Battle of Riga

The Battle of Riga was the last great operation on the Eastern Front before the disintegration of the Russian army. On 1 September 1917 the German Eighth Army of General of Infantry Oskar von Hutier, after a short but extremely violent bombardment, forced a crossing of the Daugava at Ikšķile, the German Uexküll, about 30 kilometres upstream from Riga. The Germans wanted to get behind the Russian Twelfth Army and trap it around the city. The Russians resisted only where they were covering the retreat, among others the Latvian Riflemen on the Little Jugla stream, and withdrew the rest of the army to the north-east. On 3 September the Germans entered Riga, one of Russia’s largest ports and industrial centres on the Baltic, and on 5 September the fighting died down. The battle went down in history as the first great demonstration of the new German method of breaking through a front, which was repeated a few weeks later at Caporetto and in the spring of 1918 on the Western Front.

Name and dates

In German literature it is the “Battle of Riga” (Schlacht um Riga), in Russian the “Riga operation”, and in Latvian also the battle of the Little Jugla (Mazā Jugla), after the place of the heaviest fighting by the Latvian Riflemen. English-language works speak of the Riga offensive or of the “Hutier offensive”.

All dates are given according to the Gregorian calendar. Russia then used the Julian calendar, 13 days behind, so in Russian documents and in some Russian works the operation lasted from 19 to 24 or 26 August, and Riga fell on 21 August. We adopt the dates 1–5 September 1917, as the German official history and the British chronology of the war do. On 5 September the fighting died down and the Eighth Army began to dig in. Russian and Latvian works end the operation on 6 September, when the retreating Russian troops took up positions near Cēsis (Wenden). German and Russian sources also differ in their times: the Germans reckoned by German clocks, the Russians by their own, two hours ahead.

Background

From the autumn of 1915, when after the Battle of Dvinsk the front settled along the Daugava, Riga was the northern pillar of the Russian defence. The Russians held an extensive bridgehead on the left bank of the river, which shielded the city from the south and west, as well as smaller bridgeheads at Ikšķile and Jakobstadt. In January 1917 the Twelfth Army tried to strike from here towards Mitau, but without significant gains. Riga, before the war a city of almost half a million, had become greatly depopulated during the war. In 1915 the Russians had evacuated hundreds of factories, together with their workers, to the interior. According to a census of May 1917, about 213,000 inhabitants remained.

After the February Revolution the troops of the Northern Front, the closest to Petrograd, were particularly susceptible to agitation. In the Twelfth Army power was in practice shared with the commanders by soldiers’ committees, in which Bolshevik influence was growing. The army was short of more than 30,000 soldiers, and replacements arrived almost untrained. At the same time it had enough ammunition and, according to Russian estimates, about 160,000–190,000 men and more than a thousand guns. At the conference in Moscow at the end of August the commander-in-chief, General Lavr Kornilov, warned that without the restoration of discipline Russia would lose Riga.

The Germans were indeed preparing this blow. While the counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia was still under way, the First Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff, asked the chief of staff of Ober Ost, Colonel Max Hoffmann, what he thought of a crossing of the Daugava above Riga. Hoffmann agreed at once. At the beginning of August, when the advance in Galicia came to a halt, the Commander-in-Chief in the East, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, instructed Hutier to prepare the operation. The Eighth Army received three additional corps headquarters and several divisions from the south, as well as heavy artillery and more than five hundred Minenwerfer, that is, trench mortars. The assault group at Ikšķile was formed by the headquarters of Generals Albert von Berrer, Julius Riemann and Hugo von Kathen. The artillery fire was planned by the army’s chief of artillery, Lieutenant-Colonel Georg Bruchmüller.

The Russian command knew of the preparations from air reconnaissance and from deserters. The commander of the Northern Front, General Vladislav Klembovsky, and the commander of the Twelfth Army, General Dmitry Parsky, concluded that the army could not be held on the left bank. In August part of the troops were withdrawn from the Riga bridgehead to a shorter line, and at Ikšķile the bridgehead on the left bank was given up without a fight. The evacuation of offices and depots from Riga also began. The sector opposite Ikšķile was defended by XLIII Corps under General Vasily Boldyrev, and directly on the river by the 186th Infantry Division. The position consisted of several lines of trenches on the sandy hills above the Daugava and a second line on the Little Jugla. A third, on the Great Jugla, had only just begun to be dug.

Course of the battle

The crossing, 1 September. At four in the morning, German time, the German artillery began shelling the Russian batteries with gas shells. According to the American historian David Zabecki, Bruchmüller had 615 guns, 251 of them heavy, and 544 Minenwerfer on the crossing sector. For the first two hours they fired mainly at the artillery, then in turn at the trenches, the defences and the approach roads, and at 6.30 a.m. the Minenwerfer joined in. At about 9.10 a.m., after a little over five hours of bombardment, the first companies, equipped with flamethrowers and machine guns, crossed the river, about 300 metres wide, in boats and pontoons at several places at once. The Russian 186th Division lost half its men that day. By half past two in the afternoon the sappers had built three pontoon bridges, over which further divisions and guns crossed. The Russians counter-attacked with single regiments only. In the evening the Germans reached the Little Jugla, where the Russian 2nd Latvian Rifle Brigade arrived from the reserve.

The Little Jugla and the retreat from Riga, 2 September. On the far bank Hutier divided his forces into three groups. Riemann’s group was to advance along the Daugava on Riga, Berrer’s group northwards towards the road from Riga to Cēsis to cut off the Russian retreat, and Kathen’s group to cover the whole from the east. Parsky had already decided during the night of 1/2 September that he could not hold Riga, and ordered the army to fall back. Boldyrev was only to hold up the Germans for as long as possible. The heaviest fighting took place on the Little Jugla, where the Latvian Riflemen repulsed the attack of the German 2nd Guards Division, supported by gas, flamethrowers and aircraft, all day long. Only towards evening did the Germans seize a bridgehead on the far bank, while meanwhile the Bavarian 14th Division broke through the position of the Russian XXI Corps on the river Ogre. The resistance of the Latvians and of some Russian regiments gave time for the Siberian corps from the bridgehead on the left bank to pass through Riga to the north-east. German heavy artillery was already shelling the city.

The capture of Riga, 3 September. In the morning Russian rearguards blew up both iron bridges over the Daugava, and in the city the stations, depots and some of the factories were burning. During the day German troops entered Riga from the south-east and from the west, from the former Russian bridgehead. According to the Berlin communiqué the first troops entered the city at about eleven o’clock. On the Great Jugla heavy fighting was still going on with Russian units covering the retreat.

The pursuit, 4–5 September. On the morning of 4 September a German naval detachment occupied the abandoned fortress of Dünamünde at the mouth of the Daugava, where the Russians had left heavy coastal guns without their breech-blocks. On the same day the German 20th Division cut the road and railway to Cēsis near Hinzenberg station, but the main body of the Twelfth Army was already further on. The Germans crossed the river Gauja, but did not pursue the Russians vigorously. From the outset Ludendorff had intended to halt the Eighth Army after taking Riga and transfer some of its divisions to the west and to Italy. On 5 September the fighting died down. The Russians fell back in disorder, abandoning guns and baggage trains, while German aircraft bombed the crowded roads. By 6 September the Twelfth Army had taken up positions near Cēsis, about 80 kilometres from Riga.

Casualties

According to the German official history the Eighth Army lost about 4,200 men and took almost 9,000 prisoners and more than 260 guns. The Russian Stavka estimated the losses of the Twelfth Army at about 25,000 men, including about 15,000 prisoners and missing, and the equipment lost at 273 guns, 256 machine guns and more than 230 mortars and bomb-throwers. German communiqués of the first days gave different figures: on 6 September they spoke of more than 7,500 prisoners and 180 guns, and on 8 September of 316 guns captured on the battlefield. The heaviest losses were suffered by the units covering the retreat. Latvian sources state that in two regiments of the 2nd Latvian Rifle Brigade more than half the soldiers were put out of action.

Significance

In military terms the battle was an incomplete success. The Germans took a great city and port and threatened the road to Petrograd, but the Twelfth Army escaped encirclement. Hoffmann admitted that the number of prisoners and the booty were smaller than expected. Ludendorff called the operation a “poor substitute” for the offensive in Moldavia that he had had to abandon, but considered that he had achieved his aim: Russia had received another blow. Riga became the starting point for further attacks, on the bridgehead at Jakobstadt and, in October, for the landing on the islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga (Operation Albion).

The political consequences proved more important. The fall of Riga caused fear in Petrograd of a German march on the capital, and preparations began to evacuate government offices to Moscow. The right and the high command blamed the defeat on the soldiers’ committees and Bolshevik agitation, while the left suspected that Kornilov had deliberately surrendered the city to have a pretext for crushing the revolution. A few days after the battle the dispute between the commander-in-chief and the Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky, turned into the Kornilov affair.

For military history Riga is important as the proving ground of a new German method of attack. Instead of a bombardment lasting many days, which gave away the place of the attack, Bruchmüller used a precisely planned hurricane of fire lasting a few hours, in which gas shells neutralised the enemy’s artillery and infantry, and the fire moved forward in stages ahead of the advancing infantry. Many works also say that the infantry advanced in small storm groups, bypassed centres of resistance and left them to the following waves. The American historian Bruce Gudmundsson points out, however, that at Riga the infantry attacked essentially in line with ordinary German doctrine, in company-strength skirmish lines, and that what was truly new was the way the artillery was used. The Allies later called this method “Hutier tactics”, although the general played no great part in developing it. Hutier and Bruchmüller later applied it on a much larger scale in the spring offensive of 1918, and a similarly prepared attack broke through the Italian front at Caporetto in October 1917.