The Red Army on the Baltic

On 10 October 1944 the spearheads of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army reached the Baltic near Palanga, north of Klaipėda (Memel). Five days earlier General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan’s 1st Baltic Front had struck westwards from Šiauliai, on a sector where the Germans had not expected the main attack. It broke through the front of the German Third Panzer Army and in less than a week severed the last land link between Army Group North and East Prussia. Some thirty German divisions in Latvia were cut off from the Reich.

Popular war chronologies record this event in two entries. Under 5 October they note that the Red Army began an offensive to take Riga, and under 10 October that it reached the Neman in Prussia and continued fighting for Riga. Both entries need qualifying. The advance on Riga had been under way since 14 September; what began on 5 October was a new operation, known in Russian literature as the Memel (Klaipėda) operation, directed not at Riga but westwards, towards the sea. On 10 October Soviet troops stood not on the Neman but on the Baltic. The Red Army reached the lower Neman – which on this stretch flowed through the former Memel Territory and along the northern border of East Prussia – over the following days; according to Russian studies, by 22 October it had cleared most of the river’s northern bank.

A change of direction

In September the three Baltic Fronts had been advancing concentrically on Riga. The offensive succeeded in the north – the Germans abandoned Estonia – but stalled before Riga itself. Troops of the 1st Baltic Front, south of the Daugava, came within a few dozen kilometres of the city and met stiff resistance. The commander of Army Group North, Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner, was shortening his front and pulling forces into the Riga area, expecting the decisive battle to be fought there.

On 24 September the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command (Stavka) issued a directive shifting the main effort of Bagramyan’s front to the Memel axis. Within a few days, under cover of continued attacks near Riga, the front regrouped several armies into the Šiauliai area, among them the 4th Shock Army and the 51st Army, as well as Lieutenant General Vasily Volsky’s 5th Guards Tank Army. On 27 September the staff of the German Sixteenth Army reported Soviet columns moving south-west, but German intelligence failed to identify the purpose of the regrouping. On the 19-kilometre breakthrough sector west and south-west of Šiauliai, according to Soviet figures, 35 rifle divisions and 777 tanks and self-propelled guns were assembled.

The opponent was Colonel General Erhard Raus’s Third Panzer Army, the left wing of Army Group Centre, which had been routed in Belorussia that summer during Operation Bagration. In August and September German counter-attacks in Samogitia had restored a narrow link between the two army groups; now it was precisely this link that came under attack. Soviet studies put the army’s strength on the Memel axis at some 130,000 men in 16 divisions, with around 400 tanks. On the breakthrough sector itself, however, the only defender was the relatively weak 551st Volksgrenadier Division.

The breakthrough

On 5 October, after an artillery preparation, Bagramyan’s armies attacked on a front nearly a hundred kilometres wide. The 551st Volksgrenadier Division collapsed on the first day, and according to Russian studies the Soviet troops advanced 7–17 km. On 6 October the armies’ mobile groups, with the 1st and 19th Tank Corps, entered the battle, and soon Volsky’s tank army was committed to the breach and sent towards the coast north of Klaipėda. The Germans were unable to organise a defence on either the second or the third line. By 7 October the positions of the Third Panzer Army had disintegrated, and by the evening of 8 October the Soviet shock group had driven some 90 km deep, widening the breach to more than 250 km. Volsky’s tanks overran the headquarters of the Third Panzer Army; Raus and his officers had to fight their way through to Klaipėda.

In the south, closer to the Neman, Lieutenant General Afanasy Beloborodov’s 43rd Army advanced and reached the sea south of the city. At the same time the northern wing of General of the Army Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorussian Front was moving towards Tilsit, an old Prussian town on the lower Neman. When Soviet units stood on the Baltic near Palanga on 10 October, a Soviet-held belt several dozen kilometres wide separated the German forces in East Prussia from Army Group North. According to Russian studies, the Germans never managed to break through it.

Klaipėda, part of Lithuania until 1939 and defended by General of Infantry Hans Gollnick’s XXVIII Army Corps, was surrounded on the landward side. Only the narrow Curonian Spit connected the city with East Prussia, and the garrison was supported by gunfire from the sea by Kriegsmarine heavy cruisers, among them Prinz Eugen and Lützow. In the meantime the Kriegsmarine managed to evacuate some of the soldiers and civilians from the port.

Riga

The breakthrough at Šiauliai also sealed the fate of Riga. While Bagramyan’s offensive was still under way, on 6 October, the Germans began withdrawing troops from the Riga area into Courland. On 9 October Schörner reported that he was ready to strike towards Klaipėda and restore the link with Prussia if he was permitted to evacuate Riga. On 10 October Soviet troops came within artillery range of the city. The German Eighteenth Army was passing through Riga into Courland, blowing up the bridges behind it, while the retreat was covered by the rearguard of the 227th Infantry Division and anti-aircraft guns.

On the same day that Soviet troops reached the sea near Palanga, therefore, Riga was witnessing an evacuation rather than a battle for the city. The chronologies are right to note that fighting near Riga went on, but by then it consisted mainly of actions against the troops covering the withdrawal. The brunt of it was borne by General of the Army Andrei Yeremenko’s 2nd Baltic Front and General of the Army Ivan Maslennikov’s 3rd Baltic Front, which went over to the pursuit.

Courland

Hitler refused to allow an attempt to break out of Courland into Prussia. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, by his own account in his memoirs, demanded that Army Group North be withdrawn to East Prussia, where its divisions could defend the Reich’s border. Hitler preferred to hold Courland, citing among other things the importance of its ports, Liepāja and Ventspils, to the Kriegsmarine and its U-boat training in the eastern Baltic. The armies cut off on the peninsula were to tie down Soviet forces and serve as a base for a future counter-offensive that never came.

Thus 10 October marked the beginning of the Courland Pocket. Bagramyan was unable to eliminate it at once: the withdrawal from Riga and Estonia allowed Schörner to concentrate two armies, the Sixteenth and Eighteenth, on the peninsula, supplied by sea.

Its place in the war

According to Russian studies, in the course of the Memel operation the Red Army advanced about 150 km and occupied more than 26,000 km²; they put German losses at over 24,000 killed and 420 tanks and assault guns. These figures come from one side only and are difficult to verify. More important was the strategic consequence: Army Group North ceased to be the wing of the Eastern Front and became an isolated force that could no longer influence the defence of the Reich for the rest of the war.

On 13 October Soviet troops took the part of Riga on the right bank of the Daugava, and on 15 October, after crossing the river, the whole city. On 16 October the 3rd Belorussian Front began an advance deep into East Prussia in the direction of Gumbinnen, which was halted after a few days by strong German resistance. Soviet troops had stood on the borders of East Prussia since August; now, for the first time, they entered deep into its territory. On the Estonian islands fighting continued until 24 November.

Klaipėda remained encircled for more than three months. The Germans evacuated wounded and refugees from it by sea, and the last units left the city on 28 January 1945, during the Soviet offensive in East Prussia. After the war Klaipėda became part of the Lithuanian SSR. The Courland Pocket – from January 1945 held by Army Group Courland – beat off successive Soviet attacks until the German surrender in May 1945; only then did between some 135,000 and some 190,000 soldiers, according to various estimates, go into captivity (nearly 200,000 including the Latvians). For Latvia and Lithuania the Red Army’s arrival on the Baltic meant the return of Soviet rule over almost all their territory – and with it new deportations and years of armed resistance by the underground.