Strachwitz's counter-attack at Narva

On 26 March 1944, after a dive-bomber attack, German Tigers and East Prussian infantry struck the Soviet bridgehead at Krivasoo, in the marshes south of Narva. The attack was led by Hyazinth Strachwitz, a panzer officer known as the “Panzer Count”, whom the command of Army Group North had brought to Narva precisely in order to take from the Red Army its most dangerous position on the west bank of the river. On the very first day the Germans cut off the western end of the bridgehead, the so-called “western sack” (Westsack), and by 31 March they had destroyed it completely. On 6 April the same force attacked the “eastern sack” (Ostsack). The bridgehead as a whole could not be eliminated, but after this fighting the front on the Narva isthmus froze until July.

It is usually recorded that Strachwitz’s offensive destroyed part of the Soviet bridgehead. This agrees with the sources; it need only be added that 26 March was the first day of several days of fighting, not a single blow.

The Krivasoo bridgehead

Troops of the Leningrad Front crossed to the west bank of the Narva over the ice at the beginning of February 1944, immediately after the Germans had fallen back behind the river to the front at Narva. The Germans and Estonians had eliminated the bridgeheads north of the town by early March. The bridgehead at Krivasoo, cut into marshy forest a few kilometres south of Narva, proved durable, however. It extended in a wedge westwards, towards the Narva–Tallinn railway and highway. Had the Russians managed to cut them, the defenders of Narva and Ivangorod would have found themselves in a pocket.

Successive Soviet attacks were launched from this bridgehead: the February offensive, the 59th Army’s attack of 1–4 March, and finally, after the destruction of Narva, the offensive of 18–24 March, aimed at Auvere station on the railway. All were halted, but at the cost of ever heavier losses. At the end of March the bridgehead was held by troops of General Filipp Starikov’s 8th Army and of the 59th Army. Exhausted by weeks of fighting in the swamp, they had gone over to the defensive. The front commander, Army General Leonid Govorov, intended to bring them back up to strength and renew the attack.

The Germans divided the bridgehead into two parts, which they called “sacks”. The western part, which reached furthest towards the railway, was the most dangerous for them; it was held by units of the 109th Rifle Corps. The eastern part, closer to the river, was defended by the 6th and 117th Rifle Corps of the 59th Army. Supplies and reinforcements reached both parts across the river and the marshes, along causeways and forest tracks, mostly at night.

The “Panzer Count”

Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz von Groß-Zauche und Camminetz (1893–1968) came from a Silesian aristocratic family from Kamień Śląski (Groß Stein). In the First World War, as a young Guards cavalry officer, he was taken prisoner by the French as early as 1914. After the war he belonged to the Freikorps (PL), and in 1921, during the Third Silesian Uprising (PL), he commanded a battalion in the fighting against the Polish insurgents around St Anne’s Mountain (Góra Świętej Anny); according to Polish regional literature (Zyta Zarzycka) he was allegedly responsible at the time for the murder of captured insurgents – an accusation, not a judicial finding. Afterwards he farmed the family estate and belonged to the SS, while remaining a reserve officer.

In 1939 he took part as a reserve officer in the September Campaign, in 1940 in France, and in 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. As a battalion commander and then commander of the panzer regiment of the 16th Panzer Division, he reached the Volga at Stalingrad in 1942. In 1943 he commanded the panzer regiment of the Großdeutschland Division at Kharkiv and in the Kursk salient, where he was badly wounded. He was one of the most highly decorated officers of the Wehrmacht, famous for his daring and for leading attacks in person, from the front line.

After his recovery he was posted to Army Group North, then commanded by Field Marshal Walter Model. Formally he was still an Oberst (colonel) of the reserve; his promotion to Generalmajor came with effect from 1 April 1944, and shortly afterwards he became the army group’s “senior panzer commander” (Höherer Panzerführer). At Narva he was subordinate to General of Infantry Johannes Frießner’s Army Detachment Narwa.

The attack of 26 March

For the attack Strachwitz was given three infantry divisions – the 11th, 170th and 227th – and tanks, above all the heavy Tigers of the 502nd Heavy Panzer Battalion, which a week earlier had stopped the Soviet tanks at Auvere. Among those serving in it was Otto Carius, later one of the most successful German tank commanders. The plan was simple: to strike from two sides at the base of the western wedge, cut it off from the rest of the bridgehead and destroy it in encirclement before the Russians could bring reinforcements across the marshes.

On the morning of 26 March, after a Ju 87 raid and a short artillery preparation, the tanks struck the flanks of the 109th Rifle Corps south of the railway to Tallinn. Behind the Tigers came the East Prussian grenadiers, forcing their way into fortifications the Russians had been building since February. According to accounts based on German and Estonian sources, by evening the Soviet units in the western sack were encircled, and the rest of the corps had withdrawn eastwards.

The next day the Russians counter-attacked, trying to break through to the encircled troops. They were beaten off with heavy losses by the 23rd Grenadier Regiment of the 11th Division. On 28 March German tank groups broke through the Soviet lines in several places and split the bridgehead in two. Fierce air battles raged over the marshes; according to some studies the Germans lost more than 40 dive-bombers in them, a figure that is hard to verify. By 31 March the western sack had ceased to exist. Soviet losses in this fighting are estimated at about 6,000 men; precise figures from Soviet archives have not been published, and German figures for prisoners and dead should be treated with caution.

For the defenders of Narva this meant pushing the threat back from the railway and the highway to Tallinn – the only supply routes for the whole of Army Detachment Narwa. In Estonia, where only a few weeks earlier Soviet aircraft had burned Narva and bombed the capital, the success at Krivasoo was the first sign since the beginning of the year that the front on the Narva could hold.

The eastern sack and the spring thaw

Encouraged by his success, Strachwitz attacked the eastern part of the bridgehead on 6 April; it was defended by the 6th and 117th Rifle Corps of the 59th Army. He began with a feint attack from the west, which convinced the Russians that the Germans again meant to cut off a flank. The real blow, preceded by heavy shelling and dive-bomber raids, went straight at the positions of the 59th Army; the 61st Infantry Division and the Tigers drove deep into the Soviet defences and separated the two corps. An attempt by the newly brought-up 8th Army to cut off the German tanks was beaten off. On 7 April Govorov ordered a switch to the defensive, and the bled-white 59th Army – by estimates it lost another 5,000–6,000 men in those days – was withdrawn from the bridgehead.

On 15 April Strachwitz received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds – only the eleventh recipient ever of this highest grade of the award. He hoped to eliminate the whole bridgehead, but spring arrived. The thaw turned the peat bogs into a quagmire in which the heavy Tigers could not move. The attack of 19–24 April broke down against the defences of the 8th Army, and according to German figures the Germans lost more than 2,200 killed and captured in it. Total German losses at Narva in April amounted, according to the same figures, to over 13,000 men; the Estonian historian Mart Laar estimated Soviet losses at no fewer than 30,000. The reduced Krivasoo bridgehead survived, and both sides, exhausted, went over to the defensive.

Place in the war

Strachwitz’s counter-attack closed the winter and spring phase of the fighting on the Narva. From February to April the Leningrad Front tried several times to break through the isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus and was stopped each time; the fighting at Krivasoo showed that the Germans, with tanks and fresh Estonian units, could still regain the initiative on a limited sector. Holding Narva mattered beyond Estonia: it shielded the Gulf of Finland, and with it the Soviet fleet’s route into the Baltic, as well as communications with Finland. In March Finland was conducting peace talks with the USSR, and in April it rejected the Soviet terms as unacceptable; some German commanders saw this as a political consequence of the defence of Narva.

The success was, however, local. On 31 March Model took over command of Army Group North Ukraine in place of the dismissed Erich von Manstein, and Army Group North was taken over by Colonel General Georg Lindemann. In the summer, after the Soviet offensive on the Karelian Isthmus and the destruction of Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, many divisions were withdrawn from Narva. On the night of 24/25 July the Germans abandoned Narva and Ivangorod and fell back to the Tannenberg Line in the Sinimäed hills, where they repelled further Soviet attacks until August. Only in September, when Finland left the war and the Red Army threatened to cut off the troops in Estonia from the south, did the Germans evacuate the country; Tallinn was taken on 22 September 1944.

Strachwitz fought on in the northern sector of the front. In August 1944 his panzer group broke through along the coast of the Gulf of Riga to the cut-off Army Group North near Tukums, supported by the guns of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. A few days later Strachwitz was badly injured in a car accident. In 1945, by now a Generalleutnant of the reserve, he commanded improvised anti-tank units in Silesia, and in May he fought his way through to Bavaria, where he was taken prisoner by the Americans. After the war he served, among other things, as an adviser to the Syrian government; he died in Bavaria in 1968. The fighting at Krivasoo, for all the fame it brought Strachwitz, did not change the course of the war in the north: it gained the Germans a few months in Estonia, but could not stave off the coming defeat of Army Group North.