Crimean offensive (1944)

The Crimean offensive (Russian Крымская наступательная операция; in German literature Schlacht um die Krim) was the Red Army offensive that in the spring of 1944 recaptured the Crimean Peninsula from the Germans and Romanians. On 8 April 1944 the 4th Ukrainian Front of General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin attacked from the north – from the Isthmus of Perekop and from a bridgehead on the southern shore of the Sivash – and during the night of 10–11 April General of the Army Andrei Yeremenko’s Separate Coastal Army moved off from the east, from near Kerch. The operations of the two groupings were coordinated by the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky.

The German 17th Army defending the peninsula under Colonel General Erwin Jaenecke, made up of German and Romanian divisions, lost the whole of the Crimea except Sevastopol within a week. Adolf Hitler, however, forbade a full evacuation and ordered the fortress to be held, even though its fortifications of 1941–1942 had never been rebuilt. After three weeks of preparation, Soviet troops stormed Sapun Ridge on 7 May and entered Sevastopol on 9 May, and on 12 May the last units, driven back onto the Chersonese peninsula, surrendered. The belated permission to evacuate turned the final days into a disaster: Soviet aircraft sank, among others, the transports Totila and Teja, on which several thousand men died.

Name and time frame

Soviet historiography calls the battle the Crimean (strategic) offensive operation and dates it to 8 April – 12 May 1944; in post-war propaganda, together with the liberation of Odessa, it was the third of the “ten blows of Stalin” of 1944. German and Western literature uses the same dates. The seaborne evacuation of the 17th Army, conducted by the German and Romanian navies (known in Romanian as “Operation 60,000”, after the approximate number of Romanians in the Crimea), began on 14–15 April and ended during the night of 12–13 May.

Background: the Crimea cut off from the mainland

The Crimea had fallen into German and Romanian hands in 1941–1942. In the autumn of 1941 Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army broke into the peninsula through the Isthmus of Perekop, and the Soviet Kerch landing at the turn of 1941 and 1942 ended in May 1942 with the destruction of the Crimean Front (the fighting on the Kerch Peninsula). The siege of Sevastopol lasted 250 days and ended with the fall of the fortress in July 1942. From then on the Crimea served as the rear base of the German front in the Caucasus and, after the defeat at Stalingrad, as the forefield of the defence of Ukraine.

In the autumn of 1943, during the Battle of the Dnieper, the situation was reversed. In October the 17th Army evacuated the Kuban bridgehead and crossed the Kerch Strait into the Crimea. At the turn of October and November Tolbukhin’s troops, having broken the German defence on the Molochna River, reached Perekop, broke into the positions on the Turkish Wall and seized a bridgehead on the southern shore of the Sivash, while landings by the 18th and 56th Armies (the Kerch–Eltigen operation, 31 October – 11 December) won a bridgehead north-east of Kerch; in November the 56th Army was reorganised as the Separate Coastal Army. From November 1943 the Crimea was cut off from the mainland and supplied solely across the Black Sea, from Romanian Constanța and from Odessa.

The Wehrmacht’s senior commanders – the Chief of the Army General Staff, Kurt Zeitzler, the commander of Army Group A, Ewald von Kleist, and Manstein himself – repeatedly proposed evacuating the peninsula while it was still possible. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, whose divisions made up more than half of the forces in the Crimea, demanded the same. Hitler refused. He believed that the loss of the Crimea would open the way for Soviet aircraft to the Romanian oilfields around Ploiești, weaken the loyalty of Romania and Bulgaria and shake Turkey’s neutrality. He was backed by the head of the Kriegsmarine, Karl Dönitz, for whom the Crimea “shielded the Balkans”, and who assured the 17th Army that the navy would keep it supplied. Hitler did not approve the evacuation plan prepared in case of a withdrawal (Operation Adler).

In the winter and early spring of 1944 the front on the mainland moved far to the west. During the offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine the Red Army took Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih, Kherson (13 March) and Mykolaiv (28 March), and Konev’s troops crossed the Dniester and reached the borders of Romania. On 30 March Hitler dismissed Kleist and Manstein; Army Group A, renamed Army Group South Ukraine at the beginning of April, was taken over by Colonel General Ferdinand Schörner. The Crimea now lay several hundred kilometres behind the front line, and the 17th Army was in a trap from which the only way out was by sea.

Forces and plans

At the beginning of April 1944 the 17th Army numbered, according to Soviet figures, more than 195,000 men (German sources give a similar figure, about 200,000, including rear units and auxiliary formations), about 3,600 guns and mortars, more than 200 tanks and assault guns, and about 150 aircraft on Crimean airfields. It had five German divisions (the 50th, 73rd, 98th, 111th and 336th Infantry Divisions – the last two shipped to the peninsula in January and March) and seven Romanian ones, including mountain and cavalry divisions. In the north, facing Perekop and the Sivash, General Rudolf Konrad’s XLIX Mountain Corps held the line together with a Romanian cavalry corps; on the Kerch Peninsula stood General Karl Allmendinger’s V Army Corps (73rd and 98th Infantry Divisions) with Romanian divisions; the coasts and mountains were covered by General Hugo Schwab’s Romanian mountain corps, which also fought the partisans. The positions on the isthmuses and at Kerch had three or four defensive belts each, but in the interior of the peninsula, and especially around Sevastopol, the fortifications were weak: the Germans had not rebuilt the fortress destroyed in 1942.

On the Soviet side, the 4th Ukrainian Front had in its first echelon Lieutenant General Yakov Kreizer’s 51st Army on the Sivash bridgehead and Lieutenant General Georgy Zakharov’s 2nd Guards Army at Perekop, with Lieutenant General Ivan Vasilyev’s 19th Tank Corps as its mobile group. They were supported from the air by Colonel General Timofei Khryukin’s 8th Air Army. Yeremenko’s Separate Coastal Army, supported by Konstantin Vershinin’s 4th Air Army (PL), stood at Kerch. The seaward flanks were covered by Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky’s Black Sea Fleet and Rear Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s Azov Flotilla. In all, the Soviet grouping numbered some 470,000 troops, nearly 6,000 guns and mortars, 559 tanks and self-propelled guns, and about 1,250 front-line aircraft (more than 2,000 including naval aviation and long-range aviation). Behind enemy lines, in the Crimean Mountains, three partisan groupings operated, numbering more than 3,500 people in all. Vasilevsky, as representative of the Supreme High Command (the Stavka), was accompanied by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who coordinated the operations of the Coastal Army.

The date of the attack was postponed several times. It was originally to begin in the second half of February, then in March, but the Stavka made it dependent on the progress of the 3rd Ukrainian Front on the lower Dnieper and the Southern Bug, and the thaw and rains turned the roads and the Sivash bridgehead into mud. The plan called for the 51st Army to deliver the main blow from the Sivash bridgehead towards Dzhankoi, coming out in the rear of the Perekop positions; the 2nd Guards Army was to pin down the defenders of the isthmus; and once the line was broken, the 19th Tank Corps was to drive on Simferopol and Sevastopol. The Coastal Army was to break out westwards from Kerch. The aim was to split the 17th Army into pieces and prevent its evacuation. As late as 7 April, after an inspection in the Crimea, Schörner himself assured the Army High Command that the defence of the peninsula was secure “for a long time”.

The breakthrough at the Sivash and Perekop (8–11 April)

On the morning of 8 April 1944, after a reconnaissance in force the previous evening and a two-and-a-half-hour artillery and air preparation, the infantry of the 4th Ukrainian Front went in. The attack was made along causeways and underwater crossings through the shallow, marshy Sivash, which Soviet sappers had spent the whole winter strengthening so that T-34 tanks and heavy artillery could use them; the Germans knew about this work but had been unable to stop it. On the first day the 2nd Guards Army broke into the Perekop positions and took Armyansk, but on the main axis, on the Sivash bridgehead, the 51st Army made only slight progress. The defenders – the German 50th and 111th Infantry Divisions and the Romanian 10th and 19th Infantry Divisions – held firm.

For the next two days every line of trenches between the salt lakes was fought over. The first clear success came for the 51st Army’s 63rd Rifle Corps, which on 9 April drove several kilometres into the positions of the 111th Infantry Division. On 10 April the defence south of the Sivash cracked, and the 51st Army came out on the flank of the German grouping at Perekop. That same day Odessa was taken by the troops of General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky’s 3rd Ukrainian Front – the Crimea lost its last major supply port on the western shore of the Black Sea apart from Constanța.

On the morning of 11 April the 19th Tank Corps entered the breach; its commander, Vasilyev, had been seriously wounded in an air raid the previous day, so the corps was led by his deputy, Colonel Ivan Potseluyev. That same day the tanks took the railway junction of Dzhankoi and set off across the steppe towards Simferopol. The threat of encirclement forced Jaenecke to abandon the Perekop positions and retreat across the whole of the north of the peninsula. During the night of 10–11 April the Coastal Army attacked too: on the morning of 11 April it took Kerch, and the German V Army Corps, which had begun to disengage that same night, fell back hastily westwards across the Kerch Peninsula towards the so-called Parpach position and on towards the mountains.

The pursuit across the peninsula (11–16 April)

After the collapse of the defence on the isthmuses, Hitler agreed to the 17th Army’s withdrawal to Sevastopol and to the removal from the Crimea of the wounded, rear units, prisoners and some of the Romanians, but not of the combat troops: the fortress was to be held “for a long time”. In the north and east of the peninsula a race for Sevastopol began. German and Romanian units fell back in columns along the few roads, harried by Soviet aircraft, while Soviet armoured and motorised spearheads tried to overtake and cut them off.

On 13 April Soviet troops took Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea and the seat of the 17th Army’s headquarters, as well as Yevpatoria on the west coast and Feodosia in the east. On 14 April Bakhchysarai and Sudak fell, on 15 April Alushta, and on 16 April the Coastal Army, advancing along the coast road on the southern shore, entered Yalta. That same day troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front reached the outer fortifications of Sevastopol. An attempt to take the city on the march failed. Some of the German and Romanian troops from the Kerch Peninsula, in particular the Romanian mountain divisions, fought their way through the mountains to Sevastopol; others were destroyed or captured on the way.

The Crimean partisans played a large part in the pursuit. In accordance with their orders they attacked columns and headquarters on the mountain roads, destroyed communications and tried to prevent the destruction of towns and ports; they distinguished themselves particularly in the liberation of Simferopol, Karasubazar (today Bilohirsk) and Yalta. On 12 April a partisan detachment seized the small town of Stary Krym, cutting the road of the 98th Infantry Division as it retreated from Kerch. In a night counter-attack on 12–13 April one of the division’s regiments recaptured part of the town, and in the dozen or so hours before Soviet troops arrived, German soldiers murdered, according to Soviet findings, 584 inhabitants of that part of Stary Krym, regardless of age or sex.

On 16 April, when the main Soviet forces stood before Sevastopol, the Stavka placed the Coastal Army under the 4th Ukrainian Front (formally on 18 April) so that all the troops in the Crimea would be under a single command. Yeremenko was transferred to command the 2nd Baltic Front, and the army was taken over by Lieutenant General Kondrat Melnik. In eight days the Red Army had recaptured almost the entire peninsula – in 1941 Manstein had needed several weeks to do so, and a further eight months for Sevastopol.

Before Sevastopol (16 April – 4 May)

Sevastopol, which in 1941–1942 had held out against the Germans for 250 days, was no longer a fortress in 1944. The ring of fortifications destroyed during the siege and the Störfang assault had not been rebuilt, and the 17th Army only began digging new positions in earnest after its retreat. The defence rested on three lines: on the heights above the Belbek valley and the Mekenzi Heights in the north, on Sapun Ridge and the heights above Balaklava in the east and south-east, and, further back, on positions around the city and on the Chersonese peninsula, where there was an airfield and the small bays from which the evacuation was to take place.

The first phase of the evacuation was under way at the same time. From 14–15 April German and Romanian ships, escorted by warships of both navies with Romanian destroyers in the lead, carried the wounded, rear services, prisoners and soldiers of the eastern formations, as well as tens of thousands of Romanians, from Sevastopol to Constanța. According to Romanian figures more than 63,000 people were shipped out between 15 and 25 April; the German historian Rolf-Dieter Müller writes of 45,000 Germans and Romanians, 16,000 eastern legionaries and 3,800 prisoners. The convoys were attacked by Black Sea Fleet aircraft, submarines and torpedo boats, which the Stavka had ordered on 11 April to concentrate on blockading the Crimea.

Hitler, however, halted any further departure of troops and demanded that Sevastopol be held; replacement battalions were even sent to the Crimea by sea. On 19 and 23 April Soviet troops twice tried to break through the main defensive belt, and both attempts failed; they needed time to regroup and bring up artillery and ammunition. Jaenecke considered the defence hopeless. At a conference with Hitler at Berchtesgaden at the end of April (29 April is the date most often given) he demanded the evacuation of the army and was dismissed. On 1 May (some sources say 3 May) command of the 17th Army passed to the former commander of V Corps, General of Infantry Karl Allmendinger, with orders to defend Sevastopol “to the last”. After the defeat Jaenecke was brought before a court martial; he is said to have been saved from a harsh sentence by the intervention of Heinz Guderian, and in January 1945 he was discharged from the army.

The plan for the final assault was approved by Vasilevsky. The main blow was to be delivered by the left wing of the 51st Army and by the Coastal Army from the Balaklava area against Sapun Ridge and the heights near the village of Karan, so as to cut the defenders off from the bays west of the city. The 2nd Guards Army was to begin two days earlier from the north, through the Belbek valley towards Severnaya (North) Bay, and draw the German reserves onto itself. From 19 April to 5 May aircraft and artillery systematically bombed and shelled the defenders’ positions.

The storming of Sapun Ridge and the capture of Sevastopol (5–9 May)

On 5 May the 2nd Guards Army went over to the attack. Its thrust through the Belbek valley and onto the Mekenzi Heights, made in heavy fighting, did its job: Allmendinger shifted part of his reserves to the north. At 10.30 a.m. on 7 May, after an artillery preparation and with the support of almost the entire air strength of the front, the main assault began on the sector from Sapun Ridge to Karan. Sapun Ridge – a steep crest with several lines of trenches, shelters and firing positions, commanding the eastern approaches to the city – was the key to the defence. The infantry of the 51st Army and the Coastal Army climbed the slopes under fire from above; the fighting for each line went on all day, and by the evening of 7 May the ridge was in Soviet hands. In the USSR the storming of Sapun Ridge became one of the symbols of the war: a museum and a diorama were later built on the site of the fighting.

The loss of Sapun Ridge sealed the fate of Sevastopol. On 8 May Soviet troops broke through the last lines before the city from the east and south-east, while the 2nd Guards Army reached Severnaya Bay from the north. Schörner, to whom the 17th Army was subordinate, asked for permission to evacuate. Hitler granted it only in the early hours of 9 May. That day the troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front broke into Sevastopol from three sides and took the city; red flags were hoisted over the ruins. Of the roughly 109,000 pre-war inhabitants, about 3,000 remained in the city according to Soviet figures, and only a small proportion of the residential buildings survived. The remnants of the 17th Army, pursued by the 19th Tank Corps, fell back onto the Chersonese peninsula, to a last position covering the landing stages and the airfield.

Chersonese and the evacuation disaster (9–12 May)

On the narrow strip of land between the city and Cape Chersonese some 30,000–50,000 German and Romanian troops, by various calculations, were crowded together. They held on, counting on the ships. But the convoys from Constanța arrived late, and Soviet aircraft and artillery pounded the bays and quays where the soldiers were waiting. On the evening of 10 May the promised embarkation was put back by a day; many ships could not be brought safely alongside, and some left only partly loaded. In the final phase, on 10–13 May, the Romanian navy of Rear Admiral Horia Macellariu and German vessels carried away more than 30,000 further men. Some were flown out in transport aircraft.

The greatest tragedy was the sinking of two large transports, Totila and Teja – Hungarian-built cargo ships (originally ordered by the USSR) that had been taken over by Germany. They arrived at Sevastopol with a convoy from Constanța on 8–9 May, took thousands of people on board, mostly soldiers, on the morning of 10 May, and on the return voyage were bombed and sunk by Soviet aircraft. According to various sources 4,000–5,000 people died on each of them, up to about 10,000 in all; only a few hundred were rescued. The wreck of Totila was found on the bed of the Black Sea in 2013.

During the night of 11–12 May came the last Soviet assault on the positions at Chersonese. On 12 May the soldiers still left on the peninsula – about 21,000, according to Soviet figures – surrendered. The last vessel to leave the Crimea was the Romanian minelayer Amiral Murgescu, with about a thousand soldiers on board; among them was General Walter Hartmann, who in the last days had commanded one of the 17th Army’s corps. The German general and historian Kurt von Tippelskirch wrote after the war that this time the Soviet communiqués, which spoke of losses to the 17th Army in killed and prisoners of the order of 100,000 men and of enormous booty, were probably close to the truth.

Losses

Axis losses are disputed, because each side counted differently. According to German figures cited by the historian Rolf-Dieter Müller, the 17th Army lost 31,700 Germans and 25,800 Romanians (killed, missing and captured) during the fighting and the evacuation, and some 60 ships were lost during the evacuation; other German calculations speak of more than 40,000 men who died at sea in May. Soviet historiography stated that the 17th Army’s irrecoverable losses in the fighting exceeded 100,000 men, including 61,580 prisoners, and that together with the losses at sea they reached around 140,000; a more recent Russian calculation from 2020 gives 111,600 killed and captured. These figures include German and Romanian soldiers but also volunteers from the eastern formations and auxiliary personnel, and the various tallies partly overlap. According to German and Romanian figures, 120,853 people were taken out of the Crimea by sea between 14 April and 13 May – 58,500 Germans (12,000 of them wounded), 36,600 Romanians, 15,400 Soviet volunteers, more than 7,000 civilians, as well as prisoners and Slovaks – and a further 21,000 or so by air. The 17th Army lost almost all its heavy weapons.

Russian loss tables (Krivosheev) give Soviet losses as 17,754 killed and missing and 67,065 wounded and sick, together with 171 tanks and self-propelled guns, 521 guns and mortars and 179 aircraft. The Black Sea Fleet lost, among other vessels, the submarine L-6. More than a hundred soldiers were made Heroes of the Soviet Union for the fighting in the Crimea, and 160 units received honorific names after the cities they had taken – Perekop, Sivash, Kerch, Simferopol, Sevastopol.

The population of the Crimea

The peninsula recaptured by the Red Army had been laid waste. During the occupation the Germans murdered the Jews and the Krymchaks, and in reprisal for partisan activity burned villages and shot hostages; the towns – especially Sevastopol, Kerch, Feodosia and Yevpatoria – lay in ruins. The massacre at Stary Krym on 12–13 April was one of the last such crimes.

Soon after the battle came another tragedy, this time at the hands of the Soviet authorities. As early as 13 April the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, ordered the Crimea to be “cleansed” of “anti-Soviet elements”, and on 10 May he presented Joseph Stalin with a plan to deport the entire Crimean Tatar people, justified by the collaboration of some of them with the occupiers (by various estimates 10,000–20,000 Tatars served in formations under German command, mainly in self-defence battalions; others fought in the Red Army and with the partisans). On 11 May the State Defence Committee decided on the deportation, and on 18–20 May the NKVD, under the direction of Bogdan Kobulov and Ivan Serov, carried off more than 180,000 people in cattle wagons, mainly women, children and the elderly (around 190,000 including those mobilised for labour), chiefly to Uzbekistan. In the following weeks Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians were also deported from the Crimea. The number who died in transit and in exile is disputed: NKVD documents point to several tens of thousands of deaths by the end of the 1940s, while estimates by Crimean Tatar activists and some historians reach nearly half of those deported. Crimean Tatar place names were replaced with Russian ones, and the Tatars were able to return to the Crimea in large numbers only at the end of the 1980s (the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944).

Significance and place in the war

The Crimean offensive concluded the Red Army’s great offensive in Ukraine in the winter and spring of 1944. It eliminated the last large German foothold east of the Dniester, which had threatened the flank and rear of the Ukrainian Fronts, and gave the Black Sea Fleet back its main base at Sevastopol. Soviet aircraft and warships gained a starting point for operations against the Romanian coast and Constanța, and Romania, whose troops had suffered in the Crimea another heavy defeat after Stalingrad, moved still closer to leaving the war – which it did in August 1944.

For the Wehrmacht, the defeat in the Crimea was yet another example of the consequences of Hitler’s ban on retreat: an army that could still have been withdrawn overland in the autumn of 1943, and relatively safely by sea in April 1944, was sacrificed in the defence of a fortress that could not be held. The 17th Army’s losses, though smaller than at Stalingrad, were serious on the scale of the campaign, and the commanders were blamed for them – Jaenecke was put on trial, even though it was he who had demanded the evacuation. For the people of the Crimea, meanwhile, the end of the occupation meant not only liberation but also collective punishment: the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other peoples, whose consequences still weigh on the peninsula’s history today.

In the wider picture of the war, the spring of 1944 was a period of preparation for the decisive blows. While the last fighting was going on in the Crimea, the Western Allies were preparing the landings in Normandy and the Stavka the great offensive in Belarus, which began in June. The recovery of the Crimea secured the southern flank of the front and allowed the 4th Ukrainian Front and its commanders to be moved to other sectors: in May Tolbukhin took over the 3rd Ukrainian Front, which in August took part in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive that decided the fate of Romania.