The destruction of Narva

On the evening of 6 March 1944 Soviet bombers appeared over Narva. Over the next two nights, supported by heavy artillery, they turned into a sea of fire a town whose inhabitants had been evacuated a few weeks earlier. The baroque Old Town burned – one of the most valuable historic ensembles on the Baltic, which had survived the Swedish wars, the Great Northern War and the fighting of 1918–1919. The raid was the prelude to another attack by the Leningrad Front, which since the beginning of February had been trying in vain to break through the German defences on the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus. March brought a series of heavy battles on this sector: from the attack of the 59th Army on 1 March, through the assault on the Ivangorod bridgehead on 8 March, to the fighting around Auvere station, which died down on 24 March. None of them opened the road to Tallinn for the Red Army.

The Narva front at the turn of February and March

From 2 February 1944, when the leading Soviet units crossed the ice to the western bank of the river, the Narva front became one of the most important sectors of the northern part of the Eastern Front. Breaking through it would open the road along the coast into the depths of Estonia, to the rear of Army Group North and towards the airfields from which Finland could be attacked. Joseph Stalin took a personal interest in this axis: he regarded the conquest of Estonia as a precondition for knocking the Finns out of the war.

The attack launched on 15 February by General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 2nd Shock Army collapsed after two weeks, and the earlier landings – from the sea at Mereküla and across the frozen Lake Peipus – had been destroyed. After the failure of the Narva offensive the Stavka issued a new order on 22 February: break through the defences, strike towards Pärnu, clear Estonia and push on through Latvia. According to figures cited by Estonian historians, General of the Army Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front had lost more than 227,000 men killed, wounded and missing since the beginning of January, but it received reinforcements. General Ivan Korovnikov’s fresh 59th Army was sent to the bridgehead south of the town, followed in March by General Filipp Starikov’s 8th Army. The 8th Estonian Rifle Corps, made up of Estonians evacuated or mobilised into the Red Army in 1941, was also placed under the Front. In March the Narva isthmus was one of the most densely packed sectors of the entire Eastern Front; Estonian authors put the Soviet forces at about 200,000 men, although full archival data have never been published.

On the other side, General of Infantry Johannes Frießner’s Army Detachment Narwa numbered about 123,500 men on 1 March. The town and the Ivangorod bridgehead were defended by the III SS Panzer Corps, with volunteers from Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, and the Krivasoo bridgehead by XLIII Army Corps. Estonian units also joined the fighting: regiments of the Estonian Waffen-SS brigade then being converted into a division (later the 20th SS Grenadier Division), eastern and police battalions, and conscripts from the mobilisation endorsed on the radio on 7 February by Estonia’s last constitutional prime minister, Jüri Uluots. The Germans had been evacuating Narva’s civilian population since 25 January; by the beginning of March the town was almost deserted.

The 59th Army’s attack (1–4 March)

The first blow of March fell on the southern flank of the defence. On 1 March 1944 the divisions of the 59th Army, supported by heavy artillery fire and more than a hundred tanks, advanced west from the Krivasoo bridgehead towards the village of Kuremäe and the Vasknarva–Jõhvi road. The aim was to cut the defenders’ supply routes and, further ahead, to reach the Narva–Tallinn road and railway and take Jõhvi and Rakvere. Estonian historiography calls this fighting the Battle of Putki (Putki lahing), after the marshy area in which it took place.

The attack drove several kilometres into the German defences and encircled strongpoints of the 214th Infantry Division and of two Estonian eastern battalions (the 658th and 659th). The encircled garrisons did not surrender, and their resistance tied down the Soviet forces for the time Frießner needed to bring up reserves – among them elements of the Nordland Division and the 11th Infantry Division. Korovnikov himself, citing shortages of artillery and men, held back the advance, which some studies point to as one of the reasons for the failure. On 4 March the 59th Army renewed its attack towards the north-west, but this too was stopped. Over the following days German counter-attacks roughly restored the former front line.

At the same time, on the lake flank, on 2 March a regiment of the Soviet 2nd Rifle Division tried to cross the northern end of Lake Peipus and seize the road running along the shore. According to German and Estonian studies, the 225th Infantry Division defending this sector killed up to 500 of the attackers and captured several anti-tank guns.

North of the town, meanwhile, the initiative lay with the defenders. From 29 February the 45th and 46th SS Grenadier Regiments – the 1st and 2nd Estonian – attacked the bridgehead at Siivertsi, supported by Danes of the Danmark Regiment. The fighting for every house in the suburb and for the cemetery was exceptionally fierce; Soviet soldiers turned the granite memorial to the soldiers of the White North-Western Army who had fallen at Narva in 1919 into a strongpoint. On 5 March the 1st Estonian Regiment cut the bridgehead into pieces and rolled it up, and by 6 March the last scrap of the Soviet-held bank at Vepsküla had been eliminated. The western bank of the river north of Narva was once again in German hands. This success, won largely by freshly mobilised Estonians, had a symbolic dimension in Estonia – they were now fighting for their own country.

The raid of 6 March

The Soviet command planned a new attack for 8 March, this time on the Ivangorod bridgehead, and decided to precede it with a massive air attack. On the evening of 6 March bombers arrived over Narva – according to Estonian tallies more than a hundred aircraft in all, including machines of the Leningrad Front’s 13th Air Army. The first wave, on the night of 6–7 March, struck the western bank of the river, from the town centre to Peeterristi a few kilometres further on; the second, on the night of 7–8 March, struck mainly at Ivangorod. At the same time Soviet artillery shelled the town. The Estonian press of the time wrote of thousands of incendiary and high-explosive bombs and of a town that had become “a single sea of flames”.

The Old Town was the principal victim of the raid. Narva, in the 17th century one of the most important towns of Sweden’s Baltic possessions, had been rebuilt in stone in a uniform baroque style after the great fire of 1659. This ensemble – the town hall of 1671, the exchange building, narrow streets of merchants’ houses, churches and the so-called House of Peter the Great – had survived the capture of the town by the Russians in 1704 and later wars, and in the interwar years was regarded as one of Estonia’s greatest architectural treasures. In March 1944 it burned almost entirely, as did the synagogue, St Peter’s Church and many buildings by the Kreenholm textile mill. Some of the historic buildings had already suffered in earlier, smaller raids in 1941–1943, but it was the March bombing that turned the historic centre into a field of ruins.

Civilian casualties were relatively few, because the town had been evacuated beforehand. The Estonian historian Andres Toode points out, however, that some civilians – people employed in maintaining the town’s utilities and serving the army, as well as those who had evaded evacuation – remained in Narva, among them women and children; the exact number killed is not known. The German troops stationed in the town, on the other hand, suffered heavy losses, especially in the Ivangorod bridgehead. The tally of material losses was drawn up later: of Narva’s roughly 3,550 masonry buildings, only 198 were habitable after repair at the end of the war – but that toll also reflected later fighting, artillery fire and renewed bombing, including the raid of 25 July 1944.

The purpose of the bombing was above all to prepare the attack and to destroy German quarters, depots and supply routes. Estonian authors, however, also see it as part of a wider campaign of March air raids on Estonian towns intended to break the population’s will to resist and to discourage Estonians from supporting the Germans. A few days later Tallinn suffered a similar fate.

The attacks of 8 to 24 March

On the morning of 8 March, after a two-and-a-half-hour artillery preparation in which – according to Estonian studies – some 100,000 shells and bombs fell on the positions of the Nordland Division and the Nederland Brigade, General Nikolai Simonyak’s 30th Guards Rifle Corps attacked the Ivangorod bridgehead. North of the town the 14th Rifle Corps tried to re-establish the bridgeheads lost a few days earlier; it was supported by the artillery of the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps, which fired some 7,000 shells that day. So there were Estonians on both sides of the front – some in Red Army uniform, others in the Estonian Waffen-SS regiments. Both attacks were repulsed with heavy losses to the attackers.

The last phase of the winter fighting was played out south of the town. On 17 March a Soviet armoured group came out near Auvere station on the Narva–Tallinn railway; it was stopped by the Tigers of the 502nd Heavy Tank Battalion, among them two tanks under Lieutenant Otto Carius, who later became one of the best-known German tank commanders. From 18 March six divisions of the 109th and 6th Rifle Corps attacked the weakened 61st Infantry Division. Their objective was the command post of XLIII Army Corps on Lastekodumägi (Orphanage Hill), the easternmost of the Sinimäed hills by the Tallinn road, 16 kilometres west of Narva. The Soviet infantry briefly reached the railway embankment, but the attack broke down under tank and artillery fire. After a week of exhausting fighting, on 24 March, the 8th and 59th Armies went over to the defensive. According to German reports, the 502nd Battalion destroyed 38 tanks and more than 20 self-propelled and assault guns between 17 and 22 March – figures that come from one side only.

The dates 6–24 March, which link the raid with the subsequent fighting, follow the division of the Battle of Narva adopted in some Western studies rather than any single Soviet operation of that name. In reality this was a series of separate attacks – on Ivangorod and the northern bridgeheads on 8 March, and at Auvere on 17–24 March – separated by pauses and regroupings. For decades Soviet literature did not describe them, and full figures for Red Army losses in March 1944 have never been published. All that is known is that German losses ran into thousands and Soviet losses – by every available estimate – were considerably higher.

Its place in the war

March 1944 closed the period of great Soviet winter offensives at Narva. The Leningrad Front had not taken the town, had not cut the Tallinn road and had not broken through to the rear of Army Group North; Stalin’s plan for the rapid conquest of Estonia as a base against Finland and towards East Prussia had failed. As early as 26 March the Germans went over to counter-attacks: the battle group of Major General Hyazinth Strachwitz smashed the western end of the Krivasoo bridgehead, and on 6 April its eastern end. The spring thaw turned the marshes into impassable terrain, and until the end of July relative quiet reigned on the isthmus. Some Finnish and Estonian historians believe that the prolonged defence of Narva kept the threat of attack from Estonian bases away from Finland and helped it negotiate an armistice rather than a capitulation in the summer of 1944.

It did not save Narva itself. On 25 July 1944, before the decisive attack, the town was bombed again, and on 26 July the Red Army entered its ruins; the Germans withdrew to the Tannenberg Line on the Sinimäed hills, where fighting continued until August. After the war the Soviet authorities did not rebuild the baroque Old Town. Although in 1947 the ruins of several dozen buildings were placed under heritage protection, in 1950 it was decided to demolish them and use the material for road building. Of the historic fabric only individual buildings were restored, above all the town hall; blocks of flats rose where the merchants’ houses had stood. The former inhabitants, mostly Estonians who had left during the evacuation, were not allowed back into the town, which was resettled with newcomers from other parts of the USSR. Today Narva is predominantly a Russian-speaking town, and the destruction of March 1944 is among the most painfully remembered losses of the war in Estonia – alongside the raid on Tallinn of 9 March, which completed the picture of the Soviet “March campaign” against Estonian towns.