Between Giants

by Prit Buttar

  The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Wehrmacht High Command, or OKW) report for 31 March made the most of the German success, somewhat exaggerating the gains:

  The bulk of several Russian divisions were encircled and destroyed in several days of offensive operations in the trackless forests and marshes southwest of Narva, with effective support from artillery, rocket launchers, tanks and fighter-bombers. Repeated enemy relief attacks failed. In this attack, the enemy lost over 6,000 dead, several hundred prisoners, and 59 guns, as well as numerous other weapons and war materiel of all kinds.37

  On 19 April, with the spring thaw making all movement difficult, the Germans attempted to reduce the rest of the Soviet bridgehead, using the Tiger Abteilung, Strachwitz’s tanks, and elements of 61st, 122nd, 170th and Feldherrnhalle Divisions. Confused fighting lasted several days, with both sides suffering short-term encirclements for periods of time. The attack was finally called off on 24 April, having made limited headway. Strachwitz received the Diamonds to the Knight’s Cross for his efforts before being assigned to a new command. Carius was awarded the Knight’s Cross.

  The Soviet version of events was completely different from the earlier OKW report:

  The Hitlerite command decided to restore the rail line and, to that end, launched a counterattack on 26 March. During the course of two weeks, the enemy launched attack after attack. At a cost of heavy losses, the enemy managed to drive a wedge into the Soviet defences, but part of their forces were encircled and destroyed, and the remainder withdrew to their jumping-off positions.38

  It was the end of the winter fighting in the area. Govorov’s armies, attacking almost continuously for three months, had driven the Germans back from Leningrad into Estonia in less than a month, but despite repeated efforts, and substantial reinforcements, had failed to break through the Narva line. For the Germans, the satisfaction of stopping the Soviet advance was tempered by the heavy losses they had suffered. A resumption of fighting would have to wait until the dramatic events of the summer.

  Further south, the Latvians had been involved in heavy fighting against Soviet forces attempting to advance directly towards Latvia, to the south of Lake Peipus. The 2nd Latvian SS Brigade had now been upgraded to form the new 19th SS Waffen-Grenadier Division (2nd Latvian), and in order to create a new field command that would allow the two Latvian divisions to fight alongside each other, the SS established VI SS Corps in October 1943. This new corps, consisting of the two divisions, was tasked with occupying part of the Panther Line along the River Velikaya. The first commander of the corps was Obergruppenführer Karl von Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a man held in high regard by senior Latvian officers.

  In this sector, the line had been poorly positioned. The east bank of the Velikaya consisted of a line of hills, giving the Soviet troops the advantage of overseeing the Latvian positions. Attempts by Standartenführer Veiss to push the front line forward, in order to secure the hills and improve the position, were only moderately successful; the Latvians had been in constant retreat for days, often engaged in exhausting and costly combat with the pursuing Red Army, and the men were unwilling to abandon the shelter of the bunkers of the Panther Line.

  On 1 March, units of the Red Army attacked across the frozen Velikaya, the beginning of a series of battles that continued through most of the month. On 16 March, the Latvians were driven from Hill 93.4 near Sapronovo, one of the few pieces of high ground on the west bank, and after a series of bloody reversals the following day, they succeeded in recovering their positions on 18 March. A week later, after a heavy bombardment, the Red Army tried again, forcing 15th SS Waffen-Grenadier Division – the southerly of the two Latvian divisions – to concede ground. Determined counter-attacks failed to destroy the Soviet bridgehead, and in early April, the battered Latvian division was pulled out of the front line.

  Heavy fighting continued in the sector held by 19th SS Waffen-Grenadier Division into April. Standartenführer Veiss was wounded by a grenade on 7 April, and died of his wounds several days later. Soviet attempts to break through continued until the middle of the month before the spring thaw intervened. The Latvians estimated that they had held off at least 11 Soviet rifle divisions, though the cost to themselves was considerable. To mark the day of the heaviest fighting, the Latvians proclaimed 16 March as Latvian Legion Day. It was the only occasion that the two Latvian divisions would fight side by side under a Latvian commander.39

  Chapter 7

  BREAKING THE DEADLOCK: SUMMER 1944

  Relative calm descended upon Army Group North and the Soviet Fronts that faced it, as the fighting along the Narva died down with the spring thaw. Whilst the Red Army had much to celebrate, there was nevertheless a sense of missed opportunity. Leningrad was now completely safe from German attack, and the front line had approached – and in the case of the Narva bridgeheads, crossed – the old 1939 frontier of the Soviet Union. But despite being badly battered, Army Group North had survived. Its defence along the Narva had demonstrated that the Wehrmacht remained more than capable of tough resistance, resulting in heavy Soviet casualties.

  A similar pattern was seen elsewhere along the Eastern Front. In the central sector, there was particularly heavy fighting during the winter to the north of Vitebsk, where 1st Baltic Front succeeded in taking Nevel and Gorodok, but then spent several weeks battering in vain at Vitebsk itself. The city was left in a dangerous salient, with Soviet forces to the west, north and east. Despite its being an obvious target for a Soviet assault, Hitler refused to allow its evacuation; instead, it was declared a fortress, to be defended to the last man. Further south, Soviet forces pursued the Germans after their failure to break through during the battle of Kursk and forced German positions along the Dnepr. The 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts succeeded in encircling a substantial German force near the city of Cherkassy, and even though the Germans succeeded in breaking out and at least some of the troops in the encirclement escaped, it seemed as if further successes were imminent. With this in mind, Stalin urged his commanders to maintain pressure along the entire Eastern Front, in the belief that such relentless attacks would eventually create a collapse on part of the front, which could then be exploited to break up the entire German line. But as was the case in the north, the immobilising spring thaw, combined with exhaustion of the attacking Soviet formations, prevented a decisive breakthrough.

  As the weather grew warmer, the Germans anxiously prepared for a resumption of the Soviet onslaught. Hitler and OKH concluded that the Red Army’s main effort would fall in the Ukraine, a belief fed by elaborate Soviet deception measures. Empty goods trains were repeatedly spotted leaving the area during the day, and were believed to have transported men and equipment into the front near the city of Kovel. The trains did indeed enter the region during the night, but unknown to the Germans, they were as empty as when they were spotted by German reconnaissance during the day. The real Soviet build-up was opposite Army Group Centre.

  The three armies of Army Group Centre could not fail to detect the Soviet forces massing against them. Although they may have underestimated the total Soviet strength, it was clear to the officers and men of 3rd Panzer Army, 4th Army and 9th Army that they faced a major assault. Despite the incontrovertible evidence, OKH remained convinced that the main effort would come further south. By 10 June, this steadfast opinion was beginning to shift:

  When it is still considered that the attack against Army Group Centre will be a secondary operation in the framework of overall Soviet offensive operations, it must be taken into account that the enemy will also be capable of building concentrations in front of Army Group Centre, whose penetrative power cannot be underestimated in view of the ratio of forces between the two sides.1

  Refused permission to pull back, the exposed German troops of Army Group Centre could only watch and wait, listening anxiously to reports of the invasion of Normandy by the Western Allies. On 22 June, the third anniversary of the German invasion, the blow fell, as the huge Soviet forces massed f
or Operation Bagration were unleashed. In three days, Vitebsk was encircled, and fell on 27 June, with the loss of the German LIII Corps. Further envelopments followed at Mogilev and Bobruisk, followed by another encirclement at Minsk. By this stage, the Germans were in total retreat, with only isolated resistance by a small number of panzer divisions, fighting desperately in the face of the unstoppable tide.

  The disintegration of Army Group Centre created two immediate problems. Firstly, there was an urgent need to transfer forces to fill the huge gaps left by the loss of up to half a million men. With a pressing requirement for troops in France to face the Western Allies in Normandy, the only sources of reinforcements for Army Group Centre were either a few divisions on garrison duty in places like Norway, or the army groups in the northern and southern sectors of the Eastern Front. Such transfers of troops would weaken their former sectors, making them in turn vulnerable to further Soviet assaults.

  The second problem was that the rapid Soviet advance across Belarus to the Polish frontier in the wake of Bagration exposed the flanks of the army groups immediately to the north and south. In the case of Army Group North, this provided an opportunity to bypass the stubborn German defences that had held up the Soviet advance in the last weeks of the winter offensive. As troops were sent from Army Group North to try to re-establish a line in the centre, the weakened German 16th and 18th Armies began to look increasingly vulnerable.

  The catastrophic plight of Army Group Centre forced the German High Command to consider radical options. OKH proposed the abandonment of Estonia and parts of Latvia, with a withdrawal of forces to the line of the River Daugava. Johannes Friessner, who had replaced Lindemann as commander of Army Group North, presented this proposal to Hitler on 12 July. The response can have come as little surprise to anyone: Hitler ordered Army Group North to stand firm on the Narva, or die in the attempt.2

  The following weeks saw rapid and dramatic developments across the entire Eastern Front. These battles often occurred at the same time, but in an attempt to provide a coherent account, they will be described first in the south, where the Soviet armies on the northern flank of Bagration pushed into Lithuania and Latvia, and then in the north, where the traditional invasion route between Estonia and Russia, along the Baltic coast, remained the scene of bitter fighting and enormous bloodshed.

  The first crisis for the German forces in the Baltic States came towards the end of Bagration, as General Ivan Khristorovich Bagramian’s 1st Baltic Front and General Ivan Danilovich Cherniakhovsky’s 3rd Belarusian Front advanced on the northern flank of the great Soviet advance. Despite suffering heavy losses in the initial phase of Bagration, 1st Baltic Front remained a powerful force, and as he advanced, Bagramian repeatedly raised concerns about the German Army Group North hanging over his right flank. The German forces there, he felt, represented a potential threat, but also an opportunity: a drive against them could result in the isolation and eventual destruction of Army Group North. In other words, in keeping with Stalin’s philosophy during the winter offensives, he wished to exploit the collapse of German forces in front of him and to induce a similar collapse elsewhere.

  Bagramian was the son of an Armenian railwayman, and the first non-Slavic Soviet officer to be given command of a front. He had been a member of an Armenian nationalist group during the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution, and was briefly expelled from the Frunze Military Academy in 1934 when this was discovered; fortunately for him, his arrest was successfully challenged by Anastas Mikoyan, an Armenian member of the Politburo.3 At the beginning of Barbarossa, he was deputy chief of staff of the South-western Front, and was one of the few officers to survive the front’s collapse in the Western Ukraine. After taking part in the planning of the Soviet counter-attack in the battle of Moscow, he was involved in Timoshenko’s disastrous Kharkov counter-offensive of 1942, and was demoted in the aftermath, even though he had attempted to persuade both Timoshenko and Stalin that the operation was going badly awry.4 Partially rehabilitated, he commanded first 16th Army, then 11th Army, and further impressed Stalin during the preparations for the battle of Kursk. After his appointment to command of 1st Baltic Front, he headed up the assault on Vitebsk during the winter of 1943–44, before leading his front during Bagration.

  Cherniakhovsky was also the son of a railwayman, this time from the Ukraine. He was younger than many of his contemporary generals, and his early experience of the Second World War was when he led his 28th Tank Division in a doomed counterattack against Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group during the early fighting in Lithuania. In early 1943, he achieved fame while commanding 60th Army when he liberated Kursk, creating the salient that was the centre of the following summer’s fighting. He was the youngest man to be appointed to command of a front, and showed great flair in shifting his front’s axis of attack during Bagration, something that he repeated during the closing months of the war in East Prussia.

  Bagramian’s forces reached Lake Narach in north-west Belarus on 4 July, and were now ordered to press on towards Kaunas and Vilnius. As well as the symbolic importance of these cities, securing either of these objectives would open the way for a push to the Baltic coast, which would isolate Army Group North. The German line facing Bagramian’s 1st Baltic Front was composed of General Gerhard Matzky’s XXVI Corps, part of the remnants of 3rd Panzer Army. Matzky, who had served as military attaché in Tokyo until 1940, took command of 21st Infantry Division in 1943 and XXVIII Corps in early 1944. During the defensive fighting south of Pskov he earned the Knight’s Cross, before taking command of XXVI Corps.

  One of the few formations available to 3rd Panzer Army that was in good shape was 7th Panzer Division, newly arrived from Army Group North Ukraine. It detrained north of the town of Lida, in north-west Belarus, and as they arrived on 5 July, its troops were dispatched to the north, in order to set up a protective front some 30 miles south-east of Vilnius. Many of the division’s personnel would have remembered their passage through this area three years ago, when they led the triumphant Wehrmacht in its apparently unstoppable drive into the Soviet Union. The current state of affairs in their new theatre of operations came as a shock to the panzer troops:

  There was great turmoil at the front, with some units retreating in complete disarray as individual soldiers. The command staff received no reports from the ‘front’ and could give no information about the enemy, still less which formations they had earlier fought, and there was a complete lack of cohesion.5

  In a series of running battles, 7th Panzer Division fell back steadily towards the west. Like all motorised German formations, it was hamstrung by fuel shortages, and on 10 July, Generalmajor Karl Mauss, the division commander, was forced to order the destruction of disabled tanks that were being towed. Crossing into Lithuania on 10 July, Bagramian’s spearheads passed 7th Panzer Division’s northern flank, reaching the outskirts of Alytus, over 40 miles west of the German front line. Whilst the bulk of the panzer division continued to face east, defending the river crossing at Varėna, just inside Lithuania, a battlegroup fought its way towards Alytus in the face of strong Soviet antitank defences. Under constant pressure, 7th Panzer Division fell back to the south-west, crossing the River Niemen at Merkinė late on 13 July. In response to urgent requests for help from the garrison commander of Alytus, who had almost no troops at his disposal, Mauss dispatched a battlegroup to the town, where despite assurances to the contrary, it was promptly dispersed in small detachments. In any event, the town couldn’t be held. Strong Soviet attacks on 15 July forced the Germans back, leaving some elements of the 7th Panzer Division battlegroup to the north-west of Alytus, while the rest fell back to the west. Here, it proved possible to halt the Soviet advance on high ground:

  The day brought the division a defensive success through the deployment of all available forces against a continuously attacking enemy. On this day, enemy forces of between 10 and 12 regiments in strength attempted to break through with the use of the heaviest artillery, anti-ta
nk, mortar and air support, particularly west of Alytus. Nevertheless, the main point of effort was clearly disrupted, particularly through the use of artillery.6

  One of 7th Panzer Division’s panzer battalions had been in France, re-equipping with new Panther tanks, and its return to the division provided a most welcome boost in strength. Heavy fighting continued, and late on 27 July, the division was ordered north to Kaunas, to deal with a dangerous development that threatened to open up the entire German front.

  On Bagramian’s southern flank was Cherniakhovsky’s 3rd Belarusian Front, opposed by a mixture of units, with the most prominent being 5th Panzer Division. The division had been heavily involved in a fighting withdrawal from Mogilev to Minsk and from there to the Lithuanian and East Prussian borders, and despite its losses remained a powerful force. The bitter fighting made a big impression on the soldiers involved, as the commander of one of 5th Panzer Division’s panzergrenadier regiments recorded:

  These battles were the toughest that I had ever experienced, and in the main fitted the motto: Let the enemy come forward, give him a punch on the nose, disengage, attack ourselves, and disappear again. This meant the most strenuous efforts by everyone from the commanders to the youngest grenadiers. There was absolutely no more thought of sleep. Words cannot describe what was required during these days in terms of heroism, operations, and endurance. It would be wrong to single out a few individuals or units, as all gave their best.7