North from the Reich, and to isolate Klaipėda – had been achieved in only six days.

The contrast between the various offensives mounted by both sides in such a short time is striking.
Doppelkopf
, the German attack to restore contact with Army Group North, was launched after several panzer divisions – all of them weakened by losses – were assembled in western Lithuania and Latvia, and although contact along the Baltic coast was achieved, the main drive towards Jelgava was blocked. Similarly, Bagramian’s attempts to batter into Riga from the south and south-west also failed in the face of determined resistance. Both operations were conducted on fairly confined battlefields, where the defenders were able to anticipate the coming attack. The terrain favoured the defenders, and the attacking formations were unable to manoeuvre around the prepared positions. By contrast, the successful drive to Klaipėda was on a much larger battlefield, and over terrain more suitable for mobile warfare. Also, unlike the two previous operations, a successful defence would have required a substantial redeployment of forces. The Germans lacked the troops to prepare strong defensive positions along their entire front, and although the area chosen for the operation was a fairly obvious one, the Red Army successfully masked its preparations until it was too late for the Germans to respond in a timely manner. The use of infantry-rich formations to achieve the initial breakthrough was also a ‘luxury’ that was not available to the Germans during
Doppelkopf
, after their catastrophic losses as a result of
Bagration
. In both
Doppelkopf
and
Cäsar
, the panzer divisions were required both to break the Soviet defensive line and then to exploit the resultant breaches if they appeared; by contrast, Bagramian massed sufficient forces to ensure that even though his main exploitation force – 5th Guards Army, commanded by the hapless Volskii – failed to make a significant impact until the operation was almost over, the Germans could not hold back the forces committed to the original breakthrough.

Now that Klaipėda was isolated by land, and Army Group North was trapped in western Latvia, Bagramian ordered his army commanders to prepare for what he expected would be the inevitable German counter-attacks. He anticipated an operation from Army Group North, using troops released by the steady German withdrawal through Riga, aimed at restoring contact between Army Group North and the Reich. To this end, 5th Guards Tank Army was ordered to withdraw from the front line, so that it could be held in reserve to deal with any German attacks. At the same time, there was the threat of a German attack from East Prussia, where 3rd Baltic Front’s 39th Army was withdrawn in preparation for an offensive by Cherniakhovsky’s front into East Prussia. On 12 October, Chanchibatse’s 2nd Guards Army reported that the 16th Latvian Rifle Division had come under attack by a unit not previously identified in the battle, the
Fallschirm (
parachute
) Panzer Division Hermann Goering
. This division – nominally part of the Luftwaffe – had been sent to the area from central Poland, and to Bagramian’s relief, its initial attack on the Latvian division was beaten off.
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Bitter fighting raged for another day; German and Soviet accounts attempt to portray their own role in the fighting as a defensive success, and it seems that neither side was able to make any significant headway as the front slowly stabilised along the line of the River Niemen.

Bagramian’s assessment of German intentions was correct: as early as 9 October, Schörner proposed a counter-attack from western Latvia towards Klaipėda and from there towards East Prussia. However, this attack was contingent on Hitler agreeing to the evacuation of Riga, in order to release sufficient forces for the operation. As was often the case, Hitler agreed to such a proposal from one of his favoured commanders, where he would have refused to yield an inch if another army group commander had made such a request. By this stage, much of Riga was within artillery range of the Red Army, and the only relatively safe route from the area east of the city into Courland was along the beach road. The withdrawal from Riga was codenamed
Donner
(‘Thunder’), and with 227th Infantry Division forming a rearguard, Schörner’s troops conducted an orderly withdrawal through the city, destroying the bridges over the Daugava as they fell back. The men of the 19th SS Waffen-Grenadier Division must have experienced particularly bitter moments as they pulled back, crossing the Daugava to the south of Riga; they had continued their hard-fought retreat across their homeland, almost constantly in contact with the Red Army. The battles a few miles to the east of Sigulda, holding what became known as the Segewold Positions while German units further north pulled back from the Estonian border, were remembered by Latvian veterans as particularly bloody.
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By 13 October, most of the Latvian capital was under Soviet control. Shortly thereafter, the 3rd Baltic Front was disbanded.

Whilst he prepared to repulse the expected German counter-attack, Bagramian wanted to maintain pressure on the two trapped German armies:

It seemed to me at the time that it was important in this situation that the formations of Army Group North retreating from the fortified area around Riga should be followed by 2nd and 3rd Baltic Fronts without regrouping or any pause in the attack in order to prevent their unhindered retreat. One had to inflict a defeat on them, as the Fascists would take up strong defensive positions in the woody and swampy terrain of Courland and would be able to save themselves from our blows. It was vital to make maximum use of the dry time of year for a concerted attack to destroy the enemy’s forces in Courland with the combined power and resources of the Baltic Fronts and the Baltic Fleet before the wet season typical of the Baltic region arrived.
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The dissolution of 3rd Baltic Front, with some of its forces being withdrawn into strategic reserve, was therefore not welcome news to Bagramian. Nevertheless, he made a bid to capture the vital port of Liepāja, on the west coast of Courland. Originally developed as a base for the Czarist navy, the port – known to Germans as Libau – was vital if the forces in Courland were to survive; the port of Ventspils, further north, was too small to support the two trapped armies. Chistiakov was therefore ordered to send forces north in an attempt to secure Liepāja before the German line could solidify. In an attempt to counter this, Schörner dispatched III SS Panzer Corps to the area around Priekule. Late on 12 October, Chistiakov’s army penetrated through dense woodland immediately to the north of Skuodas, and
SS Panzergrenadier Brigade Nederland
rushed two battalions to the area. Combining with elements of 11th Infantry Division, the SS mobile forces succeeded in surrounding the Soviet troops that had broken through, and over the next two days reduced the pocket. A little to the west, 4th Panzer Division had been joined by 12th Panzer Division on its western flank, and on the same day that Chistiakov attempted to push through to Liepāja, the two German divisions launched an attack to clear the woodland to the south of the River Venta. Two days of heavy fighting followed, with the divisions making slow but steady progress; the terrain was every bit as difficult as that encountered during
Doppelkopf
, but the Soviet defences were less well organised, and by the end of 13 October, with their reserves still not committed, the German divisions were confident that they would be able to build momentum in the coming day, particularly as they had cleared almost all of the woodland that so favoured the defenders.

Chistiakov had not abandoned his attempts to drive into Courland, if only to disrupt German plans, and on 13 October, his forces breached the lines of 61st Infantry Division, midway between the two German panzer divisions and III SS Panzer Corps. 4th and 12th Panzer Divisions were ordered to stop their attack. 225th Infantry Division would relieve them, allowing them to be pulled out of line in preparation for Schörner’s planned counter-attack towards Klaipėda. Bagramian’s estimate of the forces available was substantial: he later wrote that Schörner had no fewer than seven or eight panzer or panzergrenadier divisions at his disposal. The truth was that Army Group North had 4th, 12th, and 14th Panzer Divisions, together with the few remaining armoured formations of III SS Panzer Corps.

In Berlin, Heinz Guderian, Chief of Staff at OKH, made the first of several requests to Hitler for the evacuation of Army Group North. The divisions of 16th and 18th Armies, he argued, had been badly weakened during the fighting of 1944, but retained a solid core of experienced soldiers. These forces could be used to bolster the fragile front line that ran along the borders of East Prussia and into Poland and beyond. Bagramian and his colleagues also expected such a move, but Hitler refused. Courland was to be held at all costs, he maintained. Its evacuation would weaken the resolve of the Baltic soldiers serving in the SS, and the territory could serve as a springboard for future offensive operations against the Red Army. The professional soldiers of the Wehrmacht – and indeed of the Red Army – could not comprehend how the occupation of Courland by so many German divisions could be justified on the grounds of improving the fighting spirit of one Estonian and two Latvian divisions, and talk of future offensive operations was, in every sense of the word, incredible. However, Bagramian recorded that the Germans would have struggled to make sufficient shipping available for an evacuation, and this is probably true. Although the success of the German navy and merchant marine in rescuing hundreds of thousands of Germans from East and West Prussia in 1945 might suggest otherwise, there would have been little military advantage in evacuating the personnel of Army Group North without their equipment, and there simply was not sufficient shipping for such a massive undertaking. An evacuation would have been difficult and time-consuming, especially given Soviet air superiority, and the likelihood of substantial losses at sea. Furthermore, it is likely that Soviet forces facing the Courland ‘bridgehead’ would either have overwhelmed the German front as German troops were withdrawn, or would have been able to move to the Eastern Front faster than their German counterparts could be redeployed via a seaborne evacuation.