Battle of Riga begins

On 1 September 1917 (19 August by the Julian calendar) the German 8th Army of General Oskar von Hutier crossed the Dvina at Ikšķile, the German Uexküll, about 30 kilometres south-east of Riga. The Russians had been expecting an attack for weeks. According to the commissar of the Northern Front, Vladimir Stankevich, a German deserter, a native of Alsace, had betrayed the plan in such detail that the staff of the 12th Army had warned the troops the previous day of a night bombardment and a morning attack. What surprised them, however, was the force of the blow.

At four in the morning German time (Russian sources, keeping time by their own clocks, give six) several hundred German guns opened fire on the Russian batteries. The bombardment had been planned by the army’s chief of artillery, Lieutenant-Colonel Georg Bruchmüller. In the first phase mainly gas shells were fired, combining the choking “green cross” with the irritant “blue cross”, which penetrated gas masks and forced soldiers to take them off. Some Russian studies also mention mustard gas, but Western sources do not confirm this. The Russian artillery, of which there was little on this sector, soon fell silent. At six o’clock heavy shells fell on the second line of Russian trenches, and at 6.30 hundreds of trench mortars joined in, turning the trenches along the bank into a field of craters. The German war correspondent Rolf Brandt described how the houses of Ikšķile crumbled into dust while red, white and black clouds of explosions rose over the bank.

At about nine o’clock soldiers carried pontoons out of the woods, and at 9.10 the first companies, with flamethrowers and machine guns, set off across the river, here about 300 metres wide, at three places at once, near the islands of Elster and Borkowitz. A smokescreen shrouded the river. The first objective, the brickworks at Ikšķile, was taken in a single rush, and according to Brandt a quarter of an hour later the Germans also held the second line of Russian trenches on the hills by the Riga–Dvinsk railway. About a thousand dazed prisoners emerged from the trenches. The Russian 186th Infantry Division, which defended the bank, lost 3,283 of its 6,575 men that day according to Russian figures. One of its regiments, the 742nd Ponevezh, practically ceased to exist. While still under fire the engineers began building pontoon bridges, and by half past two in the afternoon three were standing, over which further divisions and artillery crossed. According to the American historian David Zabecki, the first wave was formed by the 2nd Guards Division, the 19th Reserve Division and the Bavarian 14th Division. The Bavarians, who tried to cross further east, opposite Ogre, had their first attempts repulsed by the Russian XXI Corps.

Early in the afternoon the commander of the 12th Army, General Dmitri Parsky, ordered the commander of XLIII Corps, General Vasily Boldyrev, to throw the Germans back into the river, and placed at his disposal two divisions and a brigade from the reserve as well as the 2nd Latvian Rifle Brigade. A joint counter-attack, however, could not be organised. Only the 130th Kherson Infantry Regiment went into the attack, and without support from its neighbours it had to halt. Late in the afternoon the Latvian Riflemen came up from the direction of Ropaži. According to Latvian studies, at about four o’clock soldiers of the 5th Zemgale Regiment, commanded by Jukums Vācietis, were the first to occupy the trenches on the Little Jugla stream, about 7–8 kilometres from the Dvina, driving out small German detachments. There, on the second line of defence, the Latvians halted and began to dig in.

By evening the Germans held a bridgehead a dozen or so kilometres wide on the right bank of the Dvina, and their leading units had reached the Little Jugla. A Russian communiqué admitted that the Germans had thrown bridges across the river and that the infantry, despite the good performance of the artillery, had been unable to stop them. During the night of 1–2 September Parsky decided that Riga could not be held and began preparing the army’s retreat.