War in the East
Phase 1.5: Operation Northern Lights and the Bloody End of the Red Navy
January - April 1943
One branch of the Wehrmacht which actually was prepared when the Soviet Union declared war on the Pact of Steel--if only because of their continued operations--was the Kriegsmarine. Despite numerous fleet units keeping the bulk of the British Army bottled up in Northern Ireland, a few fleet units were available to answer the sorties of the Soviet Navy, which was unwisely sortied on failed intelligence. The Intelligence Department of the People's Commissariat of the Navy had reported to the Naval Staff that the bulk of the Kriegsmarine was either patrolling off of the coast of Great Britain or laid up in port as repairs and refits occurred. The staff, headed by Admiral Ivan Isakov, had been looking for a way to strike at the Germans from the outbreak of war in a hope that they would not approach the coast. With a suitable plan, the sortie of the Red Banner Fleet had begun.
Admiral Ivan Isakov, after he had been rehabilitated in the 1960s. His
decisions to sortie the Red Banner fleets were suicidal, but Stalin demanded
action.
The Marat
, one of the three ancient battleships soldiering on with the
Red Banner Northern Fleet at the outbreak of hostilities. While managing
to get hits on some of the Kriegsmarine, in the end, the experienced
Germans outdid their opponents.
The issues, as ever, were that the fleet was not concentrated. Two surface action groups were formed, and neither supported the other. The first to be engaged was the
Parizhskaya Kommuna and
Krazni Kavkaz, escorted by the three light cruisers
Profintern,
Pamiat Merkuriya, and
Chervonaya Ukrania as well as a group of four destroyers. The Kriegsmarine had dispatched all of their Marinefliegergeschwaders (MFG) to the Baltic, having long since become irrelevant in the Atlantic, these forces sighted and caused most of the damage to the Soviet fleet as it cruised in the Gulf of Riga. The surface group dispatched included three battlecruisers,
Blucher,
Tirpitz, and
Pommern, escorted by three light cruisers
Stuttgart,
Nautilus, and
Lubeck. The battle was over in mere hours, with the old battlewagon
Parizhskaya Kommuna and the light cruiser
Pamiat Merkuriya sunk by the air assets. The other battlegroup, formed of the battleships
Marat and
Oktyabrskaya Revoluciya and escorted by a few destroyers of the 4th Squadron, met their end in a more traditional engagement in the northeastern Baltic. Given the lack of supporting arms, a distinct lack of technology to match the same German fleet which had forced the previous group into the “kill box” for the aviation assets and without any air cover of their own, they did well to only sacrifice the destroyers. A supporting group of several destroyers escorting fleet oilers and supply ships was engaged by the geriatric battlegroup of
Schlesein,
Schleswig-Holstein,
Emden, and all available Kriegsmarine destroyers, but only resulted in the loss of four Soviet destroyers; the same force managed to corner and sink the
Kirov the next day while it was cruising independently in the southern Baltic.
The Kirov
in happier days. While detached, she did manage to sink or damage a few
German freighters moving supplies up to Konigsburg, but the restrictive waters of the
Baltic left her nowhere to hide from the eyes of the Kriegsmarine.
The Soviets withdrew from the Baltic for two weeks, as Isakov was purged for the loss and Kuznetzov was promoted to Chief of the Naval Staff. Another sortie of the Baltic Fleet on 2 February, this time consisting of the
Oktyabrskaya Revoluciya and escorted by the
Chervonaya Ukrania was met on the Pommeranian coast quite by accident during a training cruise of the
Moltke and
Hindenburg, escorted by the light cruisers
Dresden and
Koln. In what can only be a disastrous level of overconfidence, the trainee radar operators and gunners aboard
Moltke were not quite ready for the engagement, and it showed: by the third salvo from the ancient dreadnought,
Moltke was severely damaged, suffering the loss of her two after turrets and set afire. The MOF Baltische was rapidly called upon to cover the retreat of the modern battlecruisers, but the Soviets retired from the area before action could be rejoined. Unfortunately for the Soviets, their light cruiser stumbled across a u-boat from u-Boot Geschwader 18, and was sunk with the loss of all hands; a few hours later, the Kriegsmarine’s air arm caught the old battleship out in the waters of Olandssund, where the lack of any appreciable anti-air artillery left it open to the attacks. The ship sank in shallow water, but the Swedish Coast Guard managed to rescue dozens of Soviet sailors before they succumbed to the cold waters of the Baltic. A few weeks later on 28 February, the Marat was sunk by the Marinefliegergeschwaders, and the last major fleet unit,
Krazni Kavkaz, was similarly sent to the bottom on 4 March, ending the threat of any major Red Fleet units.
Soviet infantrymen holding a building on the outskirts of Murmansk. The untried
infantry could not hold off the experienced troops so recently out of the Highlands
of Scotland.
As the War in the East began, Germany faced a conundrum: the bulk of--indeed the entirety--their high-quality motorized divisions were in Scotland, instead of in Poland to support the Panzers. Also in the Highlands were the two elite specialized force arms of the Wehrmacht: the Fallschirmjäger- and Gebirgsjäger-divisionen. Much of the strategic sealift capability would be tied up for weeks if the former were shipped to Danzig or Konigsburg, and more time burned in getting those units to where the Panzerkorps were. Agents in the United States were detecting a shift in the population there, as more began to view the Reich’s expansion with unease, and a call to relax the Neutrality Act began to circulate from former President Roosevelt’s supporters. While dismissive of the support that could come from the United States, Hitler’s foreign office underlings took every chance to remind Joachim von Ribbentrop of what had happened in the Great War: every American ship sunk would lead to a more pliable population should their political fortunes change.
A daring plan was concocted: the lighter Gebirgsjäger-divisionen would be loaded aboard the available sealift capacity to conduct an amphibious landing in Murmansk to deny the Soviets their main port, and then, supported by the Fallschirmjager-divisionen, follow-on operations could be conducted. Dubbed “Operation Northern Lights,” it took advantage of the limited Soviet naval forces in the area and the accompanying lack of reconnaissance to detect the movements. With their own intelligence reflecting Murmansk as being held by mere headquarters units, the Kriegsmarine approved of the plan and dedicated a task group to support it. By mid-to-late January, the first of the Gebirgsjägers were ashore, and the forces began spreading out. An airlift of the follow-on Fallschirmjager-divisionen began, bringing the total force to two corps of troops, and the first contact between Soviet and German troops began on 26 January 1943, in Polyarny. For the month, the German units fought their way to a defensible location in Karelia losing 1,020 dead, but leading to the destruction or capture of three Soviet divisions (27., 89., and 228. Rifle Divisions), and a pair of corps and army headquarters. Soviet losses in manpower totaled 1,729 killed in action and over 29 thousand men captured as prisoners of war.
A map of the furthest extent of German control in
Karelia, just after the operations which established
the “Northern Line,” a deeply fortified area to prevent
Soviet attacks. The Gebirgsjägers would hold this line
for years, with very little action seen.
The planned follow-on operation was delayed until April 1943, when a break in the bleak weather of Karelia allowed a long-range airborne operation to launch. The three Fallschirmjager-divisionen were allocated, with 1 FsJD launching the initial airdrop on 3 April 1943, followed by 2 and 3 FsJD. For the next three weeks, these three divisions fought their way through Arkhangelsk, suffering 953 killed in action during the airdrop and subsequent urban fighting, while 1,789 Soviet soldiers lost their lives. Over 12 thousand troops of the 145. and 162. Rifle Divisions were marched off into captivity, having fought desperately and honorably. In the end, though, Oberkommando Ost believed that holding the port city was a “city too far” removed from the support of the base at Murmansk, and withdrew the paratroopers on 27 June 1943, leaving the Soviets to reoccupy the city on 8 July 1943.
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