Between Giants (17 page)

In any event, a prolonged defence along the line of the Daugava was now impossible. Moving up on Manstein’s left flank, Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps reached the river on 28 June and took Jēkabpils that day, but another attempted
coup de main
by the Brandenburg Regiment failed to capture the bridge. In less than ten hours, German combat engineers built a pontoon bridge, while infantry crossed on rafts to secure the north bank. Two days later, 6th Panzer Division crossed the Daugava a little to the east at Līvāni. The Soviet unit in this sector, 202nd Rifle Division, had been in continuous action since the war had begun, and had lost most of its heavy equipment in the preceding days. It lacked the firepower or numbers to hold back the German armour.

Even as Reinhardt’s panzer divisions were forcing their way across the Daugava, a mixed German battlegroup approached the Latvian capital, Riga. Colonel Otto Lasch led a force consisting of an infantry regiment from 1st Infantry Division, with a battalion of
Sturmgeschütz
assault guns and a company of anti-aircraft guns, to Joniškis late on 27 June. From here, he was ordered to press on towards Riga, in an attempt to cut off the Soviet forces in Courland. He set off at 0030hrs on 28 June, rushing forward to Bauska, where he beat off strong Soviet attacks from the west. With the bridges over two rivers near the town secured, Lasch continued to fight off Soviet counter-attacks, and the following night pressed on towards Riga itself.

As it grew light, Lasch found himself pressing forward through the retreating Red Army. Wherever he met resistance, he deployed and attacked, overrunning two motorised artillery batteries in the process. His line of march lay across a series of tributaries to the Daugava, and the bridges over these small rivers were vital to a rapid advance. In the confusion, his column rapidly captured the crossings at Iekava and Ķekava. At 1020hrs, Lasch’s vanguard reached the western edge of Riga, and pushed on swiftly towards the vital bridges across the Daugava. As they approached the road bridge, the Germans ran into a Soviet column on foot, also making for the bridge. Immediately, a hectic fight erupted at close quarters; aboard the leading vehicle, Lasch personally shot at and silenced a quad machine gun mounted on a Soviet truck. Continuing his wild advance, Lasch sent five assault guns and supporting infantry racing over the road bridge, while he set up a defensive perimeter on the east bank. His combat engineers moved onto the railway bridge, where they found that demolition charges had already been prepared; they located and cut a command wire, but were unsure whether there might be others.

The German column had successfully seized the road bridge across the Daugava, but suddenly found itself assailed on all sides. In addition to the road and railway bridges, there was a pontoon bridge over the river, and within minutes of Lasch’s spearhead reaching the east bank, there were two huge explosions as Soviet troops detonated the charges in the pontoon bridge and road bridge. The former was completely destroyed, the latter badly damaged. Soviet forces in the main part of Riga, on the east bank, now began to organise themselves for an assault on the small detachment that had crossed the river, while large numbers of Soviet troops that were retreating to Riga from the west launched a series of attacks on the main German contingent under Lasch’s personal command. The fighting raged all day at close range, with repeated – though poorly coordinated – attempts by the Soviet troops to penetrate Lasch’s lines and reach the bridges; in addition to wishing to destroy the German force, the Soviet soldiers were aware that German control of the bridges prevented their own escape to the east.

Knowing that the small contingent on the east bank was coming under heavy pressure, Lasch dispatched two assault groups from a motorcycle battalion to cross the railway bridge on foot, in order to reinforce the eastern bridgehead. The Soviet forces on the east bank spotted their movement, and poured a heavy fire onto the railway bridge; most of the German infantry was killed or wounded, and no soldiers reached the east bank. Meanwhile, during the early evening, there were two major assaults on the western bridgehead. Several tanks were destroyed on the western approach, and only a determined counter-attack on the south-west perimeter restored the defensive line. Shortly after, the German commander of the eastern bridgehead retreated back across the badly damaged road bridge, with three of his men. All were wounded, and they reported to Lasch that they were the only survivors of the force that had rushed across the bridge.

As the evening drew on, the Soviet units on the west bank launched further attacks. Lasch’s men counted over 40 knocked-out tanks around their perimeter. With darkness came a pause in the fighting, but there were suddenly more loud explosions as the Red Army succeeded in blowing up parts of the railway bridge. For Lasch and his exhausted men, the worst was over. Reinforcements had been hurrying to catch up with them all day, and the first elements of 61st Infantry Division arrived before dawn. A final Soviet attempt to break up Lasch’s bridgehead was beaten off at first light, and the battle for Riga was effectively over. Early the following day, 1 July, German infantry crossed the Daugava in boats and found that the Red Army had abandoned the city.
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Lasch was justifiably proud of the achievements of his men, and was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his part in the battle. He claimed that his command had fought off most of the Soviet 8th Army; whilst his men certainly defeated several times their number, much of 8th Army actually succeeded in escaping beyond the Daugava by crossing further upstream. On 27 June, faced with catastrophe on all parts of the front, Kuznetsov had ordered 8th Army to retreat north into Estonia, while 11th and 27th Armies withdrew to the north-east. Prior to the deployment of 27th Army, the advance of Manstein’s LVI Panzer Corps had opened a large gap in the centre of the Soviet lines, and now a new gap opened between the two axes of retreat, leading directly to Ostrov and Pskov and, beyond there, to Leningrad. Keen to exploit this, Hitler wanted all of 4th Panzer Group to press on to Ostrov. However, Leeb continued to insist that circumstances on the ground demanded a pause in the advance. With the infantry divisions still struggling to catch up with the panzers, he continued to resist pressure, from both above and below. Kuznetsov was grateful for the short time that he was granted by Leeb’s caution, but even if he had been given more time, there were limits to what could be achieved. His armoured strength had fallen to 150 tanks, and his front had only 154 combat aircraft available.
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In any event, Stalin had run out of patience with Kuznetsov. He was removed from command, and replaced by Sobennikov, who had been commander of 8th Army. Unlike the unfortunate Dmitri Pavlov, the commander of the Red Army’s Western Front at the beginning of the war, Kuznetsov survived his demotion.
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He continued to be in command of armies and fronts until the end of the war. To stiffen the command structure of the North-west Front, Stalin dispatched Nikolai Fedorovich Vatutin, First Deputy Chief of the General Staff, to become Sobennikov’s chief of staff, with stern instructions to resist the German advance at all costs.

On 1 July, Manstein was finally given orders to advance again. He issued orders to Brandenberger’s 8th Panzer Division to renew its advance early the following day, setting it the objective of reaching Kārsava, about 51 miles to the north-east. Early on 2 July, the brilliant sunshine that had lasted since the beginning of the campaign was replaced by heavy rain. The combination of deteriorating road conditions and determined Soviet defenders prevented an easy resumption of the rapid advance of earlier days. The main thrust on the right flank of 8th Panzer Division struggled to drive back the Soviet defences, and it was only when Brandenberger ordered his reconnaissance battalion, which was advancing with the left flank of the division, to attack east in order to outflank the Red Army units blocking the main thrust that significant gains were made. On 3 July, slowly overcoming the Soviet defences, the two battlegroups of 8th Panzer Division worked their way forward to Rēzekne, taking the town in the evening.

Hoepner’s panzer group had been ordered to advance to Lake Peipus, and after securing the land corridor between the northern shore of the lake and the Baltic, to press on with the bulk of the panzer group from the southern end of the lake towards Leningrad; this order was then amended to stop the panzers at Pskov until the infantry could catch up. While Busch’s 16th Army continued to spread out to cover the western flank of the army group, Küchler’s 18th Army would advance into Estonia. After struggling through the mud for two days, Reinhardt’s panzer corps reached Ostrov on 4 July. Early the same day, 8th Panzer Division rapidly advanced from Rēzekne to Kārsava, and from here was ordered to turn more to the east, to cover the right flank of the German advance. Further progress was hindered by a combination of poor roads and large numbers of abandoned Soviet vehicles, and then brought to a halt when the retreating Red Army blew the bridge at Golisevo, on the Soviet border; the withdrawing Soviet 227th Rifle Division had lost too many personnel and equipment in the hard fighting of the preceding days to be able to put up much resistance. The weather improved in the coming days, but the boggy ground around the Velikaia valley proved a considerable obstacle. Still, although much hard fighting lay ahead for the two panzer corps, they were now onto Russian territory.

Had 8th Panzer Division been allowed to advance immediately after the capture of Daugavpils, what might have been the outcome? Given the chaos and dislocation throughout the Soviet chain of command, it seems most unlikely that sufficient forces could have been concentrated to hold up the German division. The weather throughout the days that Brandenberger was left to fret on the north-east bank of the Daugava was sunny, unlike the rain that arrived almost as soon as the German advance was resumed, and at the very least, 8th Panzer Division would have enjoyed better conditions – in terms of a disorganised enemy and weather – than it endured during its advance to Kārsava. Had elements of Manstein’s corps reached northern Latvia within a day or two of seizing Daugavpils, most of the Soviet forces attempting to escape from Riga and Courland would have been encircled and destroyed, thus facilitating a rapid German advance across Estonia. The wait at Daugavpils therefore probably resulted in even greater delays later in the campaign. In 1940, during the German drive towards the English Channel, the panzer divisions were halted for an entire day due to nervousness in Berlin and at Higher Command levels about the possible isolation of the German armour, and this short delay probably gave the British just enough time to retreat to Dunkirk. Similarly, the short delay at Daugavpils allowed the Red Army to escape from Riga and the surrounding area, and wasted several days of excellent campaigning weather. Whilst the blame for the hold-up lies with Leeb, he was not alone in showing such caution – similar considerations resulted in an even more wasteful pause in the German Army Group Centre’s drive towards Moscow. It is debatable whether the ultimate outcome of the campaign might have been different; some have argued that the delay effectively cost the Germans their best opportunity to capture Leningrad at an early stage of the campaign.
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Further west, the German 18th Army advanced rapidly across northern Latvia. Rather than risk a further series of battles that would fragment the front line, the Soviet 8th Army, now commanded by Lieutenant General Fedor Sergeevich Ivanov, tried to pull back its front line in a coherent manner. The Soviet 10th Rifle Corps was closest to the coast, with three rifle divisions, while 11th Rifle Corps was further inland, with an additional three rifle divisions, together with what remained of the various mechanised corps that had been thrown into the battle. In practice, these rifle divisions – significantly below strength at the start of the campaign – were now in many places reduced to barely 2,000 men. By 9 July, Ivanov had pulled back into Estonia, and was attempting to defend a line from the coast at Pärnu to Lake Võrtsjärv, and thence to Lake Peipus, with one corps either side of Lake Võrtsjärv. At this stage of the campaign, several factors began to work in favour of the defenders. Firstly, reinforcements had begun to arrive, though many of these were poorly equipped and even more poorly trained. Secondly, the lengthening German lines of supply were beginning to impose checks on their rate of advance. Thirdly, the diverging German forces were no longer able to support each other so effectively, either directly or indirectly – breakthroughs by 4th Panzer Group earlier in the campaign had destabilised the Soviet forces along the entire front, but now the German armour was much further away from the Baltic coast, and in any event the presence of Lake Peipus effectively separated its area of operation from that of 18th Army. Also, the Luftwaffe was struggling to provide adequate air support over such a huge battlefield. Forward airfields, either captured from the retreating Soviets or improvised on open ground, were liable to turn to mud whenever it rained, and there simply weren’t enough planes, with adequate supplies, to maintain support wherever the Wehrmacht demanded it.

As a consequence, the German 18th Army faced tougher resistance in its advance across northern Estonia than it had done in the entire campaign to date. As a further hindrance, Army Group North assigned the conquest of what remained of Estonia a relatively low priority: the main emphasis remained the thrust towards Leningrad, initially in an attempt to seize the city, and subsequently to isolate it and to link up with the Finns. In the second half of July, as 6th Panzer Division advanced towards Leningrad, east of Lake Peipus, 58th and 1st Infantry Divisions struggled to move forward in parallel, between the panzer division and the lake. Resistance steadily increased, while the German forces found themselves increasingly stretched to cover the vast expanses of front line.

In Latvia and Lithuania, the Germans had taken advantage of spontaneous uprisings against the Red Army, though they had rarely instigated such rebellions. The Estonians had maintained links with the Finns for many years, dating back to the Estonian war of independence, when Finnish volunteers had come to the aid of the struggling Estonian Army. Even after the pacts imposed by Stalin on the Baltic States in 1939, such contacts continued, though in secret. As a result, when the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, many Estonian officers and soldiers fled the short distance to Finland – some also travelled to Sweden – and these men were now formed into a volunteer battalion by the Germans. An attempt was made to land part of this battalion on the north Estonian coast on 5 July, but failed due to bad weather. Two days later, about 40 men were put ashore; it had been intended to land a larger group, but some of the transports were intercepted by Soviet warships and forced to turn back. The men who succeeded in returning to Estonia set up makeshift landing strips, where further men and supplies were flown in from Finland. They now provided the Germans with valuable intelligence, as well as harassing Red Army units when the opportunity arose.
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