Crimean Offensive (1944)

Background

By the autumn of 1943 the Red Army's advance across southern Ukraine had sealed the Crimea off by land. Soviet troops held a lodgment across the shallow, salty Sivash lagoon on the north-east side of the peninsula and a beachhead at the eastern tip of the Kerch peninsula. Inside sat Jaenecke's 17th Army, which had been brought back from the Kuban bridgehead in October 1943.

Zeitzler at the high command, Kleist at army group and Jaenecke all agreed that the army should get out while it could. Hitler refused and instead raised its German strength from one infantry division to five, with two assault-gun brigades. Marshal Antonescu wanted his seven Romanian divisions brought home; they stayed. Hitler's reasoning was political as much as military: holding Sevastopol for six or eight weeks, he argued in April, would keep Turkey quiet until the expected Anglo-American invasion in the west. Soviet officers joked that the Crimea was an ideal prison camp where the inmates fed and guarded themselves, and Moscow was in no hurry to see the army evacuated to some more useful sector.

In March Tolbukhin and Yeremenko settled the plan with Stalin. Zakharov's 2nd Guards Army would make a deliberate attack on the old Tatar Ditch line at Perekop, Kreizer's 51st Army would break out of the Sivash lodgment, and Vasilyev's 19th Tank Corps would then drive south for Simferopol. Yeremenko's Separate Coastal Army was to pin Allmendinger's V Corps at Kerch and follow up. On 7 April, the day before the attack, the army group commander Schörner reported that the peninsula could be held 'for a long time'.

The armies

The 17th Army was a German–Romanian army in roughly equal parts by divisions, though not by fighting power. In the north Gruppe Konrad (Konrad's XLIX Mountain Corps) held Perekop with the German 50th Infantry Division and the Sivash front with the German 336th and the Romanian 10th and 19th Infantry Divisions, backed by Assault Gun Brigade 279. In the east Allmendinger's V Corps held Kerch with the German 73rd and 98th Infantry Divisions, the Romanian 3rd Mountain and 6th Cavalry Divisions and Mountain Jäger Regiment Krim. Schwab's Romanian Mountain Corps (1st and 2nd Mountain, 9th Cavalry Divisions) guarded the south coast and fought the partisans; the German 111th Infantry Division was in reserve. The German divisions were understrength, much of the artillery was horse-drawn, and the defences of Sevastopol had barely been touched since 1942.

Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front and the Separate Coastal Army had about 462,000 men and some 560 tanks and assault guns, with the 8th and 4th Air Armies and the Black Sea Fleet's aviation overhead. The 19th Tank Corps alone had 221 tanks and assault guns, including 34 flamethrower T-34s and 63 Valentines. Zakharov's army had spent the winter rehearsing breaching drills and had pushed its trenches to within 150–200 yards of the German line; it went in with flamethrower tanks, KV-85s and ISU-152s in close support.

The battle

Breaking in, 8–11 April. After a day of air attacks on 7 April, the guns of 2nd Guards and 51st Armies opened at 0800 on 8 April and the infantry went in at 1030. At Perekop Chanchibadze's 13th Guards Rifle Corps took the first trenches and the rubble of Armyansk, but its armour stalled in a minefield. On the Sivash the Romanian 10th Infantry Division threw back the main attack, its supporting assault guns knocking out 27 of 32nd Guards Tank Brigade's 53 tanks, while a battalion waded across a lake to turn the flank of the Romanian 19th Division. On 9 April both fronts gave way: the Perekop line broke at about 1600, and the 63rd Rifle Corps broke the 19th Division. That evening Jaenecke ordered V Corps out of Kerch and Gruppe Konrad back towards the Gneisenau line around Simferopol, without asking the high command; Hitler raged but had to accept it. On 11 April the 19th Tank Corps burst out of the Sivash lodgment and reached Dzhankoy by 1100, taking Konrad's supply dumps.

The race to Sevastopol, 11–16 April. Yeremenko entered an empty Kerch on 11 April. Allmendinger's corps fled west along a single road under constant air attack, swung south through Stary Krym and down the coast road via Alushta and Yalta, with about 10,000 men taken off by sea from Sudak. Mountain Jäger Regiment Krim and two Romanian rearguard battalions were sacrificed to buy time; only three Romanians of those battalions reached Sevastopol. Soviet tanks took Simferopol on 13 April. A blocking force under Oberst Betz held the 19th Tank Corps at Bakhchisaray for twelve hours on 14 April, and by 16 April both corps were inside the Sevastopol perimeter, having lost most of their heavy weapons and nearly 30,000 men.

The fortress that wasn't, 16 April – 4 May. Romanian mountain troops held the first Soviet probes alone, knocking out 23 tanks on 15 April. Attacks on 19 and 23 April gained little, and Tolbukhin waited for his artillery. Hitler sent four battalions of half-trained recruits and summoned Jaenecke to Berchtesgaden; when Jaenecke insisted the army be withdrawn he was relieved, and Allmendinger took command of the 17th Army.

The storming of Sevastopol, 5–9 May. CDB90's Sevastopol (503, 5–10 May) opens with 2nd Guards Army's attack on the northern front on 5 May, after a two-hour barrage from 400 guns. It was a feint. On 7 May the 51st Army assaulted the Sapun Heights, held mostly by the 98th and 111th Infantry Divisions, from 1030; by evening Koshevoi's 63rd Rifle Corps was on the crest. South of it the Coastal Army's 16th Rifle Corps broke through the 73rd Division towards Karan. German counter-attacks on 8 May failed to retake the heights, and at 2300 that night Hitler authorised evacuation. On 9 May the 19th Tank Corps broke the line and by 1600 the last Germans had left the city.

Cape Chersonese, 10–13 May. The survivors fell back to a last line near Coastal Battery No. 35, where the peninsula's neck was under 900 yards wide, while German and Romanian convoys came in at night. Soviet aircraft sank the Totila and Teja on 10 May with some 9,000 men aboard. Late on 11 May the order to make for the boats became a scramble; ships missed their beaches and some sailed home empty. On 12 May Soviet tanks overran the airstrip and the last pockets. General Hartmann of XLIX Mountain Corps got away on the Romanian minelayer Amiral Murgescu; Böhme of the 73rd Division was captured on the morning of 13 May.

Aftermath

The 17th Army lost close to 100,000 men, most of them in the last week. About 8,000 drowned when the Totila and Teja went down, and more than 20,000 were captured on the Chersonese, where many who tried to surrender were shot out of hand. Of five German division commanders, two were killed, one wounded and one captured. The evacuated divisions had lost virtually all their vehicles and artillery. The Soviet victory cost under 85,000 casualties, about 17,750 of them dead or missing: a cheap triumph by Eastern Front standards.

The argument began at once. Allmendinger and Schörner blamed the German and Romanian navies for convoys that turned back or loaded only part of their capacity; the admirals were awarded the Knight's Cross four days later. Forczyk and the Romanian naval historian Sichigea both judge the army's case largely an attempt to find scapegoats. Romanians in turn complained that Germans were favoured in the evacuation, yet the three Romanian mountain divisions came out in better shape than any German one, and the affair fed the collapse of German–Romanian trust that summer.

The evacuation had in fact saved over 120,000 people across April and May, a large share of them before the final assault. Hitler ordered a court martial for Jaenecke, which Guderian deliberately slowed, and barred both him and Allmendinger from command until it reported. Within a week of the liberation the NKVD deported the Crimean Tatars en masse.

Wargaming it

The Crimea 1944 offers two very different games. The operational one, at division or regiment scale, 5 km hexes and daily turns, runs from 8 to 16 April: a breakthrough at two narrow chokepoints, Perekop and the Sivash, followed by a race between Soviet tanks and two retreating German corps, one of them strung out along a single coast road from Kerch. The Axis player must decide when to run and how much to sacrifice in rearguards; the Soviet player must get the 19th Tank Corps through the Sivash bridge in time to cut the roads to Sevastopol. Hitler's interference can be modelled as delays before any withdrawal order.

The tactical game, at company or battalion level over a single day, is 7 May on the Sapun Heights: Soviet rifle corps climbing a steep, wired ridge under machine-gun fire, with the ammunition state of the attacker and the timing of the German counter-attack on 8 May deciding the outcome. Sapun Ridge is the key terrain for the whole battle, since it overlooks the entire beachhead to Cape Chersonese.

The endgame suits an unusual scenario: a rearguard holding the Chersonese neck while ships come and go at night, scored by men evacuated rather than ground held. What-ifs include evacuation in March as the generals wanted, Allmendinger's corps caught at the Parpach Narrows, or Tolbukhin storming Sevastopol in mid-April before the defence had reorganised.

Maps and pictures