Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II by Buttar Prit

Author:Buttar, Prit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II
ISBN: 9781472802880
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2013-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

What transpired in front of our eyes is barely capable of description. It wasn’t a withdrawal any more, but a panic-stricken, headlong flight.

Everything and everybody was heading toward Dünaburg [Daugavpils] – trucks, wheeled vehicles, motorcycles. Everything was completely loaded down. No one could be persuaded to stop. It was like a river that swells whenever its tributaries flow into it after a rainstorm.13

Just short of the village of Malinovka, Carius encountered a junior officer who told him that the village had been occupied by Soviet tanks. A brief reconnaissance suggested that Soviet infantry was not present in any significant numbers, and swiftly Carius made a plan to retake Malinovka: he and another tank commander would drive into the village at full speed and engage any enemy tanks there, while the other six tanks in the company took up positions on high ground to the south and engaged any Soviet tanks that attempted to retreat.

The attack lasted less than 15 minutes, resulting in the swift recapture of the village. Some of the tanks appeared to have been left with only one or two crewmembers aboard – the rest were apparently busy collecting loot. Without losing any tanks, Carius and his company claimed to have destroyed 17 JS-2 tanks and five T34s. From Malinovka, they moved on to ambush the rest of the Soviet tank brigade, inflicting further heavy casualties.14 However, the Soviet forces in the area at the time, 5th Tank Corps, gave different losses for 41st Tank Brigade (ten T34s) and 48th Guards Heavy Tank Regiment (five JS-2s), as the heavy tank regiment reported:

At 1200 the enemy opened coordinated fire of tanks and SP-guns from the region of Malinovo [Malinovka]. Taking cover in folds in the terrain, the regiment started a firefight with the enemy. Enemy aircraft actively operated overhead. As a result of bombing and enemy artillery fire the regiment suffered losses – five tanks were set ablaze. The regiment was withdrawn from combat and laid an ambush in the forest south-east of Malinovo.15

To confuse matters even further, the official after-action report of Schwere Panzer Abteilung 502 records that Carius and his company destroyed 17 tanks in Malinovka on 22 July, and makes no mention of the ambush that Carius describes after the initial combat.16 Given that Carius was writing several years after the events he described, it is likely that the other more contemporary accounts are more accurate.

During the operation, Carius claimed, he recovered a Soviet officer’s map, which suggested that the Red Army intended to bypass Daugavpils to the north and then attack the city from the north and north-west. The commander of 290th Infantry Division, Generalmajor Rudolf Goltzsch, rejected the map as misinformation and insisted on positioning his heavy weapons to the east of Daugavpils. Whatever the truth of this account, Soviet forces from 6th Guards Army and 4th Shock Army closed in from both the east and north, and on 24 July, Carius was dispatched with four Tigers to protect the north-west approaches of Daugavpils.

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