The liberation of Yalta and Kerch

On 16 April 1944 units of the Separate Coastal Army, together with Crimean partisans, entered Yalta – a resort on Crimea’s southern coast and one of the last towns the Germans and Romanians abandoned in their retreat to Sevastopol. That same day the Soviet spearheads arrived before the perimeter of the Sevastopol fortress. Eight days after the start of the Crimean offensive, almost the whole peninsula was in the hands of the Red Army.

Two reports are recorded under 11 and 16 April: that Soviet troops took Kerch, beginning the recovery of Crimea, and that they occupied Yalta, with most of the peninsula liberated. Both describe the same advance of the Coastal Army across eastern and southern Crimea. The second is accurate. The first needs correcting: the recovery of Crimea did not begin at Kerch but three days earlier, on 8 April, in the north – on the Perekop Isthmus and the Sivash. Kerch fell only when the breakthrough in the north forced the Germans to withdraw from the Kerch Peninsula. As for Yalta, Soviet sources and the official honorary titles give 16 April; some German studies place the occupation of the town on 14–15 April, when the last German and Romanian units were leaving it.

Kerch for the third time

Kerch, the easternmost city of Crimea, changed hands three times. The Germans took it in November 1941, lost it after the Kerch landing at the end of December, and retook it in May 1942, when in Operation Trappenjagd they smashed the Crimean Front and ended the fighting on the Kerch Peninsula. The occupation cost the city thousands of victims: Russian sources speak of some 15,000 inhabitants murdered, of whom about 7,000 – most of them Jews – were shot in an anti-tank ditch near the village of Bagerovo as early as the beginning of December 1941. For several months in 1942 cut-off soldiers and civilians held out in the underground quarries at Adzhimushkay, while the Germans blew up the entrances to the workings and pumped them full of smoke.

From November 1943 the Soviet Separate Coastal Army, formed from the troops that had landed there across the Kerch Strait, had been holding on north-east of the city. It was commanded by General of the Army Andrei Yeremenko, a defender of Stalingrad. Facing it, behind four lines of fortifications, stood the German V Army Corps with the 73rd and 98th Infantry Divisions and Romanian units.

11 April: Kerch

When on 10 April the 51st Army broke through the defences on the Sivash, and the next day Soviet tanks rolled into Dzhankoy, the troops on the Kerch Peninsula were in danger of being cut off. V Corps began to withdraw westwards to the old positions on the Parpach isthmus, and then further. On the night of 10–11 April the Coastal Army struck at the retreating Germans, and on the morning of 11 April units of 16th Rifle Corps – the 318th, 339th and 383rd Rifle Divisions, with naval infantry and tanks – took Kerch. The city lay in ruins; according to Russian figures more than 85 per cent of its buildings had been destroyed. That day partisans supported by Soviet reconnaissance troops began fighting for Stary Krym in the interior of the peninsula. On the night of 12–13 April retreating Wehrmacht units carried out a massacre there: according to Russian sources, 584 inhabitants, including some 200 children, were killed in the streets and in their homes.

On 12 April the Coastal Army broke through the position at Ak-Monai, at the narrowest point of the Kerch Peninsula, where in 1942 the Crimean Front had long held its line against Manstein. From there it advanced in two columns: one through Karasubazar into the interior of Crimea, where on 13 April it linked up with the troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front, and the other along the coast.

Along the southern coast

On 13 April Yeremenko’s troops took Feodosia, the port the Germans had recaptured from a Soviet landing force in January 1942. Sudak fell on 14 April, Alushta on 15 April and Yalta on 16 April. The narrow coast road, squeezed between the Crimean Mountains and the sea, was an ideal place to delay a pursuit, but the Germans and Romanians no longer had the strength or the time for it. They were attacked by partisans from the mountains, who according to Soviet accounts took part in the capture of Yalta and tried to prevent the destruction of the port and the sanatoria; Soviet aircraft and warships attacked the ships taking soldiers off from the ports of the southern coast.

Meanwhile, in the north and centre of the peninsula, the troops of the 4th Ukrainian Front took Simferopol and Yevpatoria on 13 April, and on 14 April Bakhchysarai, the former capital of the Crimean khans. On 15 and 16 April the spearheads of the 2nd Guards Army, the 51st Army and the Coastal Army reached the outer defences of Sevastopol. On 18 April the army was placed under the 4th Ukrainian Front (losing the adjective “Separate”); its command passed to Lieutenant General Kondrat Melnik, while Yeremenko, who had led it only since February, left to command the 2nd Baltic Front.

Evacuation by sea

Behind the backs of the retreating troops the evacuation began. As early as 12 April Hitler had agreed to the removal from Crimea of the wounded, rear services, prisoners and some of the Romanians, and from 15 April German and Romanian convoys sailed between Sevastopol and Constanța. For the Romanian navy it was the biggest operation of the war, code-named “60,000” after the approximate number of Romanian soldiers in Crimea. By 25 April, in the first phase, between about 60,000 and more than 70,000 people – by various calculations – had been shipped out in this way; Soviet aircraft and submarines attacked the convoys, but most reached their destination. Then Hitler halted the evacuation: Sevastopol was to be defended, and the troops inside the perimeter – some 70,000 men – awaited the assault.

Place in the war

The capture of Kerch, Feodosia and Yalta closed the first, rapid phase of the fighting for Crimea. In eight days the Red Army recovered almost the whole peninsula, the conquest of which had taken the Germans more than nine months in 1941–1942, including the siege of Sevastopol. At the same time, after the liberation of Odessa on 10 April, the Black Sea coast from Kerch to the mouth of the Dniester, with the exception of Sevastopol, passed into Soviet hands, and the Black Sea Fleet could once again operate from Crimean bases.

The fortress did not hold out for long. The assaults of 19 and 23 April were repulsed, but after two weeks of preparation, on 7 May, Soviet troops took Sapun Ridge, and on 9 May they liberated Sevastopol – a year and ten months after the Germans had captured it. The last defenders surrendered on 12 May on the Chersonese peninsula, and in its final days the evacuation turned into a disaster: transports sunk and thousands of German and Romanian soldiers drowned. A week later the NKVD deported the entire Tatar population from the peninsula.

Yalta, in April 1944 a wrecked and deserted resort, ten months later, in February 1945, played host to Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, who settled the shape of post-war Europe in the Livadia Palace. After the war, in 1973, Kerch was awarded the title of Hero City.