Two countries celebrate Victory Day for the same battle, on consecutive dates, and they have been doing it since the 1930s. The Latvians mark 22 June; the Estonians mark 23 June. Both holidays trace back to a town called Cēsis in northern Latvia and to a five-day battle in 1919 that decided whether the new Baltic republics would survive their first year. On the German side were the Iron Division and the Baltic Landeswehr, Freikorps units left over from the World War who hoped to carve out a German-controlled state on the eastern shore of the Baltic. On the Latvian and Estonian side were 6,115 men, mostly young, with no cavalry advantage and inferior artillery. By the morning of 23 June they had broken the Germans, taken Cēsis, and started a march on Riga that would chase the Iron Division out of Latvia for good.
When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917 and the German Empire followed in 1918, the eastern Baltic was suddenly nobody's. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence and immediately had to defend it against three separate threats: the Bolsheviks pushing west, the local Baltic German nobility trying to keep their five-hundred-year hold on the land, and the Freikorps — German volunteer units organized by veterans who had not accepted that the war was over. Latvia had declared independence in November 1918 and lost Riga to the Bolsheviks within months. The Red Latvian Riflemen pushed nearly to the sea before the German VI Reserve Corps stopped them. Then the Germans, instead of going home, decided to keep going. Latvian volunteers loyal to the legal Provisional Government found themselves placed under the command of the Baltic Landeswehr, a force whose officers cheerfully discussed turning Latvia into a German protectorate.
On 10 June 1919 the Allied powers brokered a ceasefire between the Estonian forces moving south from Tallinn and the German-led units in northern Latvia. Talks failed. On 19 June the Iron Division attacked Estonian positions near Limbaži, and the war for the Baltic resumed in earnest. The 3rd Estonian Division, which included the 2nd Latvian Cēsis Regiment under Colonel Krišjānis Berķis, fielded 5,990 infantry and 125 cavalry. The pro-German forces had a roughly even infantry count, four to five times the cavalry, and a substantial advantage in cannons, machine guns, and mortars. On paper the Germans should have won. They had professional soldiers — many of them combat veterans from the Western Front — fighting against farm boys and clerks who had been in uniform for less than a year.
The Landeswehr attacked along several sectors of the front, looking for a weak spot to roll up the Estonian-Latvian line. They didn't find one. The conscripts held. The Kuperjanov Battalion, named after a Estonian partisan leader killed earlier in the year, became famous in the fighting for refusing to retreat from positions it had been given. By 22 June — the date Latvia now marks — the German attacks had spent themselves. On 23 June the Estonian and Latvian forces went over to the offensive, drove the Germans out of Cēsis, and started south. The Iron Division, which had been treating the Baltic as a personal Freikorps adventure, suddenly remembered it was outnumbered and far from home.
By 3 July the 3rd Estonian Division was at the outskirts of Riga. The Allies, alarmed at how far the Estonians had come, demanded an armistice. The Ceasefire of Strazdumuiža restored the legal Latvian government of Kārlis Ulmanis to Riga and ordered German forces to leave Latvia. The Landeswehr was placed under Latvian command and sent off to fight the Bolsheviks. Many German soldiers refused to leave and reorganized themselves as the West Russian Volunteer Army under Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, which then attacked Riga in October. That fight, too, the Latvians won. By the end of 1919 the Freikorps adventure in the Baltic was over and three new countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — had survived their birth year.
Estonia made 23 June a national holiday almost immediately. The Estonians call it Võidupüha, Victory Day, and it falls on the day after Latvia's own Victory Day on 22 June, with both countries timing their celebrations to the climax of the same battle. The Soviet occupations of 1940 to 1991 forbade public commemoration; the holidays returned with independence. Today Estonian and Latvian honor guards meet every June at the Freedom Monument in Cēsis to mark the moment when their two armies, working together, beat back an attempt to deny them their countries. The town itself is small — about 16,000 people, sitting on the Gauja River in a region of pine forest and sandstone cliffs — and the battle is half-forgotten outside the Baltic. But to the people who live there it is the reason their countries exist.
Cēsis sits at 57.31°N, 25.27°E in the Vidzeme region of northern Latvia, on the Gauja River about 90 kilometers northeast of Riga. The medieval castle ruins on the western edge of town and the modern Cēsis castle complex are visible from low altitude. Riga International Airport (EVRA) is the nearest major field, 95 kilometers southwest. Tallinn (EETN) is 240 kilometers north. The Gauja National Park, with its sandstone outcrops and dense pine forest, runs from Cēsis northwest along the river. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL following the Gauja valley; the battlefield itself is now farmland and forest north and east of the town.