Battle of Dvinsk

The Battle of Dvinsk was the longest of the autumn battles with which the great retreat of the Russian army in 1915 ended. The German Niemen Army of General Otto von Below was to reach the Dvina, cover the advance on Vilna from the north and take Dvinsk, an important railway junction and base of the Russian army. Throughout September its troops pushed General Pavel Plehve’s Russian 5th Army back from the distant approaches to the city onto a fortified bridgehead among the lakes. In October the Germans took the ruined town of Illukste, but they did not take Dvinsk. At the beginning of November the fighting died down, and the front came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres short of the city, where it was to remain until 1918.

Name and dates

The city, which the Poles knew as Dyneburg and the Latvians call Daugavpils, received the official Russian name Dvinsk in 1893. Polish sources of the war period wrote of it as Dźwińsk, and the Polish edition uses that name in its title; here we use the Russian name of the period, Dvinsk.

On this page we adopt the dates 9 September – 1 November 1915. On 9 September the Niemen Army set off towards Dvinsk together with the 10th Army’s advance on Vilna. The British chronology of the war records the start of the battle under that date. The end is harder to pin down, because the offensive did not break off on a single day, but gradually petered out. The German official list of battles, on which the divisional histories are based, calls this fighting the “Battle before Dvinsk” (Schlacht vor Dünaburg). For some divisions it ends it on 30 September, after which it lists the fighting between Lakes Drysviaty and Medum (1–31 October), while for others it counts it until 1 November. From November the list records only positional fighting before Dvinsk. The date of 1 November as the end of the battle is also given by some chronologies of the war. Russian studies speak of fighting on the Dvinsk axis from August to October and also mention clashes on 2–3 November. Ludendorff wrote that the fighting at Dvinsk lasted a long time and was broken off at his wish, because poor communications with the rear made a further advance impossible.

The earlier, August fighting of the Niemen Army further north must be treated separately. On 3 September the German 41st Infantry Division took Friedrichstadt (today Jaunjelgava), and the Germans reached the Dvina between Riga and Jakobstadt.

Background

Dvinsk lay on the right, northern bank of the Dvina, at the crossing of the railways from St Petersburg to Warsaw and from Riga to Oryol. On the river stood a 19th-century fortress, which since the beginning of the war had served as a great depot and hospital. In the summer of 1915 Dvinsk housed the headquarters of Plehve’s 5th Army, which in July had escaped encirclement at Šiauliai and at the end of July counter-attacked at Kupiškis. According to Latvian studies, as the front approached, the equipment of some 60 factories, the offices and the schools were evacuated from the city and district into the interior of Russia, and with them thousands of workers and their families.

At the end of August the Russians divided their forces in the north. General Nikolai Ruzsky’s new Northern Front, with the 12th Army at Riga and the 5th Army at Dvinsk, was to defend the road to Petrograd. On the German side, in mid-August the Niemen Army numbered about seven infantry divisions and six cavalry divisions. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg assigned it a supporting role. The main blow was to be struck by the 10th Army at Vilna, while the Niemen Army was to throw the Russians back across the Dvina and cover its northern flank. The advance on Dvinsk was made by its right-wing group under General Otto von Lauenstein.

Course

The march on the bridgehead, 9–13 September. On 9 September the right wing of the Niemen Army, including the 3rd Cavalry Division, General Beckmann’s division and the 88th Infantry Division, set off eastwards from the Šventoji river towards Utena. On the road from Kovno to Dvinsk the Germans quickly pushed back the Russian III Corps, and General Kaznakov’s cavalry detachment fell back to the north-east without giving battle. The Russians tried to check the enemy with a thrust from the bridgehead at Jakobstadt, but on 11 September this attack failed. On 13 September the right wing of the Niemen Army reached the positions the Russians had prepared on the distant approaches to Dvinsk. They ran in an arc from Novoalexandrovsk (Polish Jeziorosy, today Zarasai), as the Russians called it, through a belt of lakes to Illukste on the Dvina.

Fighting for the bridgehead, 13–30 September. Five German infantry divisions faced the bridgehead. The German communiqué of 15 September reported fighting on the bridgehead west of Dvinsk and the repulse of Russian cavalry south of the city. On 17 September, after stubborn street fighting, the Germans took the small town of Vidzy south of Dvinsk and reached the road leading west from there. The same day, after the arrival of heavy batteries, the attack on the north-western sector of the bridgehead began. During the night of 19/20 September the Russians abandoned their positions between the lakes near Novoalexandrovsk, and the German line moved eastwards. On 22 September the Germans broke into the Russian positions on a 3-kilometre front east of Smelina, south-west of Dvinsk, and according to their communiqué took 2,000 prisoners. On 26 September they took another position in this sector and more than 1,300 prisoners, and on 30 September they pushed the Russians into the narrows between the lakes east of the village of Wesselowo.

Every step, however, cost more and more. In the 88th Division, made up of older age groups, more than half of the infantry regiment and battalion commanders had by then been killed or wounded. The Russians meanwhile were bringing reinforcements by rail to the Dvinsk area, and in the south, by Lake Drysviaty, their cavalry and infantry were attacking the German flank. Latvian studies credit the saving of the city above all to Plehve, who despite the critical situation refused to retreat across the Dvina and is said to have declared that as long as he was in Dvinsk, not a single step back was allowed. At the end of September, south of Dvinsk, in the gap between the Niemen Army and the 10th Army, an army group under General Friedrich von Scholtz was inserted, formed from the staff of the German 8th Army, which had just been disbanded, cavalry and several infantry divisions.

The October fighting. In October the fighting concentrated in the narrows between Lakes Drysviaty and Medum and in the north, on the Dvina. The Russian 1st Army, transferred northwards from Lake Naroch, struck the German flank between Lakes Drysviaty and Demmern on 11 October and took some of the trenches, but attacks repeated until 19 October achieved nothing more. On 23 October the Germans resumed their attack on the bridgehead. After many hours of bombardment, directed from aeroplanes, they took Illukste on the Dvina. The small town was almost completely destroyed, and according to Latvian studies, of its roughly 9,000 inhabitants about a hundred remained. Further attacks on 26–27 October brought the Germans no comparable successes. The Russians defended themselves skilfully and counter-attacked, among other occasions on 31 October.

The fighting dies down. At the beginning of November the offensive petered out. According to Russian studies, in fighting on 2–3 November the Germans drove the Russians out of one more of the narrows between the lakes, but Dvinsk remained in Russian hands, and the Russians held a bridgehead in front of the city on the left bank of the Dvina.

Losses

Complete figures for the losses are lacking. German communiqués gave the numbers of prisoners on individual days, from several hundred to about two thousand, but not overall totals for the whole battle. Both sides suffered heavy losses in attacks on fortified positions among the lakes and marshes. The civilian population of the frontline towns and villages also suffered, especially Illukste, as did Dvinsk itself, bombed from the air and abandoned by a large part of its inhabitants.

Significance

The Battle of Dvinsk was a failure for the Germans. The Niemen Army reached the Dvina along a long stretch between Riga and Dvinsk, but took neither Riga nor Dvinsk, and the Russians kept bridgeheads on the left bank of the river at Dvinsk and Jakobstadt. Ludendorff explained that a further advance was impossible because of poor communications, and that the troops were to prepare winter positions.

For the Russians the defence of Dvinsk meant halting the great retreat in the north. The front on the Dvina became one of the most heavily fortified sectors of the Eastern Front. At Dvinsk positional fighting went on throughout 1916 and 1917, and the Germans took the city only in February 1918, when after the breakdown of the peace talks at Brest they advanced eastwards almost without resistance.