Between Giants (49 page)

In the south, the Soviet forces, with 1st Tank Corps now in the lead supporting the Latvians and the 3rd Guards Rifle Division, swept past the flanks of Braumüller’s anti-aircraft formations, mainly to the north, and bypassed Kelmė. As they passed to the west, they overran Braumüller’s guns almost before they could go into action. Four Soviet tanks were destroyed at close range, but ten guns were lost. More elements of 5th Panzer Division had arrived overnight, but the division’s panzer regiment could field only 15 Panthers and 12 Pz.IV. With this small force and the bulk of the division’s 14th Panzergrenadier Regiment, Oberst Herzog, commander of the division’s panzer regiment, launched a counter-attack into the southern flank of the Soviet forces streaming to the west. The German battlegroup claimed to have destroyed 26 Soviet tanks, but was unable to close the gap to
Gruppe Lauchert
, about six miles to the north. 1st Tank Corps continued to drive west, with 5th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance battalion attempting to keep up with it on its southern flank. By the end of the day, the German division was strung out over about 12 miles, and Karl Decker, the division commander, gave up the unequal struggle, ordering his men to make contact with 548th Grenadier Division to the south-east. Even if he had been able to concentrate his division’s fighting strength, the absence of the vital supply elements left his men desperately short of fuel and ammunition.
¹⁴

The weather became overcast and rainy on 7 October, but this was not sufficient to prevent Bagramian’s air support from operating. With more elements of
Grossdeutschland
and 7th Panzer Division arriving overnight, XXVIII Corps attempted to build on the check achieved at Ubiške, by establishing a new front line stretching to Tryškiai. The retreating remnants of 551st Grenadier Division were incorporated into the line, but the southern flank of the position had already been turned by Volskii’s deviation, and the Germans were forced to pull back further. Bagramian, who was already impatient with Volskii’s slow rate of advance, continued to harangue his subordinate to get his tanks moving faster, but even without the full weight of 5th Guards Tank Army, the Soviet forces continued to put huge pressure on the Germans.
Gruppe Fabisch
, consisting of a battalion of panzergrenadiers supported by a few assault guns and an artillery battalion, was joined in Luokė by a substantial part of 7th Panzer Division’s panzer regiment, as well as perhaps a battalion or more of stragglers from 551st Grenadier Division. The tanks were deployed on the southern flank of the German position, and as a group of Panthers advanced in a local counter-attack, they came under heavy fire from their southern flank, suffering several losses.
¹⁵
Soviet artillery fire on Luokė steadily grew heavier, with a salvo of Katyusha rockets causing terrible casualties when the
Grossdeutschland
field dressing station was hit.

Soviet infantry began to penetrate into the village, and with Soviet armour from Malakov’s 19th Tank Corps already bypassing the position to the south, the German forces were ordered to withdraw. As they withdrew, the tanks of 7th Panzer Division attempted to take as many infantry with them as they could, but suddenly found themselves under intense small-arms fire. Partially surrounded, they fought their way clear, though most of the infantry riding on the tanks were killed. As they broke out of the encirclement, one of the tanks slipped into a ditch full of German soldiers attempting to take cover. Unaware of the presence of the infantry, the tank driver continued to drive on, and the crew of the following tank could only watch in horror as the soldiers trapped in the trench were literally torn apart by the tank’s tracks.
¹⁶
As they pulled back towards Klaipėda, the German tanks could do nothing to prevent the Soviet 19th Tank Corps from driving through open space on their southern flank.

The defences at Luokė were swiftly overwhelmed. A panzergrenadier battalion from
Grossdeutschland
failed to receive the order to withdraw at the same moment as the other units, and was encircled. Late on 7 October, the battalion succeeded in breaking through to the west, leaving much of its heavy equipment behind. Another battalion from the division encountered a battalion of T34s from 19th Tank Corps. After an initial probing attack, the Soviet battalion, commanded by Major Pissariev, bypassed the town to the north before turning back and attacking from the northwest. The Soviet tanks inflicted heavy losses on the German forces, but the arrival of a group of German assault guns allowed the panzergrenadiers to rally on the western outskirts, where they were able to prevent a further Soviet advance.
¹⁷
Several Tiger tanks from
Grossdeutschland
also found themselves isolated, but adopted all-round defence until dusk, when they were able to drive through the Soviet lines without incident and reach German lines.

On the southern flank of the Soviet operation, 39th Army from the neighbouring 3rd Belarusian Front joined in the attack. Facing it was 95th Infantry Division, which had almost been completely destroyed during
Bagration
. Although its ranks had been filled with replacements, many of these were of a similar calibre to the men used to create the new grenadier divisions. Survivors of 197th and 256th Infantry Divisions had also been incorporated into the division, but there had been no time for training and other exercises that would have allowed the disparate units to bed down together. The division’s left flank gave way almost immediately, and 39th Army’s leading elements rampaged through the division’s artillery positions. The rest of the division fell back in disorder, with no contact with friendly forces on either flank. For Decker’s 5th Panzer Division, this was a singularly unwelcome development, requiring the panzer division to spread its forces even more thinly in an attempt to provide some sort of screen along the southern flank of the Soviet breakthrough.

Despite these successes, Bagramian continued to fret about Volskii’s apparent lack of urgency. He had further cause for concern on 8 October, when the weather turned much wetter, making many areas swampy and therefore further hindering armoured movement. Chistiakov’s 6th Guards Army reported increasingly strong German counter-attacks on its right-hand formation, 22nd Guards Rifle Corps, at Mazeikiai. A little to the south, 29th Tank Corps, part of Volskii’s 5th Guards Tank Army, finally joined the advance, swiftly capturing first Telšiai and then Plungė. But 3rd Guards Tank Corps, part of the same army, continued to be held up some distance from the front by heavily congested roads, and Bagramian once more berated Volskii for not moving forward faster. Nevertheless, by the end of the day, Bagramian’s leading formations were fast approaching the third line of German defences that 1st Baltic Front had identified at the outset of the operation.

These defences ran broadly along the Reich frontier, and had been given the grand title ‘East Prussian Defence Position’. The line of fortifications had been created by Erich Koch,
Gauleiter
– Party chief – of East Prussia, in his role as Reich Defence Commissar. Although Koch spent a great deal of time and energy on the fortifications, whose construction was overseen by Kurt Knuth, one of his subordinates, the defence position left much to be desired. Originally, the intention had been that the positioning of fortifications would be directed by local army commanders, and that the National Socialist Party’s role would be merely to provide manpower and resources, but there was a lack of engineering officers to oversee the task, with the result that the political aspect of the fortifications assumed a greater degree of importance than their military value. Many fortifications were badly positioned, and although Koch was able to announce that the first month of construction saw the completion of nearly around 14,000 miles of trenches and the excavation of over 41 million tons of earth, many of these trenches were too shallow to be of any major military value. Koch also had a bad reputation for using every opportunity to benefit his own supporters, and the construction of the East Prussian Defence Position was no exception. One of his subordinates was ‘General’ Fiedler, who had been a senior officer in the fire service in East Prussia. He was the owner of a cement works, and persuaded Koch to authorise the manufacture of large numbers of so-called ‘Koch-pots’, which consisted of a concrete tube with a hinged metal lid. These were buried upright in the ground, and were designed to be manned by a single soldier, who would hide in the pot until a Soviet tank was close enough to be engaged with a
Panzerfaust
. Soldiers regarded them with contempt, as the concrete from which they were manufactured was prone to fragmentation if hit by small-arms fire, and any soldier inside the one-man fortification felt isolated and alone. The diversion of so much concrete meant that there was much less available for use in other fortifications, which might have been of greater military value.
¹⁸

It is not clear how much Bagramian knew about the true nature of these defences; perhaps veering on the side of caution, he decided that rupturing the line before the retreating German units could deploy along them was a high priority, hence his constant urging of his front-line units to continue the pace of their attack. Late on 8 October, he received a gratifying report from Chistiakov: 79th Tank Brigade, part of 19th Tank Corps, had captured the German airfield at Vaiņode, only 25 miles from the Baltic coast. Further south, the spearheads of the Soviet advance were less than 12 miles from Klaipėda. Less impressive was the news from Volskii’s 5th Guards Tank Army. The bulk of its forces appeared to be stopped along the line of the River Minija. An increasingly irritated Bagramian demanded that Volskii should at least attempt to bypass the German defences, and then press on to the Baltic coastline; he gave a deadline of midday on 10 October for the completion of this order.
¹⁹

The southern axis of the Soviet advance was making good progress. 5th Panzer Division was forced to dispatch its reconnaissance battalion to deal with a deep penetration by Soviet forces in the lines of 548th Grenadier Division, and then late on 8 October, orders arrived for the division to fall back to the East Prussian Defence Position in order to prevent Soviet forces from breaking through to Tilsit. As an officer of the division recalled, this was no simple task:

What such a move entailed, with complete enemy air superiority, enemy tanks that had already broken through, and columns of refugees on the retreat roads, can barely be described.
²⁰

The evacuation of the civilian population in the face of the Soviet advance was something that had been discussed repeatedly as the front line approached German territory. There were many Germans living in south-west Lithuania, even outside the boundaries of Memelland, and many of the Lithuanian residents of the region were also not enthusiastic about the return of Soviet rule; despite the bitter disappointment of German occupation, they remembered the previous Soviet occupation as being even worse. Any evacuation would fall under the remit of the local Party structure, and whilst the Party had been energetic in demanding that the Wehrmacht turned over territory to its control in the victorious years, there was huge reluctance to reverse the process as the Wehrmacht retreated. Had the military been given control of the area to their rear, they would have been in a position to order a timely evacuation, but for the moment, everything behind the immediate front line remained firmly under Party control. In any event, on 5 October, as the Soviet attack began, Schörner announced that there was no requirement for any evacuation. Raus, who was perhaps less devout in his adherence to Hitler’s doctrines than his superior, disagreed with this policy, and immediately urged Party officials to organise an evacuation. At first in a trickle, then in an increasingly disorganised flood, refugees began to struggle towards East Prussia, heavily burdened with hopeless quantities of baggage. Many such columns were overrun by the advancing Red Army, while others greatly hindered the movements of the Wehrmacht. Only in Klaipėda itself – which had the highest density of German citizens in the entire zone affected by the fighting – was the evacuation conducted in a timely and relatively efficient manner.

The hasty redeployment of German formations now began to have its inevitable effect. Priority had naturally been given to the combat elements of the panzer divisions and
Grossdeutschland
, but as the fighting vehicles began to run out of fuel and ammunition, the need for their supply elements became increasingly vital. By the end of 8 October, the Tiger tank battalion of
Grossdeutschland
was forced to abandon several tanks – more than had been lost as a result of the fighting with the Red Army. Nevertheless,
Grossdeutschland
continued to be one of the few units putting up strong resistance to the Soviet advance. It reorganised into three battlegroups –
Kampfgruppe Schwarzrock
,
Kampfgruppe von Breese
, and a third built around the reconnaissance battalion – and attempted to hold positions along the Minija and around Kretinga and Salantai.
Kampfgruppe von Breese
suffered heavy losses in an encounter with advancing Soviet armour from Volskii’s tank army, and then pulled back to Kretinga. Here, they found that their road crossed a bridge over the railway, where a train was burning after being hit by an air raid. Some of the wagons were laden with ammunition, and there were a few nervous moments as the battlegroup crossed the bridge, still under aerial bombardment.
²¹

A combination of increasing German resistance and lengthening Soviet supply lines began to slow the advance of 1st Baltic Front. Near Vainode, 51st Guards Rifle Division, part of Chistiakov’s 6th Guards Army, found itself under heavy counterattack, which it beat off with difficulty. 43rd Army, aiming to reach the coast to the south of Klaipėda, continued to make good progress with its eight rifle divisions, as did 2nd Guards Army, with 1st Tank Corps, 3rd Guards Rifle Division and 16th Latvian Rifle Division in the lead. By the end of 9 October, its spearheads had penetrated the first positions of the East Prussian Defence Position, even before 5th Panzer Division could occupy the defences. With Soviet forces advancing freely on either flank, the German division abandoned attempts to defend an extended front line, and pulled back towards Tilsit. To the west, the town of Šilutė, known to the Germans as Heydekrug, was captured by the Red Army before many of its civilians had left. Much of the local population fled to the coast immediately to the north. Here, protected by a paper-thin screen of
ad hoc
German units, they waited in fear while German engineers ferried them across to the Kurische Nehrung, the narrow line of sand dunes about six miles off the coast. Fortunately for them, the Soviet forces made little attempt to destroy the small enclave, which was evacuated over five days. Many of the residents of Priekulė were caught by the leading Soviet elements before they could leave, and the survivors who reached the pocket on the coast brought terrifying tales of rape and murder.