Battle For The Baltic Islands 1917

“A very detailed operational account of the highly successful German amphibious landings in October of 1917 on the Russian islands of Osel and Dago.”—The NYMAS Review In late 1917, the Russians, despite the revolution, were still willing to continue the war against Germany. This is an account of Operation Albion, the highly successful seaborne operation launched by the Germans to change their minds. The Baltic Islands were pivotal for the defense of the Finnish Gulf and St. Petersburg, so their capture was essential for any campaign towards the Russian capital. Only after the fall of the islands did Russia begin peace negotiations (freeing nearly half a million German soldiers for the Kaiser’s last gamble on the Western Front). This then was a campaign of great significance for the war on both Eastern and Western fronts. A large part of the High Sea Fleet took part in the invasion of the Baltic islands, including the most modern dreadnought battleships. The Russians mounted a resolute defense despite being heavily outgunned and over a ten-day period there were many naval clashes around the islands as well as the campaign ashore, all of which are described in detail with the use of both Russian and German firsthand accounts. This book shatters the myth that the Imperial German Navy spent the last two years of the war cowering in port. “Should be a blueprint for other military history books . . . The maps are some of the best I have seen in military books . . . The author tells the story of the campaign from the smallest mine sweeper to the various battleships involved.”—A Wargamers Needful Things

In October 1917, an invasion force of some 25,000 German soldiers, accompanied by a flotilla of 10 dreadnoughts, 350 other vessels, a half-dozen zeppelins, and 80 aircraft, attacked the Baltic islands of Dago, Osel, and Moon at the head of the Gulf of Riga. It proved to be the most successful amphibious operation of World War I. The three islands fell, the Gulf was opened to German warships and was now a threat to Russian naval bases in the Gulf of Finland, and 20,000 Russians were captured. The invasion proved to be the last major operation in the East. Although the invasion had achieved its objectives and placed the Germans in an excellent position for the resumption of warfare in the spring, within three weeks of the operation, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia (November 7, 1917) and Albion faded into obscurity as the war in the East came to a slow end.

The translation of these memoirs brings an important and authoritative historical source to those interested in Russian or naval history who are unable to access them in the original Russian. Their author, Rear Admiral S N Timiryov, was well placed to make observations on the character of many of the significant commanding officers and also many of the operations of the Baltic Fleet from the beginning of the war in 1914 up to exit from it in 1918. He trained with many of the key figures and shared battle experience with them in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and the siege of Port Arthur; and he spent a year in Japan as a prisoner of war with a number of them. In his subsequent career in the Navy he had roles which brought him into contact with new recruits as well as with many serving officers, and as the Executive Officer on the imperial yacht Shtandart for some years, he came into contact with senior members of the navy establishment and of the government, including the imperial household. His memoirs also exhibit an unusual degree of self-awareness. Written in Shanghai in 1922, these memoirs remained unknown to scholars for several decades. Since their publication in New York in 1961, in the absence of access to authoritative archives, many historians in the West used them as a source for the study of the role of the Navy in the Russian revolution, particularly as it unfolded in the north. They have also been used as a source in numerous studies of the naval war in the Baltic, and following the fall of the Soviet Union they were re-published in Russia and are regarded there as an authoritative source on the history both of the revolution and of the Russian Navy in the First World War. This first English-language edition, complemented by extensive notes and commentary on issues which may not be familiar to many, will fascinate scholars and naval historians alike.

This illustrated study of the German Imperial Navy presents a ship-by-ship history from the dreadnaught era through WWI. The battleships of the Third Reich have been written about exhaustively, but there is little in English devoted to their predecessors of the Second Reich. In The Kaiser’s Battlefleet, Aidan Dodson fills this significant gap in German naval history by covering these capital ships and studying the full span of battleship development during this period. Kaiser’s Battlefleet presents a chronological narrative that features technical details, construction schedules and the ultimate fates of each ship tabulated throughout. With a broad synthesis of German archival research, Dodson provides fresh data and corrects significant errors found in standard English-language texts. Heavily illustrated with line work and photographs drawn from German sources, this study will appeal to historians of WWI German as well as battleship modelmakers.