The second assault on Sevastopol

At dawn on 17 December 1941, at 6.10 a.m., German artillery opened fire on the Soviet positions around Sevastopol. A few minutes later the infantry of General der Infanterie Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army went into the attack on every sector of the defences, with the main weight of the blow falling on the northern and north-eastern approaches to the city, in the valley of the Belbek (PL) river. It was the second and largest assault of 1941 on the main base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. It lasted until the last day of the year and ended in failure.

It is often said that the battle for Sevastopol began on 17 December. That is a simplification. The city had already been under siege for a month and a half: the German spearheads had reached Sevastopol on 30 October, when, after breaking through the positions at Ishun, the 11th Army occupied almost the whole of the Crimea, and the first assault, on 11–21 November, had stalled on the outer defences. What began on 17 December, therefore, was not the siege but a second, carefully prepared attack that was meant to end it.

Preparations

After the November failure Manstein realised that he would not take Sevastopol on the march, and began preparing a methodical assault. It was originally to begin at the end of November, but the date had to be postponed several times. The autumn rains had washed out the Crimean roads, and the single railway line by which the army received its supplies was in a deplorable state. According to Russian studies, by mid-November half of the 11th Army’s horse-drawn and motor transport was unusable, and of the five locomotives at the army’s disposal only one was serviceable. Soviet partisans operating in the mountains raided the supply columns.

The forces Manstein had at his disposal were modest. The assault was to be carried out by two corps. In the north, General der Kavallerie Erik Hansen’s LIV Corps, with four infantry divisions (the 22nd, 24th, 50th and 132nd), was to break through the Belbek valley and the Kamyshly ravines to Severnaya Bay (the Northern Bay), which separates the northern part of Sevastopol from the city proper. In the south-east, XXX Corps, with the 72nd and 170th Infantry Divisions and the Romanian 1st Mountain Brigade, was to attack from the direction of Balaklava and tie down the defenders. According to figures cited in the literature, the four divisions of LIV Corps had a combined total of barely more than 15,000 infantrymen in the front line, and more than 7,000 soldiers of the whole army were in hospital. Artillery ammunition and heavy guns were in short supply – according to some sources, the artillery preparation on 17 December lasted only a few minutes in order to save shells. To concentrate as many troops as possible at Sevastopol, Manstein left the defence of the entire coast from Yalta to Kerch to the weak XLII Corps, with one German infantry division and two Romanian brigades.

It was a risk that would soon exact its price. By mid-December the Germans had gone over to the defensive along the entire Eastern Front: on 5 and 6 December the Red Army had launched its counter-offensive at Moscow, and at the end of November it had already recaptured Rostov. At that moment Manstein was the only German army commander in the East who still had an offensive task. Adolf Hitler attached great importance to Sevastopol: as long as the Black Sea Fleet had its base there, the Crimea was not safe, and Soviet ships and aircraft could threaten Romanian oil and the sea route along the coast.

The defenders

Sevastopol was held by the Sevastopol Defensive Region, formed on 4 November. It was commanded by the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky, while the land defence was conducted by Major General Ivan Petrov’s Independent Coastal Army – the same army that had defended Odessa in the summer and autumn before being evacuated to the Crimea in October. The occupiers had then taken Odessa and a few days later carried out a massacre of the Jews there. The defences were divided into four sectors; the most important were Sectors III and IV in the north and north-east, where the Germans had the shortest route to the bay.

The defenders made good use of the few weeks’ respite. Sappers laid minefields and wire entanglements, and the fleet brought in reinforcements from the Caucasian ports. Between 7 and 13 December the cruisers Krasny Kavkaz and Krasny Krym escorted convoys that brought in the fresh 388th Rifle Division – according to Russian figures more than 11,000 men with artillery and mortars. Petrov held it in reserve near Inkerman. Many Soviet units, however, consisted of sailors with no training whatsoever in land warfare, and the army was short of tanks, anti-aircraft guns and mortar ammunition.

The defence’s trump card was its coastal artillery. Sevastopol, fortified for decades against attack from the sea, had batteries whose guns could also fire inland. The strongest was Battery No. 30 north of the city, with four 305 mm guns in two armoured turrets; the Germans called it “Fort Maxim Gorky I”. Its fire had been falling on German columns since the first days of the siege. It was supported by other batteries, among them Battery No. 10 with 203 mm guns, and by the ships of the fleet, which closed the shore at night and shelled the attackers.

The attack in the north

On 17 December the Germans attacked all four sectors, but it soon became clear that the main blow was coming in the north. The Soviet command was taken by surprise – it had not expected an assault in the middle of winter. On the Belbek the 22nd Infantry Division, supported by StuG III assault guns and Ju 87 dive-bombers, struck the 8th Naval Infantry Brigade and regiments of the 388th Division, which had been hastily committed to the fighting. On 18 December one of these regiments was broken and thrown back several kilometres, and a neighbouring regiment of the 95th Rifle Division was encircled. According to some accounts, the defenders lost about 3,500 killed and wounded in the first two days.

Over the following days the Germans slowly forced their way deeper into the defences along the Kamyshly ravines and towards the Mekenzievy Heights, across which ran the road and railway to Severnaya Bay. On 21 December Hill 192 above the Kamyshly ravine was fought over all day, and its summit changed hands several times. According to figures cited in the literature, between 17 and 21 December the garrison lost about 2,000 killed and 6,000 wounded. German losses were also high: companies dwindled and there were no replacements. In the south XXX Corps and the Romanian mountain brigade took only a few hills.

The situation at Sevastopol caused alarm in Moscow. On 20 December the Stavka placed the Sevastopol Defensive Region under Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov’s Transcaucasian Front and ordered reinforcements to be sent to the city immediately. The landing operation on the Kerch Peninsula that this front was preparing, originally set for 21 December, was postponed. On the morning of 21 December cruisers and destroyers brought Colonel Aleksei Potapov’s 79th Naval Infantry Brigade from Novorossiysk, and it was thrown straight from the quayside into a counter-attack. On 23 December a convoy from Tuapse delivered the 345th Rifle Division and a battalion of T-26 tanks. Both units had originally been intended to take part in the landing at Kerch.

On 22 December the 8th Naval Infantry Brigade gave way under the pressure and fell back towards the city. Petrov shortened the line in Sector IV: the defenders abandoned their positions on the lower Belbek, and with them the area of Battery No. 10, and took up new positions closer to the bay. The arrival of fresh units, however, came as an unpleasant surprise to the Germans. When the 132nd Infantry Division attacked at the junction of Sectors III and IV on 24 December, it ran into a regiment of the 345th Division and was thrown back. On Christmas Day the Soviet troops, supported by tanks, an armoured train and naval gunfire, went over to the counter-attack themselves.

The last days

Early on 26 December the first Soviet landing parties came ashore near Kerch, and on 29 December the Red Army put troops ashore in the port of Feodosia. Manstein had to send the 170th Infantry Division east, which weakened the attack in the south. In the north, however, LIV Corps kept attacking, because the bay seemed within reach. On 27–28 December the 22nd Infantry Division, supported by rocket artillery, took Mekenzievy Gory railway station after heavy fighting. On 29 December the 345th Division and the 79th Brigade counter-attacked, while the battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna (formerly the Sevastopol), the cruiser Molotov and destroyers fired more than a thousand heavy shells at the German positions. The station changed hands several times.

The Germans’ last objective on this sector was anti-aircraft Battery No. 365, which they called “Fort Stalin”. On 31 December two battalions of the 22nd Division, supported by assault guns, attacked the positions of the 345th Division in front of the battery, and at noon two more battalions were committed. The defenders, who according to the division’s report had about 2,000 infantrymen left in the front line, held on, and in the evening the 8th Brigade and regiments of the 95th Division struck the German flank in the Belbek valley. That day the attack petered out, and Manstein gave up further attempts. The German troops stood a few kilometres from Severnaya Bay but no longer had the strength to reach it.

In the first days of January 1942 the Germans withdrew from their most exposed, hard-to-hold positions to a more favourable line of defence. Manstein wrote in his memoirs that this was his own decision, forced on him by the crisis on the Kerch Peninsula. Soviet historiography presented the withdrawal as the result of the defenders’ counter-attacks. Both versions contain part of the truth: the attack had exhausted itself even before the landing, and the landing took from Manstein the remaining troops with which he might have renewed it.

Why the assault failed

The German attack failed for several reasons. The 11th Army was simply too weak: its divisions, bled white in the fighting for the Crimea, received no replacements, and in winter there were no reserves anywhere on the Eastern Front. The Luftwaffe, most of whose strength was fighting at Moscow, could not provide the kind of support Manstein received later. The short winter day and bad weather limited flying, and the artillery had too little ammunition. The Soviet fleet, on the other hand, controlled the sea: throughout the two weeks of fighting, transports and warships brought men and ammunition into Sevastopol, and at night the ships shelled the attackers. According to Russian studies, ships made more than 160 voyages to Sevastopol in December 1941.

The leadership of the defenders also mattered. Petrov, a commander experienced in the defence of Odessa, handled his reserves skilfully, and the Stavka, which had just gone over to the counter-offensive at Moscow, decided at the critical moment to send Sevastopol units intended for the landing. The cost of that decision was a delay of several days in the Kerch operation, but the city was held.

Place in the war

The failure of the second assault meant that Sevastopol remained in Soviet hands for another six months. At the turn of 1941 and 1942 the initiative in the Crimea briefly passed to the Red Army: Stalin hoped that the landings on the Kerch Peninsula would make it possible to relieve the city and recapture the whole peninsula. That did not happen. In May 1942 Manstein routed the Soviet forces on the Kerch Peninsula, and in June, with massive support from the air force and the heaviest artillery, including the 800 mm railway gun Dora, he launched the third assault on Sevastopol. The city fell at the beginning of July 1942 after 250 days of siege, and Manstein received his field marshal’s baton. Tying down the 11th Army in the Crimea for the first half of 1942 came at a price, however: it was missing from the main axis of the summer offensive towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad.

The defence of Sevastopol became one of the symbols of the war in the USSR, and in 1945 the city received the title of Hero City. The December fighting for the Belbek valley, the Mekenzievy Heights and “Fort Stalin” was the first serious test in that story: it showed that a fortress supplied from the sea, defended by a determined garrison and strong artillery, could be taken only by a great concentration of forces, which in the winter of 1941 the Wehrmacht had nowhere in the East.