By October 28, 1941, the German armed forces had captured Kiev as well as Kharkov, two of the most important cities in the Ukraine. They were close enough to threaten Rostov-on-Don, a major trading port connecting East and West, the portal linking Moscow with southwestern Russia and the Caucasus. Hitler saw it as a prospective “German Gibraltar,” an overseas territory that would give Germany access to the Black Sea and (indirectly) the Mediterranean. It would, of course, be cleansed of its Slavic population and resettled by Germanic colonizers, after Germany had won the war.

As Army Group South advanced further east, the German Eleventh Army under Erich von Manstein and the Romanian Third Army under General Petre Dumitrescu turned south and invaded the Crimean Peninsula. This region, settled since antiquity and occupying an unrivaled strategic position on the Black Sea (and the minor Sea of Azov to the northeast), remains a flashpoint even today; in March 2014, the Russian Armed Forces annexed the area after an uprising by pro-Russian separatists. Moreover, the scenic land and beaches, along with its many palaces, villas, and dachas, makes it one of the most desired parts of the Ukrainian region. For the Germans, their main objective was Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, an especially strong fortification on a peninsula almost surrounded by water. Many of the defenders came from the Soviet Navy, and thus were not suited for an ad hoc infantry role. Also, a “Separate Coastal Army” under General Ivan Petrov had evacuated from Odessa earlier in October also participated in the defense. The Soviets, however, feared a possible naval invasion and deployed many units along the coastline, rather than against the concentration of Axis forces pushing down the slender strip of land connecting Crimea to the Ukraine. Nevertheless, the bottleneck approach and the absence of armored support meant that Manstein faced a tall order from the beginning of his invasion of the Crimea on October 18. He made little progress until October 24, when Luftwaffe superiority permitted a major breakthrough.

By November Manstein ordered divisions to Yalta and Balaklava, trapping Sevastopol behind the German war machine and the sea. The commander of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky, took charge of the city’s defense and brought additional men from the Caucasus while Manstein assembled enough units for a sustained assault. Aerial superiority remained problematic because Operation Typhoon caused most squadrons on the Eastern Front redirected to Moscow. The Soviet defenders also had the benefit of shelling by the ships belonging to the Black Sea Fleet, including the Parizhskaya Kommuna, one of the first dreadnoughts in the Imperial Russian Navy, renamed in 1921 after the 1871 Paris Commune after its crew joined the failed Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik government. (In 1943, the ship would be renamed again, this time Sevastapol, in recognition of its part in the defense.)

In December, while the rest of the German front went on the defensive, unprepared for harsh Russian winter, Manstein dug in to organize a proper offensive plan for taking Sevastopol. The German offensive did not start until December 17, which gave the Soviets plenty of time to prepare and plan – which is exactly what they did. Shortly after Manstein’s operation began, the Red Army launched an amphibious landing operation on the Kerch Peninsula, essentially an eastern extension of the Crimean Peninsula. Units from the Transcaucasian Front (including many Georgian soldiers) and the Crimean Front created a bridgehead but suffered high casualties. The main intention of the landings, to relieve Sevastopol, utterly failed; their planned offensive deteriorated into a war of attrition they could not win without continued resupply and reinforcement. From December 26 to January 2, the Red Army lost almost 50,000 men. They did, however, manage to delay the fall of Sevastopol by diverting German forces elsewhere.

It was not until April 1942 that the Germans had completely halted the repeated Soviet offensive attempts, ordered by Stalin himself. Manstein faced the daunting prospect of taking back the Kerch Penninsula from a larger, entrenched enemy behind minefields and anti-tank ditches. He finally received armored support in the form of the 22nd Panzer Division in March, although this unit had suffered heavy casualties after arriving on the Eastern Front earlier that spring. It possessed mostly obsolete and lightly-armored Panzer 38(t) tanks and lacked support equipment. From late February into April, the Red Army had launched four unsuccessful offensives, losing over 350,000 men compared to around 24,000 German losses. In the meantime, Luftwaffe fighters and bombers worked to keep additional Red Army forces and material, regularly bombing Soviet ports and ships. By late April, Stalin was still demanding counterattacks in the Crimea, despite the starved and exhausted state of the survivors in the area.

On May 8, Manstein launched Operation Trappenjagd (“Bustard Hunt”), using a holding action against the northern Soviet front while his southern units broke through Red Army lines and then swung around to the north. Despite the odds heavily in favor of the defender, the Eleventh Army and their Romanian allies succeeded in swiftly overrunning the Soviet positions, destroying three entire armies. The order to switch from the offensive to the defensive had come far too late for the Red Army, which had long ago lost any real effectiveness as a fighting force. Far more Soviet soldiers surrendered, but many fought to the last, some even taking to the quarries on the Kerch Peninsula to wage a partisan conflict. Nevertheless, Manstein once more had the freedom to turn all of his attention and resources to finishing off the Crimea. While having to give up the 22nd Panzer Division for the planned German summer offensive into the Caucasus, by May 20 Manstein had finally returned to the conditions of November 1941: with almost all of Crimea under German occupation, save Sevastopol.

Sevastopol had held out in all this time, but by spring 1942 was a hollow imitation of the beautiful coastal city it once was. Some residents evacuated, but many remained, including the famous Soviet writer Yevgeny Petrov, one-half of the literary team of he and Ilya Ilf, known collectively as “Ilf and Petrov.” Those that stayed faced incessant and heavy bombing; by July German bombers flew as low as a hundred meters above the northern edges of the city. For fear of collapsing roofs and walls, some Sevastopol dwellers relocated to the caves and tunnels underneath the city. There, they searched usually in vain for fresh water, resorting to drinking water pooled under dead bodies.

On June 7, after heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe and artillery, German infantry attacked the fortified Soviet bunkers, but just as with the five months on the Kerch Peninsula, both sides see-sawed in their fighting, with little gains and huge losses. On June 12, the Germans took Fort Stalin, an important Soviet stronghold to the north, and between June 18 and 23 the Soviet forces finally broke. The Soviet commanders, General Petrov of the Separate Coastal Army and Admiral Oktyabrsky, evacuated the city; General Pyotr Novikov, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Winter War, assumed responsibility for the final defense of Sevastapol. Novikov too attempted to escape on July 2 but was intercepted and captured by German troops. He died in a concentration camp in 1944.

Over two days – May 8 to May 9, 1942 – the Soviets lost 14,714 people a day. Although the entire Soviet casualties amounted to 177,000 total, this rate far exceeded what the Soviets suffered in the first month of Operation Barbarossa: 23,207 per day on the Western Front and 16,106 per day on the Southern and Southwestern Fronts. Arguably, in perspective, the failed Kerch offensive was one of the costliest Soviet failures of the entire war. Still, it did have the effect of keeping Manstein and the German Eleventh Army stuck in the Crimea and thus diverted important German resources from other objectives, such as Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus. Manstein received a promotion to field marshal on July 1 for his efforts, but the German Eleventh Army had lost its fighting capacity; Hitler broke it up and sent its individual units to the various army groups. In August 1942, Manstein assumed command of the German forces to finish off the siege of Leningrad, but unlike Sevastopol, victory would remain elusive. Meanwhile, in September, the German Sixth Army would become mired in brutal close-combat fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad; had the Eleventh Army been on hand to reinforce them, that battle may have gone differently. Taking Sevastopol and the Crimea was always going to come at a high price – a price the German Eleventh Army paid.

Throughout this period, Manstein and the Eleventh Army supplied troops and equipment to Einsatzgruppe D, the SS death squad tasked with rounding up and killing “ideological enemies” behind German lines. Manstein regularly received reports about the executions of Jews and even contributed units to the massacre of some 11,000 Jews in Simferopol in November 1941. Since Simferopol lay between major communication routes in the Crimea, the army wanted the area “pacified” – that is, cleansed of “threats,” such as the Jews, behind their lines. (Even non-Jews suffered from the German policy of collective punishment; on November 29, 1941, 50 people were shot in Simferopol in retaliation for a German soldier killed by a mine and a German officer killed by a partisan.) In February 1942, Manstein personally requested that watches collected during the execution of the Jews be given to his troops. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, at the trial of the Einzatgruppen, the verdict stated that the Eleventh Army participated in genocide. Manstein was convicted of war crimes in 1949 and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but ended up only serving four. He later served in the creation of the West German armed forces and wrote a memoir that contributed greatly to the myth that the Wehrmacht fought a “clean war” on the Eastern Front, presenting himself as the quintessential loyal and chivalrous German commander.

The Crimean campaign also produced a legendary Soviet figure, that of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful woman sniper in history. She fought first in the Odessa region in the summer of 1941, where she obtained 187 kills in the first 75 days of the war. She then moved to Crimea to participate in the defense of Sevastopol, where she notched even more kills and became a star of Soviet propaganda. Wounded before the city fell, she escaped capture by the Germans, but not before recording 309 confirmed kills, including 39 enemy snipers sent to eliminate her. She famously became the first Soviet citizen to meet a U.S. President, meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then touring the U.S. at the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She eventually returned to the Soviet Union and finished the war as a Red Army sniper instructor.

Sources

Bellamy, Chris. 2007. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Forczyk, Robert. 2008. Sevastopol 1942: Von Manstein’s Triumph. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Hayward, Joel. 1999. “A Case Study in Early Joint Warfare: An Analysis of the Wehrmacht’s Crimean Campaign of 1942.” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 22(4), pp. 103-130.

Lemay, Benoit. 2010. Erich von Manstein: Hitler’s Master Strategist. Trans. Pierce Heyward. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers.

Markwick, Roger and Euridice Charon Cardona. 2012. Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.