The Battle of the Sea of Azov

On 8 October 1941 German troops entered Mariupol, a port and steelmaking centre on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. The city was taken almost without a fight by the reconnaissance battalion of the SS brigade “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” under Major Kurt Meyer, together with tanks of the 13th Panzer Division. It was one of the closing acts of the battle that the Germans called the Battle of the Sea of Azov. In less than two weeks Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 and the German 11th Army had encircled and smashed two armies of the Soviet Southern Front on the steppe between the Dnieper and the coast. The road to the Donets Basin and Rostov-on-Don lay open before them.

It is often said that with the capture of Mariupol on 8 October the Germans reached the Sea of Azov. That is a simplification. The German 11th Army had reached the shores of this sea as early as September, when its divisions came out onto the steppe along the Azov coast and cut the Crimea off from the mainland. Kleist’s tanks reached the sea near Berdiansk on 6–7 October. Mariupol, on the other hand, was the largest city the Germans captured in this battle. The remark about the weather that is often added is true, however: in the first half of October the autumn rains began in the south and soon turned Ukraine’s roads into mud.

After Kiev: new tasks for Army Group South

In September 1941 Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South won the greatest victory of the war so far. After Hitler’s order of 21 August, Guderian’s and Kleist’s tanks closed the ring around the South-Western Front near Lokhvytsia, and on 19 September the Germans entered Kiev. Rundstedt could now turn towards the objectives that Hitler had considered more important than Moscow since the summer: the coal and steelworks of the Donets Basin, the industrial region of Kharkiv, the Crimea, and Rostov-on-Don, the gateway to the Caucasus. Hitler’s Directive No. 35 of 6 September, which announced the offensive against Moscow, also confirmed these tasks in the south.

On the southern wing of the German front the 11th Army had been operating since the beginning of the war, advancing from Romania together with the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies. On 12 September its commander, Colonel General Eugen von Schobert, was killed when his Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft landed in a Soviet minefield. Command of the army passed to General of Infantry Erich von Manstein, brought down from the Leningrad sector, the author of the 1940 plan for the thrust through the Ardennes. Manstein was given a double task: to take the Crimea, sealed off by the narrow Perekop Isthmus, and at the same time to advance along the coast of the Sea of Azov towards Rostov. He had too few forces for both. LIV Army Corps was held up in front of the Perekop fortifications, while the army’s eastern wing on the Molochna river, in the area of Melitopol, was covered by XXX Corps and General Petre Dumitrescu’s Romanian 3rd Army, which was under German command.

Facing them was the Soviet Southern Front of Lieutenant General Dmitry Ryabyshev, which since the summer had been falling back from the Prut and the Dniester, through Uman, to beyond the Dnieper. At the beginning of October it had three armies: the 12th in the area of Pavlohrad, and Lieutenant General Andrei Smirnov’s 18th and General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th between the Dnieper and the Sea of Azov. According to Russian studies the whole front numbered some 540,000 men, but its divisions had been badly depleted by the defeats of the summer. Its northern wing, along the Dnieper, was thinly held, and Soviet intelligence failed to notice that Kleist’s panzer group, returning from Kiev, was assembling in the bridgehead at Dnipropetrovsk, today’s Dnipro.

The Soviet attack near Melitopol

The Stavka demanded that the Southern Front not only defend but also attack. On 26 September the 9th and 18th Armies, with a dozen or so divisions between them, struck the Romanian mountain brigades and the German XXX Corps on the Molochna. The Romanians gave way along a front of more than ten kilometres, and by 29 September the situation on the 11th Army’s eastern wing had become dangerous for the Germans. Manstein had to turn back XLIX Mountain Corps, which was on its way to the Crimea, and throw into a counter-attack his only mobile reserve, the “Leibstandarte” brigade of Josef “Sepp” Dietrich. The front was stabilised, but the Crimea had to wait.

This Soviet attack had an unexpected consequence. The Southern Front’s best forces were committed in the west, against the 11th Army, just as a threat that no one in the Soviet staffs had spotted was approaching from the north.

Kleist strikes

At the turn of September and October – Soviet sources give 29 September, German ones 1 October – Panzer Group 1 set off south-eastwards from its bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper. According to Russian studies Kleist concentrated some 350 tanks on a sector only 25 kilometres wide, and the blow fell on two Soviet rifle divisions that were at less than half strength and had almost no artillery. The tanks broke through the front and drove deep into the steppe, into the rear of the 18th and 9th Armies. Within a few days the panzer group was to be renamed the 1st Panzer Army.

Only on 3 October did Ryabyshev obtain the Stavka’s permission to retreat. On 4 October the 12th Army gave up Zaporizhzhia and fell back to the Pavlohrad–Vasylkivka line, while the 18th and 9th Armies began to withdraw eastwards from the Molochna. It was already too late. On 5 October Ryabyshev was relieved of command of the front; he was replaced by Colonel General Yakov Cherevichenko. On 5–6 October the Germans took Melitopol, and on 6 October the “Leibstandarte”, pursuing the retreating troops along the coast, entered Berdiansk, then called Osipenko. On 7 October the spearheads of General Gustav von Wietersheim’s XIV Motorised Corps from Kleist’s group met units of the 11th Army north of Osipenko. The ring was closed.

The Chernihivka pocket

Trapped in the encirclement, around the village of Chernihivka north-west of Berdiansk, were the main forces of the 18th Army and part of the 9th – according to Russian data, up to six divisions. Smirnov took command of the encircled troops. The German infantry divisions could not keep up with the tanks, so the ring was porous in places, and open steppe stretched between the motorised columns. Some of the Soviet troops broke out eastwards by night towards Volnovakha and Mariupol, leaving behind guns and lorries that had run out of fuel. The rest fought on in scattered groups, bombed by the Luftwaffe.

On 8 October the 18th Army’s command post near the village of Popivka came under heavy fire. General Smirnov was killed – according to the Soviet version, while leading his men in a breakout. There are other accounts as well: according to some he fell in a night battle on 9–10 October, according to others he shot himself to avoid capture. German sources and later Soviet accounts state that the Germans buried him with military honours. The village where he lies is now called Smyrnove. Command of the 18th Army passed to Major General Vladimir Kolpakchi. By 10–11 October organised resistance in the pocket had ceased. The remnants of the 18th Army withdrew towards Stalino, today’s Donetsk, and the remnants of the 9th Army towards Taganrog.

Mariupol

Mariupol, which had more than 240,000 inhabitants before the war, was one of the principal steelmaking centres of the Soviet Union. After the outbreak of war the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works and the Azovstal combine, built in the 1930s, produced among other things armour plate for T-34 tanks. The Germans entered the city on 8 October, taking by surprise the Soviet authorities, who had not had time to organise its defence. The Soviet Information Bureau admitted the loss of Mariupol only on 14 October.

Behind the army came the Einsatzgruppen. Sonderkommando 10a of Einsatzgruppe D, following the 11th Army and Kleist’s group, murdered Jews in every town it entered along the Sea of Azov. According to historians some 1,000 people were killed in Berdiansk and around 2,000 in Melitopol. In Mariupol, on 20–21 October, the commando shot some 8,000 Jews – women, children and the elderly – in anti-tank ditches outside the city, near the so-called Agrobaza. As in Kiev, the occupiers had first ordered them to report with their belongings on the pretext of resettlement. The German occupation of Mariupol lasted until 10 September 1943. According to the Soviet commission investigating the occupiers’ crimes, tens of thousands of people were killed in the city and its surroundings during that time, and tens of thousands more were deported to forced labour in Germany.

Losses

German communiqués announced the capture of more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers and the capture or destruction of 212 tanks and 672 guns; Wehrmacht reports cited by some historians give 106,332 prisoners and around 770 guns. Manstein himself wrote more modestly in his memoirs that his forces had taken around 65,000 prisoners, 125 tanks and more than 500 guns. The German figures also include prisoners taken in the pursuit beyond the pocket. The Russian loss tables compiled by the team of General Grigory Krivosheev give, for the whole Donbas–Rostov defensive operation, which lasted from 29 September to 16 November, 143,313 killed, missing and captured, and more than 17,000 wounded and sick, with a substantial part of the irrecoverable losses caused by the October fighting by the Sea of Azov. The German 11th Army and Panzer Group 1 lost a total of 12,421 men between 21 September and 10 October, 2,456 of them killed; not all their units fought by the Sea of Azov.

For the hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the pockets of 1941, captivity meant open-air camps, hunger and disease. The soldiers taken by the Sea of Azov shared the fate of the prisoners from Uman and Kiev: a large proportion of them did not survive the winter.

Rain, mud and the road to Rostov

The Battle of the Sea of Azov was the last great encirclement on the southern wing of the front in 1941. Afterwards Hitler and Rundstedt divided the tasks: the 11th Army, reduced in strength and devoted entirely to the war for the Crimea, was to storm Perekop from 18 October, while the 1st Panzer Army, reinforced with XLIX Mountain Corps and the “Leibstandarte”, took over the advance on Rostov. Kleist’s tanks moved east along the coast. Near Taganrog they ran into a hastily formed operational group under Lieutenant General Fyodor Remezov, which held the Germans up for several days. Taganrog fell on 17 October, and on 20 October the Germans and the Italians entered Stalino.

Then, however, the pace slackened. From mid-October the rasputitsa set in across southern Russia – the autumn season of mud that turned the dirt roads of the steppe into a quagmire. Wheeled vehicles got stuck, supplies arrived late and tanks burned up their fuel in the mud. The same was happening outside Moscow, where Operation Typhoon began to lose momentum after its great victories. Kleist halted on the Mius river, a few dozen kilometres from Rostov, and moved on only after the ground froze in November. On 21 November he took Rostov-on-Don, but a week later a counter-attack by the Soviet Southern Front drove him out of the city. Rundstedt pulled his troops back to the Mius without Hitler’s consent and lost his command – it was the Wehrmacht’s first serious retreat of the war.

The Battle of the Sea of Azov showed once again how far the Red Army of 1941 lagged behind the Germans in reconnaissance and mobile operations: two armies committed themselves to an attack without seeing that an entire panzer group was bearing down on their flank. But it also showed the limits of the German victories. The pocket was porous, and within a few weeks the Stavka managed to rebuild a defensive line on the Mius from the decimated divisions of the Southern Front, a line from which the first successful Soviet counter-offensive was launched in November. Most of the Donets Basin, with its mines and steelworks, fell, but the Germans never managed to get its industry fully working again, and the Wehrmacht did not return to Rostov and the Caucasus until the summer of 1942.