The offensive at Narva

On 15 February 1944, after a heavy artillery preparation, the troops of the Soviet Leningrad Front attacked the German defences at Narva, on the Estonian border. The aim was to cut the road and railway from Narva to Tallinn, encircle the German troops defending the river and open the way into the heart of Estonia. For two weeks the 2nd Shock Army reached the railway in the German rear several times, but was thrown back each time. By the end of February the attack had petered out, and the Soviet bridgeheads on the western bank of the Narva had been partly eliminated.

It is often said that on 15 February the Leningrad Front began the Narva offensive, which lasted until 28 February. Estonian and Western literature adopts this framework. It should be added, however, that the fighting for the bridgeheads had gone on without a break since the beginning of the month, and the 2nd Shock Army’s artillery had opened fire as early as 11 February; Soviet historiography, for its part, did not treat the February fighting as a separate operation, regarding it instead as a continuation of the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive. 15 February was the day the main attack began.

Stalin’s order

At the beginning of February the Soviet armies that had lifted the siege of Leningrad reached the Narva and, as the Narva front took shape, seized bridgeheads on its western bank: in the Krivasoo marshes south of the town, and north of it, near the villages of Riigiküla and Siivertsi. The isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus was the only convenient route to Tallinn, and for the Baltic Fleet, bottled up in the eastern part of the gulf, the route to the Baltic. Taking Estonia also mattered politically: Finland was just then sounding out terms for leaving the war, and the German loss of the Estonian coast would expose it to direct attack.

Joseph Stalin demanded that Narva be taken “no later than 17 February 1944” – “for both military and political reasons”. On 9 February the front commander, General of the Army Leonid Govorov, ordered General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 2nd Shock Army to break through the defences north and south of the town, push the front 50 kilometres to the west and advance on to Rakvere.

On the other side stood the group of General of Infantry Otto Sponheimer, subordinate to the 18th Army and to Army Group North, which since the end of January had been commanded by Colonel General Walter Model. Narva itself and the Ivangorod bridgehead were held by SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s III SS Panzer Corps – with the “Nordland” division, in which volunteers from Denmark, Norway and other countries served, and the Dutch “Nederland” brigade. South of the town the defence was held by depleted Wehrmacht infantry divisions, units from Luftwaffe field divisions, and Estonian police and Eastern battalions.

In mid-February the German position was dangerous. On 13 February guardsmen of General Nikolai Simonyak’s 30th Guards Rifle Corps took the village of Auvere by surprise and briefly cut the railway, a few hundred metres from the road to Tallinn. The road was covered only by scattered groups of infantry and Panther tanks positioned every few hundred metres, and Soviet artillery shelled it continuously. The German troops on the river were in danger of encirclement.

The day before the attack: two failed outflanking moves

The frontal attack was to be supported by two outflanking moves. On 14 February a naval infantry force landed on the coast of the Gulf of Finland behind the Germans, and on the lakes to the south a Soviet regiment crossed the ice to the Estonian shore near Meerapalu. Both ventures – the Mereküla landing and the lake crossing – ended in disaster: of more than 500 marines, six came back, and the lakeside bridgehead was wiped out by Estonian and German troops on 15 February, the day the main attack began. Nor did the landing force live to see the army’s attack that was meant to come to its aid – the artillery at Auvere did not open fire at the appointed time.

Fighting south of Narva

On 15 February, after a heavy artillery preparation, the 30th Guards Rifle Corps attacked again from the Krivasoo bridgehead. Fedyuninsky reinforced it with the 13th Rifle Division from reserve. The 45th Guards Rifle Division broke through to the railway 500 metres west of Auvere station, but there it was pinned down by German Ju 87 dive-bombers. The railway to Tallinn, which supplied the troops at Narva, was cut in two places, but the Germans, supported by the tanks of the 502nd Heavy Tank Battalion, counter-attacked and halted the guardsmen. The elite corps, intended for breaking through fortified positions, bled itself white in this fighting; according to figures cited in the literature it lost 7,773 men and ceased to exist as a fighting formation. Around 20 February the attack was halted.

That day Fedyuninsky committed the fresh 124th Rifle Corps, reinforced with the artillery of the shattered divisions; it was commanded by Major General Voldemar Damberg, an Estonian by origin. The corps struck beyond the railway despite fierce resistance from the 61st Infantry Division. On the German side command had by then passed to General of Infantry Johannes Frießner, who replaced Sponheimer in February (on the 2nd according to some sources, on the 23rd according to others); on 23 February his group was renamed Army Detachment Narva (Armeeabteilung Narwa). Frießner threw the 61st Infantry Division, the “Feldherrnhalle” Panzergrenadier Division and the Tigers of the 502nd Battalion southwards – in a fierce battle they drove the Soviet corps back into the marshes. The worn-out 30th Guards Corps was replaced by another rifle corps. On 28 February the 214th Infantry Division cut off one of the Soviet divisions from the rest of the force; the situation was restored only by the 43rd Rifle Corps.

Fighting north of the town

North of Narva, two divisions of the 43rd Rifle Corps had on 12 February seized a bridgehead stretching from the suburb of Siivertsi to the village of Riigiküla. Had it been widened, the town and the German bridgehead at Ivangorod would have been cut off. In the week after 13 February the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) arrived at the front from the Nevel area, brought up to strength with newly called-up conscripts – at the beginning of February the occupation authorities had proclaimed general conscription in Estonia, and Jüri Uluots backed it in a radio speech, calling on his compatriots to defend the country against the return of Soviet rule. For many of these men it was a fight for their own country, not for Germany’s cause – yet they wore Waffen-SS uniform and fought in German ranks.

Steiner committed the division on 20 February. On 21 February its 45th and 46th Regiments drove a wedge between the Riigiküla and Siivertsi bridgeheads, but direct attacks broke down under the fire of Soviet batteries across the river. The Estonian officers therefore fell back on tactics learned before the war: small assault groups forced their way into the trenches, where Soviet artillery could not target them. The Riigiküla bridgehead, reinforced to some 780 men and a dozen or so guns, was eliminated on 24 February, the anniversary of Estonia’s declaration of independence – which held symbolic meaning for those who took it. On 29 February the Estonians attacked the Siivertsi bridgehead; according to Estonian sources it was taken at the beginning of March.

The balance sheet

By the end of February the 2nd Shock Army had accomplished none of its tasks: it had not taken Narva, had not permanently cut the road to Tallinn and had not advanced into the heart of Estonia. The losses of both sides in this fighting are not precisely known – detailed Soviet data on the strength and losses of the Leningrad Front at Narva have not been fully published, and the figures given by the Estonian and German sides are based on battlefield reports. What is known is that several Soviet divisions emerged from the February battles badly depleted. On 22 February Stalin issued a new order: break through the defences, push on to Pärnu, cut off the German forces in Estonia and advance further through Latvia to East Prussia. According to German figures, on 1 March the Narva group numbered some 123,500 soldiers.

What came next

The February offensive was only the first of several Soviet attacks on the isthmus. On 1 March the newly arrived 59th Army struck from the Krivasoo bridgehead towards the village of Kuremäe and within three days broke through the defences of the 214th Infantry Division, but encircled German strongpoints and Estonian Eastern battalions fought on, and the Germans managed to bring up reinforcements and halt the attack. On 6 March Soviet aircraft bombed Narva: the Baroque old town, whose inhabitants had been evacuated earlier, was almost completely destroyed. During the night of 9–10 March bombs fell on Tallinn; several hundred inhabitants were killed and a large part of the city centre burned down. The raids on Estonian towns, in which civilians died, tended to harden Estonians’ hostility to the returning Red Army rather than break their resistance.

In March and April the fighting shifted to the Krivasoo bridgehead, where German battle groups under Colonel Hyazinth Strachwitz recovered some of the lost ground. From the end of April the Narva front fell quiet for three months. The Red Army’s failure in Estonia had political consequences: Finland, whose high command had watched the fighting on the Narva with anxiety, rejected the Soviet peace terms in April and stayed in the war until September 1944.

The breakthrough came only in the summer. After the great offensive in Belarus, Soviet troops attacked at Narva again in July; on 26 July they took the ruins of the town, and the Germans fell back to the Sinimäed hills (the Tannenberg Line), where one of the bloodiest battles on this sector of the front was fought. Army Detachment Narva held them until mid-September, when Adolf Hitler agreed to the evacuation of the whole of mainland Estonia. In the February offensive the Soviet command, driven by a political deadline, threw corps after corps at the narrow isthmus and paid for it with enormous losses. It was the first sign that, after its great victories at Leningrad, the Red Army would be held on the threshold of the Baltic states for almost six months.