The Mereküla landing

On 14 February 1944 the Red Army tried to outflank the German defences on Estonia’s border from two directions. Before dawn a detachment of Baltic Fleet naval infantry – more than five hundred men – landed on the coast of the Gulf of Finland a few kilometres behind the front line on the Narva, with orders to cut the only road and railway linking the Germans around the town with the rest of the country. That same night, some 150 kilometres to the south, a Soviet rifle regiment crossed the ice of the narrow lake joining Lake Peipus to Lake Pskov and seized a bridgehead on the Estonian shore near the village of Meerapalu. Both operations ended in disaster: the Mereküla landing force was destroyed within three days at most, and the lakeside bridgehead as early as 15 February.

Chronologies treat the two episodes separately: on 14 February the Soviet 374th Rifle Regiment establishes a bridgehead on the western shore of Lake Peipus while the Mereküla landing meets resistance; on 15 February the bridgehead is wiped out. The dates and the regiment’s number agree with Estonian accounts. It need only be added that Meerapalu lies on the Lämmijärv, the strait between Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov – in common usage the whole is called Lake Peipus. And the word “resistance” is too weak: of the Mereküla landing force, six men made it back to their own lines.

The isthmus between the gulf and the lake

At the beginning of February 1944, after the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive, the troops of the Soviet Leningrad Front reached the Narva. As the Narva front took shape, General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 2nd Shock Army crossed the river north and south of the town and seized bridgeheads, the largest of them in the Krivasoo marshes. The Germans – General of Infantry Otto Sponheimer’s group with the III SS Panzer Corps – nevertheless held the town itself, the bridgehead at Ivangorod on the eastern bank and, most importantly, their line of retreat: the road and railway from Narva to Tallinn, running parallel to the coast.

The isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus is some 45 kilometres wide. Anyone who wanted to advance into the heart of Estonia had to cross it or go round it – by sea or across the frozen lakes. The front commander, General of the Army Leonid Govorov, decided to try both routes at once. Joseph Stalin was demanding that Narva be taken by 17 February at the latest – partly for political reasons, since in those same weeks Finland was sounding out peace terms.

On the German side the situation was serious. The Soviet bridgeheads south of the town had come within a few hundred metres of the road, and on 13 February guardsmen of General Nikolai Simonyak’s 30th Guards Rifle Corps took the village of Auvere and briefly cut the railway. Reinforcements were being rushed to the front, among them the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian), being brought up to strength with newly called-up Estonians – on 7 February Jüri Uluots, the last pre-war prime minister, had backed the mobilisation as a way of defending the country against the return of Soviet rule.

The Mereküla landing

Mereküla (Meriküla in Estonian) was a seaside summer resort a few kilometres west of the mouth of the Narva; today it is part of the town of Narva-Jõesuu. The landing force was to go ashore about 6 kilometres behind the German front line, cut the Narva–Rakvere road and railway, seize Auvere station and hold out until the troops of the 2nd Shock Army arrived. The task was given to the 571st Independent Submachine-Gun Battalion of the 260th Naval Infantry Brigade with an attached rifle company – according to Russian accounts, 517 men under Major Stepan Maslov, armed mainly with submachine guns, with three light mortars, a dozen or so anti-tank rifles and a dozen or so machine guns. Among them were several young women serving as radio operators. They were given neither artillery nor tanks.

According to the memoirs of the fleet commander, Admiral Vladimir Tributs, the idea of the landing came from Govorov, and the landing force was only meant to hold out for a few hours, until the army broke through the front. Russian historians who later studied the operation point out that the plans did not match: the 2nd Shock Army’s main attack on Auvere was not scheduled until the following days. Nor was any provision made for fire support from ships and aircraft after the landing, for cooperation with the land forces, or for evacuation in the event of failure – repeating, as they write, the same mistakes that had doomed the landings at Peterhof and Strelna in the autumn of 1941.

The detachment sailed on the evening of 13 February from the island of Lavansaari in the Gulf of Finland, aboard armoured motor boats and patrol craft; the minesweepers turned back because of drifting ice. At around 4 a.m. on 14 February the first wave landed unnoticed. The second came in under artillery and mortar fire. The coast turned out to be strongly defended: as early as 1939 the Estonians had anticipated a Soviet landing at precisely this spot and built coastal batteries there, and the Germans, when constructing the Panther Line, had installed their own guns in them. About 430 men got ashore; two boats sank, and several dozen soldiers could not be landed and returned to base. The landing craft left immediately after unloading, and the supporting gunboats arrived several hours late and did not open fire because they had no contact with the detachment – not a single message came through from the landing force’s four radio sets.

German and Estonian units stationed nearby were quickly sent against the marines: according to Estonian and Western accounts, the SS regiment “Norge” of the “Nordland” division, coastal guards and three Tiger tanks; according to Russian ones, also a battalion of the Estonian division and sub-units of the German 227th Infantry Division, whose headquarters found itself in the combat zone. The landing force split into three groups and tried to fight its way towards Auvere. The 2nd Shock Army’s artillery failed to begin in time the attack the landing force was waiting for. Estonian and Western sources write that the beachhead was destroyed after seven and a half hours of fighting; according to Russian sources, organised resistance by the last group ceased on 16 February, while individual soldiers were still trying to get through to their own side. Major Maslov, badly wounded, was killed on 15 February.

The outcome was devastating. According to Russian findings, six of the landing force crossed the front line, eight wounded men were taken prisoner and the rest were killed. Soviet publications spoke of 1,500–2,000 Germans killed and 20–25 tanks destroyed and claimed that the landing had tied down large enemy forces – modern Russian researchers regard these figures as greatly exaggerated. A surviving report of the German 227th Infantry Division lists 32 killed, 74 wounded and 4 missing in the division and its attached units.

The bridgehead on the lake: Meerapalu

The second outflanking move went across the lakes. The left wing of the Leningrad Front, which after taking Gdov on 4 February had been advancing along the eastern shore of Lake Peipus, was to cross the ice to the Estonian shore and push towards Tartu. During the night of 11–12 February Soviet units occupied the island of Piirissaar in the middle of the lake. The shore opposite was defended by scattered strongpoints with German anti-aircraft batteries and battalions of the Estonian Home Guard (Omakaitse) from Võru county.

By chance, on 11 February the 1st Battalion of the 45th SS Grenadier Regiment of the Estonian division, under Major Harald Riipalu, also arrived there, having been taken off a train bound for Narva at Tartu. During the night of 12–13 February his men beat off several attacks near Mehikoorma by Soviet infantry advancing across the ice in dense skirmish lines; according to Estonian accounts, 700–800 Red Army soldiers were killed in them. These attacks, however, turned out to be merely a diversion.

During the night of 13–14 February the 374th Rifle Regiment of the 128th Rifle Division crossed the Lämmijärv further north and took Meerapalu and the neighbouring village of Pedaspää by surprise. The crew of a German anti-aircraft battery fled, abandoning eight guns. Major General Erich Hoffmann, in charge of the defence of the lakeshore, arrived on the scene and at first wanted to pull his troops back and wait for reinforcements; Riipalu persuaded him to counter-attack at once and was given command of the hastily assembled units. All day and night artillery shelled the ice over which the Russians were bringing up reinforcements, while Junkers Ju 87s broke up columns in the open.

On the morning of 15 February Soviet units advanced west from Meerapalu, but were stopped by the fire of light anti-aircraft guns. A second, battalion-sized bridgehead was established at Jõepera; it was destroyed by midday by Riipalu’s men and a newly arrived battalion of the 44th Grenadier Regiment from the East Prussian 11th Infantry Division. After two dive-bomber strikes, the attack on Meerapalu began at 1.35 p.m., and by 5 p.m. the village had been retaken; a few hours later Pedaspää fell. Weapons, the abandoned anti-aircraft guns and the colours of the 374th Regiment were captured. Estonian sources estimate Soviet losses in killed and captured at more than two thousand, and those of Riipalu’s battalion at 9 killed and 30 wounded – the first of these figures comes from the victorious side and should be treated with caution. On 17 February the battalion of the 44th Regiment retook Piirissaar.

Significance

Both episodes showed how hard it was to get round the defences on the Narva. The defeat at Meerapalu closed the route to Tartu across the lakes for several months, and in Estonian memory it lives on as one of the first victories of units made up of Estonians in 1944. The Mereküla landing was one of the Baltic Fleet’s least successful amphibious operations. The People’s Commissar of the Navy, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, issued a special directive in which he accused the fleet command of failing to reconnoitre, of leaving the landing force without fire and air support, and of withdrawing the ships before the mission had been accomplished.

The story of the landing was long passed over in silence. Only at the end of the 1960s did fleet veterans succeed in establishing the names of the fallen; none of the participants was decorated. In 1972 a monument to the landing force was erected at Mereküla; it was destroyed in 1990 and later rebuilt, and in August 2022 the Estonian authorities dismantled it as part of the removal of Soviet war memorials.

The main Soviet attack at Narva, originally scheduled for the same days, began on 15 February and lasted until the end of the month. It, too, brought no breakthrough. The fighting for the isthmus went on until the summer of 1944: in July Soviet troops took the ruins of Narva, and the Germans withdrew to the nearby Sinimäed hills, which they abandoned only in September, when they evacuated the whole of Estonia.