Operation Albion begins

On the morning of 11 October 1917 (28 September in the Julian calendar), in the Baltic north of Libau, the groups of German warships that had been waiting two weeks for the weather to improve joined up. Ten dreadnoughts, a battlecruiser, cruisers, dozens of torpedo boats and minesweepers and 19 transports carrying troops set off northwards towards the island of Saaremaa, then known as Ösel. Operation Albion was beginning, the largest German amphibious landing of the war, whose aim was to capture the islands that closed the Gulf of Riga. The British chronology of the war records under this day the start of operations against the Baltic islands. The first soldiers went ashore at dawn the next day.

The key to the Gulf of Riga

Saaremaa, Muhu (Moon) and Hiiumaa (Dagö) lie at the entrance to the Gulf of Riga and the Gulf of Finland. The Russians had fortified them with coastal batteries and minefields, and their ships, sheltering behind the islands, dominated the gulf. In August 1915 the German fleet had forced its way into it through the mines, but had had to turn back after two days. When General Oskar von Hutier’s army took Riga at the beginning of September 1917, the German sea route to the city was still closed. The First Quartermaster General, Erich Ludendorff, wanted to push Russia towards peace with further blows and demanded that the navy take part in an attack. The Admiralty agreed to an attack on the islands, although it meant bringing a large part of the High Seas Fleet into the Baltic.

The landing was entrusted to Lieutenant General Ludwig von Estorff’s 42nd Infantry Division, reinforced by a cyclist brigade, an additional infantry regiment, an assault battalion and an engineer landing company from Harburg, made up of former sailors, which manned the flat-bottomed boats. The whole was commanded by General of Infantry Hugo von Kathen. According to German figures this amounted to about 24,500 soldiers, 8,500 horses and 2,400 vehicles with supplies for 30 days. The ships were commanded by Vice Admiral Ehrhard Schmidt, the same man who had led the attack on the Gulf of Riga in 1915. The plan provided for a night passage and a landing at dawn in Tagga Bay in north-western Saaremaa, far from the strongest batteries in the south of the island. The cyclists were to cross the island at once and close the causeway leading to Muhu, the only line of retreat for the Russian garrison.

Two weeks in port

The ships and transports were ready as early as 24 September. The dreadnoughts of the III and IV Squadrons, sent from the North Sea, lay in the Bay of Puck, the transports with their escort at Libau, and the light cruisers at Windau. For more than two weeks, however, autumn gales raged over the Baltic and the soldiers waited aboard the ships. In the meantime German aircraft and airships bombed the batteries on the islands. On the night of 30 September – 1 October, after one of the raids, the ammunition magazine of the 305 mm battery on Cape Zerel, which covered the Irben Strait, blew up. According to its commander about 110 men were killed. Minesweepers cleared the strait of mines, and several of them sank. On the evening of 10 October the weather improved and the dreadnoughts left the Bay of Puck.

The passage north

On the morning of 11 October, at about 7.15 a.m., the dreadnoughts met the convoy from Libau. Schmidt and Kathen and their staffs transferred to the battlecruiser Moltke, the flagship of the expedition, and in the early afternoon the ships from Windau joined. The force sailed at nine knots in four groups: in front the minesweepers and torpedo boats clearing the way, behind them the engineers in torpedo boats and small steamers, then the dreadnoughts with Moltke, and at the rear the transports and supply ships. Seaplanes from Libau covered them from the air. The British submarine E1, lying in wait off Libau, sighted the ships leaving port, but did not attack and did not understand what it was seeing.

In the afternoon and evening the minesweepers worked more and more slowly. The sea was rising, and in the darkness, at a change of course, their formation broke up. At about 9 p.m. two dreadnoughts detached themselves to stage a feint landing at dawn on the Sõrve peninsula in the south of Saaremaa. Around midnight the main force caught up with the minesweepers and everything began to fall behind schedule. If the engineers were to reach Tagga Bay before dawn, there was no time for further sweeping. Schmidt ordered the minesweepers out of the way and led the ships through unchecked waters, risking his dreadnoughts and heavily laden transports running onto mines.

The Russians wait

The Russians expected a landing. Their intelligence, which was reading German wireless messages, had warned of a large operation in the Baltic as early as the end of September. On 10 October it reported that the attack would begin the next day. On Saaremaa there were three infantry regiments under the command of General Fyodor Ivanov. On paper they had about 24,000 soldiers, in reality far fewer. Ivanov could not man the whole coast. He therefore decided to delay the enemy’s advance after the landing and wait for reinforcements from the mainland. One regiment guarded Tagga Bay, another the Sõrve peninsula with the battery on Zerel, and the third stood in reserve in the middle of the island. In the waters between the islands waited the ships of Vice Admiral Mikhail Bakhirev, including the old battleships Slava and Grazhdanin.

The weakness of the defence, however, was the attitude of the soldiers. After the February Revolution soldiers’ committees undermined the officers’ orders, and the garrison, on alert for weeks, stopped believing in a German attack when the gales came. At about three o’clock in the morning of 12 October the German battleships anchored off Tagga Bay, and the engineers set off in boats towards the shore. At dawn, as the ships were taking up their positions and opening fire on the coastal batteries, two dreadnoughts and one of the steamers carrying infantry struck mines.