Operation Trappenjagd

On the morning of 8 May 1942 the German 11th Army of Colonel General Erich von Manstein attacked the Soviet Crimean Front, which was holding the Ak-Monai (Parpach) isthmus on the Kerch Peninsula. Within a few days the offensive, named Operation Trappenjagd (“Bustard Hunt”), turned into one of the most one-sided battles of the Eastern Front. With fewer men, guns and tanks than his opponent, but in command of the air, Manstein broke through the Soviet defences on the very first day, on the third day encircled the main forces of the 51st Army against the Sea of Azov, and on 15 May entered Kerch. By about 18 May the Red Army on the peninsula was no longer fighting a battle but saving what it could: the remnants of three armies held out in a few pockets of resistance at the eastern tip of the peninsula and crossed the Kerch Strait under fire, while tens of thousands of soldiers went into captivity.

Some war chronologies carry, under 8 May, the statement that the Germans took the Kerch Peninsula that day. In reality 8 May was only the start of the offensive. Kerch fell on 15 May (some Soviet sources give 16 May), the Crimean Front was disbanded on 19 May, and the last pockets of resistance on the strait fell, according to Russian studies, by 20 May. The mention in the same chronologies, under 18 May, of a great retreat of the Red Army from Kerch after mass surrenders does, on the other hand, capture the final phase of the battle well.

Background

The Kerch Peninsula, the easternmost part of Crimea, had been the scene of gruelling fighting since December 1941. In the autumn Manstein had overrun almost the whole of Crimea and laid siege to Sevastopol, but in the last days of the year the Soviet landings at Kerch and Feodosia retook the eastern end of the peninsula and forced him to break off the second assault on the fortress. In January the Germans recaptured Feodosia and stopped the enemy at the Ak-Monai isthmus, some 17–20 kilometres wide, between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

At the end of January the forces on the peninsula were formed into the Crimean Front under Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov, with the 44th, 47th and 51st Armies. Beside the commander stood the representative of the Stavka, Army Commissar 1st Rank Lev Mekhlis, head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army and a trusted man of Joseph Stalin, who in practice took over the running of the front although he knew nothing of operational art. Between 27 February and mid-April the Crimean Front attacked on the isthmus four times in an attempt to break through to relieve Sevastopol. Each offensive foundered in the mud and under the fire of German artillery, gaining a few kilometres at most at the cost of more than a hundred thousand men.

These failures left the front disastrously deployed. Two-thirds of its forces stood in the north, in a salient around the village of Kiet, where the 51st and 47th Armies were set up for another attack rather than for defence. The southern sector, from Koi-Asan to the Black Sea, was held by the weakened 44th Army of Lieutenant General Stepan Chernyak, deployed in a single echelon with shallow rear areas. An anti-tank ditch ran across the whole isthmus, but no proper positions had been prepared behind it. As late as April the Stavka ordered preparations for a new offensive, and only on 6 May did it order a switch to the defensive, when there was no longer time to regroup. According to Russian figures the Crimean Front then numbered about 296,000 men, more than 4,600 guns and mortars, more than 200 serviceable tanks and about 400 aircraft.

On the other side, Adolf Hitler’s Directive No. 41 of 5 April ordered that, before the great summer offensive in the south, the Kerch Peninsula be cleared and Sevastopol taken, so that Crimea would not threaten the flank and rear of the forces advancing on the Caucasus. According to Russian studies Manstein had about 150,000 German and Romanian troops and about 180 tanks and assault guns, roughly half the enemy’s strength. His only advantage was in the air. VIII Air Corps under Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen, the best German close-support formation, was transferred to Crimea and by 8 May had concentrated, according to various estimates, from about 600 to 800 aircraft. Richthofen expanded the network of forward airfields to cut flying times and stockpiled thousands of containers of SD-2 light fragmentation bombs.

Manstein’s plan

Manstein decided to strike where the enemy least expected it: in the south, along the Black Sea coast, in marshy ground held by the 44th Army. Generalleutnant Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s XXX Corps, with four infantry divisions and the 22nd Panzer Division, was to break through the defences, after which the panzer division was to swing north, pin the 51st and 47th Armies against the Sea of Azov and encircle them. An improvised motorised brigade under Colonel von Groddeck, made up of German and Romanian units, was to race east towards Kerch and cut the lines of retreat. In the northern sector XLII Corps with a single German division and the Romanian VII Corps were merely to tie down the enemy.

For the breakthrough XXX Corps was given several dozen StuG III assault guns, batteries of heavy anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers and strong engineer units. The tactics relied on close cooperation between infantry assault groups, assault guns, engineers and aircraft – the same tactics that had opened the way into Crimea for the Germans in the autumn.

The breakthrough

According to Russian studies the German air force began bombing the Soviet headquarters, which had long remained in the same places, and lines of communication as early as 7 May. The ground offensive began on 8 May at 4.15 a.m., after a short but violent artillery preparation. An assault detachment of the 132nd Infantry Division sailed along the coast in boats and landed behind the Soviet 63rd Mountain Rifle Division, causing panic. Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers smashed the command posts of the 44th Army, and Henschel Hs 129 ground-attack aircraft and assault guns destroyed Soviet tanks before their counter-attacks could reach the German infantry. Within a few hours the 44th Army’s second line of defence had been broken on a front of several kilometres. According to German figures XXX Corps took more than 4,500 prisoners on the first day for the loss of just over a hundred killed.

The front command failed to grasp the scale of the breakthrough. Kozlov issued orders for counter-attacks which, with communications cut, either never reached the troops or ended under the bombs, and he did not throw his reserves in at the right place. Mekhlis, instead of acting, sent cables to Moscow blaming the front commander and demanding his replacement. Stalin, in a reply dated in Russian publications to 9 May, reproached him for his “strange position of an outside observer”, reminded him that as the Stavka’s representative he bore responsibility for the front together with its command, and added that there were no “Hindenburgs” in reserve, and that one did not need to be a Hindenburg to understand that aircraft must be thrown against the enemy’s tanks.

On 9 May engineers bridged the anti-tank ditch and Manstein committed the 22nd Panzer Division. According to Russian studies the commander of the 51st Army, Lieutenant General Vladimir Lvov (PL), was killed in an air raid that day (sources differ on the date: some speak of a mortal wound as early as 8 May, others give 11 May as the day of his death), and his deputy was badly wounded. In the evening Groddeck’s brigade broke into the rear areas and took the airfields around Marfovka one after another, destroying dozens of aircraft on the ground. A downpour that grounded the German air force for a few hours on the evening of 9 May gave the defenders only a brief respite.

The pocket on the Sea of Azov

During the night of 9/10 May, after speaking to Kozlov, Stalin agreed to a withdrawal to the line of an old earthen rampart cutting across the peninsula in front of Kerch, known as the Turkish Wall. The order reached the 51st and 47th Armies too late. On 10 May the 22nd Panzer Division, having swung north, reached the Sea of Azov and encircled the main forces of the 51st Army. On 11 May Soviet resistance in the pocket collapsed: according to German reports eight divisions of the 51st Army ceased to exist, and tens of thousands of soldiers went into captivity. It was these surrenders that determined the scale of the defeat.

The columns that broke out eastwards marched across bare, treeless steppe without air cover. In the first days of the battle VIII Air Corps flew between one and a half and two thousand sorties a day, while the front’s own air force, much of it destroyed on its airfields, practically ceased to count. German bombers showered the crowded roads with containers of SD-2 bombs, which in open country inflicted terrible losses on the infantry. Richthofen later wrote that there had never yet been such concentrated air support.

On 12 May most of Richthofen’s aircraft had to fly north, where the Red Army had launched its offensive at Kharkov, but the battle in Crimea was already decided. That day German bombers turned Kerch into a sea of fire. On 13 May the Germans broke through the defences on the Turkish Wall and reached the outskirts of the town. The same day the Sovinformburo announced that Soviet troops, “in the face of the enemy’s superior forces”, had withdrawn to new positions, and called the German communiqué about the end of the fighting and the huge number of prisoners a lie. During the night of 13/14 May Marshal Semyon Budyonny, to whom the Crimean Front had been subordinated since 21 April as commander of the North Caucasus Direction, and a few hours later Stalin himself, authorised the evacuation of the troops across the strait.

The last days: retreat and evacuation

On 15 May the Germans entered Kerch. The shattered remnants of the Soviet forces still held out in three pockets of resistance at the eastern tip of the peninsula – in the Voikov metallurgical works in Kerch, in the settlement of Yenikale on the strait and in the village of Opasnoye – covering the crossing to the Taman Peninsula. The evacuation used anything that floated: cutters, barges, fishing boats and warships of the Black Sea Fleet, under constant artillery fire and air attack. German aircraft sank transports carrying wounded and the small craft plying across the strait, a few kilometres wide, while crowds of leaderless soldiers waited their turn on the shore. Such was the situation around 18 May: the Crimean Front no longer existed as a fighting force, and its armies, after mass surrenders in the pocket and on the roads of retreat, were fleeing towards the strait.

On 19 May the Stavka disbanded the Crimean Front and the North Caucasus Direction and handed the remnants of the troops to Budyonny’s new North Caucasus Front. The evacuation went on until 20 May. According to Soviet figures some 140,000 people were carried across to the Taman Peninsula, many of them wounded, along with some equipment. Some Western historians consider this figure greatly inflated, and the most cautious estimates speak of several tens of thousands saved.

Not all of those left behind surrendered. Several thousand soldiers from the units covering the crossing, together with civilians from Kerch, went down into the underground workings of the Adzhimushkay quarries on the outskirts of the town. Cut off from water and food, they held out there from the second half of May until the end of October 1942. The Germans blew up the entrances and the roofs of the galleries and pumped smoke into them; survivors’ accounts also speak of gas, but the scale and nature of the means used remain disputed. Few survived.

Losses

According to the Russian statistical study edited by Grigoriy Krivosheev, the Crimean Front lost 176,566 men in the Kerch defensive operation (8–19 May), 162,282 of them irrecoverably – killed, missing and captured – as well as more than 4,600 guns and mortars, 196 tanks and 417 aircraft. Manstein reported taking some 170,000 prisoners and capturing or destroying 258 tanks and 1,133 guns. Some historians, among them the Swedish researcher Christer Bergström, point out that civilians were also counted among the prisoners, which is why some studies give lower figures, around 147,000. The prisoners’ fate was harsh: like all Soviet soldiers in German captivity at that time, they ended up in camps where hunger and disease killed on a massive scale.

German and Romanian losses were many times smaller. According to German archival figures cited by the American historian Robert Forczyk, XXX and XLII Corps lost 7,588 men, including 1,703 killed and missing; the Russian historian Aleksei Isaev, counting from divisional reports, gives about 9,600. VIII Air Corps lost 37 aircraft in eleven days.

Causes of the defeat

The Soviet disaster had several sources. The front was deployed for attack, not defence, with its main forces in the north and a weak, shallow wing in the south, exactly where Manstein struck. Until the last moment the Stavka ordered preparations for another offensive, and only two days before the German attack did it order a switch to the defensive. Headquarters had stood in the same places for months, so the German air force found them easily. The front’s air force failed to stand up to the Luftwaffe, and communications collapsed in the first hours. Finally, the dual authority of Kozlov and Mekhlis paralysed command at a time when every hour counted.

On the German side victory was decided by concentration and surprise. Manstein massed almost all his forces on a narrow sector, and Richthofen gave him a superiority in the air such as the Wehrmacht had not had in the east since the summer of 1941. The British historian John Erickson wrote that Mekhlis had “frittered away twenty-one divisions of three armies in a nightmare of confusion and incompetence”.

Place in the war

Operation Trappenjagd was the Wehrmacht’s first great victory of 1942 and a foretaste of the summer campaign. It showed that the army that had lost the initiative before Moscow in the winter could still carry out a lightning encirclement against an enemy twice its size. It also freed Manstein’s hands: he moved artillery and divisions from Kerch to Sevastopol, where on 2 June the bombardment began ahead of the third assault on the fortress. Sevastopol fell at the beginning of July, and on 1 July 1942 Manstein received his field marshal’s baton. In September 1942 the Kerch Peninsula served the Germans as the springboard for a crossing to the Taman Peninsula during the offensive towards the Caucasus (Case Blue).

For the Soviet Union the defeat meant the loss of its last foothold in Crimea, sealed the fate of Sevastopol and exposed the Caucasus. It came just before the disaster at Kharkov and, together with it, weakened the southern wing of the Red Army at the very moment when the Germans were preparing their main blow there. On 4 June a Stavka directive accused the front command of “failing to understand the nature of modern warfare” and of “bureaucratic, paper methods of command”. Mekhlis lost his posts as Deputy People’s Commissar of Defence and head of the Main Political Directorate and was demoted by two grades, to corps commissar; Kozlov was demoted to major general, and the commanders of the 44th and 47th Armies to colonel. Of the responsibility of the Stavka itself, which had ordered the front to attack to the very end, the directive said nothing. The writer Konstantin Simonov, who had been on the Crimean Front, wrote thirty years later that he still could not read his diary from those weeks without pain: the failed winter offensive he had witnessed was, in his view, the direct prelude to the May disaster.