The Crimean Front offensive

At the beginning of March 1942, on the narrow Ak-Monai isthmus that joins the Kerch Peninsula to the rest of the Crimea, one of the bloodiest and least known battles of the winter was being fought. The troops of the Soviet Crimean Front were trying to break through the German-Romanian defences, push deep into the peninsula and relieve besieged Sevastopol. On the flat, bare steppe, softened by the thaw, the infantry sank into the mud, the tanks could not move, and the German artillery pounded masses of soldiers who had nowhere to take cover.

Many calendars state under 1 March that a Red Army offensive was beginning in the Crimea while the siege of Leningrad continued in the north. The starting date needs correcting: the attack had already begun on 27 February 1942. 1 March was the third day of the first and strongest assault – the day on which the Germans halted the Soviet penetration on the northern flank of the front. The offensive, renewed three more times, went on intermittently until mid-April.

After the landing

At the end of December 1941 the Red Army landed near Kerch and at Feodosia and within a few days recovered the whole Kerch Peninsula. In doing so it forced Erich von Manstein, who two months earlier had broken into the Crimea, to break off the second assault on Sevastopol. The Soviet command, however, failed to seize the chance of quickly smashing the weak German screen. The troops of Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov advanced slowly, while Manstein brought more divisions over from Sevastopol. On 15 January 1942 the German XXX Corps struck the 44th Army near Feodosia, shattered its headquarters with air attacks and artillery, and retook the town on 18 January. The Soviet troops fell back to the Ak-Monai isthmus (in Western literature also called the Parpach isthmus), the narrowest point of the peninsula, a dozen or so kilometres wide, from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. There both sides dug in facing each other.

Stalin had not given up on recovering the Crimea. Under his plan for a general offensive of early January, the troops on the Kerch Peninsula were to liberate the whole peninsula. On 28 January the Stavka carved a separate Crimean Front out of the Caucasus Front, whose headquarters sat far away in Tbilisi. Kozlov became its commander, Major General Fyodor Tolbukhin its chief of staff, and the front was given three armies: the 44th, 47th and 51st. The Black Sea Fleet and the Sevastopol Defence Region with the Independent Coastal Army were also placed under the front’s operational control.

Mekhlis

On 20 January Army Commissar 1st Rank Lev Mekhlis, Deputy People’s Commissar of Defence and head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, one of Joseph Stalin’s closest associates, flew to Kerch as the representative of the Stavka. Mekhlis, during the Great Purge a ruthless hunter of “enemies” in the army, had no military education, but he had full powers and a direct line to the Kremlin. In his very first message to Stalin he wrote that he had found “a most unpleasant picture” of the organisation of command, and that Kozlov “gives the impression of a commander who is lost and unsure of his actions”. From then on it was he who in practice ran the front. The writer Konstantin Simonov, who was in the Crimea as a war correspondent, recalled years later that Mekhlis, “fanatically brave, militarily of little competence”, had subordinated to himself the “educated but spineless” front commander and directed everything himself.

The Stavka’s plan was ambitious. The front was to break through the defences on the isthmus, strike towards Karasubazar (Bilohirsk) and on towards Dzhankoy, the Sivash and Perekop, cut the only railway line supplying Manstein’s army and force the Germans to lift the siege of Sevastopol. Stalin and Mekhlis wanted to begin on 12–13 February, but the troops were not ready. Supplies came across the partly frozen Kerch Strait, where an ice road was built in the winter – according to Western studies almost 97,000 soldiers, nearly 24,000 horses and more than 6,500 vehicles crossed to the peninsula by it – and through ports that the Luftwaffe bombed with increasing frequency. The peninsula lacked roads, ammunition, fuel and food. The date was postponed twice.

The forces

By the end of February the Crimean Front had assembled a large force on the isthmus. According to Russian data, twelve rifle divisions (seven in the first echelon), two rifle brigades, four tank brigades and an independent tank battalion were assigned to the attack – at least 85,000 men; the British historian Robert Forczyk gives about 94,000 men, nearly 1,200 guns and mortars, 194 tanks, including 36 heavy KV-1s, and about 200 aircraft. The whole front then numbered more than 180,000 men.

Facing them were two corps of the German Eleventh Army: in the north XLII Corps with the 46th Infantry Division and the Romanian 18th Infantry Division, in the south XXX Corps with the 132nd and 170th Infantry Divisions. In reserve was Colonel Otto Hitzfeld’s reinforced 213th Infantry Regiment. According to Russian estimates the Germans had some 46,000 men in the front line and about 10,000 Romanians in various units. The defence was based on fortified villages – Kiet, Korpech and above all Koi-Asan (today Frontove), a hub at the junction of the two corps through which Manstein could shift reserves along the front. The villages were surrounded by minefields and wire and prepared for all-round defence.

The first assault

On the morning of 27 February 1942 the Soviet artillery opened fire along the whole front, some twenty kilometres long. The preparation was weak: light 76 mm guns predominated, whose shells could not smash German bunkers, and no one engaged the German batteries. The weather spoilt the rest. The thaw turned the steppe into a bog. In a conversation with the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Kozlov reported that even the infantry could barely move, ammunition could be brought up only by horse, and the artillery and tanks were stuck. The heavy KVs sank up to their hulls.

Success came only on the northern flank, by the Sea of Azov. There troops of the 51st Army attacked the Romanian 18th Infantry Division, which could not withstand the assault and fell back in disorder, losing its heavy weapons, including two German artillery battalions attached to it. The breach reached about four kilometres in width and up to eight kilometres in depth. Elsewhere the Soviet units advanced a few hundred metres at most. The 44th Army in the south failed to pin down the Germans, who began shifting reserves northwards: Hitzfeld’s regiment, a regiment of the 170th Division, and then that division’s headquarters.

On 28 February Hitzfeld counter-attacked and regained some of the ground. The same day the Soviet 77th Mountain Rifle Division broke into Kiet but was driven out towards evening. On 1 March, the date often given for the start of the offensive, the attack on the northern flank was still going on, but it was halted by arriving units of the 170th Infantry Division. On 2 March Kozlov threw two rifle divisions and three tank brigades at Koi-Asan. The tanks got stuck on obstacles and minefields, and German anti-tank guns, artillery and Ju 87 dive-bombers destroyed them one after another; according to Forczyk the Soviet side admitted losing 93 tanks that day. On 3 March the attack was called off.

Simonov, who watched this fighting at close quarters, remembered it like this: “Everything was stuck in the mud, the tanks would not go, the guns were stuck somewhere in the rear, and so were the lorries; shells were carried up by hand. There were senselessly many people in the front line. Never before or since have I seen so many killed not in battle, not in an attack, but by systematic artillery fire.” There were no trenches or ditches in the open field; the soldiers stood crowded together and were killed by the shells. The result of several days of fighting was a shallow, exposed salient on the northern flank.

At the same time, on 27 February, the defenders of Sevastopol went over to the attack on the northern sector on the orders of the Stavka. Their attacks lasted several days and did not break the ring of the siege.

Further attempts

Kozlov blamed the failure on the weather; Mekhlis put the blame on Tolbukhin and had him removed – on 10 March Major General Pavel Vechny became the front’s chief of staff. Stalin demanded that the attack be renewed. Meanwhile Manstein had also received reinforcements: the newly formed 22nd Panzer Division, and later the 28th Light Division. In front of Koi-Asan the Germans laid thousands of mines and positioned StuG III assault guns.

On 13 March the Crimean Front attacked for a second time, again mainly at Koi-Asan and Kiet. The attack on the main axis achieved almost nothing, and the tanks – parcelled out among the rifle divisions on Mekhlis’s advice instead of being concentrated into a single fist – were destroyed by anti-tank guns and assault guns. According to Russian data, between 13 and 20 March the front’s tank brigades lost 157 tanks, 88 of them in the 56th Tank Brigade alone. Only the supporting attack brought partial success: in the second half of March Soviet units took the fortified village of Korpech (Russian studies give 16 March, some Western ones 24 March).

Manstein decided he had to respond before the enemy widened the breach. On 20 March he threw the 22nd Panzer Division into a counter-attack on Korpech; it had about 140 tanks, mostly light ones of Czech design (LT vz. 38), and was not yet fully ready for combat. The attack went in in thick fog, onto minefields and into Soviet anti-tank guns and tank brigades that were just preparing for another attack. After a few hours the division withdrew, having lost, according to German figures, 33 tanks destroyed or damaged. Manstein admitted in his memoirs that he had committed the inexperienced division too early, but claimed that the counter-attack had broken up the Soviet preparations. The Russian historian Aleksei Isaev disputes this, pointing out that in repelling the attack the Soviet side lost only a dozen or so tanks.

On 24–26 March troops of the 51st Army attacked Koi-Asan again. On 26 March the attack collapsed under the fire of German anti-tank guns, and repeated attacks up to 29 March produced no result, after which the Soviet units returned to their starting positions. According to figures cited by Forczyk, the 51st Army alone lost almost 10,000 killed, nearly 5,000 missing and some 24,000 wounded between 10 and 31 March. On 31 March the front went over to the defensive, but only for a few days: after an unsuccessful attempt on 3 April, the last attack began on 9 April, again at Koi-Asan. Units lost their way in the fog, tanks drove onto mines without infantry, and infantry advanced without tanks or artillery. On 11 April the Stavka called off the fruitless attacks, and on 12 April the operation came to an end.

Leningrad

At the same time, at the other end of the front, the blockade of Leningrad went on: the city was living through the last weeks of the worst winter of the great famine, while the Soviet 2nd Shock Army, which in January had driven into the German lines on the Volkhov to break the ring, was sinking ever deeper into the swamps.

The toll

The Crimean Front’s offensive produced nothing but losses. According to the figures of the Russian historian Grigori Krivosheev, in the fighting on the Kerch Peninsula from 14 January to 12 April 1942 the front, which numbered 181,680 men at the outset, lost 43,248 killed, missing and captured and 67,091 wounded and sick – more than 110,000 men in all; other estimates go as high as more than 220,000. The German Eleventh Army lost in all from 1 January to 10 April 1942, including the fighting at Sevastopol and against partisans, just under 4,000 killed, more than 15,000 wounded and about 2,500 missing; Romanian losses have not been established. According to Forczyk, the offensives cost the Crimean Front about 40 per cent of its men, more than half its tanks and a quarter of its artillery.

The most dangerous consequences, however, were not numerical. Focused on attacking, the command did not fortify its positions on the isthmus, the best place on the whole peninsula for a defence. Most of the troops were crowded onto the northern flank, into the salient won in February and March, while the 44th Army in the south was weakened. Simonov wrote that everywhere near the front line there were so many troops that “their very number blunted vigilance”: no one dug in and no one dug trenches.

Place in the war

The offensive on the Ak-Monai isthmus was part of the Red Army’s great winter offensive, in which Stalin wanted to exploit the victory at Moscow to smash the Wehrmacht along the whole front. As on other sectors, forces were dispersed and attacks were pressed doggedly and frontally, regardless of losses. For Manstein the four-month defence on two fronts – at Sevastopol and on the isthmus – was one of his greatest defensive successes; his army, though numerically weaker, inflicted losses on the enemy many times greater than its own.

On 21 April the Crimean Front was subordinated to the new North Caucasus Direction under Marshal Semyon Budyonny. On 8 May 1942 Manstein, supported by the air forces of General Wolfram von Richthofen, struck the weakened southern flank of the front in Operation Trappenjagd (“Bustard Hunt”), outflanked the armies crowded in the north and within less than two weeks destroyed the Crimean Front. The Germans announced the capture of some 170,000 prisoners; according to Russian figures, about 140,000 men were evacuated to the Taman Peninsula. On 19 May the front was disbanded. Some of the soldiers who failed to get across held out in the Adzhimushkay quarries near Kerch until the autumn of 1942.

A Stavka directive of 4 June 1942 accused the front’s command of “failing to understand the nature of modern warfare” and of “bureaucratic, paper methods of command”. Mekhlis was removed from his posts as Deputy People’s Commissar of Defence and head of the Main Political Directorate and demoted to Corps Commissar; Kozlov was demoted to major general. According to an account that Simonov cited as psychologically plausible, when Mekhlis reported to Stalin, Stalin merely snapped “Damn you!” and walked out. The collapse of the Crimean Front sealed the fate of Sevastopol: freed from the threat in the east, Manstein moved his whole army against the fortress, which fell on 4 July 1942, and in the summer the Germans were able to cross the Kerch Strait to the Kuban and the Caucasus.