End of the Battle of Riga

On 5 September 1917 (23 August in the Julian calendar) the Battle of Riga came to an end. The German war communiqué of that day reported that north-east of the Dvina the troops had reached the Baltic, crossed the river Gauja, called the Livonian Aa by the Germans, and routed the Russian rearguards on its southern bank, and that the fortress of Dünamünde at the mouth of the Dvina, taken the day before, had yielded to them undamaged heavy coastal guns of up to 305 millimetres calibre. Two days after the capture of Riga, however, the main aim of the German operation, the encirclement of the Russian Twelfth Army, had proved unattainable.

The Germans had come close. During the night of 3/4 September they intercepted a Russian radio message with details of the retreat, and on the morning of 4 September the German 20th Division of General Albert von Berrer’s group cut the road and railway from Riga to Wenden (Cēsis) near Hinzenberg station, about 35 kilometres north-east of the city. Most of the Russian troops, however, had already passed along that road. Their retreat was covered by dismounted cavalry, Captain I. M. Stavsky’s partisan detachment and Lieutenant-Colonel P. V. Glasenapp’s shock regiment, and earlier, on the Little and Great Jugla streams, by the Latvian Riflemen and several Russian regiments. The Germans pursued the Russians without much energy. Only the German air force bombed the crowded highway to Wenden, the columns of troops and refugees, and the ships leaving Dünamünde.

The retreat was chaotic. According to the Soviet historian Aleksandr Kavtaradze, the corps were assigned the wrong roads, the columns became mixed up, and in practice the troops were directed by the divisional commanders. Soldiers abandoned guns and baggage trains and in many places set villages on fire. Even so the army did not fall apart as the Eleventh Army had in Galicia in July. By 6 September most of its units had taken up a prepared position near Wenden, from the mouth of the Pēterupe stream on the Gulf of Riga to Koknese (Kokenhusen) on the Dvina. The army commander, General Dmitry Parsky, ordered it to be held at all costs as one of the last barriers on the road to Pskov and Petrograd, and the high command sent there from Finland and the Western Front six infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions. In a directive of 8 September Parsky admitted that “serious mistakes” had been made in commanding the troops during the battle.

The Germans had no intention of going further in any case. Erich Ludendorff had from the start treated the attack on Riga as a limited operation. “We soon halted the Eighth Army,” he wrote in his memoirs, and it was ordered to dig in on the shortest line between the Dvina and the Gulf of Riga, while two divisions left at once for the Western Front to relieve others intended for the attack in Italy. The following days brought only skirmishes between German cavalry and Russian rearguards. The chief of staff of Ober Ost, Colonel Max Hoffmann, admitted that the number of prisoners and the booty were smaller than expected.

The balance remains disputed. 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. German communiqués gave more than 7,500 prisoners and 180 guns on 6 September, and two days later as many as 316 guns. The Russian Stavka estimated the losses of the Twelfth Army at about 25,000 men, including about 15,000 prisoners and missing. Despite the incomplete success, the way in which Hutier and his artillery chief Georg Bruchmüller had broken through the front – with a short, carefully planned bombardment making massive use of gas, followed immediately by the infantry assault – caught the attention of the German high command. A few weeks later it was applied in Italy, and Hutier received the Pour le Mérite for Riga.