Germans capture Jakobstadt

On 22 September 1917 (9 September in the Julian calendar) at four in the morning German troops entered Jakobstadt, Latvian Jēkabpils, a small town on the left bank of the Dvina about 140 kilometres south-east of Riga. This ended a two-day attack in which the troops of Lieutenant-General Count Egon von Schmettow eliminated the last large Russian bridgehead on the left bank of the river between Riga and Dvinsk. For two years, since the autumn of 1915, the bridgehead, according to a German communiqué 40 kilometres wide and about 10 deep, had shielded the railway junction at Krustpils (PL) opposite and the railway from Riga to Dvinsk. It was defended by soldiers of the Russian Fifth Army of the Northern Front.

The attack began early on the morning of 21 September. As three weeks earlier at Riga, the German artillery first drenched the Russian batteries with gas shells, and then hundreds of Minenwerfer, massed on a sector little more than a kilometre wide, swept away the first line of trenches. According to the German correspondent Rolf Brandt, the infantry struck in two columns from two salients projecting from the front, and its leading units were ordered to push forward as fast as possible, paying no attention to the fighting going on behind them. Before ten o’clock the Germans had taken the heights that were the key to the Russian position, and before noon they had crossed the small Susēja (Sussei) river. The Russians threw local reserves into a counter-attack, among them regiments of a Caucasian rifle division, which in hand-to-hand fighting managed to push the Germans back for a while. From midday torrential rain fell, and German aircraft under Rittmeister Prince Friedrich Sigismund of Prussia flew low over the forests, showing the infantry the way and machine-gunning the Russians.

By the evening the Russian defence in the bend of the Dvina had been shattered, but in the wet forests just outside Jakobstadt fighting went on into the night. The retreating Russians set fire to the district by the railway bridge and blew up the bridge over the Dvina itself. On the morning of 22 September the Germans occupied the town and then also cleared the southern edge of the bridgehead near Liewenhof (Līvāni). The Russians crossed to the right bank and shelled the streets leading down to the river from there. According to the German communiqué of 22 September more than 4,000 Russians were taken prisoner and the Germans captured more than 50 guns. Brandt wrote of almost 5,000 prisoners, and Latvian studies give 4,700 prisoners and 55 guns. The next day the Germans stood on the Dvina along its whole length from Liewenhof to Stockmannshof.

The capture of Jakobstadt was a continuation of the blow against Riga. Erich Ludendorff wanted to keep striking at the weakening Russia without pause in order to hasten its collapse, but used small forces for it, because he was sending most of his available divisions to Italy and to the west. Apart from the bridgehead at Dvinsk, the Russians lost their foothold on the left bank of the river, and in Petrograd, where after the fall of Riga preparations had begun to evacuate government offices to Moscow, the new defeat only hastened those preparations. The front settled on the Dvina between Jakobstadt and Krustpils and stayed there until February 1918, when the Germans resumed their offensive in the east. For the moment Ludendorff was already preparing the next blow: in October the Germans landed on the islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga (Operation Albion).