The capture of Hiiumaa

Around midday on 3 October 1944 Soviet troops completed the occupation of Hiiumaa, Estonia’s second-largest island, which lies at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Riga. The fighting lasted little more than a day. The landing force had come ashore on 2 October, and the German garrison did not fight it out: during the night of 2–3 October it withdrew via a neighbouring islet to Saaremaa, where the Germans intended to hold out longer.

The Soviet capture of Hiiumaa is usually dated to 3 October. This date agrees with Estonian and Russian sources: 2 October was the day of the landing, and 3 October the day on which the whole island was in Soviet hands.

Hiiumaa (German and Swedish Dagö) covers nearly 1,000 km². It is separated from Saaremaa by the narrow Soela Strait and from the mainland by the shallow waters of the Väinameri, which the Germans called the Moon Sound. The island’s only town is Kärdla. In the autumn of 1941 the Germans had needed several weeks to take it: the last Soviet resistance on Hiiumaa ended on 21 October 1941. Three years later the island changed hands within a single day.

The Moonsund operation

The capture of Hiiumaa was one stage of the Soviet amphibious operation against the West Estonian Archipelago, known in Russian literature as the Moonsund operation. It was part of the offensive in the Baltic states which the three Baltic Fronts had launched on 14 September. After the Red Army entered Tallinn on 22 September and had taken the whole of mainland Estonia by 26 September, only the islands remained in German hands. They controlled the entrance to the Gulf of Riga and the sea lanes along which the Kriegsmarine supplied Army Group North, which was holding out in Latvia.

The operation was conducted by the 8th Army of Lieutenant General Filipp Starikov of the Leningrad Front, supported by ships and aircraft of the Baltic Fleet under Rear Admiral Ivan Svyatov. Russian studies state that some 78,000 men took part in all, including more than 30,000 soldiers of the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps. The tasks were divided between two corps. The Estonian corps was to take Muhu and strike at Saaremaa from there. The 109th Rifle Corps, made up of three rifle divisions (the 72nd, 109th and 131st), was to capture Hiiumaa and cross from it to Saaremaa from the north.

On the German side the islands were defended chiefly by the 23rd Infantry Division of Lieutenant General Hans Schirmer, whom the Army Group North command had appointed commandant of the islands on 7 September. According to Russian figures, the whole garrison of the archipelago, including security battalions, numbered about 11,500 men. The division was spread across three islands. According to Estonian studies, Hiiumaa was held by Colonel Rehmer’s 23rd Artillery Regiment, the division’s fusilier battalion, two batteries, a railway company, a company of landing engineers in the port of Orjaku and a company of heavy army artillery. These forces were enough to watch the coast, but not to defend an island with a coastline several hundred kilometres long.

Operations began with the smaller islands. On 27 September a naval infantry battalion, carried in torpedo boats, landed on Vormsi, which was taken the next day. On 29 September the main landing on Muhu began near the port of Kuivastu, and by 1 October the island was in Soviet hands. The Germans withdrew from it after weak resistance and blew up the causeway linking Muhu with Saaremaa.

The landing on Hiiumaa

On 2 October the 109th Rifle Corps attacked Hiiumaa. According to Estonian studies, the first wave, a force of battalion strength, landed at the port of Heltermaa on the island’s east coast, the closest to the mainland. Soviet accounts state that German strongpoints at Käina and Kärdla were eliminated on the first day, and that fighting continued throughout the night.

The Germans, however, had no intention of holding Hiiumaa. Their units withdrew to the islet of Kassari, linked to it by a causeway on the south coast, and during the night of 2–3 October crossed from there to Saaremaa. Estonian sources name the ports of Orjaku and Sõru as the points of embarkation. According to them, the Germans took all their units and all their equipment with them. Russian studies, by contrast, claim that more than 300 German soldiers were taken prisoner and a great deal of equipment captured. The two versions cannot be fully reconciled; the Soviet figures may have included stragglers and men of auxiliary units who failed to reach the boats. By the middle of 3 October the island was in Soviet hands.

To carry troops across the straits the Red Army used, among other things, American DUKW amphibians supplied under Lend-Lease, as well as Finnish vessels. Under the armistice signed in Moscow on 19 September, Finland had to place ships and their crews at the disposal of the Allied Control Commission. The Soviet side demanded a hundred galeases (coastal sailing vessels) and a hundred motor boats; the Finns negotiated the number down by half. A Finnish detachment, known after its commander as the Arho detachment, carried men and supplies, especially on 4 and 5 October, when troops were being moved to Saaremaa.

The islanders

The offensive found several thousand inhabitants on Hiiumaa. In the summer and autumn of 1944 hundreds of them fled to Sweden in fishing boats, fearing a repeat of the mass deportations of 1940–1941. From the western islands and the coast of Läänemaa the route to Sweden was shortest, which is why Estonian politicians also fled this way: in September members of the Otto Tief government tried to escape from western Estonia. In the following weeks the Germans evacuated from Saaremaa, besides the wounded and prisoners, many Estonian civilians who did not want to find themselves under Soviet rule again.

The island is also bound up with the history of the Estonian Swedes. The Swedish community of Hiiumaa had ceased to exist as early as the 18th century: in 1781 Catherine II ordered some 1,000 of the island’s Swedes to be resettled in southern Russia, on the Dnieper, where they founded the village of Gammalsvenskby. In the 20th century the Swedes lived mainly on Vormsi, on the Noarootsi peninsula, on Ruhnu and on the Pakri islets. During the war the men of this minority were conscripted first into the Red Army and then into the German forces. Most of them left for Sweden in 1943–1944, before the Red Army returned. According to Swedish figures, on 8 June 1945 there were 6,554 Estonian Swedes and 21,815 Estonian refugees in Sweden.

Those who stayed found themselves in a new reality. After the capture of Hiiumaa the whole island was declared a Soviet border zone with restricted freedom of movement. Boats left behind after the escapes to Sweden were destroyed or gathered in guarded harbours, and border guard cutters patrolled the coast. The permit system remained in force until October 1987.

Place in the war

The fall of Hiiumaa was a brief episode, but it opened a second route to Saaremaa for the Red Army. The Soviet plan envisaged taking the whole archipelago by 5 October. The Germans, however, reinforced Saaremaa, moving the 218th Infantry Division and the 12th Luftwaffe Field Division there. On 5 October Soviet troops landed on the north coast of Saaremaa, between Jaani and Keskvere, while also advancing onto the island from Muhu. By 8 October the Germans, after delaying actions including one at Tehumardi, had withdrawn to the narrow Sõrve peninsula in the south-west of the island. The rest of Saaremaa, including the town of Kuressaare, was already in Soviet hands.

On the Sõrve peninsula the Germans held out for another six weeks, in positions built partly on Soviet fortifications of 1941 and with fire support from the heavy cruisers Admiral Scheer and Prinz Eugen. Soviet landings in the rear of these positions were repulsed with heavy losses. Contrary to Hitler’s orders, the commander of Army Group North, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, permitted the evacuation of the peninsula. By the morning of 24 November ships had carried some 4,500 surviving soldiers, including about 700 wounded, to Ventspils (Windau) in Courland. Russian literature estimates German losses in the whole island operation at some 7,000 killed and 700 prisoners; these figures are difficult to verify.

The capture of the archipelago ended the fighting on Estonian territory. For the Soviet Baltic Fleet it meant freer access to the central Baltic, and for Army Group North, cut off in Courland in October, the loss of its cover to the north. For the people of Hiiumaa it was the beginning of almost half a century of Soviet rule, during which the island remained a closed border zone. Some of those who had fled to Sweden in 1944 were able to visit it again only at the end of the 1980s.