By early 1944, the Wehrmacht was pushed back along its entire frontline in the east. In February 1944, it retreated from the approaches to Leningrad to the prepared section of the Panther Line at the border of Estonia. In June and July, Army Group Centre was thrown back from the Byelorussian SSR into Poland by Operation Bagration. This created the opportunity for the Red Army to attack towards the Baltic Sea, thereby severing the land connection between the German Army Groups in the east.
By 5 July, the Šiauliai offensive commenced, as a follow-up from Operation Bagration. The Soviet 43rd, 51st, and 2nd Guards Armies attacked towards Riga on the Baltic coast with 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps in the van. By 31 July, the coast on the Gulf of Riga had been reached; 6th Guards Army covered Riga and the extended flank of the penetration towards the north.
The German reaction was rapid, and initially successful. A counterattack, code-named Operation Doppelkopf, was conducted on 16 August by XXXX and XXXIX Panzer Corps under the command of Third Panzer Army, Army Group Centre. Acting in coordination with armored formations from Army Group North, they initially cut off the Soviet troops on the coast, and re-established a tenuous 30-kilometer-wide corridor connecting Army Groups Centre and North. The main objective of the attack was to retake the key road junction of Šiauliai (German: Schaulen), but the German tanks ran head-on into an in-depth defense by the 1st Baltic Front, and by 20 August the German advance had stalled with heavy losses. A follow-up attack, code-named Operation Cäsar, and launched on 16 September, failed in the same manner. After a brief period of respite, Stavka issued orders for the Baltic strategic offensive, which lasted from 14 September to 24 November.
Battles
Baltic offensive
In common with other Soviet strategic offensives, the Baltic offensive covers a number of operational level operations and individual Front offensive operations:[8]
The Moonsund Landing Operation (Russian: Моонзундская десантная операция) (27 September–24 November 1944) was the amphibious landing on the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa, Saaremaa and Muhu, which block access to the Gulf of Riga. According to Soviet data Germany lost 7,000 dead soldiers and 700 captured.[9]
The Memel offensive (Russian: Мемельская операция) (5–22 October 1944) was an attack by the 1st Baltic Front aimed at severing the connection between the German Army Groups Centre and North.
From the German defensive perspective, the period included the following operations:
Operation Cäsar, aimed at the restoration of contact between Army Groups Centre and North 16–21 September 1944;
Operation Aster aimed at the evacuation of Army Group North from mainland Estonia 17–26 September 1944;
The Baltic offensive operation resulted in the expulsion of German forces from Estonia and Lithuania. The Soviet fronts involved in the battle lost a total of ca. 280,000 men to all causes (killed, missing, wounded, sick).
Communication lines between Army Group North and Army Group Centre were permanently severed, and the former was relegated to an occupied Baltic seashore area in Latvia. On 25 January, Adolf Hitler renamed Army Group North to Army Group Courland implicitly recognising that there was no possibility of restoring a new land corridor between Courland and East Prussia.[10] The Red Army commenced the encirclement and reduction of the Courland Pocket which retained a possibility of being a major threat, but were able to focus on operations on its northern flank that were now aiming at East Prussia. Operations by the Red Army against the Courland Pocket continued until the surrender of the Army Group Courland on 9 May 1945, when close to 200,000 Germans were taken prisoner there.
The German command released thousands of native conscripts from military service. However the Soviet command began conscripting Baltic natives as areas were brought under Soviet control.[7] While some ended up serving on both sides, many partisans hid in the woods to avoid conscription. (See also Forest Brothers)
112 Hero of the Soviet Union awards were given out during the offensive, of which three were given soldier's second award.[11]
Soviet rule of the Baltic states was re-established by force, and sovietisation followed, which was mostly carried out in 1944–1950. The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the mass deportation of civilians in March 1949. All private farms were confiscated, and farmers were made to join the collective farms. An armed resistance movement named the 'Forest Brothers' was active until the mass deportations. Tens of thousands participated or supported the movement; thousands were killed. The Soviet authorities fighting the Forest Brothers also suffered hundreds of deaths. Among those killed on both sides were innocent civilians. Besides the armed resistance of the Forest Brothers, a number of underground nationalist schoolchildren groups were active. Most of their members were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The punitive actions decreased rapidly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; from 1956 to 1958, a large part of the deportees and political prisoners were allowed to return to their homelands. Political arrests and numerous other kinds of crimes against humanity were committed all through the occupation period until the late 1980s. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the populations remained anti-Soviet. This helped the Baltic citizens to organise a new resistance movement in the late 1980s and then rapidly develop a modern society after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.[12]
↑ Frieser, Karl-Heinz; Schmider, Klaus; Schönherr, Klaus; Schreiber, Gerhard; Ungváry, Kristián; Wegner, Bernd The Eastern Front 1943–1944: The War in the East and on the Neighbouring Fronts, p. 636
↑ Anderson, p. 203; Muriev, pp. 22–28; Stilwell, p. 343; Проэктор.
1 2 Д. Муриев, Описание подготовки и проведения балтийской операции 1944 года, Военно-исторический журнал, сентябрь 1984. Translation available, D. Muriyev, Preparations, Conduct of 1944 Baltic Operation Described, Military History Journal (USSR Report, Military affairs), 1984-9, pp. 22–28
Anderson, D, et al. The Eastern Front, Zenith Imprint (2001), ISBN0-7603-0923-X
Muriyev, D. Preparations, Conduct of 1944 Baltic Operation Described, Military History Journal (USSR Report, Military affairs), 1984-9
Stilwell, A. and Hastings, M. The Second World War: A World in Flames, Osprey (2004), ISBN1-84176-830-8
Проэктор, Д. M. "Агрессия и катастрофа. Высшее военное руководство фашистской Германии во второй мировой войне", Глава восьмая. "Катастрофа", М.: Наука, 1972.
Further reading
Melzer, W. 'Der Kampf um die baltischen Inseln'
Niepold, G. 'Panzeroperationen Doppelkopf und Cäsar'
Operation Bagration was the codename for the 1944 Soviet Byelorussian strategic offensive operation, a military campaign fought between 22 June and 19 August 1944 in Soviet Byelorussia in the Eastern Front of World War II, just over two weeks after the start of Operation Overlord in the west. It was during this operation that Nazi Germany was forced to fight simultaneously on two major fronts for the first time since the war began. The Soviet Union destroyed 28 of 34 divisions of Army Group Centre and completely shattered the German front line. The overall engagement is the largest defeat in German military history, with around 450,000 German casualties, while 300,000 other German soldiers were cut off in the Courland Pocket.
Army Group Centre was the name of two distinct strategic German Army Groups that fought on the Eastern Front in World War II. The first Army Group Centre was created during the planning of Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, as one of the three German Army formations assigned to the invasion.
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The Lvov–Sandomierz offensive or Lvov–Sandomierz strategic offensive operation was a major Red Army operation to force the German troops from Ukraine and Eastern Poland. Launched in mid-July 1944, the operation was successfully completed by the end of August.
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The 3rd Panzer Army was a German armoured formation during World War II, formed from the 3rd Panzer Group on 1 January 1942.
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The Battle of Memel or the siege of Memel was a battle which took place on the Eastern Front during World War II. The battle began when the Red Army launched its Memel offensive operation in late 1944. The offensive drove remaining German forces in the area that is now Lithuania and Latvia into a small bridgehead in Klaipėda (Memel) and its port, leading to a three-month siege of that position.
The Vilnius offensive occurred as part of the third phase of Operation Bagration, the Soviet Red Army's strategic summer offensive against the German Wehrmacht in June and July 1944. It lasted from 5 July to 13 July 1944 and ended with a Soviet victory.
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The 51st Army was a field army of the Red Army that saw action against the Germans in World War II on both the southern and northern sectors of the front. The army participated in the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula between December 1941 and January 1942; it was destroyed in May 1942 with other Soviet forces when the Wehrmacht launched an operation to dislodge them from the peninsula. The army fought in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43, helping to defeat German relief attempts. From late 1944 to the end of the war, the army fought in the final cutting-off of German forces in the Courland area next to the Baltic. Inactivated in 1945, the army was activated again in 1977 to secure Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the army continued in existence as a component of the Russian Ground Forces. The army was active during two periods from 1941 until 1997.
The Polotsk offensive was part of the second phase of the Belorussian strategic offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration.
The Kaunas offensive was part of the third phase of the Byelorussian strategic offensive of the Red Army in summer 1944, commonly known as Operation Bagration. The Kaunas offensive was executed by the 3rd Belorussian Front on July 28 – August 28, 1944, with the aim of destroying the German concentration on the western bank of the Neman river, the occupation of Kaunas, and reaching the boundaries of East Prussia.
The Gumbinnen Operation, also known as the Goldap Operation, was a Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front late in 1944, in which forces of the 3rd Belorussian Front attempted to penetrate the borders of East Prussia.
Operation Doppelkopf and the following Operation Cäsar were German counter-offensives on the Eastern Front in the late summer of 1944 in the aftermath of the major Soviet advance in Operation Bagration with the aim of restoring a coherent front between Army Group North and Army Group Centre. The operation's codename was a reference to the German card game Doppelkopf.
The Šiauliai offensive was an operation of the Soviet forces of the 1st Baltic Front, commanded by General Hovhannes Bagramyan, conducted from 5 July to 29 August 1944, during the Second World War. It was part of the third phase of the Belorussian strategic offensive operation, and drove German troops from much of Lithuania, with the main tactical objective of the city of Šiauliai.
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The Baltic strategic defensive operation encompassed the operations of the Red Army from 22 June to 9 July 1941 conducted over the territories of the occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in response to the offensive launched by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa.
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