Battle of Tannenberg Line - Casualties

Casualties

In the Soviet era, the losses in the Battle of Tannenberg Line were not mentioned in the Soviet sources. In recent years, the Russian authors have published some figures but not for the whole course of the battles. The number of Soviet casualties can only be estimated upon other figures. In the attack of 29 July 225 men survived of the Soviet 109th Rifle Corps carrying the main weight of the assault. Of the 120th Rifle Division, 1808 men were lost as dead and wounded. The rest of the Soviet rifle corps lost their capacity for further attacks. In the same attack, the German forces lost 600 men. The headquarters of the 2nd Shock Army reported 259 troops fit for combat within the 109th Rifle Division and a total exhaustion of the army at the night before 1 August, which probably meant a few thousand troops fit for combat out of the 46,385 men who had initiated the Estonian Operation on 25 July. The losses of the 8th Army were similar to that.

In the evening of 29 July, the army detachment "Narwa" counted 113–120 destroyed Soviet tanks, almost half of them in the battles of 29 July. The 2nd Shock Army reported on fifty of their tanks destroyed on 29 July. The German side counted additional 44 destroyed Soviet tanks on August 3–6.

Russian author G.F. Krivosheev in his account "Soviet casualties and combat losses in the twentieth century" lists 665,827 casualties suffered by the Leningrad Front in 1944, 145,102 of them as dead, missing in action, or captured. Estonian historian Mart Laar, deducting the losses in the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive, Battle for Narva Bridgehead and the combat in Finland estimates the number of Soviet casualties in the Battle of Tannenberg Line as 35,000 dead or missing and 135,000 wounded or sick.

The German Army Group North buried 1709 men in Estonia in 24 July – 10 August 1944. Added the men missing in action, the number of irrecoverable casualties in the period is approximately 2,500. Accounting the standard ratio 1:4 of the irrecoverable casualties to the wounded, the total number of German casualties in the Battle for Tannenberg Line is approximately 10,000 men.