Courland Pocket deported tens of thousands of Cossack survivors to the Soviet Union after the war Joseph Stalin ordered them all shot See also Osttruppen COUNTERBATTERY FIRE When divisional artillery batteries fired against enemy batteries to suppress fire If additional artillery at corps level was called in, the practice was referred to as “counter-bombardment.” See also radio COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE CORPS (CIC) The U.S Army counterintelligence organization It operated wherever the U.S Army went COURLAND As part of Latvia, Courland was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940 It was overrun by the Wehrmacht in the opening phase of BARBAROSSA in 1941 It was reattached to Soviet-occupied Latvia at the end of the war See also Baltic offensive operation (1944); Courland Pocket COURLAND POCKET Under overall command of Marshal Alexander M Vasilevsky, the Red Army’s Baltic Front broke through to the Baltic coast on the west side of Riga on July 31, 1944 It had made a bloody and arduous trek to reach the coast, so Vasilevsky paused to regroup and rest the troops By mid-September he was ready to resume the advance, joined now by the Leningrad Front under Marshal Leonid A Govorov The Soviets struck on September 14, launching the Baltic offensive operation (September 14–November 24, 1944), which drove the remnants of Army Group North into a shrinking pocket on the Courland (Kurland) peninsula, a feat achieved only after ferocious infantry and tank battles and heavy Russian losses Most of the dreaded and despised Army Group North, which tormented Leningrad for 28 months, was shattered By October, remnants of 33 badly attrited Wehrmacht divisions crowded into a shrinking pocket on Courland They were led by Ferdinand Schörner, who had been forced out of Riga by relentless Red Army pressure Schörner asked Adolf Hitler for permission to pull out of Courland as well, but was given a Haltebefehl order Worse, he was stripped of several divisions, which Hitler pulled out to reinforce Army Group Center, which was then being driven back across Poland and east-central Germany by massive rolling offensives by the Red Army Hitler again forbade evacuation of Schörner’s 300,000 men in January 1945 Instead, he uselessly renamed Schörner’s command “Army Group Kurland.” It became increasingly difficult to feed hordes of German civilian refugees who crowed into the pocket, fleeing ravages of the Red Army in East Prussia Hitler replaced Schörner with a new commander in January and ordered “Army Group Kurland” to attack out of the pocket When the assault failed bloodily, Hitler sacked the new commander as well In the last months of the war, Hitler made wholesale changes in command all around the Wehrmacht, often out of desperate and impulsive rage As several giant Fronts of the Red Army raced for Berlin from January to April, 1945, Russian and German troops in the Courland Pocket waged an 271