Battle of Moon Sound

Significance

The Battle of Moon Sound formed a key engagement within Operation Albion, the German amphibious campaign in the Baltic Sea conducted from mid-October to early November 1917. The German objective was the destruction of Russian naval forces and the seizure of the West Estonian Archipelago; both were achieved. The operation demonstrated the capacity of the Imperial German Navy to project combined arms power into the Baltic while Russian naval resistance—limited to two pre-dreadnoughts, three cruisers, three gunboats, twenty-one destroyers, and three British submarines—proved insufficient against a force that included ten battleships, a battlecruiser, nine light cruisers, and fifty destroyers. The fall of the archipelago tightened German control over the eastern Baltic and increased pressure on a Russian state already in acute political crisis in the autumn of 1917.

Commanders (2)