IF I NOW attempt to describe the battles fought in the Crimea by Eleventh Army and its Rumanian fellow-combatants, my main reason for doing so is to commemorate my comrades of the Crimean Army. At the same time I should like to give the men who survived those battles a general account of the events of which they could have had only an incomplete picture at the time.
These men put up a tremendous performance in the period 1941-2, fighting one battle after another against an adversary who almost invariably outnumbered them. In attack and pursuit their aggressive spirit was unparalleled; and when the situation appeared hopeless they would stand and fight unflinchingly. Often they may not have known what compelled us to make demands on them that seemed impossible to fulfil, or why they were flung from one action to another and from one front to the next. And yet they went to the very limit of endurance to carry out these demands, reciprocating the trust of those who led them.
But Eleventh Army’s campaign in the Crimea also deserves attention outside the immediate circle of its participants, for it is one of the few cases where an army was still able to operate independently in a segregated theatre of war, left to its own devices and free of interference from the Supreme Command. It was a campaign which, in ten months of incessant fighting, included both offensive and defensive battles, mobile warfare with full freedom of action, a headlong pursuit operation, landings by an enemy in control of the sea, partisan engagements and an assault on a powerfully defended fortress.
Finally, the campaign is of interest because it was fought over the Black Sea peninsula which even today bears traces of the Greeks, Goths, Genoese and Tartars. Once before, in the war of 1854-6, this had been a focal point of history, and the names of places which played a role then—the Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman and Malakoff will be heard here all over again.
Operationally, however, the war of 1854-6 can in no way be compared with the campaign fought in 1941-2. In the former case the Western Powers enjoyed naval supremacy and all the advantages this implies, whereas in the Crimean campaign of 1941-2 it was the Russians who controlled the Black Sea. Our Eleventh Army had not only to conquer the Crimea and Sevastopol, but also to contend with all the possibilities open to the Russians by reason of their mastery at sea.
On 17th September 1941 I arrived at Eleventh Army H.Q. in Nikolayev, the Russian naval base at the mouth of the Bug, and took over command.
My predecessor, Colonel-General Ritter v. Schobert, had been buried in the city the day before. On one of his daily visits to the front he had landed on a Russian minefield in his Fieseler Storch aircraft, and both he and his pilot had been killed. In him the German Army lost an officer of great integrity and one of its most experienced front-line soldiers. His troops would have followed him anywhere.
H.Q. Eleventh Army, whose operations staff was later to form the headquarters of Don Army Group, was almost without exception a superb team of men, and I have grateful memories of the assistance I received from so many splendid officers in two and a half tough years of war. We got on extraordinarily well together, and when I relinquished my command in 1944 many of them did not want to remain on the staff.
The novelty of my new position did not end with the expansion of my sphere of command from an army corps into an army. I did not discover until I reached Nikolayev that in addition to Eleventh Army I was also to take over Third Rumanian Army, which was affiliated to it.
For political reasons the actual chain of command in this part of the Eastern Front had not been easy to arrange.
Command of the allied forces committed from Rumania Third and Fourth Rumanian Armies and Eleventh German Army had been entrusted to the Rumanian Head of State, Marshal Antonescu, but at the same time he was bound by the directives of Southern Army Group, commanded by Field-Marshal v. Rundstedt. H.Q. Eleventh Army had been acting as the connecting link between the Marshal and Army Group H.Q. and had advised him on operational matters.
By the time I arrived, however, the situation was such that Antonescu only retained control of Fourth Rumanian Army, which he had directed to attack Odessa. The other Rumanian army taking part in the campaign, the Third, had been placed under command of Eleventh Army, which henceforth took its orders direct from H.Q. Southern Army Group.
At the best of times it is embarrassing for an army headquarters to have to control another self-contained army in addition to its own, and the task was necessarily twice as difficult when the army in question happened to be an allied one. What made things harder still was that there were not only certain differences of organization, training and leadership between the two armies — as is always the case where allies are concerned but also a noticeable contrast in their fighting qualities. From time to time this led us to take a firmer hand in our ally’s handling of an operation than was usual with our own forces or desirable in the interest of good relations.
That we were able, despite these difficulties, to collaborate with the Rumanian headquarters staffs and fighting units without any real friction occurring was primarily due to the loyalty of the commander of Third Rumanian Army, General (later Colonel-General) Dumitrescu. The German liaison teams which we had attached to all Rumanian staffs down to divisional level also contributed by their tact, and when necessary by their firmness, to this co-operation.
The man most deserving of mention in this respect, however, is Marshal Antonescu. Whatever verdict posterity may pass on him as a politician, Antonescu was a real patriot, a good soldier and certainly our most loyal ally. He was a soldier who, having once bound up his country’s destiny with that of the Reich, did everything possible until his overthrow to put Rumania’s military power and war potential to effective use on our side. If this did not always work out quite as he had hoped, the reason was to be found in the internal circumstances of his State and his régime. At all events, he remained faithful to his allies, and I can only speak with gratitude of our work together.
As for the Rumanian Army, there is no doubt that it had considerable weaknesses. Although the Rumanian soldier who was usually of peasant origin was modest in his wants and usually a capable, brave fighter, the possibilities of training him as an individual fighting man who could think for himself in action, let alone as a non-commissioned officer, were to a great extent limited by the low standard of general education in Rumania. In cases where members of the German minority did come up to the necessary standard, Rumanian national prejudice tended to impede any advancement. Neither were such outmoded practices as flogging likely to improve the quality of the rank and file. Their effect was rather to make Rumanian soldiers of German stock do everything they could to join one of the German armed services or since the latter were not allowed to accept them the Waffen-SS.
One disadvantage as far as the inner stability of Rumanian troops was concerned was the absence of a non-commissioned officer corps as we know it. I am afraid people in Germany nowadays are all too ready to forget what a debt we have owed in the past to our excellent body of regular N.C.O.s.
Another factor of far-reaching importance was that a considerable proportion of the Rumanian officers holding senior and medium appointments were not up to requirement. Most of all, the Rumanians lacked that close link between officers and men which tends to be taken for granted in the German Army. Man management with them was entirely devoid of the ‘Prussian’ tradition.
Because they had no war experience, the combat training of the Rumanians fell short of the exigencies of modern warfare. This led to unnecessary losses, which in turn was bound to affect morale.
The military leaders, who had been under French influence since 1918, still thought in terms of World War I. Weapons and equipment were partly obsolete and also inadequate. This was particularly true of the anti-tank units, with the result that they could hardly be expected to hold their ground against Soviet tank attacks. Whether Germany could not have rendered more effective help in this respect is a question for others to decide.
One final drawback regarding the use of Rumanian troops on the Eastern Front was their terrific respect for ‘the Russians’. In difficult situations this was liable to end in a panic. Indeed, it is a problem of which account must be taken in any war against Russia involving South-East European nations. In the case of the Bulgarians and Serbs the insecurity is increased by their sense of Slavonic affinity.
There was one other factor that could not be entirely disregarded in any assessment of the combat efficiency of Rumanian troops. At the time with which we are dealing Rumania had already attained her fundamental war aim, the reconquest of Bessarabia. Even ‘Transnistria’, the territory between the Dniester and Bug which she had been persuaded to accept by Hitler, did not really lie within the scope of Rumania’s aspirations. It was understandable that the idea of pushing even further into the Russia they dreaded so much was none too warmly received by many Rumanians.
Despite all the defects and reservations mentioned above, however, the Rumanian troops performed their duty as best they could. Above all, they always readily submitted to German military leadership and did not, like other allies of ours, put matters of prestige before material necessity. Undoubtedly the soldierly mentality of Marshal Antonescu exerted a decisive influence in this respect.
To sum up, the verdict given me at the time by my advisers was that in the event of any substantial losses Third Rumanian Army would cease to be capable of offensive action and only be fit for defence if reinforced by German ‘corset bones’.
The sector I had to command formed the southernmost wing of the Eastern Front. Broadly speaking, it embraced the Crimea and the part of the Dnieper bend south of Zaporozhye. There was no direct contact with the main forces of Southern Army Group advancing north of the Dnieper, which was all to the good as far as Eleventh Army’s operational freedom was concerned. After the forest tracts of northern Russia in which I had last had to operate with a tank corps unsuited to that type of country, I now found myself in the vast expanses of the steppes, which were almost entirely devoid of natural obstacles, even if they did not offer any cover either. It was ideal tank country, but unfortunately Eleventh Army had no tanks.
The only variety was offered by the smaller rivers, the beds of which dried up in summer-time to form deep, steep-banked fissures known as balkas. Nevertheless, the very monotony of the steppes gave them a strange and unique fascination. Everyone was captivated at one time or other by the endlessness of the landscape, through which it was possible to drive for hours on end often guided only by the compass without encountering the least rise in the ground or setting eyes on a single human being or habitation. The distant horizon seemed like some mountain ridge behind which a paradise might beckon, but it only stretched on and on. The poles of the Anglo-Iranian telegraph line, built some years before by Siemens, alone served to break the eternal sameness of it all. Yet at sunset these steppes were transformed into a dazzling blaze of colour. In the eastern part of the Nogaisk Steppes, around and north-east of Melitopol, one came upon lovely villages with such German names as Karlsruhe and Helenental. They lay in the midst of rich fruit plantations, their well-built stone houses bearing witness to a past prosperity. The inhabitants still spoke the purest German, but they were almost all old men, women and children. The men had been deported by the Soviet authorities.
The task assigned to Eleventh Army by the Supreme Command inevitably committed it in two divergent directions.
On one hand, by advancing on the right wing of Southern Army Group, it was intended to continue pursuing the enemy as he withdrew eastwards. To this end the main body of the army was to be brought forward along the north coast of the Sea of Azov in the general direction of Rostov.
On the other hand, the army was also meant to take the Crimea a task given special priority. One reason for this was the favourable effect the capture of the peninsula was expected to have on the attitude of Turkey. Another even more pressing one was the threat of the enemy’s big Crimean air bases to the Rumanian oilfields, so vital to Germany. After the Crimea had been taken, the Eleventh Army’s corps of mountain troops was to move over the Straits of Kerch towards the Caucasus, evidently to reinforce an offensive beyond Rostov.
At that time, therefore, the Supreme Command still had pretty far-reaching aims for the 1941 campaign. It was soon to become apparent that the dual role allotted to Eleventh Army was unrealistic.
At the beginning of September Eleventh Army had forced a crossing over the lower Dnieper at Berislavl an exceptional feat of arms in which the main part had been played by 22 (Lower Saxon) Infantry Division. Nonetheless, it marked the point where the duality of the army’s task inevitably brought about a cleavage in its axis of advance.
When I took command I found myself confronted by the following situation:
Two army corps 30 Corps under General v. Salmuth (72 and 22 Infantry Divisions and the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler) and 49 Mountain Corps under General Kubier (170 Infantry Division and 1 and 4 Mountain Divisions) had continued their eastward pursuit of the enemy after his defeat on the Dnieper and were approaching the line from Melitopol to the Dnieper bend south of Zaporozhye.
One corps the 54th under General Hansen had been diverted to the approach to the Crimea, the Perekop isthmus. 50 Infantry Division, which had come from Greece, was partly under Fourth Rumanian Army before Odessa and partly engaged in mopping up the Black Sea coast.
Third Rumanian Army, comprising a mountain corps (1, 2 and 4 Mountain Brigades) and a cavalry corps (5, 6 and 8 Cavalry Brigades), was still west of the Dnieper, where it proposed to rest for a while. In doing so it was probably guided by a desire to avoid any advance beyond the river, since it had already exceeded Rumania’s political aims in having to cross the Bug.
Faced with this dual mission of pursuing the enemy eastwards to Rostov and conquering the Crimea for a subsequent drive through Kerch to the Caucasus, Eleventh Army Headquarters had to decide whether to deal with the two divergent tasks simultaneously or in chronological order. A decision which was really the responsibility of the Supreme Command was thus left to an army.
It seemed quite certain that both tasks could not be solved simultaneously with the forces we had at our disposal.
The capture of the Crimea called for a considerably stronger force than 54 Corps, now facing Perekop. Although the Intelligence picture indicated that only three divisions of the enemy army were likely to have escaped from the Dnieper into the isthmus, it was not clear what forces the Russians had available in the Crimea itself, particularly at Sevastopol. Soon afterwards it emerged that the enemy could put not three but six divisions into action in the isthmus itself. These were later to be reinforced by the Soviet Army then defending Odessa.{10}
In view of the nature of the ground, however, a stubborn defence by even three enemy divisions would probably suffice to deny 54 Corps access to the Crimea or at least to cause it considerable losses in the fight through the isthmus.
The Crimea is divided from the mainland by the so-called Lazy Sea, the Zivash. This is a kind of mud-flat or brackish swamp, almost impassable for infantry and an absolute obstacle to assault boats on account of its extreme shallowness. There are only two firm approaches to the Crimea the isthmus of Perekop in the west and a neck of land running west of Genichesk in the east. The latter is so narrow in places as only to leave room for a causeway and railway embankment, both of which are interspersed with long stretches of bridges. For the purpose of an attack, therefore, it was quite useless.
As even the Perekop isthmus was less than five miles wide, the assault would have to be purely frontal and over ground quite devoid of cover. A flanking attack was ruled out by the proximity of the sea on either side. In addition to being already equipped with strong field defences, the isthmus was cut straight across the middle by Tartars’ Ditch, an ancient earthwork anything up to 50 feet in depth.
Once the Perekop isthmus had been broken through, there was another bottle-neck to be tackled further south at Ishun, where salt lakes reduced the potential assault front to a mere two miles.
In view of these difficulties on the ground and the enemy’s superiority in the air, we had to expect a hard and exhausting struggle. Even if we succeeded in breaking through at Perekop, it was doubtful whether the corps would still have the strength to fight a second battle at Ishun. In any case, two or three divisions would never be enough to conquer the whole of the Crimea including Sevastopol.
To ensure a swift occupation of the Crimea, therefore, the army had at all costs to detach strong additional forces from its pursuit group now heading eastwards. What remained should still suffice for the pursuit as long as the enemy continued to withdraw though it would be too weak for an objective as remote as Rostov if he were to form a new front further back or actually bring up fresh forces.
Should it be considered crucial to advance on Rostov, the Crimea would have to be left behind for the time being. In that event, however, it would be difficult to tell when, if ever, the forces needed to conquer the peninsula could be made available. Besides, in the hands of an enemy with command of the sea the Crimea was liable to become a serious menace deep in the flank of the Eastern Front, quite apart from the fact that the air bases would continue to threaten the Rumanian oilfields.
If the attempt were made to conduct a far-reaching operation towards and beyond Rostov with two army corps and simultaneously to conquer the Crimea with one other corps, the only result could be that neither objective would be effectively attained.
Eleventh Army accordingly decided to give priority to the Crimea. At all costs we were determined not to tackle this task with insufficient forces. As a matter of course 54 Corps was given all the available army artillery, engineers and anti-aircraft guns, in addition to which it was to call forward 50 Infantry Division from its rear location at the latest in time for the second phase, the battle for the Ishun isthmus. But this was still not enough. It was imperative to have a second corps in order to conquer the Crimea quickly after the breakthrough if indeed it were not actually needed to fight through the lakes at Ishun. We decided that this should be the German Mountain Corps, which the Supreme Command had anyway earmarked in its directives to be moved up through Kerch to the Caucasus later on. Meanwhile this formation of two divisions could be put to better use in the mountainous parts of the southern Crimea than out in the steppes.
Apart from all this, an attempt was to be made, once we had broken into the peninsula itself, to take the fortress of Sevastopol by a surprise thrust with motorized units. For this purpose the Leibstandarte was to assemble behind 54 Corps when it went into the assault.
These dispositions naturally entailed a considerable weakening of the army’s eastern front. All that could be found to replace the forces there, apart from the elements of 22 Infantry Division being used on coastal defence north of the Crimea, was Third Rumanian Army. Despite the Rumanian inhibitions to which I alluded earlier, I was able to arrange in a personal talk with General Dumitrescu that his army should be moved quickly forward over the Dnieper.
It was perfectly clear that the measures taken by Eleventh Army would involve considerable risks if the enemy on its eastern front were to halt his retreat and try to regain the initiative there. This was the price that had to be paid if we were to avoid attempting the capture of the Crimea with inadequate forces.
While supply difficulties caused the preparations for 54 Corps’ attack on the Perekop isthmus to drag on till 24th September and our forces were still regrouping on the lines already indicated, there were signs of a change in the situation on the army’s eastern front from 21st September onwards.
The enemy had taken up prepared positions along a front from west of Melitopol to the Dnieper bend, with the result that the pursuit had to be discontinued. Nonetheless, the army went ahead with the disengagement of the German Mountain Corps, giving orders for the remaining German formations to be mixed in with those of Third Rumanian Army in order to keep the risk down to a minimum. The Rumanian cavalry corps in the southern sector of this front was incorporated into 30 German Corps, while Third Rumanian Army in the north took over 170 German Infantry Division to bolster the Rumanian mountain corps.
By 24th September 54 Corps was able to move in to the assault on the Perekop isthmus. Though given maximum artillery support, 45 and 73 Infantry Divisions had the hardest possible conditions to fight under, having to advance in blazing sunshine across salt steppes on which there was no trace of water or cover. The enemy had transformed the isthmus into a powerful, ten-mile-deep defence system, and he fought bitterly for every single trench and strong-point.
Nevertheless, after warding off strong enemy counter-attacks the corps took Perekop and crossed Tartars’ Ditch on 26th September. Three more days’ intensive fighting saw it through the rest of the enemy’s defence zone and, after the capture of the strongly defended locality of Armyansk, out into more open country. The enemy fell back between the Ishun lakes, having suffered heavy losses in killed and left 10,000 prisoners, 112 tanks and 135 guns in our hands.
But the fruit of this hard-won victory, the final break-out into the Crimea, could still not be plucked. Although the enemy’s losses had been heavy, the number of divisions facing the corps had meanwhile risen to six. In all likelihood any attempt to go straight ahead with the storming of the Ishun bottleneck would have been too much for our troops, in view of the relative strengths involved and the tremendous sacrifices it would have imposed on the German corps.
As for Eleventh Army’s proposal to have reinforcements to hand at this juncture in the form of the Mountain Corps and the Leibstandarte, the enemy had already thwarted it. Obviously anticipating that we were intent on a speedy conquest of the Crimea, he had brought fresh forces up to his front between the Sea of Azov and the Dnieper.
Here, on 26th September, he had attacked our Army’s eastern front with two new armies, the Eighteenth and Ninth, consisting of twelve divisions which were mainly new arrivals or recently rested. In the first assault he had admittedly failed to score any successes against our own 30 Corps though even here the situation became pretty tense but in the sector of Third Rumanian Army he had overrun the latter’s 4 Mountain Brigade and torn a gap ten miles wide in the army front. The brigade in question had lost the bulk of its artillery and seemed to be at the end of its tether. Both the other Rumanian mountain brigades had also suffered severe losses.
We now had no choice but to make the German Mountain Corps, which was already on its way to the Perekop isthmus, do a right-about turn in order to set about restoring the position of Third Rumanian Army. Simultaneously, moreover, Eleventh Army was virtually deprived of the services of its one fast-moving formation, the Leibstandarte, as we were now ordered by the Supreme Command to hold it in hand for the drive on Rostov as part of First Panzer Group, to which it would shortly be transferred. We thus had to abstain from using the Leibstandarte to exploit the success in the isthmus, and it was likewise ordered back to the eastern front.
In order to be close to the army’s two fronts, the army operations branch had on 21st September established a tactical headquarters at Askania Nova in the Nogaisk Steppes, which had once been the property of a German family, the Falz-Feins.
Formerly a model estate known all over Russia, it had now become a collective farm. The manor buildings were sadly neglected, and the retreating Soviet troops had destroyed all the machinery, just as they had thrown petrol over the mountains of threshed wheat lying out in the open air and set them on fire. The latter smouldered for weeks on end without our being able to extinguish them.
The increasing gravity of the situation on the army’s front impelled us to move close up behind the danger spot with a small tactical staff on 29th September. This is always an expedient measure in times of crisis, if only because it prevents subordinate staffs from pulling out early and making a bad impression on the troops. On the occasion in question it was particularly appropriate in view of the tendency of many Rumanian headquarters staffs to change their locations prematurely.
The same day, the German Mountain Corps and the Leibstandarte delivered a thrust into the enemy’s southern flank where he had broken into Third Rumanian Army but had failed to exploit his initial success properly. While it was possible to restore the situation in this area, a fresh crisis was brewing on the northern wing of 30 Corps, where a Rumanian cavalry brigade had given way. I had to intervene vigorously there and then to prevent its hasty withdrawal. The threatened breakthrough was then parried by swinging round the Leibstandarte to meet it.
Tense though the situation on our eastern front had become as a result of the events described above, it also had the makings of a golden opportunity. By launching repeated attacks to frustrate our intentions in the Crimea, the enemy had tied both his armies down on a frontal basis and obviously now had no further reserves with which to protect himself against the Dnieper crossings at Zaporozhye and Dniepropetrovsk, whence General v. Kleist’s First Panzer Group could break out against his northern flank. After I had made representations to Southern Army Group some days previously in favour of an intervention from this quarter, the appropriate orders were issued on 1st October. While Eleventh Army kept a tight hold on the still-attacking enemy, the panzer group steadily increased its pressure from the north. Now the enemy began to yield, and by 1st October it was the turn of 30 Corps and Third Rumanian Army to go over to the attack. In the next few days, in co-operation with First Panzer Group, we succeeded in encircling the mass of both enemy armies in the area Bol. Tokmak-Mariupol-Berdyansk or in destroying them as they retreated. Some 65,000 prisoners, 125 tanks and over 500 guns found their way into German hands on this occasion.
Following the Battle of the Sea of Azov a change was made in the order of battle of the German southern wing. The Supreme Command seemed to have realized that no army could simultaneously fight one operation in the direction of Rostov and another in the Crimea, and from now on the advance on Rostov was entrusted to First Panzer Group, to which Eleventh Army was ordered to hand over 49 Mountain Corps and the Leibstandarte.
Eleventh Army was given the sole task of conquering the Crimea with its two remaining army corps. Of these, 30 Corps comprised 22, 72 and 170 Infantry Divisions, and 54 Corps was composed of 46, 73 and 50 Infantry Divisions (one third of the last-named being still outside Odessa).
Third Rumanian Army, which now reverted to the command of Marshal Antonescu, was merely to be responsible for coastal defence on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. After I had approached the Marshal direct, however, he agreed to let me take the headquarters of the Rumanian mountain corps, with one cavalry and one mountain brigade under command, into the Crimea to screen the eastern coastline.
Now that Eleventh Army’s mission was reduced to the single aim of conquering the Crimea, however, the Supreme Command became all the more impatient for a corps to be put across the Straits of Kerch towards the Kuban at the earliest possible date.
Realizing from this demand how much Hitler was underestimating the enemy, Eleventh Army felt impelled to point out that the prior conditions for any such operation must be the complete clearance of the Crimea. The enemy would undoubtedly fight to the last for the peninsula and would abandon Odessa rather than Sevastopol.
Indeed, as long as the Soviets had even one foot in the Crimea there could be no question of throwing part of Eleventh Army which had only two corps anyway through Kerch to the Kuban. As it was, we took this opportunity to put in a bid for an extra corps of three divisions, and within the next few weeks primarily, one would suppose, because of Hitler’s above mentioned requirement the army was augmented by 42 Corps Headquarters and 132 and 24 Infantry Divisions. In consequence of the Russians’ desperate efforts to hold on to the Crimea, these reinforcements were to prove indispensable for the peninsula battles alone.
The immediate problem, however, was to resume the struggle for the approaches to the Crimea and to open up the way through Ishun. Just another assault operation, one might say. Yet that ten-day battle towers above the normal type of offensive action as a shining example of the aggressive spirit and self-sacrifice of the German soldier.
In it we lacked almost all the advantages which are generally regarded as prior necessities for an attack on fortified positions.
Numerical superiority was on the side of the Soviet defenders, not of the German attackers. Eleventh Army’s total of six divisions was very soon confronted by eight Soviet rifle and four cavalry divisions, for on 16th October the Russians had evacuated the fortress of Odessa until then the object of so many unsuccessful assaults by Fourth Rumanian Army and transferred the defending army to the Crimea by sea. Despite the Luftwaffe’s claim to have sunk 32,000 tons of shipping, the bulk of the convoys from Odessa had still made landfall at Sevastopol or harbours along the west coast of the peninsula. The first divisions of this Soviet army duly appeared at the battle-front shortly after the start of our offensive.
The German artillery was certainly superior to the enemy’s and effectively supported the attacking infantry. But on the enemy side armour-plated coastal batteries were able to intervene from the northwest coast of the Crimea and the southern bank of the Zivash without the German guns initially being able to get to grips with them. And while the Russians had abundant armour to draw on for their counterattacks, Eleventh Army did not possess a single tank.
Above all, senior commanders had hardly any opportunity to lighten the troops’ arduous task by tactical manœuvre. In that situation it was quite impossible to take the enemy by surprise, since all he had to do was to sit in his well-constructed fieldworks and wait for the assault to develop. As had been the case at Perekop, the sea on one side and the Zivash on the other excluded any possibility of outflanking or even enfilading the enemy. On the contrary, it was necessary to carry the attack forward purely frontally along the three narrow strips of land into which the isthmus was divided by the lakes lying within it.
The breadth of these three strips allowed us to commit only the three divisions of 54 Corps (73, 46 and 22) in the first instance, 30 Corps being unable to go in until a certain amount of elbow-room had been gained further south.
The salt steppes of the isthmus, flat as a pancake and bare of vegetation, offered no cover whatever to the attacker. Yet the air above them was dominated by the Soviet Air Force, whose fighters and fighter-bombers dived incessantly on any target they could find. Not only the front-line infantry and field batteries had to dig in: it was even necessary to dig pits for every vehicle and horse behind the battle zone as protection against enemy aircraft. Things got so bad that anti-aircraft batteries no longer dared to fire in case they were immediately wiped out from the air. Not until the last days of the offensive, after Mölders{11} and his fighter group had been called in to assist the army, could the sky be kept clear and even then only in the hours of daylight. At night-time not even Mölders could help.
Under such combat conditions, and in the face of an opponent who stubbornly defended every inch of ground, the demands made on the attacking troops were bound to be abnormally high and their losses very considerable. Throughout this period I was constantly on the road to see for myself how things were going and what assistance could be rendered to the fighting units in their difficult struggle.
I was alarmed by the way fighting power deteriorated. The divisions carrying out this tough assignment had already made heavy sacrifices at Perekop or in the Azov battle, and the time came when one wondered whether the struggle for the narrow corridors could possibly succeed or, assuming that we did manage to break through, whether our forces would still be equal to winning the Crimea from an enemy whose strength was constantly on the increase.
By 25th October the troops seemed too exhausted to go on with the attack. Twice already the commander of one particularly good division had reported that the regiments under his command were at the end of their strength. This was the hour that usually comes sooner or later in such a contest, when the outcome of the battle is on the razor’s edge. It was the hour that must show whether the will of the attacker to exert himself to the very limit of physical endurance is stronger than that of the defender to go on resisting.
The struggle of deciding whether to call for a last supreme effort, at the risk of having ultimately demanded all that sacrifice in vain, is one that can only be fought out in the heart of the commander concerned. It would be pointless, however, were it not inspired by the confidence of the troops and their determination not to give up the fight.
Eleventh Army was not prepared, after all it had had to ask of the fighting troops, to throw victory away through its own weakness at what might be one minute to twelve. As it turned out, the unbroken aggressive spirit of the troops overcame even the enemy’s grim resolution to hold out. After one more day of hard effort, 27th October brought the final success. On 18th October, at the end of ten days of the most bitter fighting, the Soviet defence collapsed. Eleventh Army could take up the pursuit.
The chase which followed gave one more splendid example of the boldness and initiative of commanders at all levels and the self-denial of the fighting troops. The sight of those regiments, weakened by their heavy losses and well-nigh exhausted by the unprecedented demands of the campaign, yet racing towards the tempting goal of the South Crimean coast, put one in mind of the soldiers of another army who in 1796 stormed the fields of Italy promised them by Napoleon.
By 16th November the furious chase was over, and the whole of the Crimea except for the fortified area of Sevastopol was in our hands. The six divisions of Eleventh Army had wiped out the best part of two enemy armies totalling twelve rifle and four cavalry divisions. Of his initial strength of around 200,000 men, the enemy had lost over 100,000 as prisoners in the struggle for the two necks of land and the pursuit that followed, as well as 700 guns and 160 tanks. What troops had been able to escape across the Straits of Kerch or into Sevastopol were mere debris and without any heavy weapons. The fact that those taking refuge in the fortress could immediately be reformed into proper units was due to the enemy’s command of the sea, which enabled him to bring in replacements and stores with a minimum of delay.
While the administrative branches of Eleventh Army H.Q. moved into Zimferopol, the largely Russianized capital of the Crimea lying in beautiful surroundings on the northern edge of the Yaila Mountains, our tactical headquarters went to Zarabus, a sizeable village north of the city, where we found very suitable accommodation in one of the new schools built by the Soviets in almost all the bigger country places. I personally lived with the Chief-of-Staff in the small farmhouse of the fruit-growing collective, where each of us had a modest room to himself. The furniture in my own consisted of a bed, a table and chair, a stool for the wash bowl to stand on, and a few clothes-hooks. Naturally we could have obtained some furniture from Zimferopol, but our staff did not believe in indulging in comforts which the ordinary soldier had to do without.
Except for two brief stays at a command post on the Kerch front and the period in which the tactical headquarters was up in front of Sevastopol, we remained in these unpretentious quarters until August 1942. After the nomadic life we had led to date it was a complete change for all of us, though not necessarily a welcome one. Whenever a formation staff becomes static, the inevitable result is not only a settled day-to-day routine but also a return to the ‘paper war’. I fought the paper war of that winter in my classroom between two little brick stoves we had built on the Russian pattern, the heating system having naturally been destroyed by the Soviets.
At this point I might touch on a problem which, even though it receded before the grave anxieties which the winter of 1941-2 was to cause us in the operational sphere, was always a matter of great concern to me. The man who commands an army is also its supreme arbiter, and the hardest task that can ever confront him is the confirmation of a death sentence. On one hand it is his inexorable duty to maintain discipline and, in the troops’ own interest, to inflict severe penalties for delinquency in action. On the other, it is a grim thought to know that one can snuff out a human life by a mere signature. Of course, death claims thousands of victims a day in war, and every soldier expects to have to lay down his life. Yet there is a very big difference between falling honourably in battle and facing the muzzles of one’s comrades’ rifles to be ignominiously erased from the ranks of the living.
When, of course, a soldier had besmirched the honour of the army by some base action or culpably brought about the death of his comrades, there could be no mercy. But there were plenty of other cases caused not by sheer baseness of character but by some perfectly explainable human lapse. Even so, the court-martial concerned had to pass the death sentence according to the full rigour of military law.
In no case involving a death sentence was I ever content to base my final decision on the verbal elucidations of my army judges admirable men though they were but I always made a careful study of the files myself. When two soldiers in my corps were sentenced to death on the outbreak of war for raping and killing an old woman, they only received their just deserts. A very different case was that of a man who, after winning the Iron Cross in the Polish campaign, had been posted to a strange unit following a spell in hospital. On his very first day there his whole machine-gun crew was killed, whereupon he lost his nerve and fled. By law, it is true, his life was forfeit, but there still seemed grounds in this instance even though the man had been guilty of cowardice and thereby of endangering unit morale for applying a different yardstick. As I could not immediately quash the sentence passed by the court martial, the procedure I adopted in this and other such cases was to consult the man’s regimental commander and, subject to the latter’s agreement, to suspend the sentence for four weeks. If the man redeemed himself in action during this time, I quashed the sentence. If he failed again, it was carried out. Of all the condemned men to whom this probationary period was granted, only one went over to the enemy. All the others either proved their worth or died like true soldiers in the heavy fighting in the east.
Eleventh Army’s task now was to assault the enemy’s last Crimean stronghold, Sevastopol. The sooner this was achieved, the less time the enemy would have to organize his defence and the greater would be the prospect of success. What was more, it reduced the likelihood of an intervention from the sea.
According to our calculations, the necessary troop movements and ammunition-dumping would be complete by 27th or 28th November. Consequently we made this the deadline for the start of the offensive.
At this point the Russian winter overtook us, its impact being all the more devastating by reason of the two different forms it took. In the Crimea itself the rains came, very soon rendering all the unpaved roads there quite unusable. The mainland in the north, on the other hand, was already in the grip of severe frosts which promptly immobilized four of the only five railway engines then available south of the Dnieper. In consequence Eleventh Army often found its supplies reduced to as little as one or two trainloads a day. Though there was ice on the Dnieper, it still would not hold, and so far no ice-free bridges existed.
And so the preparations for the assault dragged on. Instead of 27th November, the preliminary bombardment could not start until 17th December. At last, after a three-weeks delay which was ultimately to prove crucial, 54 and 30 Corps were able to launch their attacks against the northern and southern sectors respectively. Prior to this, however, Eleventh Army had had a difficult decision to make. On 17th October the critical turn of events around Rostov had caused the Army Group to order the immediate hand-over of 73 and 170 Infantry Divisions. Despite all our warnings that this would make it impossible to attack Sevastopol, we had only been allowed to keep 170 Division, which was still moving along the coast to join 30 Corps, and would not have reached Rostov in time anyway. This concession did not alter the fact that the removal of 73 Division deprived the assault on the northern sector of its necessary reserve element, and we had to make up our minds whether in these circumstances we could afford to attack at all. In the event, we decided to risk it.
It is not possible here to describe the course of the attack in detail. The first task was to drive the enemy, by a surprise thrust from the east, from his forward area between the Kacha and Belbek, and at the same time to capture his strong-points in the Belbek valley and along its southern elevation. Thereupon the assault would be carried forward through the actual fortress glacis south of the Belbek right up to Severnaya Bay. The main responsibility for the success of this battle lay with the valiant 22 (Lower Saxon) Infantry Division, under its outstanding commander, Lieutenant-General Wolff. It cleared the forward area between the Kacha and Belbek of the enemy, stormed the heights south of the Belbek valley with 132 Infantry Division and drove into the fortified zone proper to the south of the latter. But the spearhead of the attack was steadily narrowing, as 50 and 24 Infantry Divisions, whose task was to advance towards Severnaya Bay from the east, were not making any real progress in the difficult mountain country, parts of which were overgrown with almost impenetrable bush. The heavy fighting for the pill-boxes, which the enemy defended with stubborn determination, was sapping the strength of our troops, and the severe cold to which they were henceforth exposed taxed their energies to the utmost. Nevertheless, in the last few days of December the struggle having continued all through Christmas the tip of the spearhead drew near to Fort Stalin, the capture of which would at least have given our artillery visual command of Severnaya Bay. All we needed now were fresh troops and the drive to the bay was bound to succeed. But these were just what we had lacked since handing over 73 Division, and not even by drastically packing the assault divisions into the spearhead of the attack could we make good the loss.
Such was the situation when the Soviet landings struck, first at Kerch and then at Feodosia. The threat was a deadly one, coming as it did at the very moment when the entire forces of the army, except for one German division and two Rumanian brigades, were in action around Sevastopol!
It was clear that we should have to throw forces from Sevastopol to the threatened points with the utmost speed. The slightest delay might prove fatal. But ought the attack on Sevastopol to be abandoned just when only one more push seemed necessary to gain command of Severnaya Bay?
Furthermore, it would almost certainly be easier to disengage forces from Sevastopol after a success on the northern front than if one were to let go of the enemy prematurely.
Eleventh Army accordingly decided to accept the risk involved in every further hour’s postponement of the release of troops from Sevastopol. Initially only 30 Corps was ordered to halt its assault, and 170 Division was dispatched to the threatened Kerch peninsula. At the same time, with the agreement of the commander of 54 Corps and his divisional commanders, a final attempt was to be made on the northern front to reach the assault objective, Severnaya Bay.
As always, the troops gave everything they had, and 22 Division’s vanguard, 16 Infantry Regiment, under Colonel v. Choltitz, actually penetrated the outer ring of Fort Stalin. By then everyone’s strength had given out, and on 30th December the commanders of the assault divisions reported that no further attempts to carry on with the attack could be expected to succeed. After urgent representations by telephone through Army Group had convinced even Hitler that such action was necessary, Eleventh Army Headquarters issued orders for the attack to be finally stopped. Over and above this, it was reluctantly compelled to order the withdrawal of the northern front to the heights north of the Belbek valley. But for these measures the requisite forces could not have been released to say nothing of the fact that the situation within the narrow confines of the spearhead would anyway have been untenable in the long run. Hitler’s disapproval of this decision, which though he could do nothing about it clashed with the strict ban he had just placed on any voluntary withdrawals, weighed little in comparison with one’s own responsibility to the troops who had sacrificed so much.
And so the first attempt to storm the fortress of Sevastopol had failed.
The landing of Soviet troops on the Kerch peninsula, catching Eleventh Army just when the battle on the northern front of Sevastopol had entered its crucial phase, soon proved to be more than a mere diversionary measure on the enemy’s part. Soviet radio stations proclaimed that this was an all-out offensive to re-conquer the Crimea, planned and commanded by Stalin personally, and that it would not end until Eleventh Army had been wiped off” the map. That the threat was no empty one soon became apparent from the weight of enemy forces committed. Behind them, and in the utter ruthlessness with which they were expended, one sensed the brutal will of Stalin.
On 26th December, after crossing the Straits of Kerch, the enemy had begun by landing two divisions on either side of the city. Smaller landings followed on the northern coast of the peninsula. The position of 42 Corps (General Count Sponeck), which depended solely on 46 Infantry Division for the defence of the peninsula, was certainly not an enviable one. Count Sponeck accordingly requested permission to evacuate the peninsula in the hope that it could be sealed off at Parpach. Eleventh Army did not agree with him, for if the enemy succeeded in establishing a firm footing at Kerch, the upshot would be a second front in the Crimea and an extremely dangerous situation for the entire army as long as Sevastopol remained untaken. Consequently we ordered 42 Corps to strike while the enemy was still off balance after his landing and to hurl him back into the sea. At the same time, in order to keep the whole of 46 Division free for this task, we sent 4 and 8 Rumanian Mountain Brigades of which the former was around Zimferopol and the latter engaged in guarding the eastern coast of the Crimea to Feodosia to deal with any attempt the enemy might make to land at this critical spot. Simultaneously orders were given to the only regimental group of 73 Division still in the Crimea i.e. the reinforced 213 Infantry Regiment-to move on Feodosia from Genichek.
By 28th December, 46 Infantry Regiment actually succeeded in eliminating both the enemy beach-heads north and south of Kerch, except for a small body of troops still fighting on the northern shore. In spite of this, Count Sponeck again asked permission to evacuate the Kerch peninsula. This we categorically forbade, still being convinced that any surrender of the Kerch peninsula might well lead to a situation which the army would be unable to master with the forces at its disposal.
Meanwhile, on 28th December, 54 Corps had moved off for its last attack on Sevastopol.
Yet the enemy was on the point of delivering a new blow. Early on 29th December we heard that he had carried out a night landing at Feodosia under cover of strong naval forces. Our own weak forces there (one engineer battalion, anti-tank troops and some coastal batteries the Rumanians not having started to arrive until the following morning) had been unable to stop the landing. Our telephone link with 42 Corps Headquarters, which was located somewhere in the middle of the peninsula, was out of action, but at 1000 hours we were notified by radio that Count Sponeck had ordered the immediate evacuation of the peninsula because of the new landings at Feodosia. Though we immediately issued a countermand, it was never picked up by 42 Corps Signals. While fully appreciating the corps’ anxiety not to be cut off by the enemy at Feodosia, we still did not believe that the situation would in any way be improved by a headlong withdrawal.
Simultaneously with countermanding the evacuation of the Kerch peninsula, Eleventh Army ordered the Rumanian Mountain Corps to throw the enemy forces disembarked at Feodosia straight back into the sea with the help of the two brigades mentioned earlier and a Rumanian motorized regiment now in the process of moving up. Although we had no illusions about the offensive capacity of these Rumanian formations, the enemy could still not be present at Feodosia in any real strength, and if we struck with real determination, it should be possible to catch him at a disadvantage. At the worst, we felt, the Rumanians would manage to contain the enemy in a narrow beach-head around Feodosia until German troops could get there.
Even this hope was to prove illusory, however. Far from carrying home its attack on Feodosia, the Rumanian Mountain Corps actually allowed a handful of Soviet tanks to push it right back to a point east of Stary Krim.
By a series of forced marches 46 Infantry Division did in fact reach the narrow stretch of land at Parpach. In doing so, however, it had to abandon most of its guns on the ice-covered roads, and its troops arrived in a state of complete exhaustion. From the small beach-head still in his hands north of Kerch the enemy was immediately able to take up the pursuit, the speed with which his reinforcements arrived being due to the freezing-over of the straits. Had the Soviet commander pressed home his advantage properly by pursuing 46 Division really hard from Kerch and thrusting relentlessly after the Rumanians as they fell back from Feodosia, the fate of the entire Eleventh Army would have been at stake. As it happened, he did not know when to take time by the forelock. Either he did not realize what a chance he had, or else he did not venture to seize it.
And so it was possible, with the help of an exhausted 46 Division, 213 Infantry Regiment (which had meanwhile arrived from Genichek) and the Rumanians, to build up a protective front — albeit a perilously thin one between the northern slopes of the Yaila Mountains near Stary Krim and the Zivash west of Ak-Monay. In order to stiffen the Rumanian troops and safeguard their heavy weapons, all available German officers and men, including those who could be spared from Eleventh Army Headquarters, were attached to Rumanian units.
By 15th January, 30 and 42 Corps were ready to counter-attack on the Feodosia front. The decision to risk this attack was a hard one, for it had to be launched with three and a half weakened German divisions and a Rumanian mountain brigade against an opponent whose strength had meanwhile increased to eight divisions and one brigade. The enemy, moreover, had a limited number of tanks at his disposal, whereas we had none at all. The support of the Luftwaffe was more than doubtful, since bad weather had prevented it from flying any sorties against Feodosia for the last few days. Nevertheless, we had to take the chance and attack.
Thanks to the bravery of the troops, the attack succeeded, and by 18th January Feodosia was ours. In addition to 6,700 dead, the enemy had lost 10,000 prisoners, 177 guns and 85 tanks. It now emerged that the Luftwaffe had still done a good job in Feodosia harbour, in spite of the bad flying conditions, and had sunk a number of transport vessels.
Our success at Feodosia naturally led us to consider the possibility of immediately exploiting it to get the Soviet armies right out of the Kerch peninsula. But desirable though this would have been, Eleventh Army decided, after careful reflection, that it could not be done with the resources available, especially now that a tank battalion and two bomber wings originally promised to us the very forces we should have needed for the task in question had had to go to the Army Group.
Eleventh Army thus had to dispense with any sweeping exploitation of its achievements at Feodosia and to content itself with throwing the enemy back as far as the Parpach bottleneck, where the Kerch peninsula could be sealed off between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. There was certainly nothing pusillanimous about this decision: we simply realized that after everything the troops had gone through to date, it might cause very serious reverses to demand too much of them now.
Even though the recapture of Feodosia and the sealing-off of the Kerch peninsula at Parpach had temporarily banished a mortal danger, we did not let that lull us into a false sense of security. At that particular time the enemy was striving everywhere on the Eastern Front to make good his defeats of the previous summer and to regain the initiative. Why should he make an exception of the Crimea, where his mastery of the sea offered him such exceptionally good prospects? Success here could have decisive repercussions on the entire situation in the East politically with regard to Turkey and economically through the recovery of a base for air operations against the Rumanian oilfields. Another point to consider was that Soviet propaganda had linked the offensive against the Crimea so closely with the name of Stalin that it was most unlikely to be called off.
And, sure enough, we soon discovered that the enemy was pushing reinforcements across to Kerch. Having possession of the frozen straits, he could put up with the loss of the port of Feodosia. Air photography continually showed the enemy to be concentrated in strength in his Black Sea harbours and the airfields in the area north of the Caucasus, and as early as 29th January Intelligence estimates of his strength on the Parpach front amounted to more than nine divisions, two rifle brigade groups and two independent tank brigades.
The Sevastopol front was also livening up again, particularly where the artillery was concerned.
After weeks of outward calm that were really loaded with tension, the enemy finally launched his big offensive on 27th February.
The heavy battles that followed on both the Parpach and Sevastopol fronts continued with unremitting violence until 3rd March. Then on both sides a period of exhaustion ensued. On the Parpach front we had eventually succeeded in containing the enemy breakthrough in the northern sector by making effective use of the marshlands there. Although the front was now a continuous one, however, it did recede quite a long way west in its northern part.
On 13th March the enemy began another mass attack, this time with eight rifle divisions and two independent armoured brigades ‘up’. While we were able to knock out 136 tanks in the first three days, a number of crises developed. The bitterness of the fighting may be judged from the fact that the regiments of 46 Division, which bore the main brunt of the assault on this occasion, had to beat off anything from ten to twenty-two attacks between them during the same three days.
On 18th March, 42 Corps had to report that it could no longer withstand any major attacks.
As the newly constituted 22 Panzer Division had arrived behind this front in the meantime, having been allocated to Eleventh Army by O.K.H., we decided that the extreme tenseness of the situation justified our employing it on a counter-attack. Our object was to regain the main fighting line we had originally held across the actual neck of the Parpach isthmus and thereby to cut off the two or three enemy divisions located in the northern salient.
Together with a very small tactical staff, I had moved into a command post close behind the threatened Parpach front in order to watch the preparations for the counter-attack being handled by 42 Corps Headquarters.
The attack, which took place on 20th March and was to be supported on either flank by 46 and 170 Infantry Divisions, proved a failure. The new armoured division ran straight into a Soviet assembly area in the early-morning mists. Obviously we had been wrong to throw it into a major battle before putting it through its paces in exercises with its parent formation. While this attack — despite its being directed at a relatively limited objective miscarried, the same division came fully up to expectations only a few weeks later, after completing its training under warlike conditions as part of a larger formation. But what else could we have done in the circumstances but risk committing it to battle? At least it had given the enemy a severe shock and checked his preparations for another big attack at just the critical moment. When the latter did materialize on 20th March, it was beaten off by 42 Corps. This time the enemy had committed only four divisions, either because he had temporarily exhausted his other formations or because he preferred to limit his objective now that tanks had been seen on our side for the first time.
In the meantime, while 22 Panzer Division was out of the line for a rest and refit, the advance elements of 28 Light Division also arrived behind the front.{12} We could now face any new enemy attack with equanimity.
It came — and this was the enemy’s last effort to reconquer the Crimea on 9th April, launched by between six and eight rifle divisions and supported by 160 tanks. By nth April it had been beaten off, with heavy losses to the enemy. With that the enemy’s offensive capacity in this part of the theatre was finally spent.
The stout-hearted divisions which had seen this defensive battle through to a successful conclusion, despite the tremendous strains it imposed on them, were now able to relax, even though they could not be taken out of the line.
Army Headquarters, on the other hand, turned from an arduous winter of unprecedented trials and crisis to the next task it had to tackle that of preparing its own offensive for the final expulsion of the Russians from the Crimea.
Between the penultimate and last defensive battle in the Kerch peninsula, Marshal Antonescu had come out to the Crimea and gone round with me on a tour of the Rumanian divisions and the Sevastopol front. In his soldierly way he made an excellent impression, and the senior Rumanian officers seemed to go in mortal fear of him. I was particularly grateful for his promise of two more Rumanian divisions, since apart from the two German divisions which had already arrived (22 Panzer and 28 Light), O.K.H. was unable to provide any further forces for the projected offensive.
According to O.K.H. directives, the final expulsion of the Soviets from the Crimea, including Sevastopol, was intended to preface the grand offensive which the Supreme Command planned to launch in the southern sector of the Eastern Front.
Eleventh Army’s first concern was obviously to destroy the enemy in the Kerch peninsula. One reason for this was the impossibility of predicting how long an operation to clear Sevastopol would take. The most important one, however, was that the Kerch front, being the easiest to reinforce, continued to constitute the main threat to Eleventh Army. The enemy here could be given no time to recover from the losses of his abortive attacks. Sevastopol would have to be shelved until the Soviet forces in the Kerch peninsula had been wiped out.
The relative strengths of the Russian and German forces in the Crimea, however, gave no grounds for any great optimism regarding the outcome of these two big undertakings. The enemy had three armies in the Crimea, under command of a Crimean Front Headquarters which appeared to have been only recently formed and was probably located in Kerch.
The Sevastopol fortress continued to be defended by the Coast Army, whose strength we had ascertained in February to be seven rifle divisions, one rifle brigade, two naval brigades and one dismounted cavalry division. During our Kerch offensive all we would have available to contain these forces on the northern and eastern fronts of the fortress were 54 Corps and the newly arrived 19 Rumanian Division, which had been put there to free 50 German Division for Kerch. The only force left on the southern front of Sevastopol would be 72 Infantry Division.
The Rumanian Mountain Corps, with only 4 Mountain Brigade under command, had to defend the entire south coast of the Crimea against surprise attacks from the sea. Thus Eleventh Army was having to strip the other fronts bare in order to attack at Kerch in the greatest possible strength.
On the Kerch front the enemy still had his Forty-Fourth and Fifty-First Armies. At the end of April 1942 they comprised seventeen rifle divisions, three rifle brigades, two cavalry divisions and four independent armoured brigades an aggregate of twenty-six formations.
Against this formidable array we were able to commit merely five German infantry divisions (inclusive of 50 Division from Sevastopol) and 22 Panzer Division. These were augmented by the newly arrived 7 Rumanian Corps, consisting of 19 Rumanian Division, 8 Rumanian Cavalry Brigade and 10 Rumanian Division the last-named having been moved over from the west coast. As the usefulness of these Rumanian forces in an offensive role was limited, the numerical disparity in the forthcoming offensive now being planned under the code-name ‘Bustard’ was increased still further.
It also had to be borne in mind that the attack through the Parpach gap must be a purely frontal one in the initial stages, as the seas on either side excluded any possibility of outflanking. What was more, the enemy had echeloned his defences in considerable depth. How were we in the circumstances, and in view of the enemy’s superiority of at least two to one, to achieve our object of destroying both his armies?
One thing was clear: neither a frontal push against the two enemy armies nor even a simple breakthrough could get us anywhere. If, after losing his Parpach positions, the enemy should manage to re-form his front anywhere else, our operation would inevitably be halted. The broader the Kerch peninsula became as one went east, the more the enemy would be able to make his numerical superiority felt. Our total of six German divisions might suffice for an attack through a mere 11-mile gap at Parpach, where the enemy could not put in all his forces simultaneously, but how should we fare further east when it came to fighting on a 25-mile front? The object must be, then, not only to break through the enemy’s Parpach front and achieve penetration in depth, but also to destroy either the main bulk, or at least a substantial part of his formations in the process of the first breakthrough.
In this respect the enemy himself offered us an opening. In his southern sector, between the Black Sea and Koy-Assan, he was, in the main, still sitting in the strongly prepared defences of his original Parpach front. His northern front, on the other hand, protruded well beyond the latter in a wide curve reaching as far west as Kiet and dating from the time when the enemy had overrun 18 Rumanian Division.
That the Soviet commander had considered the likelihood of our trying to cut off this bulge was clear from the way he had distributed his troops. According to our Intelligence reports he had massed two-thirds of his forces both in the line and in reserve — in or behind his northern sector. In the south, however, there were only three divisions in the line and two or three in reserve. Quite likely the abortive attack by 22 Panzer Division earlier on, the aim of which had been to cut off the enemy front in the region west of Koy Assan, was the reason for these dispositions.
Such was the situation on which Eleventh Army based its assault plan for Operation Bustard. We intended to make our decisive thrust not immediately in the area where the front protruded west, but down in the southern sector, along the Black Sea coast. In other words, in the place where the enemy would be least expecting it.
This task was to devolve on 30 Corps, composed of 28 Light, 132 and 50 Infantry and 22 Panzer Divisions. Although 170 Infantry Division would have to remain in the central sector in the initial phase in order to deceive the enemy, it, too, would subsequently follow through in the south.
The plan was that 30 Corps should break through the Parpach positions with three divisions ‘up’ and exploit over the deep anti-tank ditch in an eastward direction to enable 22 Panzer Division to cross this obstacle. Once the latter had moved up, the corps would wheel north and drive into the flank and rear of the enemy forces concentrated in the northern sector. Then, in co-operation with 42 Corps and 7 Rumanian Corps, it would finally surround the enemy on the north coast of the peninsula.
The protection of 30 Corps’ eastern flank against enemy attacks from the direction of Kerch was to be the responsibility of a mobile formation, Brigade Group Groddek, which was made up of German and Rumanian motorized units. It was to discharge its task offensively by advancing rapidly towards Kerch, since this would also serve to forestall any attempt by enemy elements in the rear to take evasive action.
In order to facilitate the difficult initial breakthrough at Parpach, Eleventh Army had made provisions for what was probably the first sea-borne assault-boat operation of its kind. A battalion travelling by assault boats from Feodosia was to be dropped in the rear of the Parpach positions at first light.
The decisive attack by the corps was to be supported not only by strong artillery but also by the whole of 8 Air Corps.
8 Air Corps, which also included strong anti-aircraft units, was by its structure the most powerful and hard-hitting Luftwaffe formation available for support of military operations. Its Commanding General, Baron v. Richthofen, was certainly the most outstanding Luftwaffe leader we had in World War II. He made immense demands on the units under his command, but always went up himself to supervise any important attack they made. Furthermore, one was constantly meeting him at the front, where he would visit the most forward units to weigh up the possibilities of giving air support to ground operations. We always got on extremely well together, both at Eleventh Army and later on at Southern Army Group. I remember v. Richthofen’s achievements and those of his Air Corps with the utmost admiration and gratitude.
On the rest of the Parpach front 42 Corps and 7 Rumanian Corps had the task of simulating an attack in order to pin the enemy down. As soon as a breakthrough had been effected in the south, they were both to join in the main assault.
The success of the operation depended on two things. The first was our ability to keep the enemy thinking that our decisive attack would come in the north until it was too late for him to back out of the trap or throw his reserves into the southern sector. The second was the speed with which 30 Corps and in particular 22 Panzer Division carried out the northward thrust.
The first of these requirements was achieved by extensive deception tactics. Apart from wireless deception, these involved laying on a sham artillery preparation in the central and northern sectors and moving troops around in the same area. Apparently they were entirely successful, as the bulk of the enemy’s reserves remained behind his northern wing until it was too late for them to move.
Immediately before the offensive began we lost our highly experienced Chief-of-Staff, General Wöhler, who had been such an invaluable support in the difficult days of the previous winter and played a leading role in the preparation of ‘Bustard’. Both of us found it particularly hard to part just as we had at last gained the initiative ourselves. However, Wöhler had been appointed Chief-of-Staff of Central Army Group, and I obviously could not put anything in the way of his advancement.
Wöhler’s successor was General Schulz, who was also to prove a sound counsellor and friend. He was an inestimable help to me in the most difficult phases of the 1943 winter campaign and throughout the time we were fighting to save Sixth Army. Apart from being a man of great personal courage, he had nerves of steel and a special awareness of the privations and needs of the fighting troops, as well as a most equable nature. Already, as Chief-of-Staff of a corps, he had won the knight’s cross in a most difficult situation. Later, as a corps commander in Southern Army Group, he was to prove a tower of strength.
On 8th May, Eleventh Army moved off on ‘Operation Bustard’.
30 Corps was able to cross the anti-tank obstacle and penetrate the enemy’s most forward positions, and the assault-boat expedition, by virtue of the surprise it achieved, had rendered considerable assistance to our right wing in its advance along the coast. Nevertheless, it was no easy battle. The ground gained on the far side of the ditch was not sufficient for the armoured division to be moved over, and the subsequent attack by 42 Corps only progressed with difficulty. Nevertheless, we had already engaged ten enemy divisions and shattered the enemy’s southern wing, and there was no indication that his reserves had moved away from the northern wing.
It was not possible to bring up and deploy 22 Panzer Division until 9th May, and before swinging north it had to fight off a strong tank attack. Then rain set in and continued all night, making it well-nigh impossible for the Luftwaffe’s close-support units to co-operate or for the tanks to make any headway on the morning of 10th May. Though the weather cleared in the afternoon, the twenty-four-hour time-lag was liable to be our undoing in an operation so dependent on speed of movement. It was consoling to know that before the rain started Brigade Group Groddek had been able to move swiftly east — a fact which subsequently enabled it to frustrate every enemy attempt to form a front further back. Evidently the enemy had not anticipated such a bold drive into the depths of his communications zone. Unluckily the valiant brigade commander, Colonel v. Groddek, was severely wounded in the course of the operation and died soon afterwards.
From 11th May onwards the operations proceeded without any serious hold-up. 22 Panzer Division got through to the coast in the north, bottling up some eight enemy divisions as it went, and the army was able to give the order for the pursuit to start. The troops, Rumanians included, strained every nerve to carry it through successfully, and by 16th May Kerch had fallen to 170 Division and 213 Regiment. Even then a great deal more heavy fighting was needed to mop up the enemy remnants which had trickled back to the east coast.
Before the attack was launched I had once again moved into a command post close behind the front, and now I was out all day long visiting divisional staffs and the front-line troops. For a soldier there was something unforgettable about this tempestuous chase. All the roads were littered with enemy vehicles, tanks and guns, and one kept passing long processions of prisoners. The view from a hill near Kerch, where I had a rendezvous with General v. Richthofen, was quite breath-taking. Down below us, bathed in glorious sunshine, lay the Straits of Kerch the goal we had dreamt of for so long. From the beach in front of us, which was crammed with Soviet vehicles of every possible description, enemy motor torpedo-boats made repeated attempts to pick up Soviet personnel, but they were driven off every time by our own gunfire. In order to spare our infantry any further sacrifices and bring about the surrender of the enemy elements still fighting back desperately along the coast itself, we had a mass artillery barrage laid down on these last pockets of resistance.
By 18th May the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula was over. Only small groups of the enemy continued to hold out in subterranean caves around Kerch for weeks to come under the pressure of a few fanatical commissars. According to the returns sent in, some 170,000 prisoners, 1,133 guns and 258 tanks had fallen into our hands.
Five German infantry divisions and one armoured, together with two Rumanian infantry divisions and one cavalry brigade, had annihilated two whole Soviet armies of twenty-six formations. Only negligible elements of the enemy had escaped across the straits of Kerch to the Taman Peninsula. A true battle of annihilation had been fought to a victorious finish!
Eleventh Army still faced the hardest task of all: the conquest of Sevastopol.
I had already apprised Hitler of our intentions regarding the assault on the fortress during a visit to his headquarters in mid-April. It was the first time I had met him since submitting my views to him on the conduct of the offensive in the west in February 1940. Even at this second meeting I had the impression that he was not only extremely well informed on every detail of the battles fought to date, but also thoroughly appreciated the operational arguments expounded to him. He listened attentively to what I had to say and fully agreed with Eleventh Army’s view on the way to conduct both the Kerch offensive and the assault on Sevastopol.
He made not the least effort to interfere in our plans or, as was so often the case later on, to ramble off into endless recitations of production figures.
One vital question was not discussed on that occasion, however: whether, in view of the offensive planned in the Ukraine, it was right to commit the whole of Eleventh Army to an attack on the powerful Sevastopol fortress for a period that could not be predetermined with any real certainty, particularly now that the victory on the Kerch peninsula had removed the threat in the Crimea. The settlement of this problem was clearly a matter for the Supreme Command, not for our own headquarters. Speaking for myself, I believed at the time, and still do today, that the decision to make Eleventh Army take Sevastopol first was the correct one. Had we continued merely to invest the fortress, a good three or four German divisions, plus the Rumanian forces in other words, half Eleventh Army would have continued to be tied up in the Crimea.
What was undoubtedly a mistake, however, was the Supreme Command’s decision, after Sevastopol’s timely fall, to withdraw Eleventh Army from the southern wing of the Eastern Front for use at Leningrad and for patching up gaps in the line. After the fall of Sevastopol this army ought as originally planned to have been taken across the Straits of Kerch to the Kuban to intercept the enemy forces falling back on the Caucasus from the lower Don before Army Group A. Had the time factor not permitted this, it should at any rate have been taken into reserve behind the southern wing. The Stalingrad tragedy might then have been averted.
Immediately after the Kerch operation Eleventh Army began regrouping for the assault on Sevastopol.
42 Corps was made responsible for safeguarding the Kerch peninsula and the south coast of the Crimea. The only German troops left to it for this purpose were those of 46 Infantry Division, in addition to which it had 7 Rumanian Corps, comprising 10 and 19 Infantry Divisions, 4 Mountain Division{13} and 8 Cavalry Brigade. All other forces were forthwith dispatched to Sevastopol.{14}
There could be no shadow of doubt that the assault on the fortress would be even tougher than that of the previous December, the enemy having had half a year in which to tighten up his fortifications, bring his manpower up to strength and stock up with stores from across the sea.
The strength of the Sevastopol fortress consisted less in up-to-date fortifications though a certain number of these did exist than in the extraordinary difficulty of the ground, which was dotted with innumerable smaller defence installations. These formed a thick network covering the entire area from the Belbek valley to the Black Sea coast.
The whole of the ground between the Belbek valley and Severnaya Bay in particular constituted a strongly developed fortress belt.
The northern front ran south of the Belbek, though north of this, too, the enemy had an extensive strong-point around and northwards of the locality of Lyubimovka. The valley itself and the slopes rising away to the south were enfiladed by a 30.5-cm. battery housed in a thoroughly up-to-date armoured emplacement, known to us as ‘Maxim Gorki I’. The slopes themselves were covered by a thick net of fieldworks 1 mile deep, some of which were concreted. Behind these came a series of strongly built, mainly concreted strong-points which our troops had nicknamed ‘Stalin’, ‘Volga’, ‘Siberia’, ‘Molotov’, ‘G.P.U.’ and ‘Cheka’, and which were mutually linked by a chain of dug-in positions. A final barrier to the northern shore of Severnaya Bay was formed by a defence zone of strong-points which included ‘Donetz’, ‘Don’, ‘Lenin’, the fortified locality of Bartenyevka, the old North Fort and the coastal batteries on ‘Battery Headland’. Into the cliffs overlooking the bay the Russians had driven chambers for storing supplies and ammunition.
The eastern front branched off the northern one at a point about a mile and a quarter east of the village of Belbek, the hinge between the two being protected by the precipitous Kamyshly Ravine. The northern part of this eastern front ran through a stretch of the dense undergrowth with which the steep spurs of the Vaila Mountains in this area are covered. In this undergrowth there were countless small pockets of resistance some of them nestling in holes blown in the rock which an attacker could hardly touch with his artillery. This wooded northern sector of the eastern front ended in the steep cliffs south and south-east of the locality of Gaytany.
Though the woods petered out further south, the ground became increasingly difficult down towards the coast, where it resembled a range of rocky mountains.
Access to the southern fortress zone on both sides of the highway leading from the south coast to Sevastopol was barred in the first instance by a series of steep, dome-shaped summits which the Russians had converted into powerful strong-points. Crimea veterans will remember such names as ‘Sugarloaf, ‘North Nose’, ‘Chapel Mount’ and ‘Ruin Hill’. Then came the strongly defended village of Kamary, and finally the rocky massif north-east of the Bay of Balaclava. The enemy had been able to hold his own here when 105 Infantry Regiment achieved its bold capture of Balaclava Fort in autumn 1941. Penetration of this chain of fortified summits and cliffs was rendered all the more difficult by the fact that one hill always flanked the next.
Behind this forward defence zone in the south, north of the road from Sevastopol, rose the massif of the Feyukiny Heights, which was extended southwards to the coastal range by strong-points like ‘Eagle’s Perch’ and the fortified village of Kadykovka. All these formed a sort of foreground to the strongest of the enemy’s fortifications, which were established along the Zapun Heights. The latter are a range of hills with steep eastern slopes, beginning at the cliffs of Inkerman and dominating the valley of the Chornaya down to the south of Gaytany. There they turn south-west to bar the road to Sevastopol and finally link up with the sea through ‘Windmill Hill’, the western spur of the coastal range. The Zapun position, by virtue of its sharp drops and possibilities for mutual flanking fire, is extremely difficult for infantry to attack, and artillery observers up there command the entire fortress area as far as the eye can see. These Heights, incidentally, were the line held by the Western Powers during the Crimean War to cover the rear of their attack on Sevastopol against the Russians’ idle relieving army.
But even when he had taken this commanding position, the attacker’s troubles were still not over. Ranged along the coast were the coastal batteries, including ‘Maxim Gorki II’ in its armoured emplacement. There was also a wide semi-circle of continuous defences round the city itself, beginning at Inkerman on Severnaya Bay and rejoining the latter by Streletskaya Bay. It was composed of an anti-tank ditch, a barbed-wire obstacle and numerous pill-boxes, and included the British Crimean War cemetery south-east of Sevastopol, which the Russians had converted into a strong battery emplacement.
Finally there were a line of fortifications running hard along the periphery of the city and also several traverses screening the peninsula of Khersones towards the east. The Russians have always been known for their skill in laying out and camouflaging field defences, and at Sevastopol they had the added advantage of holding a stretch of country which offered them excellent opportunities for flanking fire. The rocky nature of the ground, moreover, made it possible to keep the cover for guns and mortars so narrow that they could practically only be destroyed by direct hits. And since we were dealing with Russians, it was a matter of course that extensive minefields had been laid not only along the front of the various defence zones, but also right inside them.
When considering how the assault on the fortress area should be conducted, Eleventh Army arrived at essentially the same conclusions as it had done the previous winter. We could not entertain any idea of using the central portion of the siege front for a decisive operation because artillery and air support our two main trumps could never become entirely effective in the wooded area there and our losses would be far too great. We thus had no choice but to attack once again from the north and north-east and in the south of the eastern sector.
This time, too — at least to begin with the main punch was to be delivered in the north, for although the enemy fortifications were undoubtedly stronger and more numerous in the northern area of the fortress above Severnaya Bay than in its southern part, the going there was far easier. Above all, the artillery and Luftwaffe could be used to infinitely greater effect in the north than in the hilly country of the southern sector.
Of course, there still had to be an attack in the south as well. For one thing, it was important to split the enemy’s defence by attacking from several sides at once. For another, he must be expected to hold out in the city itself and on the Khersones headland even after losing the fortified area north of Severnaya Bay. We had to remember that the task facing us at Sevastopol involved not only taking a fortress but also fighting an army which was certainly our match numerically even if it were inferior in material.{15}
The factor that had primarily guided our assault tactics in the winter the need to gain command of the harbour at the earliest possible date was no less important, however. As long as Eleventh Army had 8 Air Corps in support, the enemy would no longer be at liberty to supply himself by sea.
Such were the considerations on which Eleventh Army based its plan for ‘Sturgeon’, the code-name of the operation.
We intended to attack on the northern front and the southern part of the eastern front, while keeping the enemy pinned down in the central sector from Mekensia to Verkh-Chorgun. In the north the first objectives were the northern shore of Severnaya Bay and the heights around Gaytany, in the south the capture of the dominating heights of the Zapun position on both sides of the roads leading from the south coast and Balaclava to Sevastopol.
The attack in the north was to be carried out by 54 Corps, comprising 22, 24, 50 and 132 Infantry Divisions (commanded by Generals Wolff, Baron v. Tettau, Schmidt and Lindemann) and a reinforced 213 Infantry Regiment. The corps’ orders were to keep its forces rigidly concentrated in the main direction of assault on the high ground north of the eastern part of Severnaya Bay. All parts of the fortified zone bypassed in the first instance were to be pinned down with a view to taking as many of them as possible from the rear later on. The left wing of the corps was to gain possession of the heights of Gaytany and the ground to the south-east of the latter in order to clear the way for the Rumanian Mountain Corps’ subsequent advance further south.
The attack in the south was to be directed by H.Q. 30 Corps, with 72 and 170 Infantry Divisions and 28 Light Division under command.{16}
Its first job was to gain the starting line and artillery observation posts for the advance towards the Zapun Heights. To achieve this it had to capture the enemy’s foremost defence zone based on the strong-points of ‘North Nose’, ‘Chapel Mount’, ‘Ruin Hill’, Kamary and ‘High Cliff’ south of Kamary and to eliminate flanking fire from the rocky heights east of Balaclava in the south. To solve this problem 72 Infantry Division was to advance along both sides of the highway to Sevastopol, while 28 Light Division in accordance with its specialized role had to capture the most northerly summits of the range of mountains east of Balaclava Bay. 170 Division was kept in reserve for the time being. Because of the peculiarly rugged terrain in this sector, the tasks in question could only be solved by carefully prepared local attacks.
Sandwiched between the two big assault groups, the Rumanian Mountain Corps was initially responsible for pinning down the enemy on its own front. In particular, 18 Rumanian Division was to carry out local attacks and an artillery bombardment to protect 54 Corps’ left wing against enemy flanking action from the south. Further south, 1 Rumanian Mountain Division was to support 30 Corps’ northern wing by capturing the Sugar Loaf.
In making its artillery preparations for the attack, Eleventh Army dispensed with the intensive barrage so popular with our opponents. In view of the peculiar nature of the ground and the endless number of enemy positions, this could not be expected to have any decisive effect nor should we have enough ammunition available. Instead, the preparations would start five days before the infantry assault, beginning with an air attack and all-out artillery strafe against supply lines and points where enemy reserves were known to be concentrated. In the five days that followed our gunners were to beat down the enemy artillery by steady observed fire and soften up positions in the enemy’s foremost defence zone. Throughout this period 8 Air Corps would be making continual attacks on the city, harbour, supply installations and airfields.
And now a word about our artillery strength.
Eleventh Army had naturally called in every gun within reach for the attack, and O.K.H. had made available the heaviest pieces available.
In all, 54 Corps (artillery commander General Zuckertort) had at its disposal fifty-six heavy and medium batteries, forty-one light and eighteen mortar batteries, in addition to two battalions of assault guns. This made a total of 121 batteries, supported by two observation battalions.
The heavy siege artillery included batteries of cannon up to a calibre of 19 cm., as well as independent howitzer and heavy-howitzer batteries with calibres of 30.5, 35 and 42 cm. Furthermore, there were two special 60-cm. guns and the celebrated 80-cm. Big Dora. This monster had originally been designed for bombarding the most formidable section of the Maginot Line, but had not been finished in time. It was a miracle of technical achievement. The barrel must have been 90 feet long and the carriage as high as a two-storey house. Sixty trains had been required to bring it into position along a railway specially laid for the purpose. Two anti-aircraft regiments had to be constantly in attendance. Undoubtedly the effectiveness of the cannon bore no real relation to all the effort and expense that had gone into making it. Nevertheless, one of its shells did destroy a big enemy ammunition dump buried 90 feet deep in the natural rock on the northern shore of Severnaya Bay.
30 Corps’ artillery was commanded by General Martinek, a particularly outstanding gunner officer who had previously held the same rank in the Austrian Army. Unfortunately he was later killed in the east as a corps commander.
Altogether the corps had twenty-five heavy and medium, twenty-five light and six mortar batteries, as well as one assault-gun and two observation battalions. Also assigned to it was 300 Panzer Regiment, whose tanks were remote-controlled and carried high-explosive charges.
The Rumanian Mountain Corps had twelve medium and twenty-two light batteries with which to perform its holding task.
A welcome addition to the assault artillery as a whole was provided by General v. Richthofen, Commander of 8 Air Corps, who turned over a number of his anti-aircraft regiments for use in a ground role.
At no other time on the German side in World War II can artillery ever have been more formidably massed particularly as regards the high calibres used than for the attack on Sevastopol. Yet how trifling this seems when compared with the masses of guns later considered indispensable by the Russians for a breakthrough in open country! At Sevastopol the attacker had 208 batteries (excluding anti-aircraft) at his disposal over a 22-mile front. This meant an average of less than ten batteries to every mile of front, though the ratio was obviously higher in the actual assault sectors. The Soviet offensives of 1945 were based on a ratio of 400 guns to every mile of assault front!
A few days before the attack I paid a brief visit to the south coast to take a closer look at 30 Corps’ own preparations. Our command post down there was a charming little Moorish-style palace, perched on a steep cliff overhanging the Black Sea coast and formerly the property of a grand duke. On the last day of my stay I made a reconnaissance trip in our only naval vessel, an Italian E-boat, along the coast to a point off Balaclava, my object being to ascertain how much of the coastal road, up which the whole of the corps’ reinforcements and supplies must pass, was visible from the sea and liable to come under observed bombardment from that quarter. In the event presumably out of respect for our Luftwaffe the Soviet Black Sea Fleet ventured no such action.
On the way back a calamity occurred just outside Yalta. Without any warning a hail of machine-gun bullets and cannon-shells began pumping into us from the sky. We were being strafed by two Soviet fighters which had swooped out of the sun, their sound having been drowned by the roar of our own powerful engines. In a matter of seconds seven of the sixteen persons on board were dead or wounded and the heat from the flames threatened to detonate the torpedoes slung alongside. The behaviour of the captain, a young Italian sub-lieutenant, was beyond all praise, and he showed immense presence of mind in the steps he took to save us and his ship. Disregarding the danger of mines, ‘Pepo’, my A.D.C., dived into the water and swam to the nearby shore, where still stark naked he stopped a passing truck. With this he dashed into Yalta and got the help of a Croatian motor-boat to tow us into harbour. It was a dismal journey. One Italian petty officer was dead and three sailors wounded. Captain v. Wedel, the port commandant of Yalta, had also been killed. But at my feet, severely wounded in the thigh, lay the truest comrade of all, my driver, Fritz Nagel. The Italian sub-lieutenant tore off his own shirt to use it as a makeshift bandage, but it was almost impossible to staunch the flow of blood from the artery.
Fritz Nagel came from Karlsruhe and had been my driver since 1938. We had seen and lived through so very much together, and he had already been wounded at my side once before during our time with 56 Panzer Corps. Throughout the years he had been a devoted comrade and in time had become a real friend to me. He had fine, frank brown eyes and not a trace of servility in his make-up. Sportsman-like and thoroughly decent by nature, he was a keen, cheerful soldier who had won the hearts of comrades and superiors alike. As soon as we touched land I took him straight to the field hospital. An operation was attempted, but he had already lost too much blood, and the same night his young light went out. We buried him alongside all our other German and Italian comrades in the Yalta cemetery high above the sea perhaps one of the most lovely spots on the whole of that glorious coastline.
I sent Fritz Nagel’s parents a copy of the words I spoke at his graveside.
But war waits for no man, not even for his thoughts. A few days later Eleventh Army’s tactical headquarters, reduced to a bare minimum of personnel, set up a command post on the Sevastopol front at Yukhary Karales, a Tartar village nestling in a narrow valley among the cliffs. The Russians must have known that a command staff with its own signals section had moved in there, for every evening their ‘duty pilot’ flew over in an old Rata known to the troops as a ‘sewing machine’ to drop a stick of bombs, fortunately without ever doing the slightest damage. On a cliff-top above the village, in the Cherkess-Kermen mountains, where the Goths had once built their stronghold, we had established an observation post, and on the evening of 6th June we went up to watch the infantry assault go in along the entire front next morning. It was here, in a small dugout adjoined by an observation trench equipped with stereo-telescopes, that the Chief-of-Staff, the heads of the operations and intelligence branches, ‘Pepo’ and I spent the still hours of the night before the storm. Once again it was ‘Pepo’ who introduced a cheerful note into an otherwise pensive evening.
It had been suggested that I should issue an Order of the Day to the troops pointing out the importance of the impending battle. Generally speaking, I am not in favour of exhortations of this kind. Quite apart from the fact that they seldom get past the battalion orderly-rooms, our troops did not need reminding what was at stake. Since it was the usual thing to do on such occasions, however, I wrote out a few words on a sheet of paper and handed it to ‘Pepo’ for transmission to all corps headquarters. Shortly afterwards he returned to report: ‘Herr General-oberst, I’ve passed on the blurb.’ It was a cheeky thing to say, but he was only expressing the ordinary soldier’s view of such proclamations, and we all had a good laugh over it.
On the morning of 7th June, as dawn turned the eastern sky to gold and swept the shadows from the valleys, our artillery opened up in its full fury by way of a prelude to the infantry assault. Simultaneously the squadrons of the Luftwaffe hurtled down on to their allotted targets. The scene before us was indescribable, since it was unique in modern warfare for the leader of an army to command a view of his entire battlefield. To the north-west the eye could range from the woodlands that hid the fierce battles of 54 Corps’ left wing from view right over to the heights south of the Belbek valley, for which we were to fight so bitterly. Looking due west, one could see the heights of Gaytany, and behind them, in the far distance, the shimmer of Severnaya Bay where it joined the Black Sea. Even the spurs of the Khersones peninsula, on which we were to find vestiges of Hellenic culture, were visible in clear weather. To the south-west there towered the menacing heights of Zapun and the rugged cliffs of the coastal range. At night, within the wide circumference of the fortress, one saw the flashes of enemy gun-fire, and by day the clouds of rock and dust cast up by the bursts of our heavy shells and the bombs dropped by German aircraft. It was indeed a fantastic setting for such a gigantic spectacle !
At Sevastopol there was something more than an attacking army confronted by an adversary who was at least its numerical equal, something more than artillery and aircraft of the most modern design pounding away at fortifications embedded in steel, concrete and granite. Sevastopol was also the spirit of the German soldier—all his courage, initiative and self-sacrifice contending with the dogged resistance of an opponent whose natural elements were the advantage of terrain and the tenacity and steadfastness of the Russian soldier reinforced by the iron compulsion of the Soviet system. It is impossible to depict this struggle which was to go on for a round month in the most scorching heat (even early-morning temperatures being as much as 106° F.), in terms that would do justice to the feat of either attacker or defender. What our troops achieved in this battle would be worthy of an epic, but there is only space here for a brief account of a contest that must be almost unparalleled in its severity.
On its right wing 54 Corps had directed 132 Division to launch a frontal attack across the Belbek valley towards the commanding heights to the south of it, leaving out the enemy bridgehead of Lubyimovka. To the left of it 22 Infantry Division had the task of opening the way across the valley for 132 Division by thrusting south of the Belbek from the east, over the Kamyshly gully. To the left of that, 50 Infantry Division, attacking through the locality of Kamyshly, was to join this thrust in a south-westerly direction. On the extreme left wing of the corps, in the mountainous woodlands, 24 Infantry Division was to work its way forward towards the heights of Gaytany, its left flank being covered by 18 Rumanian Division.
As a result of overwhelming support by the powerful assault artillery and the incessant attacks of 8 Air Corps, it was possible to cross the Kamyshly gully and Belbek valley on the first day and gain a footing on the commanding heights south of the latter.
Down in the south, 30 Corps’ first job was to gain possession of the jumping-off positions for its own follow-up attack on both sides of the highway to Sevastopol, which was not to be launched until some days later.
The second phase of the offensive, lasting up to 17th June, was marked on both fronts by a bitter struggle for every foot of ground, every pill-box and every trench. Time and again the Russians tried to win back what they had lost by launching violent counter-attacks. In their big strong-points, and in the smaller pill-boxes too, they often fought till the last man and the last round. While the main burden of these battles was borne by the infantry and engineers, the advanced observation posts of our artillery still deserve special mention, since it was chiefly they who had to direct the fire which made it possible to take individual strong-points and pill-boxes. They, together with the assault guns, were the infantry’s best helpmates.
On 13th June the valiant 16 Infantry Regiment of 22 Division, led by Colonel v. Choltitz, succeeded in taking Fort Stalin, before which its attack had come to a standstill the previous winter. The spirit of our infantry was typified by one wounded man of this regiment, who, pointing to his smashed arm and bandaged head, was heard to cry: ‘I can take this lot now we’ve got the Stalin!’
By 17th June it had been possible, though at the cost of heavy losses, to drive a deep wedge into the fortified zone in the north. The positions of the second defence line, ‘Cheka’, ‘GPU’, ‘Siberia’ and ‘Volga’, were in our hands.
By the same date 30 Corps was likewise able to drive a wedge into the advanced defence zones in front of the Zapun positions. In the course of heavy fighting the fortified strongpoints of ‘North Nose’, ‘Chapel Mount’ and ‘Ruin Hill’ fell to 72 Division, while 170 Division took Kamary. To the north of the corps, after a series of fruitless charges, 1 Rumanian Mountain Division finally won the ‘Sugar Loaf. 28 Light Division, on the other hand, was advancing only very slowly over the rugged cliffs of the coastal range, ‘Rose Hill’ and ‘Vermilion I and II’, since the only mode of action to adopt in that maze of clefts and chasms was to leap-frog raiding parties from one point to the next, a process which entailed considerable losses.
Despite the price we had paid for these successes, however, the outcome of the offensive seemed to be very much in the balance for the next few days. The endurance of our own troops was visibly running out. In the case of 54 Corps it was found necessary to take 132 Division temporarily out of the line in order to exchange its sorely tried regiments for those of 46 Division in the Kerch peninsula. Its place was taken by 24 Division, which had to be released from the left wing of the corps for this purpose.
At the very same time Eleventh Army found itself under pressure from O.K.H. to release 8 Air Corps for the Ukraine offensive unless any prospect could be offered of Sevastopol’s early fall. We, for our own part, insisted that the attack must at all costs go on until final success was achieved, which in turn depended on the continued presence of 8 Air Corps. In the end our view prevailed.
Yet who at that time, faced with the dwindling strength of our infantry, could have guaranteed the early fall of the fortress? Realizing that the strength of our own troops might give out prematurely, Eleventh Army asked to be supplied with three extra infantry regiments a request which O.K.H. duly approved. They were at least to arrive in time for the final phase of the struggle.
In the existing situation it was found expedient in the case of both assaulting corps to take advantage of an attacker’s ability to switch the direction or main effort of his assault as he pleases, and thereby to take the enemy by surprise.
54 Corps turned west, committing 213 Infantry Regiment and 24 Division to battle as it did so. 213 Regiment, led by Colonel Hitzfeld, took the armour-plated battery ‘Maxim Gorki I’, one of whose guns had already been put out of action by a direct hit from a siege battery. The other was demolished by our engineers, who had succeeded in getting on to the top of it. However, the garrison of the fort, which went several storeys deep, did not surrender until our engineers had blown their way in through the turrets at ground level. In the course of one attempted break-out the commissar in command was killed, whereupon his men surrendered with the name of Christ trembling on their lips. After that 24 Division was able, by 21st June, to clear the rest of the northern sector along the west coast as far as the fortifications guarding the entrance to Severnaya Bay.
In the case of 30 Corps, too, a surprise alteration in the focal point of the attack brought about an important success by 17th June. The corps resolved to halt the advance across the northern chain of the coastal range east of Balaclava and to concentrate its forces on and immediately south of the main road for a surprise thrust. There was only artillery to counteract any flank action from the direction of the coastal range. 72 Division duly succeeded in over-running the enemy’s positions south of the road, and its reconnaissance battalion, led by Major Baake, boldly exploited this initial gain by pushing straight through the floundering enemy as far as ‘Eagle’s Perch’ in front of the Zapun line. In the early morning of 18th June the battalion managed to take the strongly defended ‘Eagle’ position and to remain in possession there until the division could move reinforcements up. This having been achieved, it was possible to extend our penetration of the enemy defence system northwards.
In the subsequent and third phase success was again achieved by sudden shifts in the focal point of the attack, particularly on the part of the artillery. In the north this meant the full attainment of the first objective, Severnaya Bay, and in the south possession of our jumping off positions for the assault on the Zapun line.
In the northern sector the whole fire of the artillery was concentrated to permit 24 Division to take the peninsula forts dominating the entrance to Severnaya Bay. The most formidable of these was the antiquated but still powerful strong-point known as North Fort.
22 Division gained control along its whole front of the cliffs over-looking Severnaya Bay. There was extremely hard fighting for the railway tunnel on the boundary between 22 and 50 Divisions, out of which the enemy launched a strong counter-attack with a brigade that had recently arrived by cruiser. The tunnel was finally captured by shelling its entrance. Not only hundreds of troops came out but an even greater number of civilians, including women and children. Particular difficulty was experienced in winkling the enemy out of his last hide-outs on the northern shore of the bay, where deep galleries for storing supplies and ammunition had been driven into the sheer wall of rock. These had been equipped for defence by the addition of steel doors. Since the occupants, under pressure from their commissars, showed no sign of surrendering, we had to try to blow the doors open. As our engineers approached the first of them, there was an explosion inside the casemate and a large slab of cliff came tumbling down, burying not only the enemy within but also our own squad of engineers. The commissar in command had blown the casemate and its occupants sky-high. In the end a second-lieutenant from an assault battery, who had brought up his gun along the coastal road regardless of enemy shelling from the southern shore, managed to force the other casemates to open up after he had fired on their embrasures at point-blank range. Crowds of completely worn-out soldiers and civilians emerged, their commissars having committed suicide.
Thirdly, 50 Division, which had some hard fighting to do in the thicket-covered country of its own sector, was able to reach the eastern end of Severnaya Bay and gain possession of the heights of Gaytany dominating the mouth of the Chornaya valley.
To the left of it, the right wing of the Rumanian Mountain Corps was fighting its way forward through wooded country over the hills south-east of Gaytany. General Lascar, who later went into captivity at Stalingrad, was the life and soul of this advance.
30 Corps, too, made gains by sudden changes in the direction of its attack. Taking advantage of the capture of Eagle’s Perch by 72 Division, it swung 170 Division round from the south to attack the Fedyukiny massif. The enemy, whose eyes were turned east and who was probably already expecting an attack on the Zapun Heights themselves, was taken completely by surprise, and it was possible to take the massif relatively quickly. This secured a firm base for the decisive assault on the Zapun line.
During the same few days some progress was also made by the left wing of the Rumanian Mountain Corps (1 Mountain Division).
Eleventh Army thus found itself in possession of almost the whole outer belt of the fortress by the morning of 26th June. The enemy had been thrown back into the inner fortified zone whose northern front was formed by the precipitous rock-face of Severnaya Bay’s southern shore and whose eastern front ran from the heights of Inkerman along the Zapun range to the cliffs around Balaclava.
Eleventh Army now had to decide how to break open this inner ring of fortifications. It was taken for granted that the enemy in Sevastopol would continue to resist as bitterly as before particularly as none of the statements issued by his immediate superiors, Crimean Front Headquarters, encouraged any hope of an evacuation.
On the other hand, the fact had to be faced that though the enemy’s reserves might be largely expended, the offensive capacity of the German regiments was also virtually at an end.
In recent weeks I had spent all my mornings and afternoons visiting corps staffs, artillery commanders, divisions, regiments, battalions and gunner observation posts. I was only too well aware of the state of our units. The regiments had dwindled away to a few hundred men each, and I remember one company being pulled out of the line with a strength of one officer and eight men.
How, then, were we going to finish off the battle for Sevastopol, now that 54 Corps had Severnaya Bay before it and 30 Corps was facing the difficult assault on the Zapun Heights?
The ideal solution at this point would have been to switch the weight of the entire offensive to 30 Corps on the southern wing. In practice, however, this was just not possible. Moving the divisions alone was bound to take several days, and in this time the enemy would have an opportunity to recover his strength. In the frontal area the two sectors were linked by only one narrow road which we had taken immense trouble to build through the mountains the previous winter. In any case, it could not bear the weight of the heavy artillery, and the task of moving that quantity of guns round by way of Yalta and stocking them with ammunition when they reached the southern sector would have taken weeks to complete. An additional factor to bear in mind was the Supreme Command’s intention of withdrawing 8 Air Corps from the Crimea at an early date.
Immediately after 22 Division reached Severnaya Bay, I had been down to visit its regiments in order to obtain a general view of the situation from an observation post on the northern shore. Before me lay a stretch of water between half a mile and 1,000 yards wide where whole fleets had once lain at anchor. On the far side, to the right, was the city of Sevastopol, and straight ahead a wall of cliff honeycombed with enemy positions. It occurred to me that from here in other words, from the flank one should be able to unhinge the Zapun fortifications, for the last direction from which the enemy seemed likely to expect an attack was across Severnaya Bay.
When I first discussed this plan of mine with 54 Corps and a number of subordinate commanders, there was a great deal of head-shaking and scepticism. How, they asked, could assault boats get across that broad stretch of bay in the face of the formidable array of guns and fortifications overlooking the southern shore? How, for that matter, were the assault boats even to be got to the shore and loaded with troops when the sole access to the water was down one or two steep ravines which could obviously be kept under fire by the enemy on the southern coast?
For the very reason that it appeared impossible, however, an attack across Severnaya Bay would take the enemy unawares and might well be the key to success. Despite all the objections raised, therefore, I stuck to my plan hard though it was to order such a hazardous undertaking when one’s own position prevented one from taking part.
Once the decision had been taken, everyone involved set about its execution with the utmost energy. In this connexion a special word of appreciation is due to the engineers, who had already given an excellent account of themselves alongside the infantry in the fighting for the pill-box positions.
The general offensive against the inner fortress area -54 Corps crossing Severnaya Bay and 30 Corps assaulting the Zapun heights — was due to start early on the morning of 29th June. Already on 28th June 50 Division had succeeded in crossing the lower course of the Chornaya and taken the Inkerman. This was the scene of a tragedy that shows with what fanaticism the Bolsheviks fought. High above the Inkerman towered a sheer wall of cliff extending far away to the south. Inside it were enormous chambers which had served as cellarage for the Crimean champagne factories. Alongside the large stocks of wine the Bolsheviks had dumped ammunition, but now they were also using the chambers to accommodate thousands of wounded and refugees. Just as our troops were entering the Inkerman the whole cliff behind it shuddered under the impact of a tremendous detonation, and the co-foot wall of rock fell in over a length of some 900 yards, burying thousands of people beneath it. Though the act of a few fanatical commissars, it was a measure of the contempt for human life which had become a principle of this Asiatic Power!
During those midnight hours of 28th 29th June in which the preparations for the crossing of Severnaya Bay were being made, a tremendous tension gripped everyone connected with the operation. In order to blanket all noise from the northern shore, 8 Air Corps kept up an incessant air raid on the city. The whole of the artillery stood by to begin a murderous bombardment of the cliff-tops on the southern shore the very moment any fire from there showed that the enemy had perceived what we were about. But everything remained quiet on the other side, and the difficult job of launching and loading the assault boats went off without a hitch. At one o’clock the first wave from 22 and 24 Divisions pushed off and headed for the opposite shore. The crossing, which obviously took the enemy absolutely by surprise, turned out a complete success, for by the time the enemy defences on the cliff side went into action our sturdy grenadiers had gained a firm footing on the shore below. Any enemy weapons showing themselves from now on were quickly knocked out by our troops as they scaled the cliffs to the plateau above. With that the dreaded Zapun position was unhinged from the flank.
At first light, however, our troops had also gone into action against the front of this position.
On the left wing of 54 Corps, 50 Division and the newly committed 132 Division (now composed of the infantry regiments of 46 Division) moved off from positions around and to the south of Gaytany to assault the heights between the Inkerman and a point to the south of it. The attack received supporting flank fire from the artillery on the north shore of Severnaya Bay and was joined by the right wing of the Rumanian Mountain Corps.
30 Corps likewise began its decisive push towards the Zapun line at daybreak, supported by the long-range batteries of 54 Corps and massed sorties by 8 Air Corps. While using its artillery to create the illusion that an attack on a broad front was pending, 30 Corps had assembled 170 Division as a task force in an extremely small area by the Fedjukiny Heights, and the latter, supported by assault guns, 300 Panzer Battalion and the direct fire of an anti-aircraft regiment, soon reached the high ground on both sides of the highway to Sevastopol. Taking advantage of the enemy’s confusion, the division forthwith exploited far enough north, west and south for the corps to move its other divisions up to the crest.
After the successful crossing of the bay, the fall of the Heights of Inkerman and the penetration of the Zapun positions by 30 Corps, the fate of the Sevastopol fortress was sealed.
What now followed was a last desperate struggle that could neither stave off the defending army’s utter defeat nor possibly benefit the Soviets as regards the overall operational situation. It would even have been superfluous from the viewpoint of military honour, for goodness knows the Russian soldier had fought bravely enough! But the political system demanded that the futile struggle should go on.
Now that they had captured the cliffs on the south shore of the bay, the divisions of 54 Corps which had carried out the crossing were already inside the wide outer ring of positions which encompassed the city. So while elements of the corps mopped up this ring in a southerly direction, the main body was able to turn west and deal with the peripheral fortifications and the city itself. With the fall of the famous Fort Malakoff, that bulwark which had cost so much blood in the Crimean War, the corps was into the defences of Sevastopol proper.
Meanwhile, before 29th June was out the two rear divisions of 30 Corps which had had the task of simulating a broad frontal attack 28 Light Division and 72 Division were pushed smartly through behind 170 Division.
Once they had reached the Zapun positions already taken by the latter they were made to fan out to capture the Khersones peninsula.
28 Light Division broke through the outer ring of fortifications south-east of Sevastopol by taking the English Cemetery. The Russians had developed this into a main strong-point of their outer ring of fortifications, and the marble monuments once erected to British soldiers were now in ruins. The new dead of this battle were lying over graves torn open by shelling. Then the division thrust south of the city to take it from the west in case it should be defended; or, alternatively, to head off an enemy break-out.
170 Division’s goal was the lighthouse on the extreme western tip of the Khersones peninsula the spot from which Iphigeneia may have gazed, ‘soulfully seeking the Grecian land’.
On 72 Division devolved the task of thrusting along the south coast. Rolling up the Zapun positions in a southward direction, it first took the dominant ‘Windmill Hill’, and thereby secured the main road to Sevastopol for the use of the corps. It was followed by 4 Rumanian Mountain Division, which set about flushing the defence system round Balaclava from the rear, taking 10,000 prisoners in the process.
After our experience of Soviet methods to date we were bound to assume that the enemy would make a last stand behind Sevastopol’s perimeter defences and finally in the city itself. An order from Stalin had been repeatedly wirelessed to the defenders to hold out to the last man and the last round, and we knew that every member of the civil population capable of bearing arms had been mustered.
Our headquarters would have been neglectful of its duty to the soldiers of Eleventh Army had it failed to take account of this possibility. A battle within the city would cause more heavy losses to the attacker. In order to obviate them we directed the artillery and 8 Air Corps to go into action once more before the divisions resumed their assault. The enemy was to be shown that he could not expect to extract a further toll of blood from us in house-to-house fighting.
And so 1st July began with a massed bombardment of the perimeter fortifications and the enemy’s strong-points in the interior of the city. Before long our reconnaissance aircraft reported that no further serious resistance need be anticipated. The shelling was stopped and the divisions moved in. It seemed probable that the enemy had pulled the bulk of his forces out to the west the previous night.
But the struggle was still not over. Although the Soviet Coast Army had given up the city, it had only done so in order to offer further resistance from behind the defences which sealed off the Khersones peninsula either in pursuance of Stalin’s backs-to-the-wall order or else in the hope of still getting part of the army evacuated by Red Fleet vessels at night from the deep inlets west of Sevastopol. As it turned out, only very few of the top commanders and commissars were fetched away by motor-torpedo boat, one of them being the army commander, General Petrov. When his successor tried to escape in the same way, he was intercepted by our Italian E-boat.
Thus the final battles on the Khersones peninsula lasted up till 4th July. While 72 Division captured the armour-plated fort of ‘Maxim Gorki II’, which was defended by several thousand men, the other divisions gradually pushed the enemy back towards the extreme tip of the peninsula. The Russians made repeated attempts to break through to the east by night, presumably in the hope of joining up with the partisans in the Yaila Mountains. Whole masses of them rushed at our lines, their arms linked to prevent anyone from hanging back. At their head, urging them on, there were often women and girls of the Communist Youth, themselves bearing arms. Inevitably the losses which sallies of this kind entailed were extraordinarily high.
In the end the remnants of the Coast Army sought refuge in big caverns on the shore of the Khersones peninsula, where they waited in vain to be evacuated. When they surrendered on 4th July, 30,000 men emerged from this small tip of land alone.
In all, the number of prisoners taken in the fortress was over 90,000, and the enemy’s losses in killed amounted to many times our own. The amount of booty captured was so vast that it could not immediately be calculated. A naturally strong fortress, reinforced and consolidated in every conceivable way and defended by a whole army, had fallen. The army was annihilated and the entire Crimea now in German hands. At just the right time from the operational point of view, Eleventh Army had become free for use in the big German offensive on the southern wing of the Eastern Front.
I had spent the evening of 1st July with my immediate staff in our command post, a little Tartar dwelling in Yukhary Karales. The Soviet ‘duty pilot’ whose habit it had been to drop a few bombs in our valley around sundown had not shown up. Our thoughts went back to the battles of recent months and the comrades who were no longer with us.
And then, over the radio, came a triumphal fanfare heralding the special communique on the fall of Sevastopol. Shortly afterwards the following message came over the teleprinter:
‘To the Commander-in-Chief of the Crimean Army Colonel-General v. Manstein
In grateful appreciation of your exceptionally meritorious services in the victorious battles of the Crimea, culminating in the annihilation of the enemy at Kerch and the conquest of the mighty fortress of Sevastopol, I hereby promote you Field-Marshal. By your promotion and the creation of a commemorative shield to be worn by all ranks who took part in the Crimean campaign, I pay tribute before the whole German people to the heroic achievements of the troops fighting under your command.
ADOLF HITLER.’