The third assault on Sevastopol

12 June 1942 was the sixth day of the German infantry assault on Sevastopol, the main base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, besieged since the end of October 1941. The third assault on the fortress, Operation Störfang (“Sturgeon Catch”), had begun on 2 June with an artillery bombardment and air raids, and on 7 June the infantry of Colonel General Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army went into the attack. After five days the Germans had driven a wedge into the northern sector of the defences, along the Belbek (PL) river, but the city was still far away and their divisions were melting away before their eyes. That day Vice Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky, commander of the defence of Sevastopol, received a telegram from Joseph Stalin, and the cruiser Molotov broke through into the harbour with more reinforcements.

Under 12 June chronologies record heavy fighting “in Sevastopol” and serious casualties on both sides. The losses were indeed enormous, but the city itself was not yet a battlefield on land. The fighting was on its approaches, in woods and ravines ten to fifteen kilometres from the centre, in the first and second belts of the defences. The city, on the other hand, had been bombed and shelled for ten days, and most of its buildings were burning.

Preparations and bombardment

The capture of Sevastopol was one of the preconditions for the great summer offensive in the south of the USSR that Adolf Hitler had planned in Directive No. 41. Two earlier attempts had failed: in November 1941 the Germans had not taken the city off the march, and the second assault, in December, was broken off by the Soviet landing on the Kerch Peninsula. Only when, in May 1942, Manstein smashed the Crimean Front in Operation Trappenjagd and retook Kerch could he turn almost all his forces against the fortress.

For the attack he assigned two German corps and one Romanian. The main blow, in the north, was to be delivered by General der Kavallerie Erik Hansen’s LIV Corps with four infantry divisions (the 22nd, 24th, 50th and 132nd). In the south, towards Balaklava and the Sapun Ridge (Sapun-gora), General der Artillerie Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s XXX Corps attacked with the 72nd and 170th Infantry Divisions and the 28th Light Division, and in the centre General Gheorghe Avramescu’s Romanian Mountain Corps. The infantry was the 11th Army’s weakest link: after the winter its divisions had, according to the figures of the American author Robert Forczyk, between a third and three-quarters of their establishment strength. Manstein made up for this with artillery. According to the same figures he concentrated 785 German and 112 Romanian medium and heavy guns at Sevastopol, including the 600 mm Karl self-propelled super-heavy mortars, 420 mm howitzers from the First World War and the 800 mm railway gun Schwerer Gustav, known as “Dora”. On top of this came Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, whose airfields lay so close to the target that crews flew several sorties a day.

The defenders were the soldiers of Major General Ivan Petrov’s Independent Coastal Army and the sailors of the fleet – according to Russian figures some 106,000 men in seven rifle divisions and several naval infantry brigades. The whole Sevastopol Defensive Region was commanded by Oktyabrsky, and from May it was subordinated to Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s North Caucasus Front. The defenders had several hundred guns and mortars and powerful coastal batteries, among them the armoured turret batteries No. 30 and No. 35 with 305 mm guns, which the Germans called the forts “Maxim Gorky I” and “Maxim Gorky II”. What they lacked were tanks, anti-aircraft guns and aircraft. North of Sevastopol Bay stretched a chain of fortifications to which the Germans gave the names “Stalin”, “Molotov”, “Lenin”, “Volga” and “Siberia”.

On 2 June the Luftwaffe began its bombing. According to Western tallies based on the records of VIII Air Corps, 723 sorties were flown and 525 tonnes of bombs dropped on the first day, and by 7 June more than three thousand sorties had been flown and some 2,300 tonnes of high-explosive bombs dropped, along with tens of thousands of incendiaries. The bombs fell on positions, the port, depots, the power station and the waterworks. In those same days the artillery fired more than 42,000 shells. The super-heavy guns achieved less than had been promised: “Dora” fired several dozen rounds at ammunition dumps and coastal batteries, and the only clear success was a hit on one of the turrets of Battery No. 30 by a shell from the mortar “Thor” on 6 June.

The first days of the assault

At dawn on 7 June the infantry went in. LIV Corps attacked in the north through the Belbek valley, at the junction of two Soviet defence sectors, while XXX Corps made a supporting attack in the south. Despite five days of bombing, the defence held. Soviet soldiers held their fire until the Germans came close, and minefields and bunkers in dense scrub slowed the assault groups of sappers. Richthofen, who watched the attack from an observation post, called the first day “a real disappointment”. According to Forczyk, LIV Corps lost 2,357 men, 340 of them killed, and advanced about two kilometres. By noon the 132nd Infantry Division had fired off its entire basic load of ammunition.

The following days turned into a battle of attrition. The Germans widened the wedge at the junction of the sectors, and Petrov threw his reserves into counter-attacks. On the ridge that the Germans called Haccius, and around the railway station in the valley below the Mekenzievy Gory (Mackenzie Heights), the 132nd Infantry Division fought the 95th Rifle Division and the 79th Naval Infantry Brigade, which was almost wiped out in those days. Petrov replaced the exhausted 172nd Rifle Division with the 345th. As early as 8 June Manstein feared that the 132nd Division was “approaching the end of its strength”. In the south, XXX Corps gained almost nothing in four days: in places it broke through the positions of the 109th and 388th Rifle Divisions, but the main line on the Sapun Ridge remained intact.

The state of the battle on 12 June

On 12 June neither side could be sure of the outcome. In the north LIV Corps had driven a wedge into the Soviet defences at least three kilometres deep and five wide, but it was still several kilometres from the shore of Sevastopol Bay, and the forts “Stalin” and “Maxim Gorky I” stood in its way. According to German reports cited by Forczyk, this corps alone lost nearly two thousand men on 11 and 12 June, and more than eight thousand since the start of the assault. By 13 June XXX Corps had lost 2,659 men, 394 of them killed. According to Russian studies, German infantry companies were down to an average of twenty-odd soldiers each. Manstein wrote in his post-war memoirs that in those days the fate of the attack “hung by a thread”, because nothing suggested that the enemy’s will to resist was weakening, while the strength of his own units was visibly shrinking.

Soviet losses were at least as severe. The defenders committed all their reserves, and several battalions had ceased to exist by the first day. Six days later, on 18 June, Oktyabrsky and the member of the fleet’s military council Nikolai Kulakov (PL) reported to Stalin that the garrison had lost 22,000–23,000 men, and estimated the enemy’s losses at three to four times as many. German records do not confirm the latter estimate.

The Luftwaffe ruled the air. On 11 June, according to German figures, it flew more than a thousand sorties and dropped almost a thousand tonnes of bombs. That same day, however, Richthofen noted that he had less than two days’ worth of air munitions left, and he ordered more economical raids on selected targets instead of area bombing. Soon afterwards he himself was recalled to prepare the new offensive, and command of the air forces at Sevastopol passed to Wolfgang von Wild, the air commander over the Black Sea.

For the defenders the sea route was vital. Ships of the Black Sea Fleet brought in ammunition and reinforcements by night and took out the wounded, but the Luftwaffe, supported by German and Italian torpedo boats from Yalta and Feodosia, was sinking more and more of them. On 10 June the transport Abkhazia and the destroyer Svobodny were sunk. Even so, on 12 June the cruiser Molotov broke through to Sevastopol with the destroyer Bditelny, bringing, according to various sources, between 2,300 and 2,600 soldiers as well as ammunition and guns. The next day, at the harbour entrance, bombs sank the transport Gruziya.

That same day, 12 June, Oktyabrsky received Stalin’s telegram: “Warm greetings to the gallant defenders of Sevastopol – Red Army men, Red Navy men, commanders and commissars, bravely defending every inch of Soviet soil.” Stalin wrote that their struggle was an example of heroism for the whole Red Army and the Soviet people, and expressed his conviction that they would fulfil their duty to the motherland “with dignity and honour”. The telegram was read out to the units and printed in the newspapers. It could not replace the help the garrison needed most – aircraft and large convoys.

On the evening of 12 June German artillery and Junkers Ju 87s began to shell and bomb Fort “Stalin” and Fort “Volga” behind it. Heavy 420 mm mortars and dive bombers destroyed most of the fort’s guns, and an assault group from the 22nd Infantry Division, numbering, according to Forczyk, just over 800 men, made ready to storm it.

What followed

According to German sources, Fort “Stalin” fell at dawn on 13 June after several hours of fighting for every bunker; some Russian studies give a later date, 17 June. From then on the defence north of the bay began to crumble. On 17 June the Germans took Battery No. 30, whose crew held out for several more days in the underground passages, and between 18 and 23 June the last Soviet positions on the northern shore fell. Once German artillery could fire across the whole bay, the larger ships stopped coming into the harbour. The last to break through, on the night of 26–27 June, was the destroyer leader Tashkent, which took out more than two thousand wounded and civilians.

On the night of 28–29 June Manstein’s troops crossed Sevastopol Bay in assault boats, and XXX Corps broke onto the Sapun Ridge. On 30 June Oktyabrsky received the Stavka’s permission for an evacuation, which covered above all the command: he himself flew to the Caucasus, and Petrov left by submarine. On 1 July the Germans entered the ruined city, and Hitler promoted Manstein to field marshal. Organised resistance on the Chersonese peninsula ended on 4 July. According to 11th Army figures, Operation Störfang cost the Axis forces just under 36,000 killed, wounded and missing. The Germans claimed to have taken 90,000–100,000 prisoners; Russian authors, citing the archives, speak of at most 78,000. Behind the Wehrmacht units, commandos of Einsatzgruppe D entered the city, seeking out Jews and communists among the prisoners and the inhabitants and murdering them.

Its place in the war

The fighting of 12 June had nothing decisive about it, but it shows well what the third assault on Sevastopol was: a battle of attrition in which the Germans, despite overwhelming superiority in the air and in artillery, paid for every kilometre with thousands of men, while the defenders, ever more effectively cut off from the sea, had nowhere to fall back. For several days in mid-June the outcome was not settled. It was decided by the exhaustion of Soviet reserves and ammunition and by the Luftwaffe’s blockade of the sea route.

The battle lasted longer than the German plan had envisaged. When the great summer offensive provided for in Directive No. 41 began in the south of the USSR on 28 June, the 11th Army was still fighting in the Crimea, and VIII Air Corps had to divide its forces between Sevastopol and the new front. After the fortress fell, Manstein’s bled-white army did not follow the rest of Army Group South to the Caucasus and the Volga: most of its divisions were transferred to Leningrad in the summer. For the Soviet Union the fall of Sevastopol meant the loss of the whole of the Crimea and of the fleet’s main base, but the 250-day defence became one of the greatest symbols of resistance – the city received the title of Hero City in 1945, and the medal “For the Defence of Sevastopol” was instituted as early as December 1942. A painful thread, long passed over in silence, remained the fact that the commanders were evacuated while tens of thousands of soldiers were left behind on Cape Chersonese.