Qualla: Battle of Raseiniai

Battle of Raseiniai: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Knutux assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The Wehrmacht had never seen a tank like it. On 23 June 1941, the second day of Operation Barbarossa, German anti-tank gunners of the 6th Panzer Division opened fire on a Soviet armored vehicle that had appeared, alone, on a sandy back road behind their lines in Lithuania. Their shells bounced off it. The vehicle was a KV - either a KV-1 or a KV-2, accounts vary - one of the new Soviet heavy tanks the Germans had been told not to worry about. It would hold up the entire division for the better part of a day. By the time it was finally destroyed, four anti-tank guns had been reduced to scrap, an 88mm flak had been silenced before it could even score a hit, and combat engineers had crawled up to it under cover of darkness with satchel charges and failed. The men inside the tank were eventually killed by grenades pushed through the hatches. The Germans buried them on the spot, with full military honors. Twenty-four years later their bodies were exhumed and reburied at the Soviet military cemetery in Raseiniai. Their names are still unknown.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Knutux assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Battle of Raseiniai: Two armies in the woods

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus, Public domain. Raseiniai is a small Lithuanian town about seventy-five kilometers northwest of Kaunas, sitting in flat country broken by streams and pine forest. In June 1941 it became the focal point of the largest tank battle of the opening week of Operation Barbarossa. Erich von Manstein's L...

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Image: US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus | Public domain

Battle of Raseiniai: The counterattack that became a slaughter

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus, Public domain. Kuznetsov ordered both mechanized corps to mass for a major counterattack near Raseiniai on 23 June. The Luftwaffe spotted them first. Junkers Ju 88s of Luftflotte 1 caught the 12th Mechanized's 23rd Tank Division on the road southwest of Siauliai and burned forty vehicles. No So...

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Image: US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus | Public domain

Battle of Raseiniai: The lone tank

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus, Public domain. Among the wreckage of that catastrophic week, one Soviet tank stood out. Its crew - probably from the 3rd Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Tank Regiment of the 2nd Tank Division, according to research by Russian historian Maksim Kolomiets - had pushed a single KV behind German lines a...

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Image: US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus | Public domain

Battle of Raseiniai: The cost on both sides

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus, Public domain. The German pause to deal with Raseiniai - and the wider Soviet armored counterattacks across the Border Defensive Battles - cost Hoepner's panzer divisions roughly a week of forward momentum. They eventually reached the Daugava, seized intact bridges in a brilliant coup near Daug...

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Image: US Army Historical Division from a sketch by Raus | Public domain