The Germans take Novorossiysk

At the beginning of September 1942 the German 17th Army and Romanian troops, advancing along the Black Sea coast, broke into Novorossiysk, a port on Tsemes Bay which, after the loss of Sevastopol, was the most important Caucasian base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. By 6 September the fighting was already in the streets, and by 10–11 September the Germans and Romanians had taken most of the city, including the port, the railway station and the centre. It is often said that Novorossiysk “was captured by the Germans” on 6 September. That is a simplification. The city was never taken in its entirety: the eastern suburbs with the cement works and the eastern shore of the bay remained in the hands of the Soviet 47th Army, which held them for a whole year, until the city was liberated in September 1943. The port, dominated by Soviet artillery, was never of any use to the Axis.

The port on Tsemes Bay

Before the war Novorossiysk was one of the main ports of the southern USSR, a centre of the cement industry and a railway junction through which grain and oil from the Kuban were shipped abroad. In the summer of 1942 it acquired a further significance. After the fall of Sevastopol at the beginning of July the Black Sea Fleet had lost its main base, and its ships now depended solely on the Caucasian ports: Novorossiysk, Tuapse, Poti and Batumi. Novorossiysk was the closest to the front and the most exposed to air raids. As early as 2 July German bombers sank the destroyer leader Tashkent in its harbour; a few days earlier she had carried the wounded and evacuees out of Sevastopol.

For the Germans the port was an objective for two reasons. Its capture would deprive the Black Sea Fleet of a base and open the way along the coast, through Tuapse towards Sukhumi and Batumi, and beyond them to the Turkish border. Directive No. 45, which Adolf Hitler signed on 23 July, the day Rostov was taken, assigned Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Army Group A the task of seizing the entire eastern coast of the Black Sea and destroying the fleet, alongside capturing the oil of Maikop, Grozny and Baku. The coast was to be the objective of Colonel General Richard Ruoff’s 17th Army, reinforced with Romanian divisions, while Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army drove east towards the Terek.

To the gates of the city

After crossing the Don and taking Krasnodar on 12 August, the 17th Army turned towards the sea. On 17 August the Soviet command created the Novorossiysk Defensive Region under Major General Grigory Kotov, commander of the 47th Army. His deputy for naval affairs was Rear Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, until then commander of the Azov Military Flotilla, which was soon disbanded. The region comprised the 47th Army, naval infantry, the fleet bases at Novorossiysk, Temryuk and Kerch, and army and naval aviation. According to Russian studies, the fortifications around the city were only one-fifth complete in mid-August, and the defenders were outnumbered several times over in artillery and infantry and twice over in tanks and aircraft. Some of the 47th Army’s divisions had gone through the defeat on the Kerch Peninsula in the spring and had been rebuilt from men evacuated across the strait.

On 19 August the 17th Army attacked towards Novorossiysk and Anapa, with subsidiary thrusts towards Temryuk and the Taman Peninsula. The first attack, carried out by the German V Army Corps, stalled after a few days in the wooded hills on the approaches to the city. On 28 August the Germans renewed the attack, and on 31 August they took Anapa. The naval infantry units and the troops defending the Taman Peninsula were cut off from the rest of the 47th Army, and the ships of the Azov Military Flotilla had to fight their way through the Kerch Strait into the Black Sea.

Across the strait from the Crimea

On the night of 1–2 September troops from the Crimea also struck at the Taman Peninsula. In an operation codenamed Blücher II, the German 46th Infantry Division and Romanian units crossed the Kerch Strait in landing barges, motor boats and ferries. This was what remained of a plan which, in its original form, had envisaged that the whole of Colonel General Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army, having taken Sevastopol, would cross the strait and strike the Caucasus from the west. Hitler, however, changed his mind and in August sent Manstein with most of his army to Leningrad. Only weak forces therefore crossed the strait. They were enough, because the defenders of the peninsula were already cut off on the landward side. Within a few days the Taman Peninsula was in Axis hands, though some of the Soviet units were evacuated by sea.

At the same time Moscow reorganised the command in the Caucasus. On 1 September the Stavka decided to abolish Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s North Caucasus Front and to incorporate its troops, including the 47th Army, as the Black Sea Group of Forces into the Transcaucasus Front of General of the Army Ivan Tyulenev. On 7 September, in the midst of the fighting for the city, Kotov was recalled. Command of the 47th Army and of the Novorossiysk Defensive Region passed to Major General Andrei Grechko, later a Marshal and Soviet Minister of Defence.

Fighting in the city

At the beginning of September the German 17th Army attacked Novorossiysk itself from the north-west, from the direction of the stanitsa of Krymskaya and through the passes in the range of hills above the city. The defence cracked. On 6 September, according to most studies, German and Romanian units broke into the suburbs and the streets of the city. This date found its way into some Western chronologies as the day Novorossiysk was “captured”. In reality the fighting went on for several more days. The defenders fell back district by district, through the centre and the port, under constant air attack. Harbour installations, warehouses and quays were blown up, and the last ships and cutters were taken out of the bay. According to Russian studies, on 10 September the Germans took the port and the centre, and on 11 September their advance came to a halt on the south-eastern edge of the city.

From then on the front ran through the eastern suburbs, along the shore of the bay, past the Proletary and Oktyabr cement works, and on uphill towards the road running along the coast to Tuapse and Sukhumi. Soviet soldiers and naval infantry dug in among the ruins of the cement works, while their artillery and mortars on the eastern shore shelled the port and the quays. The Germans thus had the city but could make no use of it: ships could not put into a bay commanded by enemy fire, and the coast road to Tuapse remained closed.

Soviet counter-attacks in the second half of September did not retake the city, but according to Russian studies, in the fighting of 19–26 September they shattered the Romanian 3rd Mountain Division and forced the 17th Army to go over to the defensive at Novorossiysk. The front line on the eastern edge of the city froze for almost a year.

List is dismissed

The halt at Novorossiysk was one of the causes of a crisis in the German command. In the first days of September Army Group A was stuck along the whole length of its front: Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army had crossed the Terek at Mozdok on 2 September but could not break through towards Grozny, the mountain troops had failed to cross the Caucasus passes towards Sukhumi, and the advance along the coast had come to a stop at the cement works of Novorossiysk. Hitler, who followed the progress on the map every day from his headquarters near Vinnytsia, blamed the commanders. On 7 September he sent the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, to List’s headquarters. Jodl came back convinced that List was carrying out his orders and that the halt was due to the weakness of his forces and the difficulty of the terrain, and he told Hitler so bluntly. A violent quarrel ensued, after which Hitler for many weeks refused to shake Jodl’s hand, stopped taking his meals with the staff officers and ordered stenographers to record every word spoken at his conferences.

On 9 September the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, informed List that the Führer expected his resignation. List left his post the same day and received no further appointment for the rest of the war. Hitler did not appoint a successor. In addition to his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, he himself took command of Army Group A, directing it through its chief of staff from Vinnytsia, more than a thousand kilometres from the front. Only on 22 November did he hand it over to Kleist. Two weeks after List, on 24 September, the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, also left his post.

Place in the war

The capture of most of Novorossiysk was the furthest success of the German offensive on the Black Sea coast. The advance on Tuapse through the mountains, begun on 25 September, stalled a few dozen kilometres short of its objective, and the Black Sea Fleet, though weakened and pushed back to the Georgian ports, survived. The last port through which the Germans could have supplied their armies in the Caucasus by sea remained useless, because its bay lay under Soviet fire.

After the defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat from the Caucasus in early 1943, the 17th Army dug in on the Kuban and the Taman Peninsula, and Novorossiysk became the anchor of its defensive line. On the night of 3–4 February 1943 a Soviet landing force under Major Tsezar Kunikov seized a bridgehead on the western shore of Tsemes Bay, in the Stanichka area on the southern edge of the city. The bridgehead, known as Malaya Zemlya (the “Little Land”), held out for 225 days. On 16 September 1943, in the course of the Novorossiysk–Taman operation, the Red Army retook Novorossiysk, and in October the whole of the Taman Peninsula. In 1973 the city was awarded the title of Hero City. The fighting for Malaya Zemlya later became the stuff of myth: in 1978 the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev, who had served there as a political officer of the 18th Army, were published, presenting his part in a greatly exaggerated light.