Siege of Odessa, 1941: 73 days on the Black Sea

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies, Romania among them, invaded the Soviet Union. Romanian and German troops quickly retook Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the provinces Romania had been forced to cede a year earlier. Then the Romanians went further. On 27 July Hitler asked the Romanian leader, General Ion Antonescu, to carry on beyond the Dniester and to administer the land between the Dniester and the Bug, and Antonescu agreed on 31 July.²

Lieutenant General Nicolae Ciupercă's 4th Army began crossing the Dniester on 3 August. On 8 August the Romanian General Staff issued Operational Directive No. 31, which told the army to beat the enemy between the Dniester and the Tiligul estuary and take Odessa on the march.³

A fortress supplied by sea

The Soviet command had other plans. On 5 August the Coastal Army was ordered to fall back on Odessa, and by 13 August the city was cut off from the land. It could not be fully surrounded, because the Black Sea Fleet held the sea. On 19 August the troops in the city were joined into the Odessa Defense Region under Rear Admiral Gavriil Zhukov, about 34,500 men in all.⁴

The defense ran in three lines: an outer belt some 25 to 30 kilometers out, a main line 6 to 8 kilometers from the city, and a last line in the streets. According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, up to 100,000 citizens dug the defenses, and the city's factories armored 55 tractors and made 1,200 light mortars. Some 911 ships brought in men and supplies and carried out the wounded and civilians.⁵

The Romanian assaults

The 4th Army expected an easy prize. Instead it fought its way forward from one line of trenches and antitank ditches to the next. On 13 August Antonescu stopped the offensive to bring up more divisions, and by 24 August, Victor Nitu calculates from Romanian records, the army had lost 27,307 men since crossing the Dniester. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine credits the Romanians with a fivefold superiority in men and complete superiority in tanks and aircraft, but they could not break through.⁶

In September the costs mounted. On 9 September Ciupercă was replaced by Lieutenant General Iosif Iacobici. On 16 September the 157th Rifle Division landed in the city: 12,600 fresh troops in Nitu's count, 19,500 men with 102 guns and 40 tanks including attached units in the Ukrainian encyclopedia's.⁷

On the night of 21 to 22 September the defenders struck back. About 2,000 men of the 3rd Naval Infantry Brigade landed behind the Romanian lines at Grigorievka while the 157th Division attacked from the front, with warships and aircraft in support. The Romanian line in the eastern sector gave way before reserves stopped the advance.⁸

The evacuation

The siege was decided elsewhere. With the Southern Front in trouble and German troops breaking into the Crimea, the Soviet high command ordered Odessa evacuated. The Black Sea Fleet carried out the operation between 1 and 16 October. The last troops left their positions in secret and boarded ship between 11 p.m. on 15 October and 5 a.m. the next morning. The Ukrainian encyclopedia counts 86,000 soldiers and 15,000 civilians taken off, with guns, vehicles and horses. The Romanians noticed the stronger naval activity from 14 October, and on the morning of 16 October their patrols entered the city.⁹ › Lyudmila Pavlichenko

The cost was lopsided. The Soviet side reported 41,268 losses, 16,578 of them dead and missing and 24,690 wounded. The Romanian 4th Army lost more than 90,000 men; Nitu gives 92,545, of whom 17,729 were killed, 63,345 wounded and 11,471 missing.¹⁰

The city under occupation

Romania made Odessa the capital of its Transnistria Governorate. On 22 October an explosion destroyed the Romanian military headquarters in the city. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the dead at more than 60, including the Romanian commander of the city; Yad Vashem attributes the blast to Soviet sappers. The Romanian authorities blamed the Jews and took a terrible revenge.¹¹

In the massacres that followed, Romanian troops shot, hanged and burned Jews in the city and at Dalnyk on its outskirts. Both the museum and Yad Vashem put the number murdered in Odessa at no fewer than 25,000, and tens of thousands more were deported to camps and villages in Transnistria, where most died. By 1944, when the Red Army returned, the Jewish community of about 200,000 had almost ceased to exist.¹²