The Kerch landing

On the evening of 25 December 1941, in the ports of the Taman Peninsula, Soviet soldiers were boarding gunboats, transports, tugs, barges and fishing boats. During the night, in a gale and bitter frost, the flotillas set out across the Kerch Strait and from the Sea of Azov towards the shores of the Kerch Peninsula, the easternmost part of the Crimea. So began the Kerch–Feodosia landing operation (PL) – the first major amphibious operation in the history of the Red Army, intended to retake the Crimea and relieve besieged Sevastopol.

War chronologies usually record under 25 December that Soviet landing forces came ashore near Kerch and that the battle for the Kerch Peninsula would last until April. Both dates need correcting. On 25 December the troops were only embarked and sent to sea; the first units reached the shore before dawn on 26 December, and the main landing, in the port of Feodosia, took place on 29 December. Nor did the fighting for the peninsula end in April: the Soviet offensives went on until mid-April 1942, but the battle was decided only in May, when the Germans destroyed the Crimean Front and retook Kerch.

The plan

By the end of November 1941 the whole of the Crimea apart from Sevastopol was in German and Romanian hands. On 16 November the Germans took Kerch, and the remnants of the Soviet 51st Army crossed the strait to the Kuban. On 7 December (8 December according to some sources), just as the Soviet counter-offensive was beginning outside Moscow, the Stavka instructed the commander of the Transcaucasian Front, Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov, to prepare a landing on the Kerch Peninsula within two weeks. The plan was drawn up by the front’s chief of staff, Major General Fyodor Tolbukhin. Behind this ambitious undertaking lay Joseph Stalin’s conviction that, after its defeats at Rostov and Moscow, the Wehrmacht was close to collapse.

The plan provided for two blows. Lieutenant General Vladimir Lvov (PL)’s 51st Army was to land at several points north and south of Kerch, carried by the Azov Flotilla of Rear Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who would later command the Soviet Navy for many years. The main blow, in the port of Feodosia in the rear of the Germans defending Kerch, was to be delivered by Major General Aleksei Pervushin’s 44th Army, carried by the ships of Vice Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky’s Black Sea Fleet. According to Russian studies, eight rifle divisions, two brigades and two regiments were assigned to the operation – more than 80,000 men, about 40,000 of them in the first wave – together with more than 250 warships and other vessels. The fleet, however, did not have a single landing ship. The soldiers were put ashore from fishing boats, launches and barges, often straight into icy water.

The landing was to begin on 21 December. On 17 December, however, the 11th Army of General of Infantry Erich von Manstein launched the second assault on Sevastopol, and the city’s situation quickly became critical. On 20 December the Stavka postponed the operation and ordered part of the troops earmarked for it to be shifted to Sevastopol, including the 79th Naval Infantry Brigade and the 345th Rifle Division, with the fleet’s cruisers and destroyers taken up with transporting them. The new plan split the landing into two dates: 26 December near Kerch and 29 December at Feodosia.

The German defence

Manstein, who had concentrated almost everything he had at Sevastopol, left Generalleutnant Hans von Sponeck’s XLII Army Corps to defend the Kerch Peninsula. In practice the corps had a single division – Generalleutnant Kurt Himer’s 46th Infantry Division – strung out along a long coastline, two battalions of obsolete coastal artillery, an engineer regiment and an anti-aircraft battalion. In reserve stood the Romanian 8th Cavalry Brigade and 4th Mountain Brigade. German reconnaissance aircraft spotted the concentration of Soviet shipping, and Sponeck declared an alert, but he could do little more.

The landings near Kerch

The landings near Kerch, made in a gale and without communications, went badly. On the northern coast, at Capes Khroni, Zyuk and Tarkhan and in Bulganak Bay, the Azov Flotilla managed by midday on 26 December to put about 3,000 poorly armed soldiers of the 224th Rifle Division and the 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade ashore at five points. Launches capsized in the waves; men drowned or reached the shore soaked and frozen. From mid-morning German bombers circled over the bay. The dredger Voroshilov sank with some 450 soldiers on board, and several other vessels went down with entire units. South of Kerch the 302nd Mountain Rifle Division attacked Kamysh-Burun and Eltigen. The first waves were beaten back by fire from the German 42nd Infantry Regiment on the hills overlooking the beaches; only the third secured the waterfront at Kamysh-Burun. According to figures cited in the literature, of more than 5,000 men who were to land there, about 2,000 reached the shore.

General Himer reacted decisively. He threw two infantry regiments with artillery against the bridgeheads in the north and on 27–28 December eliminated those at Capes Zyuk and Khroni, taking, according to German figures, 1,700 prisoners. Only the bridgeheads in Bulganak Bay and at Kamysh-Burun held. It seemed that the landing near Kerch would end in disaster.

Feodosia

Then came the second blow. On 28 December the first units of the 44th Army embarked at Novorossiysk. At around 3.50 a.m. on 29 December destroyers entered the Feodosia roads and shelled the town. A group of naval infantrymen under Senior Lieutenant Arkady Aydinov seized the lighthouse on the breakwater, and further ships entered the harbour through the boom, which – against orders – had been left open. At five in the morning the cruiser Krasny Kavkaz came alongside the breakwater and began unloading an infantry regiment. The German artillery concentrated its fire on her and hit her more than a dozen times, but the ship landed her troops and withdrew. Feodosia was defended only by a few hundred engineers and the crews of two artillery battalions; by late morning the town was in Soviet hands, and by evening elements of three divisions had landed there.

Sponeck realised that the landing at Feodosia threatened to cut off the entire 46th Division on the Kerch Peninsula. He asked Manstein for permission to withdraw, and when Manstein refused and ordered him to drive the enemy into the sea with the help of approaching reinforcements, Sponeck, on the morning of 29 December, on his own responsibility ordered the division to fall back westwards and broke off communications with army headquarters. He was relieved of command the same day. Over two days, 30 and 31 December, the 46th Division marched about 120 kilometres through a blizzard, abandoning much of its transport and heavy equipment on the way, and squeezed through a narrow gap between the spearheads of the 44th Army and the Sea of Azov. It escaped encirclement. The Romanian brigades, which counter-attacked near Feodosia on 30 December without air or artillery support, were repulsed.

Soviet troops reoccupied Kerch on 30–31 December. On 31 December some 250 paratroopers were dropped from TB-3 bombers to block the Germans’ line of retreat. By 2 January 1942, when the Soviet command declared the operation over, the whole Kerch Peninsula was in the hands of the Red Army. The Germans came to a halt only on a makeshift line some 20 kilometres west of Feodosia, held by the 46th Division, the Romanians and units hastily brought up from Sevastopol.

The crisis of the 11th Army

The landing struck Manstein at his weakest point, just as his army was bleeding itself white in the assault on Sevastopol. Manstein had to send the 170th Infantry Division and other units east, and the last attack at Sevastopol petered out on 31 December. In his memoirs he admitted that had the enemy pursued the 46th Division swiftly from Kerch and struck resolutely from Feodosia at the Romanians, the situation would have become hopeless not just on the new sector: the fate of the whole 11th Army would have hung in the balance. The road lay open for the Soviet troops to the Dzhankoi–Simferopol railway, the army’s only supply artery in the Crimea.

It did not come to that. Kozlov’s troops were exhausted by the crossing and had neither transport nor communications, and instead of pushing west the front command consolidated the bridgehead. In three days the 44th Army advanced only a dozen or so kilometres from Feodosia. According to Russian statistical data, the operation cost the Soviet forces 41,935 men, of whom 32,453 were killed, drowned, frozen to death or missing. German losses were many times smaller: the 46th Division reported about a thousand killed, wounded and missing, but it had lost most of its guns and vehicles.

Sponeck

The Sponeck affair became a warning to the Wehrmacht. A few days earlier Hitler had taken over command of the Army and forbidden any withdrawal without his consent. The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, announced that for its “sluggish reaction” to the landing and its “precipitate retreat” the 46th Division had forfeited its soldierly honour, and he suspended its decorations and promotions. On 23 January 1942 a court martial presided over by Hermann Göring sentenced Sponeck to death for disobedience. Hitler, at Manstein’s request, commuted the sentence to seven years’ fortress detention, which the general served at Germersheim (PL). On 23 July 1944, three days after the attempt on Hitler’s life, with which he had nothing to do, Sponeck was shot on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.

After the war he was remembered in Germany as a general who paid with his life for saving his soldiers. Research by the historian Erik Grimmer-Solem, however, has revealed the other side of his biography: in the autumn of 1941 Sponeck’s division cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen in hunting down Jews in southern Ukraine, and on 10 December, by then a corps commander, he ordered that Jews in his area be treated as partisans. In 2015 the Bundeswehr renamed the barracks in Germersheim that had borne his name.

Crimes

In those weeks the Crimea was the scene of crimes whose traces the landing uncovered. Behind the German front operated Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D. At the beginning of December its Sonderkommando 10b shot between 2,000 and 2,500 Jews from Kerch in an anti-tank ditch near the village of Bagerovo, and in Feodosia, with the help of the German local command and the field gendarmerie, more than a thousand Jews and Krymchaks were murdered at the beginning of December. On 29 December, according to Russian studies in reprisal for the killing of a German officer, the occupiers shot several hundred inhabitants of a settlement near Kamysh-Burun in the same ditch at Bagerovo. Soviet soldiers reached the ditch on 30 December, and at the beginning of January investigators and photojournalists arrived, among them Dmitri Baltermants and Yevgeny Khaldei. Baltermants’s photograph “Grief” (Russian Gore) – people searching for their loved ones among the bodies on a snow-covered field – became one of the best-known photographs of the war, and the Soviet material from Kerch was later presented at Nuremberg.

Soviet troops also committed crimes. After retaking Feodosia in mid-January 1942, the Germans found in the town the bodies of about 150–160 wounded soldiers who had been left behind in field hospitals during the flight on 29 December. According to the records of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, described by Alfred de Zayas, some of them had been shot or beaten to death, while others had been thrown out of windows or left on the beach, doused with water in the frost. These findings come from the sources of one side and were exploited extensively by German propaganda, but the killing of wounded prisoners in Feodosia is not seriously doubted by historians. The war in the Crimea was waged from its first days without any restraint, and every landing and every repulse of one brought new executions: after a short-lived Soviet landing at Yevpatoria at the beginning of January 1942, the Germans carried out mass shootings of the town’s inhabitants.

Place in the war

The Kerch landing saved Sevastopol but did not retake the Crimea. On 15 January 1942 Manstein counter-attacked; on 18 January he recaptured Feodosia and threw the 44th Army back onto the narrow Parpach (Ak-Monai) isthmus, where the front froze. On 28 January the troops on the peninsula were formed into Kozlov’s Crimean Front, to which Lev Mekhlis came as the Stavka’s representative. Three Soviet offensives, from late February to mid-April, broke down against the German defences with heavy losses – this is the period meant by chronologies that have the battle for the Kerch Peninsula lasting “until April”. The decision, however, came only on 8 May 1942, when Manstein, backed by powerful air forces, struck in Operation Trappenjagd (“Bustard Hunt”). Within ten days the Crimean Front had ceased to exist; according to figures cited in the literature, it lost about 170,000 men, most of them taken prisoner. General Lvov was killed near Kerch. Freed from the threat to his rear, Manstein could in June throw all his forces against Sevastopol, which fell at the beginning of July 1942.

The operation of December 1941 itself went down in history as the Red Army’s first large amphibious operation and an important lesson – above all in how costly it is to land troops without purpose-built ships, communications and air cover. Kozlov, Mekhlis and their staff were held responsible for the May defeat: Stalin removed them from their posts and demoted them. Tolbukhin, the author of the landing plan, ended the war as a Marshal of the Soviet Union.