End of the German attack on the Gulf of Riga

On 21 August 1915 (8 August in the Julian calendar) the last German ships left the Irbe Strait. This ended the two-week operation in which the German fleet had tried to gain command of the Gulf of Riga. Vice-Admiral Ehrhard Schmidt’s force had already left the gulf itself the previous afternoon, after a stay of less than two days.

Two days in the gulf

The first attack, on 8 August, stalled in the minefields. The second time, from 16 August, German minesweepers cut through the Russian barrages in three days, losing one vessel, and the dreadnoughts Posen and Nassau hit the old Russian battleship Slava three times, and she withdrew towards Moon Sound. The Russians, however, sank the German torpedo boat V 99, which had broken into the gulf during the night to search for Slava. On the morning of 19 August the German force entered the gulf. On the same day, on the open sea, a British submarine torpedoed the battlecruiser Moltke. In the evening off the island of Kihnu the Germans intercepted two Russian gunboats coming from the mouth of the Dvina. Sivuch sank after a fierce fight with the cruiser Augsburg, torpedo boats and dreadnoughts, and the Germans picked up only about 50 of her crew. Koreets escaped, ran aground and was blown up by her own crew the next day. During the night the German torpedo boat S 31 sank on a mine.

On the morning of 20 August German torpedo boats brought three old steamers into the harbour of Pernau and scuttled them in the entrance channel under fire from Russian field batteries. The Russians, expecting a landing, set fire to the warehouses and works in the town themselves. In Russia and in the Entente countries the story later spread that a German landing in flat-bottomed boats had been repulsed at Pernau. It was still repeated by the British official history. German documents do not confirm that any attempt at a landing took place.

Withdrawal

At the same time Schmidt was supposed to lay mines in Moon Sound, the passage linking the gulf with the Gulf of Finland, through which the Russians moved their ships. In the morning he gave up. In the narrow passage, suspected of being mined, and with visibility of four nautical miles, his ships had no freedom of manoeuvre, and one of the torpedo boats reported a submarine. The admiral also judged that an unguarded barrage would hold up the Russians for a few days at most, since the Germans were going to leave the gulf anyway. A demonstrative bombardment of the fortifications at the mouth of the Dvina was also called off. As the main reason for the withdrawal, the German official history gives the exhaustion of the minesweepers after many days of work and the difficulty of supplying coal to the covering force of Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper.

On the afternoon of 20 August the dreadnoughts and cruisers left the gulf and anchored in the Irbe Strait. On the morning of 21 August the minesweepers collected the buoys marking the passage through the minefields. The Germans left only markers at the turning points, in case a new army offensive against Riga required them to enter the gulf again. Sappers blew up the wreck of V 99, which was sticking out of the water. During the day the ships dispersed to Libau, Danzig and Kiel, and in the evening the covering force was disbanded. The Kaiser ordered the ships of the High Seas Fleet to be sent back to the North Sea.

Balance

The Germans lost two torpedo boats and three minesweepers to mines, and according to their official history 65 men were killed or missing. The Russians lost two gunboats and, according to Russian estimates, about 150 men killed, wounded and taken prisoner. The Russian fleet nevertheless retained command of the gulf. Only a few days later its ships returned to their former positions and continued to support the defence of Riga. In Petrograd and throughout the Entente a victory was proclaimed, often with exaggerated claims of German losses. The commander in the Baltic, Prince Henry of Prussia, considered the operation a success, but in September the German Admiralty Staff concluded that as a whole it had failed, because Slava had not been destroyed and Moon Sound had not been closed.