Operation "Steinhäger"

The operation "Steinhäger" was in the night 27-28 June 1944. The purpose was to capture the little island Narvi ( somewhere on the Baltic coast...) as it was too good monitoring place for the Soviets. The Germans should provide artillery support and Finns made landings. The combined force had three German torpedo boats, five M-class sweepers and four R-class sweeper boats. Finns provided nine motor torpedo boats, ten VMV patrol boats and 11 motor boats for transport of 108 men strong landing party. The plan was that Germans should destroy Soviet positions by artillery fire and then Finnish troops would land and destroy everything on the island. The island would not be occupied, but new Soviet attempts to capture the island would be prevented.
At 22.40 the artillery support groups were in their places, all about 6 km from the island. Torpedo boats T 30, T 8 and T 10 were north from Narvi, sweepers M 15, M 19 and M 22 west and M 18 and M 30 northeast. These ships had not opened fire, when Narvi battery surprised them by opening fire at 22.43. Torpedo boats returned fire and the battle continued for seven minutes till the Soviet battery ceased fire. German ships retreated then to the planned waiting area eastwards and continued artillery bombardment till 23.15. Finnish approached the island, but they were still two miles north. Then enemy opened fire against German ships that seemed to retreat after M 19 was hit. The Finnish commander decided to wait at 23.20 and look if the Germans would start bombardment again. The Narvi battery was still functioning and as German support seemed to sail away, commander of the transport decided that it was not possible to land and cancelled the operation at 23.50. Finns knew very well how difficult it would be to land on rocky island. They had beaten back several Soviet attempts during 1941-44. In this operation there was no co-operation between Finns and Germans.

http://www.hut.fi/~jaromaa/Marine/cont44.htm

[ 01. July 2003, 07:29 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

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Kai, thanks for that interesting story on an earlier Baltic battle of 44.......looks like the only co-operation was between the two naval forces against the Soviet shore batteries ? I cannot access the site due to PC server problems.......again ! time for cable modem...

Kai is there a map U can access for poor little me that shows the operation being played out ?

thank you,

~E

Erich,

I´ll try to see if I can find something more on this but it seems quite a little operation and as well unsuccessfull so probably not much else available. But I´ll try to see the net for more info/maps!

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