Post by James G on Apr 25, 2019 18:09:18 GMT
One Hundred and Thirty–Six
The 82nd Airborne Division came to Latvia for a fight. There was no expectation that their time spent here would be easy. The intention for their operations, as was the case with the rest of the US XVIII Airborne Corps, was that they would engage Russian and Belorussian forces throughout their rear due to where they landed. This would mean conducting an all-round defence at the same time as expanding their area of operations. Strong counterattacks, from all directions, were anticipated. This wouldn’t be anything like fighting Iraqi insurgents or the Afghan Taliban – the division’s recent combat experience – in any way. Those the Americans would fight along the Daugava River were a far different opponent: one far more formidable.
That really got doing during the second day that the 82nd Airborne was on the ground in the enemy’s rear areas. Russian Airborne Troops attacked them. The 76th Guards Air Assault Division had the mission of securing both Estonia and Latvia from a NATO counter-invasion though had focused on preparing for a Baltic-launched amphibious assault. In Russian eyes, that had been opened already by the strong commando raids up and down the coast. Instead, the 82nd Airborne arrived by air. NATO had deceived them with the coastal raids. One brigade of that American elite formation had been beaten on the war’s opening day when caught by surprise inside Estonia. Regular troops from the Russian Army’s 138th Motor Rifle Brigade had achieved that victory (they were in Poland now) but the 76th Guards had fought Estonians and Latvians already. The Americans held no fear for them. A two-pronged assault was launched against those who had landed near to Jēkabpils. The 23rd & 234th Regiments – each Guards units – moved forward overnight in their armoured vehicles and also by trucks to make their attacks at dawn. They thought they hadn’t been spotted but they were mistaken. American intelligence assets spotted the move and the 82nd Airborne reacted accordingly. The fight was tough and bloody. Each side suffered grave losses and saw combat plans fall to pieces in part when the shooting started. Each also brought in strong fire support for their engaged paratroopers. The Russians had a lot of tracked vehicles – BMDs and variants of those and other airmobile platforms – which mounted weapons; they also had artillery in the form of heavy guns and mortars. The Americans had tanks. From the beat-up 170th Infantry Brigade which had been moved to the rear back in Poland, two companies of M-1A2 Abrams had come to Latvia. The move had taken up a lot of lift on transports to fly them in, but their presence paid off. The Russians didn’t expect them. The 82nd Airborne had its own artillery as well as Apache helicopters plus short-range reconnaissance drones. The 234th Regiment’s attack was blunted and a bloody standstill caused. The strike by the 23rd Regiment saw them turned back. Then the Americans counterattacked. They had three brigades and used that third one to move forward in between the two Russian regiments. This advance was led by one of those tank companies with the Abrams’ blasting open the Russians and causing panic in their lines. The advance didn’t move as far forward as planned but it was good enough. The Russians were hurt where the flanks of each regiment were hit. They started to fall back. From the divisional commander came orders for the 76th Guards to withdraw. They would regroup and try again at a later date… once they could address the issue of those tanks too.
The attack on Jēkabpils had failed. The Americans remained holding this small city and its crossings over the river. They had their airhead intact too. That was where the 23rd Regiment had been heading for before so many of its BMD-2s & BTR-Ds were blown up by Javelin missiles and over a hundred paratroopers left dead. It sat to the north of the city and was once a Soviet airbase during the Cold War occupation of Latvia as part of the Soviet Union. Since then it had been near abandoned. US Air Force Red Horse airfield engineers had been on the ground quickly after it was taken. They worked to improve what was here and make it suitable for sustained operations. C-17 and C-130s had been making landings and take-offs but the airbase needed major work. That was underway while fighting had been nearby and then moved away. There were Latvian military officers with the Americans there and elsewhere. Attached to the 82nd Airborne were some of the few men stationed outside the country when it fell (not many due to the then situation) and they had come to Jēkabpils. One of them had been detained before leaving by the CIA who suspected he was a Russian spy and that had caused some issues. Just because he had Russian heritage, he was a traitor…? The others were present to aid the establishment of the freedom of part of their homeland. They went into Jēkabpils itself and other areas where there was danger from ‘locals’. Those locals weren’t true Latvians, the attached liaison officers told the Americans, but traitors. It was they who made the city a dangerous place on its second day back under NATO control. Sniping and explosions occurred. Attacked at their front by Russian paratroopers and now in their rear by ‘terrorists’, the 82nd Airborne responded to the Jēkabpils attacks with a lot of force. They didn’t want to lose the city for they knew that the 76th Guards would return. A battalion of Albanian troops – Albania had joined NATO last year – came straight from the airbase and into Jēkabpils as well several companies of American paratroopers: for both, this their first fight of the war. Efforts were made not to cause civilian losses and not to destroy too much of the city, but both happened. The Battle of Jēkabpils would be something long remembered in Latvian history.
It was the same downstream at Daugavpils. NATO control over the large city (Latvia’s second largest behind Riga) was near non-existent. The Belgians brought in couldn’t control Daugavpils in the few numbers they had. The FSB had delivered guns to ethnic Russians there like they had up at Jēkabpils but also sent Cossacks and other volunteers from across the Rodina – and elsewhere too; many ethnic Russians from the Ukraine had volunteered to come to the Baltic States as well – to fight as auxiliary security units. Most had been busy molesting the local population before NATO paratroopers arrived. Man-to-man, Belgian infantry had the upper hand but there were so many of those armed men now acting as guerillas through Daugavpils. There was fighting to be had outside of the city for those Belgians who the British wanted to aid them so they were forced to abandon much of it for now. The Belgians with their Light Brigade were waiting on reinforcements, who were due to arrive any time soon, and they would go into the city eventually to restore order, just not today. Attached Latvian military officers with the Belgians were rather upset because they feared for civilians left at the mercy of those with guns inside but there was nothing to be done. NATO troops who’d come here were needed outside.
Daugavpils International Airport wasn’t any such thing. It had that title but that wasn’t the case. Like outside Jēkabpils, there was a former Soviet airbase here in mediocre condition. The Latvian Government had long wanted to turn it into an international airport but had lacked funding. It was now an international airbase. After being taken by British soldiers with the 16th Air Assault Brigade (the victors of the Battle of Copenhagen), the airhead established outside Daugavpils had been where the multinational 6th Airmobile Division was stood up. Doing so in the field was rather an important propaganda issue for NATO though one which many though was madness. Led by a Briton, both Belgium and Canada had a brigade of their own men assigned while there were also further NATO attachments in combat support & service support roles. Still forming, the 6th Airmobile was also fighting. Belorussians had first been encountered along with locals… before those locals were correctly identified as foreign militia instead. That intelligence failure there had come alongside the debacle when it came to misunderstanding enemy strength and capabilities. The militia were effective. They closed the airhead that NATO had here. Those volunteers – all of whom had previous military experience – used mortars and also shoulder-mounted SAMs to do this. Explosive projectiles lanced into the airport grounds and caused deaths and injuries while also hitting a couple of aircraft. One particular mortar round slammed into a field hospital (this was an accident; NATO fire had hit a Russian field hospital yesterday by accident too) established to deal with the injured from that shelling but also fighting. NATO, Russian and civilian casualties were being treated there at the time. The effects were horrendous. A ‘pool’ reporter sent by the Ministry of Defence back in London, who worked for The Daily Telegraph but was to share his stories with other publications, was on-hand to witness the aftereffects of that one incident. His story, and pictures from his partnered photographer, would go global. As to the missilemen, armed hunts took place to find them and kill them. They went to ground though and avoided the RAF Regiment men (from II Squadron, a parachute-trained unit) after them. The British were twice duped into thinking that the threat was gone. The first time saw damage done to an RAF Hercules C4 when taking off after unloading cargo and taking out wounded. The second time, five hours later and following an all-clear where this time it was said that the danger was gone for certain, a C-17 came into land. This wasn’t a British one but instead a Canadian one. It was bringing in light armoured vehicles as well as soldiers with plans for it and others to ferry in Leopard-2 tanks that the Canadians had. Up came a SAM. The aircraft was hit and the pilot made quite the heroic effort to land. He did but he then lost control once on the ground. The C-17 went off the runway and crashed. A fire started and then there was an explosion. Close to a hundred lives were lost. Daugavpils was CLOSED after that. Gurkhas joined the hunt for more of those men with missiles – the RAF Regiment squadron commander receiving quite the dressing down – but until then only airdrops could be made.
More men and especially heavy gear were needed for the fighting raging outside Daugavpils. The British had fast taken control of a large area and established outposts. They knew that the Russians could come to try to take back control here. That wasn’t wrong. Russian Airborne Troops moved against the 6th Airmobile as well as they did the Americans to the northwest. Arriving by trucks rather than an airlift which their commander would have preferred, was the 345th Guards Airborne Regiment. This independent non-divisional unit had been reformed earlier in the year with the name of a formation that had a well-regarded history of combat in Soviet service. The 345th Regiment came down from St. Petersburg – away from duties enforcing the curfew to stop the spread of that biological virus – and went into battle today. There were only a few armoured vehicles with them but they were used well in the fight that the Russians went into. Multiple attacks were made against British outposts and those were pushed back. Para units were ordered to fall back and concentrate. Fighting withdrawals were made and in the fog of war, sometimes things went wrong with those leading to men being cut off. Apache gunships in Army Air Corps service (a few of them had come to Latvia and they weren’t flying from the targeted airbase) were brought in to rescue some rifle sections. They did well in tearing into the Russians though faced strong missile fire in return. Two of them were lost when engaged by the 345th Regiment. The British fell back towards Daugavpils. They had the room to do so and the ground to give up but it wasn’t great for morale to do this. However, at Dunski the Russians were finally stopped. This village was at a crossroads east of the city where several roads converged: there was a railway line plus also a bend in the Daugava River nearby. 1 Royal Irish, 2 Para, 4 Para and two Belgian battalions fought here as whole units while there were attached companies of Canadian soldiers from parts of several battalions not yet fully here in Latvia. The Russians were outnumbered two-to-one and caught in a pre-planned trap. In the middle of a thunderstorm, complete with a summer downpour like no other, the 345th Regiment was brought to a firm stop. The fight was run by junior officers, senior sergeants and experienced NCOs. It was an infantry battle, and while there was external fire support, it was mainly between soldiers on foot. For almost an hour it raged, each side giving it all, the 345th Regiment fighting better than Naval Infantry men had done in Denmark when the British were there, but in the end the Russians gave in. They’d taken losses close to a third of their number. There was no way through and this was a battle lost. Sensibly, their regimental commander pulled his men out. He did so while using his radio. A Belgian electronic reconnaissance team had waited for this and fixed his position after a long wait. From back closer to Daugavpils, a whole battery of previously-silent Belgian LG1 guns suddenly fired: they’d been kept out of the fight which Royal Horse Artillery guns had joined earlier. High-explosive 105mm shells descended upon a patch of woodland and that Russian colonel, plus much of his battle staff, was left dead. Patience had paid off here and the results in the aftermath would be there. The Russian withdrawal was haphazard and one thus contested as the 6th Airmobile took the opportunity to tear apart as much of them as they could before finally halting once darkness came. There’d be more fighting on other days, but for today, outside Daugavpils it was over.
Inside the city, as night came, the violence increased though. Things were about to get rather crazy in there.
Up in northeastern Poland, the Allied I Corps continued fighting the Russian’s Twentieth Guards Army. Operation Baltic Arrow was in some ways looking like Operation Baltic Crawl. It was still early on and not all of those assigned NATO forces had yet to get going. Generals Mattis and Petraeus weren’t voicing displeasure with their subordinate corps commander here though like a few other voices within NATO were. CJTF–East’s commander and SACEUR both saw progress being made. They knew the strength of the opposition. Baltic Arrow would soon enough live up to its name. The Russians had had over a week to dig in and get ready to hold off the liberation of Polish soil. They were retreating and losing forces as they failed to do so. The I Corps would be in Kaliningrad soon enough then on their way – over the Daugava where the XVIII Corps was – to Tallinn on the Gulf of Finland.
As said, the Twentieth Guards Army couldn’t stop the ongoing NATO advance. All of the I Corps was now involved included the Croats now alongside all the other nationalities in this large NATO operational command. Masuria – this region once the southern part of Germany’s East Prussia – was being overrun. From Minsk, President Lukashenko had issued the order that any withdrawal of Belorussian troops would be met with punishment on the family of the officer involved. This Stalinist idiocy hadn’t gone down well with the Russians. They’d cut off Belorussian independent communications in response so that there was no more of that political interference. The ability to retreat, and then counterattack, was needed to keep the Twentieth Guards Army (a third of it with Belorussian components) in the fight. Lukashenko could rage all he wanted but he would do that to Moscow and have no more role in this fight! The I Corps found that they were able to retake Polish territory but they had to fight for it several times. Back and forth the frontlines moved through the day as the Russians & Belorussians conducted quite the effective defence in places, especially in the middle. However, on the flanks, there were significant areas liberated and for good.
The British 3rd Mechanised Division continued to push for the Suwalki Gap. At the beginning of the war, that access way from Poland to Lithuania had been shut by a joint Russian-Belorussian move east-west. The terrain favoured north-south movement though, as had been found then and again now. With an attached Canadian brigade – not here to make up the numbers nor play any second-line supporting role – that was reached. Canadian tanks with the Royal Canadian Dragoons reached the Polish-Lithuanian border. At once they were furiously counterattacked by Belorussian tanks with their 120th Guards Mechanised Brigade and needed immediate air and ground support, but they held on here. British troops moved up in support behind them while guarding their inner flank were Croatian troops seeing battle for the first time and doing well. Pushing onwards into Lithuania looked possible from afar though it wasn’t going to be something done anytime soon as the Russians moved in heavy guns and also used what air power they had to really hurt the 3rd Mechanised Division. Whilst this was happening, Belorussians nearly cut off by the forward dash withdrew and strengthened their position despite all that the Croats threw their way to stop that.
There was another big advance forward over near the Baltic Sea. The Dutch covered the inside flank for the Polish 16th Mechanised Division as it raced towards Kaliningrad. They aimed to reach Braniewo, the last Polish town before the border of that Russian exclave, but just couldn’t quite get there. Belorussian reservists with their 19th Tank Brigade came to rescue the Russian’s 1st Guards Motor Rifle Division at the crucial time and threaten the Poles’ flank despite Dutch efforts to stop that. Orders came from I Corps for a tactical withdrawal in the face of this and it was done. The Poles weren’t happy but they’d gone too far with not enough width and the Dutch had taken too many losses too quickly to stop a projected disaster in the making. In falling back, the Poles found that the Russians were unable to maintain their chase though and so – with permission – they then stopped. Braniewo remained beyond them but they’d only gone half way back to where they’d started from and still had taken plenty of territory.
Other Brits (with Belgians supporting them), the Americans, the Germans (with some Czechs attached) and the Spanish all fought through Masuria. They were spread through the middle and had a torrid time on the attack when facing the Russians turning on them in the middle of pulling back. Two heavy divisions, the 10th Guards Tank aided by the 4th Guards Tank, plus also the 138th Brigade, might have been outnumbered but they put up quite the fight. They had no intention of falling back without making NATO pay. There were Poles here among these other I Corps NATO units, men attached as liaisons like those Latvians with the XVIII Corps. They witnessed their country being blown apart but their mission was focused on that regained land. There were people here who’d been under foreign occupation. Russian occupation measures hadn’t been that severe and there hadn’t been strong resistance either. There were no mass graves to find. People needed food and medical care though. Clean water was something else required as well. Getting that forward into this battle-zone was impossible so the Poles started organizing the evacuation of the people they found to where that help was further south. So many of these civilians had refused to leave the other week when the war came to their towns and villages but they left now. Where the Poles were unable to go into was Olsztyn. That large town was now behind the lines after the Americans had cut off a retreat from Russian forces out of there. What was left of a regiment had barricaded themselves in there when blocking access routes. Surrenders were called for and met with impolite remarks. The Russians were waiting for a counterattack to come link-up with them. That was now impossible… but that didn’t stop the Twentieth Guards Army sending messages saying it was coming. The Poles estimated that there were at least thirty thousand people trapped in there. I Corps’ intelligence staff said that that was a generous estimate. It could be fifty thousand civilians. Their fate would be decided in the coming days.
The 82nd Airborne Division came to Latvia for a fight. There was no expectation that their time spent here would be easy. The intention for their operations, as was the case with the rest of the US XVIII Airborne Corps, was that they would engage Russian and Belorussian forces throughout their rear due to where they landed. This would mean conducting an all-round defence at the same time as expanding their area of operations. Strong counterattacks, from all directions, were anticipated. This wouldn’t be anything like fighting Iraqi insurgents or the Afghan Taliban – the division’s recent combat experience – in any way. Those the Americans would fight along the Daugava River were a far different opponent: one far more formidable.
That really got doing during the second day that the 82nd Airborne was on the ground in the enemy’s rear areas. Russian Airborne Troops attacked them. The 76th Guards Air Assault Division had the mission of securing both Estonia and Latvia from a NATO counter-invasion though had focused on preparing for a Baltic-launched amphibious assault. In Russian eyes, that had been opened already by the strong commando raids up and down the coast. Instead, the 82nd Airborne arrived by air. NATO had deceived them with the coastal raids. One brigade of that American elite formation had been beaten on the war’s opening day when caught by surprise inside Estonia. Regular troops from the Russian Army’s 138th Motor Rifle Brigade had achieved that victory (they were in Poland now) but the 76th Guards had fought Estonians and Latvians already. The Americans held no fear for them. A two-pronged assault was launched against those who had landed near to Jēkabpils. The 23rd & 234th Regiments – each Guards units – moved forward overnight in their armoured vehicles and also by trucks to make their attacks at dawn. They thought they hadn’t been spotted but they were mistaken. American intelligence assets spotted the move and the 82nd Airborne reacted accordingly. The fight was tough and bloody. Each side suffered grave losses and saw combat plans fall to pieces in part when the shooting started. Each also brought in strong fire support for their engaged paratroopers. The Russians had a lot of tracked vehicles – BMDs and variants of those and other airmobile platforms – which mounted weapons; they also had artillery in the form of heavy guns and mortars. The Americans had tanks. From the beat-up 170th Infantry Brigade which had been moved to the rear back in Poland, two companies of M-1A2 Abrams had come to Latvia. The move had taken up a lot of lift on transports to fly them in, but their presence paid off. The Russians didn’t expect them. The 82nd Airborne had its own artillery as well as Apache helicopters plus short-range reconnaissance drones. The 234th Regiment’s attack was blunted and a bloody standstill caused. The strike by the 23rd Regiment saw them turned back. Then the Americans counterattacked. They had three brigades and used that third one to move forward in between the two Russian regiments. This advance was led by one of those tank companies with the Abrams’ blasting open the Russians and causing panic in their lines. The advance didn’t move as far forward as planned but it was good enough. The Russians were hurt where the flanks of each regiment were hit. They started to fall back. From the divisional commander came orders for the 76th Guards to withdraw. They would regroup and try again at a later date… once they could address the issue of those tanks too.
The attack on Jēkabpils had failed. The Americans remained holding this small city and its crossings over the river. They had their airhead intact too. That was where the 23rd Regiment had been heading for before so many of its BMD-2s & BTR-Ds were blown up by Javelin missiles and over a hundred paratroopers left dead. It sat to the north of the city and was once a Soviet airbase during the Cold War occupation of Latvia as part of the Soviet Union. Since then it had been near abandoned. US Air Force Red Horse airfield engineers had been on the ground quickly after it was taken. They worked to improve what was here and make it suitable for sustained operations. C-17 and C-130s had been making landings and take-offs but the airbase needed major work. That was underway while fighting had been nearby and then moved away. There were Latvian military officers with the Americans there and elsewhere. Attached to the 82nd Airborne were some of the few men stationed outside the country when it fell (not many due to the then situation) and they had come to Jēkabpils. One of them had been detained before leaving by the CIA who suspected he was a Russian spy and that had caused some issues. Just because he had Russian heritage, he was a traitor…? The others were present to aid the establishment of the freedom of part of their homeland. They went into Jēkabpils itself and other areas where there was danger from ‘locals’. Those locals weren’t true Latvians, the attached liaison officers told the Americans, but traitors. It was they who made the city a dangerous place on its second day back under NATO control. Sniping and explosions occurred. Attacked at their front by Russian paratroopers and now in their rear by ‘terrorists’, the 82nd Airborne responded to the Jēkabpils attacks with a lot of force. They didn’t want to lose the city for they knew that the 76th Guards would return. A battalion of Albanian troops – Albania had joined NATO last year – came straight from the airbase and into Jēkabpils as well several companies of American paratroopers: for both, this their first fight of the war. Efforts were made not to cause civilian losses and not to destroy too much of the city, but both happened. The Battle of Jēkabpils would be something long remembered in Latvian history.
It was the same downstream at Daugavpils. NATO control over the large city (Latvia’s second largest behind Riga) was near non-existent. The Belgians brought in couldn’t control Daugavpils in the few numbers they had. The FSB had delivered guns to ethnic Russians there like they had up at Jēkabpils but also sent Cossacks and other volunteers from across the Rodina – and elsewhere too; many ethnic Russians from the Ukraine had volunteered to come to the Baltic States as well – to fight as auxiliary security units. Most had been busy molesting the local population before NATO paratroopers arrived. Man-to-man, Belgian infantry had the upper hand but there were so many of those armed men now acting as guerillas through Daugavpils. There was fighting to be had outside of the city for those Belgians who the British wanted to aid them so they were forced to abandon much of it for now. The Belgians with their Light Brigade were waiting on reinforcements, who were due to arrive any time soon, and they would go into the city eventually to restore order, just not today. Attached Latvian military officers with the Belgians were rather upset because they feared for civilians left at the mercy of those with guns inside but there was nothing to be done. NATO troops who’d come here were needed outside.
Daugavpils International Airport wasn’t any such thing. It had that title but that wasn’t the case. Like outside Jēkabpils, there was a former Soviet airbase here in mediocre condition. The Latvian Government had long wanted to turn it into an international airport but had lacked funding. It was now an international airbase. After being taken by British soldiers with the 16th Air Assault Brigade (the victors of the Battle of Copenhagen), the airhead established outside Daugavpils had been where the multinational 6th Airmobile Division was stood up. Doing so in the field was rather an important propaganda issue for NATO though one which many though was madness. Led by a Briton, both Belgium and Canada had a brigade of their own men assigned while there were also further NATO attachments in combat support & service support roles. Still forming, the 6th Airmobile was also fighting. Belorussians had first been encountered along with locals… before those locals were correctly identified as foreign militia instead. That intelligence failure there had come alongside the debacle when it came to misunderstanding enemy strength and capabilities. The militia were effective. They closed the airhead that NATO had here. Those volunteers – all of whom had previous military experience – used mortars and also shoulder-mounted SAMs to do this. Explosive projectiles lanced into the airport grounds and caused deaths and injuries while also hitting a couple of aircraft. One particular mortar round slammed into a field hospital (this was an accident; NATO fire had hit a Russian field hospital yesterday by accident too) established to deal with the injured from that shelling but also fighting. NATO, Russian and civilian casualties were being treated there at the time. The effects were horrendous. A ‘pool’ reporter sent by the Ministry of Defence back in London, who worked for The Daily Telegraph but was to share his stories with other publications, was on-hand to witness the aftereffects of that one incident. His story, and pictures from his partnered photographer, would go global. As to the missilemen, armed hunts took place to find them and kill them. They went to ground though and avoided the RAF Regiment men (from II Squadron, a parachute-trained unit) after them. The British were twice duped into thinking that the threat was gone. The first time saw damage done to an RAF Hercules C4 when taking off after unloading cargo and taking out wounded. The second time, five hours later and following an all-clear where this time it was said that the danger was gone for certain, a C-17 came into land. This wasn’t a British one but instead a Canadian one. It was bringing in light armoured vehicles as well as soldiers with plans for it and others to ferry in Leopard-2 tanks that the Canadians had. Up came a SAM. The aircraft was hit and the pilot made quite the heroic effort to land. He did but he then lost control once on the ground. The C-17 went off the runway and crashed. A fire started and then there was an explosion. Close to a hundred lives were lost. Daugavpils was CLOSED after that. Gurkhas joined the hunt for more of those men with missiles – the RAF Regiment squadron commander receiving quite the dressing down – but until then only airdrops could be made.
More men and especially heavy gear were needed for the fighting raging outside Daugavpils. The British had fast taken control of a large area and established outposts. They knew that the Russians could come to try to take back control here. That wasn’t wrong. Russian Airborne Troops moved against the 6th Airmobile as well as they did the Americans to the northwest. Arriving by trucks rather than an airlift which their commander would have preferred, was the 345th Guards Airborne Regiment. This independent non-divisional unit had been reformed earlier in the year with the name of a formation that had a well-regarded history of combat in Soviet service. The 345th Regiment came down from St. Petersburg – away from duties enforcing the curfew to stop the spread of that biological virus – and went into battle today. There were only a few armoured vehicles with them but they were used well in the fight that the Russians went into. Multiple attacks were made against British outposts and those were pushed back. Para units were ordered to fall back and concentrate. Fighting withdrawals were made and in the fog of war, sometimes things went wrong with those leading to men being cut off. Apache gunships in Army Air Corps service (a few of them had come to Latvia and they weren’t flying from the targeted airbase) were brought in to rescue some rifle sections. They did well in tearing into the Russians though faced strong missile fire in return. Two of them were lost when engaged by the 345th Regiment. The British fell back towards Daugavpils. They had the room to do so and the ground to give up but it wasn’t great for morale to do this. However, at Dunski the Russians were finally stopped. This village was at a crossroads east of the city where several roads converged: there was a railway line plus also a bend in the Daugava River nearby. 1 Royal Irish, 2 Para, 4 Para and two Belgian battalions fought here as whole units while there were attached companies of Canadian soldiers from parts of several battalions not yet fully here in Latvia. The Russians were outnumbered two-to-one and caught in a pre-planned trap. In the middle of a thunderstorm, complete with a summer downpour like no other, the 345th Regiment was brought to a firm stop. The fight was run by junior officers, senior sergeants and experienced NCOs. It was an infantry battle, and while there was external fire support, it was mainly between soldiers on foot. For almost an hour it raged, each side giving it all, the 345th Regiment fighting better than Naval Infantry men had done in Denmark when the British were there, but in the end the Russians gave in. They’d taken losses close to a third of their number. There was no way through and this was a battle lost. Sensibly, their regimental commander pulled his men out. He did so while using his radio. A Belgian electronic reconnaissance team had waited for this and fixed his position after a long wait. From back closer to Daugavpils, a whole battery of previously-silent Belgian LG1 guns suddenly fired: they’d been kept out of the fight which Royal Horse Artillery guns had joined earlier. High-explosive 105mm shells descended upon a patch of woodland and that Russian colonel, plus much of his battle staff, was left dead. Patience had paid off here and the results in the aftermath would be there. The Russian withdrawal was haphazard and one thus contested as the 6th Airmobile took the opportunity to tear apart as much of them as they could before finally halting once darkness came. There’d be more fighting on other days, but for today, outside Daugavpils it was over.
Inside the city, as night came, the violence increased though. Things were about to get rather crazy in there.
Up in northeastern Poland, the Allied I Corps continued fighting the Russian’s Twentieth Guards Army. Operation Baltic Arrow was in some ways looking like Operation Baltic Crawl. It was still early on and not all of those assigned NATO forces had yet to get going. Generals Mattis and Petraeus weren’t voicing displeasure with their subordinate corps commander here though like a few other voices within NATO were. CJTF–East’s commander and SACEUR both saw progress being made. They knew the strength of the opposition. Baltic Arrow would soon enough live up to its name. The Russians had had over a week to dig in and get ready to hold off the liberation of Polish soil. They were retreating and losing forces as they failed to do so. The I Corps would be in Kaliningrad soon enough then on their way – over the Daugava where the XVIII Corps was – to Tallinn on the Gulf of Finland.
As said, the Twentieth Guards Army couldn’t stop the ongoing NATO advance. All of the I Corps was now involved included the Croats now alongside all the other nationalities in this large NATO operational command. Masuria – this region once the southern part of Germany’s East Prussia – was being overrun. From Minsk, President Lukashenko had issued the order that any withdrawal of Belorussian troops would be met with punishment on the family of the officer involved. This Stalinist idiocy hadn’t gone down well with the Russians. They’d cut off Belorussian independent communications in response so that there was no more of that political interference. The ability to retreat, and then counterattack, was needed to keep the Twentieth Guards Army (a third of it with Belorussian components) in the fight. Lukashenko could rage all he wanted but he would do that to Moscow and have no more role in this fight! The I Corps found that they were able to retake Polish territory but they had to fight for it several times. Back and forth the frontlines moved through the day as the Russians & Belorussians conducted quite the effective defence in places, especially in the middle. However, on the flanks, there were significant areas liberated and for good.
The British 3rd Mechanised Division continued to push for the Suwalki Gap. At the beginning of the war, that access way from Poland to Lithuania had been shut by a joint Russian-Belorussian move east-west. The terrain favoured north-south movement though, as had been found then and again now. With an attached Canadian brigade – not here to make up the numbers nor play any second-line supporting role – that was reached. Canadian tanks with the Royal Canadian Dragoons reached the Polish-Lithuanian border. At once they were furiously counterattacked by Belorussian tanks with their 120th Guards Mechanised Brigade and needed immediate air and ground support, but they held on here. British troops moved up in support behind them while guarding their inner flank were Croatian troops seeing battle for the first time and doing well. Pushing onwards into Lithuania looked possible from afar though it wasn’t going to be something done anytime soon as the Russians moved in heavy guns and also used what air power they had to really hurt the 3rd Mechanised Division. Whilst this was happening, Belorussians nearly cut off by the forward dash withdrew and strengthened their position despite all that the Croats threw their way to stop that.
There was another big advance forward over near the Baltic Sea. The Dutch covered the inside flank for the Polish 16th Mechanised Division as it raced towards Kaliningrad. They aimed to reach Braniewo, the last Polish town before the border of that Russian exclave, but just couldn’t quite get there. Belorussian reservists with their 19th Tank Brigade came to rescue the Russian’s 1st Guards Motor Rifle Division at the crucial time and threaten the Poles’ flank despite Dutch efforts to stop that. Orders came from I Corps for a tactical withdrawal in the face of this and it was done. The Poles weren’t happy but they’d gone too far with not enough width and the Dutch had taken too many losses too quickly to stop a projected disaster in the making. In falling back, the Poles found that the Russians were unable to maintain their chase though and so – with permission – they then stopped. Braniewo remained beyond them but they’d only gone half way back to where they’d started from and still had taken plenty of territory.
Other Brits (with Belgians supporting them), the Americans, the Germans (with some Czechs attached) and the Spanish all fought through Masuria. They were spread through the middle and had a torrid time on the attack when facing the Russians turning on them in the middle of pulling back. Two heavy divisions, the 10th Guards Tank aided by the 4th Guards Tank, plus also the 138th Brigade, might have been outnumbered but they put up quite the fight. They had no intention of falling back without making NATO pay. There were Poles here among these other I Corps NATO units, men attached as liaisons like those Latvians with the XVIII Corps. They witnessed their country being blown apart but their mission was focused on that regained land. There were people here who’d been under foreign occupation. Russian occupation measures hadn’t been that severe and there hadn’t been strong resistance either. There were no mass graves to find. People needed food and medical care though. Clean water was something else required as well. Getting that forward into this battle-zone was impossible so the Poles started organizing the evacuation of the people they found to where that help was further south. So many of these civilians had refused to leave the other week when the war came to their towns and villages but they left now. Where the Poles were unable to go into was Olsztyn. That large town was now behind the lines after the Americans had cut off a retreat from Russian forces out of there. What was left of a regiment had barricaded themselves in there when blocking access routes. Surrenders were called for and met with impolite remarks. The Russians were waiting for a counterattack to come link-up with them. That was now impossible… but that didn’t stop the Twentieth Guards Army sending messages saying it was coming. The Poles estimated that there were at least thirty thousand people trapped in there. I Corps’ intelligence staff said that that was a generous estimate. It could be fifty thousand civilians. Their fate would be decided in the coming days.
