Manstein in the Crimea

In the last days of October 1941 the fate of the whole peninsula was decided on the narrow strip of land between the Crimea and the mainland. From 18 October the German Eleventh Army of General of Infantry Erich von Manstein had been assaulting the Soviet positions near the village of Ishun (PL), the last line of defence at the entrance to the Crimean Peninsula. On 27 October the defence began to crumble, and on 28 October it was broken. The Soviet forces fell back in two directions – towards Sevastopol and towards Kerch – and the German columns emerged on to the open steppe. On 1 November the Germans took the Crimean capital, Simferopol, and their spearheads had already reached Sevastopol, the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, on 30 October.

It is often said, under 27 October, that the troops of Army Group South reached Sevastopol, while the tanks of the “northern” forces were slowed or brought to a complete halt by mud. The first part of this statement anticipates events by several days: on 27 October the Eleventh Army was still fighting on the isthmus, and its forward units arrived outside Sevastopol on 30 October and 1 November. Manstein, moreover, had almost no tanks – his army consisted of infantry divisions. The second part concerns a different sector of the front: it was above all the panzer divisions of Army Group Centre, advancing on Moscow, that were then bogged down in the mud of the autumn rasputitsa.

The gateway to the Crimea

From the north there is only one convenient land route into the Crimea – the Perekop Isthmus, a strip of steppe seven to nine kilometres wide, with the Black Sea on one side and the salt shallows of the Sivash on the other. For centuries it had been barred by the Turkish Wall and its ditch, and some fifteen kilometres further south, between the lakes near Ishun, the isthmus narrowed again. Anyone who wanted to take the Crimea from the landward side had to attack head-on across flat terrain without cover. It was by the same route that in November 1920 Mikhail Frunze’s Red Army had taken the Crimea from General Pyotr Wrangel’s Whites.

The Crimea mattered to Hitler for two reasons. From its airfields Soviet bombers attacked the Romanian refineries and the port of Constanța, and Hitler called the peninsula an “aircraft carrier” aimed at Romanian oil, without which the Reich could not wage war. At the same time the Crimea was a bridge to the Caucasus: the shortest route to Caucasian oil led across the Kerch Strait. In his order of 21 August, in which he changed the direction of the advance, Adolf Hitler put the capture of the Crimea first among the objectives to be achieved before winter, ahead of Moscow.

The task fell to the Eleventh Army, advancing on the southern wing of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, whose main forces were then closing the Kiev pocket. On 12 September its commander, Colonel General Eugen von Schobert, was killed when his Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft made an emergency landing on a Soviet minefield near Mykolaiv. He was the first German army commander to fall in the war. Manstein, who until then had commanded a panzer corps in Army Group North, was summoned from near Demyansk to replace him. He took over command at Mykolaiv on 17 September.

The first assault: Perekop

The Crimea was defended by the 51st Army, formed in August 1941 as an independent army directly subordinate to the Stavka. It was commanded by Colonel General Fyodor Kuznetsov, formerly commander of the Northwestern Front. The Soviet command feared landings from the sea and from the air, so most of his divisions were deployed along the coasts, while the isthmus itself was covered by a single rifle division, supported by weak forces along the Sivash.

On 24 September, a week after Manstein took command, LIV Corps under General of Cavalry Erik Hansen attacked the positions at Perekop with two infantry divisions, the 46th and the 73rd. After two days of heavy fighting the Germans crossed the Turkish Wall and entered Armyansk. The town changed hands several times when Lieutenant General Pavel Batov, Kuznetsov’s deputy, threw hastily assembled regiments and a cavalry division into counter-attacks, but in the end it remained in German hands. At the end of September the Russians fell back to the Ishun positions. According to German reports, 10,000 prisoners, 112 tanks and 135 guns were taken. According to figures cited in the literature, LIV Corps alone lost more than 2,600 killed and wounded in six days of fighting.

There the advance stopped, because Manstein had to turn in the opposite direction. On 26 September the Soviet Southern Front attacked with two armies against the Romanian Third Army of General Petre Dumitrescu, which was covering the rear of the Eleventh Army along the Sea of Azov near Melitopol. Manstein moved XLIX Mountain Corps and the motorised SS Brigade Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler there, while General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group came down from the north into the rear of the attacking Russians. In the battle of the Sea of Azov both Soviet armies were encircled and destroyed. The victory, however, cost Manstein his strongest units: the high command took XLIX Corps and the Leibstandarte away from him, and they went with Kleist towards Rostov. The Eleventh Army was to conquer the Crimea with infantry alone.

Odessa sails to the Crimea

The Soviet command made use of the pause. On 30 September the Stavka decided that the Crimea was more important than Odessa and ordered the evacuation of the defenders of the city, besieged since August. Between 1 and 16 October the ships of the Black Sea Fleet under Vice Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky took about 86,000 soldiers out of Odessa, according to Russian studies, together with guns and equipment. The last ships left on the morning of 16 October. The Romanians, fearing a trap, did not enter the abandoned city until the evening. The fighting for the city, known in Soviet tradition as the defence of Odessa, cost the Romanian army very heavy losses, and a few days after marching in the occupiers carried out a massacre of Odessa’s Jewish population.

The evacuated Independent Coastal Army of Major General Ivan Petrov disembarked at Sevastopol and moved north towards the isthmus. Its first divisions did not reach the battle area until about 23 October, by which time the battle for the Ishun positions had been raging for five days.

The battle of Ishun

On 18 October the Eleventh Army attacked again. Three divisions of LIV Corps formed the first line. The terrain was the worst imaginable: flat, treeless salt steppe cut by lakes, where every movement could be seen from far away. The Soviet air force, operating from nearby Crimean airfields, dominated the battlefield. After the war Manstein wrote bitterly of the Soviet air superiority, against which his infantry had no cover on the open steppe. The Soviet defence, supported by coastal batteries and naval units, gave way step by step. Only when the Luftwaffe brought fighters from several units over the Crimea did the situation in the air turn around. According to the historian Christer Bergström, the Russians lost about 140 aircraft over the isthmus between 18 and 24 October.

On 22 October the Stavka placed the land and naval forces on the peninsula under a single command. Vice Admiral Gordey Levchenko became commander of the Crimean forces, with the 51st Army, the Coastal Army and the Black Sea Fleet under him. The next day Levchenko ordered a counter-attack. On 24 October the arriving divisions of the Coastal Army attacked and for two days fought a meeting engagement with the Germans that halted the advance but did not reverse it.

Manstein meanwhile regrouped his forces. He withdrew his bled-white divisions from the front line and committed XXX Corps with two divisions, as well as the fresh 132nd Infantry Division. On 26 October he struck again at the junction of the two Soviet armies. That day and the next the defence began to crack: according to Russian studies, the regiments of the Coastal Army were down to 200–500 men each, and command was breaking down. On 27 October the Soviet front on the isthmus effectively collapsed, and on 28 October the Soviet forces began to retreat along the entire line. According to German figures cited in the literature, the Eleventh Army lost more than 5,300 killed, wounded and missing in twelve days of fighting at Ishun.

The pursuit

After the breakthrough Manstein had nothing with which to pursue the enemy, so he assembled an improvised brigade from motorised units under Colonel Heinz Ziegler and sent it south across the steppe. The Soviet forces had no prepared positions in the interior of the peninsula and split up. The Coastal Army fell back on Sevastopol, and when the Germans cut its direct route, some of its units crossed the Crimean Mountains and took the narrow coast road through Alushta and Yalta. Some units, such as the 48th Cavalry Division, dispersed in the mountains and reinforced the partisan detachments forming there. The 51st Army retreated east towards Kerch.

On 31 October Ziegler’s brigade cut the road from Simferopol to Sevastopol, and on 1 November the Germans entered Simferopol. They also took Yevpatoria on the west coast, where a division defending the shore against landings fought on in isolation. In the east Feodosia fell on 3 November. The Romanians also took part in the pursuit: a mountain corps and cavalry brigades from Dumitrescu’s army, sent to the Crimea with the consent of Marshal Ion Antonescu. In his memoirs Manstein stated that his army took about 100,000 prisoners, 700 guns and 160 tanks in the Crimea. According to Russian statistics (the study edited by Grigori Krivosheev), Soviet forces lost more than 48,000 killed, missing and captured, and more than 15,000 wounded and sick, in the Crimean defensive operation, counted from 18 October to 16 November.

On 2 November Kuznetsov was removed from command of the 51st Army and replaced by Batov. The army was unable to hold the Kerch Peninsula. On 16 November the Germans took Kerch, and the remnants of the Soviet forces crossed the strait to the Taman Peninsula.

Before Sevastopol

Sevastopol, the base of the Black Sea Fleet, was strongly fortified on the seaward side, but in the last days of October its landward side was defended only by sailors, naval infantry and the crews of the coastal batteries – about 20,000 men, according to Russian studies. Soviet tradition dates the beginning of the city’s defence to 30 October, when one of the coastal batteries opened fire on an approaching German column. On 1 November the heavy guns of Battery No. 30 shelled the spearhead of the 132nd Infantry Division. The Germans failed to break into the city on the march: the Eleventh Army lacked sufficient mobile troops and air power, and its infantry was exhausted by twelve days of fighting on the isthmus.

In the first ten days of November the main forces of the Coastal Army, having crossed the mountains, reached Sevastopol, and the fleet brought further reinforcements from the Caucasus. On 4 November the Sevastopol Defensive Region was created, and Oktyabrsky soon took command of it. The fleet’s large warships left for Caucasian ports, but the battleship and the cruisers returned to bombard the attackers. The first German assault, on 11–21 November, stalled on the outer positions. From then on the siege of Sevastopol began.

Mud before Moscow

At the same time as Manstein was forcing his way through the isthmus, the Wehrmacht’s main offensive against Moscow was losing momentum. After the victories at Vyazma and Bryansk, the autumn rains turned the roads into swamp, and the fighting on the Mozhaisk Line cost the Germans more time than they had expected. At the end of October the advance of Army Group Centre in the Battle of Moscow halted for almost two weeks while it waited for frost to harden the ground. The same rasputitsa was also slowing Kleist’s panzer group on its way to Rostov, just after the Sixth Army had taken Kharkiv.

Place in the war

The breakthrough at Ishun gave the Germans almost the whole of the Crimea within three weeks and closed the route over the Romanian oilfields to the Soviet air force. It did not, however, give Hitler what he wanted most: Sevastopol, the port and fleet base, remained in Soviet hands. On 17 December Manstein began a second assault, and on 26–30 December the Red Army made landings at Kerch and Feodosia (PL), forcing him to break off the attack. The Germans retook the Kerch Peninsula in May 1942, but did not capture Sevastopol until the beginning of July 1942, after a siege of 250 days and bombardment by the heaviest guns ever built. On 1 July, as German troops were entering the city, Hitler promoted Manstein to field marshal. Soviet forces recovered the Crimea in April and May 1944.

Tying the Eleventh Army down in the Crimea also had consequences on other sectors. Manstein was unable to support Kleist at Rostov, which the Germans took on 21 November and lost a week later in the Wehrmacht’s first serious retreat of the war. Rundstedt, who withdrew his troops to the Mius river against Hitler’s wishes, lost his command on 1 December.

Behind the front of the Eleventh Army came Otto Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D. In the autumn and winter of 1941 its units murdered Jews, Krymchaks and Roma in the Crimea, more than ten thousand people in Simferopol alone in December. Manstein’s army supplied them with vehicles, fuel and drivers, and its military police cordoned off the execution sites. On 20 November 1941 Manstein issued an order in which he wrote of the need to exterminate the “Jewish-Bolshevik system”. After the war this order and the cooperation with Einsatzgruppe D were among the charges on which a British military court convicted him in 1949.