The liberation of Sevastopol

On 9 May 1944 troops of General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front broke into Sevastopol from three sides and took the city – the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, lost less than two years earlier after a 250-day siege. The issue had been decided two days before: on 7 May Soviet infantry stormed Sapun Ridge, the high ground dominating the city from the east. The German–Romanian 17th Army, which Adolf Hitler had ordered to defend Sevastopol to the end, was given permission to evacuate only on the night of 8/9 May, when the defence was already crumbling. Its remnants fell back to the Chersonese peninsula west of the city, from where they were to be shipped to Romania. That evening Moscow marked the capture of Sevastopol with an artillery salute.

The date is precise: Soviet, German and Western sources agree in dating the capture of the city to 9 May. The fighting in the Crimea, however, went on for another three days, on the Chersonese.

A fortress without fortifications

For both sides Sevastopol was more than a port. From October 1941 to July 1942 it had held out against Erich von Manstein’s Eleventh Army; its fall in July 1942 ended with tens of thousands of soldiers, driven back onto Cape Chersonese, being taken prisoner. The city and its ring of forts were then largely destroyed – and in two years of occupation the Germans did not rebuild them.

In the spring of 1944 the roles were reversed. On 8 April the Crimean offensive broke through the defences on the isthmuses by the Sivash and at Perekop, and from 11 April the Separate Coastal Army attacked from Kerch in the east. Within a week Soviet troops had retaken Kerch, Feodosia and Yalta and almost the entire peninsula; on 16 April they reached Sevastopol. The commander of the 17th Army, Colonel General Erwin Jaenecke, believed that a fortress without forts and without supply by land could not be held for long; the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, whose divisions made up a large part of the Crimean garrison, was of the same opinion. Hitler thought otherwise. He feared that the loss of the Crimea would shake the attitude of Turkey and Romania, and that Soviet aircraft and warships would gain bases within range of the Romanian oilfields and ports. He therefore halted the evacuation begun in mid-April and demanded that Sevastopol be defended.

Jaenecke, who at a conference at Berchtesgaden at the end of April (usually given as 29 April) demanded the withdrawal of the army, was dismissed. On 1 May (3 May according to some sources) command passed to General of Infantry Karl Allmendinger, previously commander of V Army Corps, with orders to defend the fortress “to the last”. The defence rested on three lines: in the north, on the heights above the Belbek (PL) valley and the Mekenzi Heights; in the east and south-east, on Sapun Ridge and the hills above Balaklava; and in depth, on positions around the city and on the Chersonese peninsula. These positions were held by bled-white German and Romanian divisions, some of whose rear units and wounded had already been shipped out to Constanța.

The plan of assault

The final plan was approved by the representative of Supreme Headquarters (the Stavka), Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who was coordinating the whole Crimean operation. After two failed attempts to break the defences – on 19 and 23 April – Tolbukhin needed time to bring up artillery, ammunition and fuel over the peninsula’s wrecked roads. From 19 April to 5 May aircraft and artillery systematically bombed and shelled the German positions.

The main blow was to be delivered by the left wing of Lieutenant General Yakov Kreizer’s 51st Army and by Lieutenant General Kondrat Melnik’s Coastal Army, which had been placed under the 4th Ukrainian Front on 18 April after its previous commander, Andrei Yeremenko, left for another front. They were to strike from the Balaklava area at Sapun Ridge and the hills near the village of Karan, so as to cut the defenders off from the bays west of the city through which the evacuation was running. The supporting attack, launched two days earlier, was entrusted to Lieutenant General Georgy Zakharov’s 2nd Guards Army, positioned in the north. It was to advance through the Belbek valley towards Northern (Severnaya) Bay and draw the German reserves onto itself. At sea, submarines, torpedo boats and aircraft of the Black Sea Fleet were to cut the convoy route between Sevastopol and Constanța.

5 May: the blow from the north

On 5 May the 2nd Guards Army went over to the attack. Its divisions assaulted positions on the Mekenzi Heights and above the Belbek – the same ground across which the Germans had fought their way into the city from the north in June 1942. The fighting was hard and progress slight, but the attack served its purpose: Allmendinger, convinced that this was where the main Soviet effort lay, shifted part of his already meagre reserves to the north.

7 May: Sapun Ridge

At 10.30 a.m. on 7 May, after an artillery preparation and with the support of almost all the front’s aircraft, the main assault began on a sector of roughly 9 kilometres from Sapun Ridge to Karan. Sapun Ridge – a steep crest with several lines of trenches, shelters and firing positions – was the key to the defence from the east: whoever held it commanded the approaches to the city and Balaklava. The infantry of the 51st Army and the Coastal Army climbed the slopes under fire from above, taking one line after another. The fighting lasted all day, with counter-attacks by the defenders, and by evening the ridge was in Soviet hands.

The storming of Sapun Ridge became one of the best-known episodes of the war in the USSR. In November 1944 the Coastal Army erected an obelisk on the summit in honour of the fallen, and a museum and a panorama-diorama depicting the assault were later built there. For the fighting for Sevastopol many soldiers received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and numerous units the honorific “Sevastopol”.

8–9 May: permission to evacuate, and the entry into the city

The loss of Sapun Ridge sealed Sevastopol’s fate. On 8 May Soviet troops broke through the last lines before the city from the east and south-east, and the 2nd Guards Army reached Sevastopol Bay from the north. Ferdinand Schörner, to whom the 17th Army was subordinate, asked Supreme Headquarters for permission to evacuate. Hitler granted it only in the early hours of 9 May – too late for the troops to be withdrawn in good order behind a strong rearguard. The defenders began abandoning their positions around the city and falling back westwards onto the Chersonese peninsula, where ships and aircraft were awaited at the small Kamyshovaya and Kazachya bays and at the airfield.

On 9 May troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front broke into Sevastopol from three sides: from the north across Northern Bay – partly in boats and improvised crossing craft – and from the east and south-east. Fighting raged on the Malakhov Kurgan, in the harbour district and in the streets of the city centre; by evening the city was in Soviet hands and red flags were hoisted over the ruins. The remnants of the 17th Army, pursued by the 19th Tank Corps, occupied a last position across the neck of the Chersonese peninsula. There the final act of the fighting in the Crimea was to be played out.

A city in ruins

The Sevastopol that the Red Army regained was one of the most devastated cities in the Soviet Union. Two sieges – the long one of 1941–1942 and the short one of 1944 – and years of occupation had razed most of its buildings. According to Soviet figures, of some 109,000 pre-war inhabitants about 3,000 remained in the city, and only a small fraction of the residential buildings survived. Many residents had been evacuated in 1941–1942 and many had died during the siege; during the occupation the Germans murdered the city’s Jews and deported tens of thousands of people from the Crimea to forced labour in the Reich. The harbour was mined and blocked with wrecks, and the fleet base was unusable. The Black Sea Fleet returned to Sevastopol only in November 1944.

A salute in Moscow

Joseph Stalin’s order of the day announced on the radio that troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front had “taken by storm the fortress and naval base on the Black Sea – Sevastopol”. Moscow celebrated the victory with a salute – according to Soviet accounts, 24 salvoes from 324 guns, fired late on the evening of 9 May (some sources say the night of 9/10 May). Since August 1943 such salutes had announced the most important victories to the inhabitants of the capital. Soviet propaganda stressed that the city whose defence in 1941–1942 had lasted 250 days had been retaken in less than a month from the start of the offensive and within a few days of the opening of the general assault.

Place in the war

The capture of Sevastopol effectively ended the struggle for the Crimea. Hitler’s belated permission turned the last phase of the 17th Army’s evacuation into a catastrophe: over the next three days Soviet aircraft sank overloaded ships, and on 12 May the last German and Romanian units surrendered on the Chersonese. In the Crimean operation as a whole, counted from 8 April, Soviet forces lost, according to Russian tallies, some 17,800 killed and missing and 67,000 wounded and sick; German and Romanian losses are disputed and ranged – depending on how they are counted – from about 57,000 (German figures) to more than 100,000 men (Soviet calculations).

Strategically, the recovery of the Crimea and Sevastopol changed the balance of power in the Black Sea. The Black Sea Fleet regained its main base, and Soviet aviation gained airfields from which it could strike the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria. Gone was the last German bridgehead in the east, which Hitler had held with Turkey and the security of the Balkans in mind – and which had also been a trap in which more than a dozen divisions were stuck. In Bucharest, the defeat in the Crimea, in which tens of thousands of Romanian soldiers were killed or captured, deepened the conviction that the war at Germany’s side was lost. In August 1944 troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts destroyed Army Group South Ukraine in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive, and Romania went over to the Allies.

Yet the war was not over for the Crimea either. A few days after the capture of Sevastopol, on 18 May, the NKVD began deporting the entire Crimean Tatar nation to Central Asia, and in February 1945, at Yalta, a few dozen kilometres from ruined Sevastopol, Stalin received Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the conference that settled the post-war order in Europe. In 1945 Sevastopol was named a Hero City; its reconstruction lasted into the 1950s.