After Riga fell, Russia lost whatever stomach it had for staying in the war.
General of the Infantry Oskar von Hutier masterminded the German offensive at Riga, which centered on the synchronicity between infantry infiltration tactics and neutralizing artillery, particularly the use of gas rounds. (INTERFOTO (Alamy Stock Photo))
On the strategic level the Battle of Riga, fought in Latvia on Sept. 1–5, 1917, effectively knocked Russia out of World War I. On the tactical level, however, Riga was even more significant. It marked one of the turning points in the history of warfare. The innovative offensive tactics tested by the Germans in that battle proved the key to breaking the long stalemate of trench warfare. After Riga no attack—or at least no successful attack—would ever again be conducted without some variation on those tactics.
It was a lightning offensive. On Sept. 1, 1917, the German Eighth Army, commanded by General of the Infantry Oskar von Hutier, made an assault crossing of the Dvina River (present-day Daugava) some 15 miles east of the city. The Russian Twelfth Army, commanded by General Dmitri Parsky, collapsed in short order. On September 3 German troops marched into the city, and by September 5 little stood between Hutier’s troops and the Russian capital at Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg), 300 miles to the northeast.
Hoffmann’s first move was to order his resident artillery
expert, Lt. Col. Georg Bruchmüller, to conduct the preliminary
reconnaissance and start fire-support planning for the crossing of the
Dvina. In his memoirs Hoffmann deemed Bruchmüller an “artillery genius.”
That may have been an understatement. By war’s end Bruchmüller proved
central to the development of almost every tactical concept of modern
fire support still practiced today.
Bruchmüller’s greatest innovation was the shift from artillery
destruction fire to neutralization fire. Rather than trying to destroy
everything in the path of the attacking infantry, Bruchmüller focused on
tightly synchronizing the fire support and the infantry scheme of
maneuver to neutralize the enemy defense just long enough for the
attacking infantry to overrun it. He was especially innovative in the
way he used combinations of persistent and nonpersistent gas to
neutralize selected targets. Thus, while the typical artillery
preparation in 1917 lasted a week or even two weeks, Bruchmüller’s
preparations lasted only a matter of hours, with far better effect.
The Eighth Army’s infantry, meanwhile, was trained in an experimental
attack doctrine the Germans would officially adopt in January 1918,
itself a large-scale application of small-unit tactics that had been
under development since late 1915. Captain Willy Rohr, the commander of
Germany’s first unit of storm troops, was among its proponents and
pioneers. Rather than advancing in the rigid, linear attack formations
so characteristic of World War I, Hutier’s infantry was trained to
advance using fluid infiltration tactics.
The infantry companies were organized into small, highly trained combined-arms assault elements. Advancing leapfrog fashion, the small assault teams probed for weak spots and bypassed enemy strongpoints, leaving them for heavier follow-on forces to reduce. Reserves were committed to reinforce success rather than being thrown in where the attack had stalled. The assault teams pushed deep into the defender’s position, threatening his artillery and disrupting his communications systems. Rather than blind conformance with an established plan, the attackers down to the lowest-level leaders and even the individual soldiers were trained to use imagination and initiative to accomplish their missions.
By the standards of World War I, these were radical
innovations. At Riga the German army would conduct the first large-scale
test of these “infiltration tactics,” often referred to incorrectly as
“Hutier tactics” or “storm troop tactics.” Riga was also the first clash
in which the new infantry assault tactics and Bruchmüller’s artillery
tactics were combined and synchronized.
Defending the Riga sector were the Russian Twelfth Army’s 15 infantry
divisions and single cavalry division, a force numbering some 192,000
troops. Russian defenses north of the Dvina were organized in two
parallel positions. The first position comprised three, and in some
places four, successive trench lines dug into the dunes along the river.
The second position consisted of two sets of trench lines anchored
along a smaller river the Germans called the Kleine Jägel (the
present-day Maza Jugla), a few miles northeast of the Dvina. (The
five-day clash is sometimes referred to as the Battle of Jugla.)
Facing the Russians opposite Riga, deployed along the south bank of the
river, Hutier initially fielded just over seven divisions along an
80-mile front running from the coast southeast to Jakobstadt
(present-day Jekabpils). Ober Ost reinforced the Eighth Army with
an additional eight infantry and two cavalry divisions. That gave
Hutier sufficient strength to make his main effort, conduct holding
attacks against the front of the city and secure the rest of his line
along the Dvina. Hutier planned to make his main effort a crossing of
the Dvina near Üxküll (present-day Ikskile), some 15 miles downriver
from the city. He committed 10 divisions of about 60,000 troops to the
crossing. Once across the Germans could maneuver around to the rear of
the city and cut off the Russian garrison.
Hutier prepared for the offensive by assembling his attack divisions
some 80 miles behind his front lines, where they trained and rehearsed
for 10 days. The attacking divisions did not move up into their jump-off
positions until the night before the attack. At 0910 hours on September
1 three divisions of Hutier’s LI Corps spearheaded the attack on a
10,000-yard front. The 19th Reserve Division, on the right, and the 2nd
Guards Division, on the left, forced a crossing of the Dvina with
assault boats and pontoon bridges. The 14th Bavarian Division in the
center had to take heavily fortified Borkum Island as an intermediate
objective. Once across the river the three divisions quickly overran the
Russians’ first defensive positions and moved on toward the second.
While the lead German elements were advancing on the second position,
German pioneers started building fixed bridges across the river in each
of the three divisional attack sectors. Once the bridges were up a
second division crossed behind each first echelon division and prepared
to exploit the breakout from the Russians’ second defensive positions.
In addition to the extra infantry divisions, Ober Ost had
given the Eighth Army massive artillery reinforcements by stripping the
Eastern Front of everything but the minimum number of guns necessary to
hold the line in the other sectors. Some guns were even transferred in
from the Western Front. With painstaking secrecy Bruchmüller supervised
the movement of 615 guns (including 251 heavy guns) and 544 trench
mortars into the 5-mile-wide penetration zone prior to the attack,
achieving a density of 68 guns and 60 trench mortars per thousand yards.
He also stockpiled 650,000 rounds of ammunition at the battery
positions.
Once they moved into position, the newly arrived batteries refrained
from giving themselves away by firing registrations before the start of
the attack. Instead, they fired abbreviated registrations on preplanned
points during the first two hours of the preparatory barrage, then
quickly shifted fire onto their scheduled targets. While not the most
accurate method of firing, it worked. The German artillery achieved
total surprise against the Russians. Stunned Western Allies who later
analyzed the battle concluded incorrectly the Germans had perfected an
accurate technique for delivering unobserved fire without prior
registration. (Bruchmüller would manage to do exactly that in March
1918.)
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