Start of the Battle of Dvinsk

On 9 September 1915 the right wing of General Otto von Below’s German Niemen Army went over to the attack in northern Lithuania in the direction of Dvinsk, today’s Daugavpils in Latvia. On the same day, further south, the German 10th Army struck north of Vilna. The German official list of battles calls the fighting that began then the battle before Dvinsk, and the British chronology of the war records its start under 9 September.

Dvinsk, on the northern bank of the Dvina, was one of the most important points of the Russian front in the north. The railways from Petrograd to Warsaw and from Riga into the interior of Russia crossed there, on the river stood a 19th-century fortress serving as a great depot, and the town housed the headquarters of General Pavel Plehve’s Russian 5th Army. Since the end of August this army had belonged to the newly created Northern Front of General Nikolai Ruzsky, which was to defend the road to Petrograd. In the summer the 5th Army had withdrawn from Šiauliai, and at Kupiškis it had halted with a counter-attack the first march of the German cavalry on Vilna and Dvinsk. On the northern wing of the Niemen Army the Germans meanwhile took Friedrichstadt on 3 September and reached the Dvina between Riga and Jakobstadt.

In the plan of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, the Niemen Army had a subsidiary task. The main blow was struck by the 10th Army at Vilna, while Below’s troops were to throw the Russians back behind the Dvina, take Dvinsk and cover the 10th Army from the north. General Otto von Lauenstein’s army group advanced on Dvinsk. Its southern wing, with the 3rd Cavalry Division, General Beckmann’s division and the 88th Infantry Division, set off eastwards from the Šventoji river towards Utena. Ludendorff recalled that the Niemen Army made good progress and its right wing quickly pushed the Russians back along the road from Kovno to Dvinsk. The Russian cavalry detachment of General Nikolai Kaznakov, which covered the left wing of the 5th Army, fell back to the north-east without giving battle.

The German communiqué of 10 September was still terse. It reported only fighting south-east of Friedrichstadt and near Vilkomir, in which a few hundred prisoners were taken. Within the next few days, however, the Germans reached the positions the Russians had prepared on the distant approaches to Dvinsk, between Novoalexandrovsk and Illukste. Fighting for this bridgehead was to go on all autumn.