Crimean offensive, 1944: the Red Army retakes Sevastopol in a month

By the winter of 1943 the German 17th Army was cut off in the Crimea. The Red Army had reached the Dnieper, held a bridgehead on the south shore of the Sivash and another on the Kerch Peninsula, and the only link to the rest of the Axis front was the Black Sea. According to Earl Ziemke, the US Army historian who wrote the standard account from the German records, the army's commander, Erwin Jaenecke, and the chief of the general staff, Kurt Zeitzler, agreed that the peninsula could not be held for long. Hitler insisted that it stay put.²

Instead of withdrawing the army, Hitler reinforced it. Ziemke writes that over the winter its German strength grew from one infantry division to five, and that the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu, who would rather have brought his troops home, left seven Romanian divisions there. The Soviet Historical Encyclopedia gives the army about 200,000 men in the spring, with some 3,600 guns and mortars and over 200 tanks and assault guns. Hitler's reason was political: losing the Crimea, he feared, would shake Turkey and the Balkan states.³

The break-in

On 7 April Ferdinand Schörner, commanding the army group, inspected the defenses and reported that the Crimea could be held for a long time. Ziemke calls it one of the least accurate predictions of the war. The next morning General Fyodor Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front attacked. The encyclopedia puts the Soviet forces at about 470,000 men with some 6,000 guns and mortars, 559 tanks and self-propelled guns and 1,250 aircraft, supported by the Black Sea Fleet and the Azov Flotilla.⁴

The line across the Perekop Isthmus held at first, but in the Sivash bridgehead the Romanian 10th Division was badly shaken on the first day and collapsed on the second. The Soviet 51st Army, making the main thrust from the Sivash, turned the flank of the Perekop position. That night Jaenecke pulled his troops back, and Hitler, Ziemke writes, accused him of losing his nerve.⁵

On 11 April General Andrei Yeremenko's Separate Coastal Army attacked from the east and took Kerch the same morning, while the 19th Tank Corps seized the rail junction at Dzhankoi. The retreat became a race for Sevastopol. Simferopol and Yevpatoria fell on 13 April, Bakhchisarai, Alushta and Sudak on the 14th and Yalta on the 16th. By 16 April the German rear guard was inside the Sevastopol defenses. In ten days, Ziemke counts, the army had lost 13,131 Germans and 17,652 Romanians.⁶

Sevastopol, again

The Germans had needed some 250 days to take Sevastopol in 1941 and 1942. Now they were ordered to hold it. Schörner told Hitler at a midnight meeting on 21 April that it could not be done; Hitler answered that he only needed the city for six or eight weeks, to keep Turkey quiet while he beat off the coming Anglo-American invasion of France. When Jaenecke asked again to be allowed to leave, Hitler relieved him and gave the 17th Army to General Karl Allmendinger.⁷

The Soviet assault came on 5 May with an attack north of the city, which Ziemke describes as a feint. The main blow fell on 7 May from the southeast behind Balaklava, and by evening the attackers held the Sapun Heights, which overlook the whole of the bridgehead down to Cape Chersonese. A German counterattack failed to retake them. On the night of 8 May Hitler agreed at last to an evacuation, and on 9 May Soviet troops took Sevastopol.⁸

The last convoys

The navies had already carried many men out. The Romanian naval historian Dan-Dragoș Sichigea, writing from German and Romanian archives, finds that the Romanian naval reports count 73,058 people taken off by sea by the end of April, while the 17th Army reported 85,836 by sea and 16,027 by air; the two tallies start on different dates. The last stage, which the Romanians called Operation 60,000, was far harder.⁹

Soviet aircraft struck the convoys off Chersonese. On 10 May they sank the transports Totila and Teja, each crowded with thousands of soldiers, and Sichigea cites a figure of more than 8,000 dead in that attack alone. German army and navy commanders blamed each other: the army said whole convoys never came inshore, the navy that smoke and fire made the inlets impossible. Ziemke's verdict is a tragic fiasco. Of 64,700 men still at Sevastopol in the first week of May, 26,700 were left on the beach to be captured.¹⁰

The count

The two sides' numbers do not match. The Soviet Historical Encyclopedia states that more than 140,000 enemy soldiers and officers were killed or taken prisoner in the operation, and it stresses that the Red Army took Sevastopol in three days. The German records Ziemke used give the losses of the first ten days and the men left behind at the end, but no single total.¹¹

Either way, the 17th Army was gone, and with it the last Axis foothold on the Black Sea coast of the Soviet Union. Hitler ordered that neither Jaenecke nor Allmendinger be given another command until a court-martial had looked into whether all had been done to hold the Crimea. The Soviet fleet could return to Sevastopol, and the troops freed by the victory went west for the summer offensives.¹²