The History of Crimean Conflicts: von Manstein & the Battle for Kerch.
von Manstein’s tactical genius in suppressing the Soviet counter-offensives & then taking the Kerch peninsula against the odds was breathtaking…but Sevastopol still lay ahead.
“The Winter battle in Russia is approaching its end,” he said mistakenly. “Through the unequalled courage and self-sacrificing devotion of soldiers to the Eastern front, a defensive success of the greatest scale has been achieved for German arms. The enemy has suffered the severest losses in men and matériel. In an effort to exploit apparent initial successes, he has expended during the Winter the bulk of his reserves earmarked for later operations (1).”
April 5th 1942 Hitler issued War Directive no.41, code-named Fall Blau, or Case Blue; the outline of his strategy for the Caucasus offensive, already contradicting his earlier assertions that talk of a Winter battle was ‘nonsense’ (see below).
As is the dictators prerogative, in his introduction to this directive he was either deliberately misleading, knowingly misrepresenting the facts to his men, or he had deeply miscalculated the numbers and resolve of the Soviets.
And of course, if he had made that fundamental error he wouldn’t be the first to do so…
Napoleon had famously remarked to Murat, “Plant our eagles here (in Poland), 1813 will see us in Moscow and 1814 in Saint Petersburg. Russia’s war is a war of three years.”
On the anniversary of Napoleon’s proclamation that he would take Russia, and a year earlier than Fall Blau had been conceived, Hitler set out his own plans for his conquest of Russia.
As is the dictators want, he ignored the facts of the situation and twisted the truth to fit his own argument and fit the pretext he needed for war. He claimed, falsely, that Russia was threatening Germany with a huge build up of troops on their border. “…Approximately 160 divisions (were) massed on our frontier,” he lied. A European crusade against Bolshevism was needed, he claimed, in what Antony Beevor (2) says was a ‘shameless lie’ told to both his people and his troops.
Hitler, like many outside Russia, believed the Bolshevik nation was rotten to the core. Stalin’s purges of the armed forces had hollowed out the military. In the final count, 36,671 officers were executed, imprisoned or dismissed. And out of 706 officers at Brigade command or higher, only 303 survived the purges.
Reasons from paranoia, megalomania, sadism and pure vindictiveness have been used to explain the purges, but no explanation covers all the horrors committed. Often times the charges against the officers were ‘grotesque inventions (2).’
One such example being the fabrications against one of the men who actually survived to tell the tale. Showing up the invalidity of the legal process, Colonel K.K.Rokossovsky was sentenced based on evidence from a man who had been dead for almost 20 years.
Rokossovsky not only survived, but fairly prospered, eventually becoming the man who delivered the ‘coup de grace’ at Stalingrad (2), setting in motion the eventual chain of events that led to Hitler’s downfall, the end of the war, and the beginning of the Cold War.
Decades later, yet another paranoid dictator would set in motion new events that would lead to another war on European soil, the first inter-state conflict since the end of WWII, and like Hitler before him, Vladimir Putin would base his pretext for his war on falsehoods, outright lies, and misinformation.
“Crimea — Russian speaking Crimea — was the first in line for the crackdown (by the US funded and run interim Ukrainian government). Because of this the people of Crimea…asked Russia to protect their rights and their very lives…Of course, we had to respond to their plea. We could not abandon Crimea and its people to their plight. That would have been a betrayal.”
March 18th 2014 (3).
A year later, and in the wake of the start of his vicious, unconscionable bombing campaign of Syrian civilians, and in the already crumbling buildings built for Putin’s showpiece 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where Russian athletes had been subjected to a coordinated programme of drug cheating, he addressed a convention of academics and journalists who specialised in Russia and matters Russian.
“Peace, a life at peace, has always been and continues to be an ideal for humanity. But peace as a state of world politics has never been stable.” Peace, he was saying, was an unnatural state, an outlier, an anomaly, and as such it was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. Whilst mutually assured destruction during the Cold War had kept the world at peace, the collapse of the Soviet Union had ended that golden era of global peace, and for this the blame was, he said, to be lain entirely at the feet of the United States.
“In the last quarter century, the threshold for applying force has been clearly lowered. Immunity against war acquired as a result of two world wars, literally on a psychological, subconscious level, has been weakened.” The implication being that this lowered threshold not only explained, but also justified his bloody intervention in Syria. Crimea was not mentioned.
The end point of the speech being that only at war, was Russia truly at peace (3).
Putin’s actions of late have given credence and substance to the violence of his words. More on that to come in two posts time…
“I won’t hear any more nonsense about the hardships of our troops in Winter…There is not going to be a Winter campaign. All the army has to do is to hit the Russians with a few hard cracks. Then you’ll see the Russian giant has feet of clay!”
Hitler’s furious, but wildly over confident and unrealistic response to Paulus’ logistics department who’d submitted a report on the situation of Operation Barbarossa (4).
Historical fact & the origins of the Great Patriotic War…
In September 1941 as the German army began to encircle Leningrad Stalin sent General Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov to take charge of the defence of the city.
The Germans, under orders from Hitler to “…erase the city from the face of the earth,” never succeeded in taking the beleaguered city, in which more than a million and a half civilians and soldiers died, with perhaps 630,000 of those having perished from starvation alone.
After a long, painful, near 900 days the siege of Leningrad was lifted.
Stalin later recalled Zhukov to the capital, to do for Moscow what he had done for Leningrad. A tough, non-compromising leader Zhukov was a strict disciplinarian who kicked the city defences into shape, mobilised the right forces at the right time and succeeded in saving the great city.
As the Germans neared the Moscow city limits Stalin announced that he would be staying no matter what, scenes that now seem oddly familiar with Zelensky’s similar steadfast refrain in the first days of Putin’s invasion— ‘I don’t want a ride. I want ammunition’ — as the grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of one time valiant Muscovite defenders have been turned into villains and invaders by Putin, and are now attempting to wipe Ukraine from the map.
A month later on November 7th 1941, the anniversary of the Bolsheviks taking power in the revolution, Stalin made an impassioned speech to lines of new recruits bound for the front as they marched through Red Square past the Kremlin;
“The whole world is looking to you as the force capable of destroying the plundering hoards of the German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe…look to you as their liberators. A great liberation mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war. Let the manly images of our great ancestors — Alexander Nevsky, Kurma Minim and Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutusov inspire you in this war. May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar.”
Putin now invokes this memory of what the Russian’s call the Great Patriotic War to inspire his troops in his war of aggression against Ukraine, in what he frames as an existential threat from a belligerent, war-mongering NATO that is every bit as dangerous for the Russian people as Hitler’s invasion had been 80 years before.
The great sacrifices made in WWII are now called for once again. Die in the cause of the Motherland and your heroics will become legend! You will be remembered forever!
Putin began his war against Ukraine in 2014 when he invaded and then illegally annexed Crimea. In this third post, and in next weeks fourth, on the history of Crimean conflicts I tell the next chapter in the tale of Generaloberst Erich von Manstein’s assault on Sevastopol and Crimea in 1942, before going on to discuss Putin’s 2014 invasion in the final part in two weeks.
Continuing the story from my post ‘von Manstein’s travails…’ the German commanders second assault on Sevastopol had been beaten back, and now the Soviet’s launched counter offensives up and down the Eastern Front, and for Generaloberst von Manstein the challenge of conquering Crimea was growing out of all proportion…
“The Red Army’s task is to liberate our Soviet territory from the German invaders!”
Stalin.
Soviet counter-offensives & German counter-punches; cut & thrust in the Kerch pensinsula, Christmas 1941- May 1942
To the North of Crimea, in areas that have once again become familiar in recent times, the Soviets were launching one such counter-offensive centred around the town of Izyum in the Donbas, some 120 kms South-East of Kharkov.
Within a day the Soviets had expanded the breach to greater than 80 kms wide, and then as now, Izyum was at a confluence of key logistical supply routes, and the Soviet successes were threatening German efforts at resupply as well as disrupting communications across the region (1).
Von Manstein lost much of his air support and many of his tanks which were moved North to help stem the rapidly expanding Izyum bulge, effectively hamstringing him for the immediate future in Crimea.
The Soviets continued to advance for another 10 days, expanding the bulge, before their attack lost momentum as resupply lines broke, and as temperatures dropped as low as minus 35°C in early February the Germans finally sealed the bulge (1).
But for von Manstein the problems didn’t stop with the loss of his air cover. As the Izyum bulge had grown the Soviets had landed a small force to the South of Feodosiya near Yalta, where General -Major Ivan Petrov, commander of the Coastal Army, had thought the German attacks might initially come from the previous December.
This force was now threatening von Manstein’s southern flank and needed to be dealt with before he could assault the heavily defended Parpach Line across the neck of the Kerch peninsula.
The Soviets took full advantage of von Manstein’s split forces to further reinforce the Parpach Line bringing massive amounts of men and materiel across the Kerch Straits on the ice road from the mainland (1).
Von Manstein recalled this episode bitterly in his memoirs: As early as 29th January an assessment of the enemy showed his forces on the Parpach front to be more than nine divisions, two rifle brigades and two tank brigades (with new T-34's). What’s more, the Sevastopol front, especially the artillery, was also becoming active again (1).”
And all the while Vice-Admiral Filip. S. Oktyabrsky, the commander of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, had continued to reinforce Sevastopol as well, bringing men, equipment, much needed heavy armaments and supplies. the fleet were also evacuating the wounded and, when close enough, firing at the enemy from behind with their heavy guns (4).
For von Manstein once again the key issue was his inability to reconstitute his army after all the losses thus far. And Soviet control of the seaways was having a disastrous impact on von Manstein’s ability to fully secure Crimea. Adequate numbers of reinforcements might be months arriving, yet he knew that he must keep the Soviets contained with the political situation vis-a-vis Turkey’s ‘neutrality’ uppermost in his mind.
As men and aircraft filtered back from Izyum the German numbers were still insufficient for von Manstein to force the issue at Kerch. During the early, bitterly cold months of 1942, there was a constant worry that the Soviets might break out from either Sevastopol or Kerch, or worse yet, both simultaneously.
The few aircraft he had available were stymied by constant bad weather, a lack of adequate ground staff and replacement parts, and perhaps most of all by the lack of a decent airfield in Crimea. When aircraft were able to get airborne they were often being asked to undertake operations for which they were ill-equipped to complete — for example, mine-laying units being asked to attack well defended ships — or they were hampered by the effectiveness of Soviet anti-aircraft fire.
Despite this, some success was achieved, but at a not inconsequential cost to the Luftwaffe.
Things were also not being helped any by Hitler’s insistence that the war in the East was already won (see the quote at the top of this piece). He had started to send men and machines back to Germany for a bit of R & R ahead of the long anticipated Allied push across the Channel.
On the 27th February von Manstein’s worst fears were realised when coordinated thrusts from Sevastopol and Kerch were mounted. The Soviet forces, aided by the powerful Black Sea Fleet, made initial gains all across the Parpach line where they vastly outnumbered their German enemies (1).
The Northern part of the line, protected by Romanian units, was pushed back, but elsewhere, despite being under huge pressure, the Germans largely held their ground.
The attempted breakout at Sevastopol had also been contained. Around Parpach, after two days of heavy fighting, an unexpected thaw arrived turning the frozen land into a quagmire, bogging down the advancing Soviets, and particularly around the Northern part of the Isthmus where the ground was marshy even at the best of times.
The better weather allowed about 120 German aircraft to take to the skies to provide much needed air support for the beleaguered, hard-pressed Germans. The Soviets were pounded by Stukas as well as Ju 88 medium bombers, who were also able to finally start hitting the Soviet build up on the Kerch peninsula, as well as the shipping up and down the Crimean coastline (1).
The Soviet advances began to lose momentum and were gradually pushed back. The British Air Ministry noted that by March 3rd the break out “does not appear to have affected any material change in this area (1).”
There was a short period of about 10 days of inaction and recuperation, but on March 13th the Soviets, under Lieutenant General Kozlov, tried once again to break out of the Parpach Isthmus.
With eight rifle brigades and two tank brigades, the Germans were once again forced back a few kilometres, as Kozlov slung wave after wave of men and machines at the Germans, but he could not force them back any further.
By April 11th the Soviets had sustained such heavy losses that the attack once again petered out. As things stabilised once more, the Luftwaffe were able to begin attacking across a much wider area, attacking transport columns, ports and Soviet defensive positions in preparation for what was to come.
“…all available forces will be concentrated on the main operations in the Southern sector, with the aim of destroying the enemy before the Don, in order to secure the Caucasus oilfields and the passes through Caucasus mountains themselves.”
Fuhrer Directive no.41, dated 3rd April 1942 (6).
Fall Blau was part of Hitler’s quest for the oilfields of the Caucasus. This objective was in danger if Crimea was not secured and the Black Sea Fleet neutralised.
Operation Trappenjagd (Bustard Hunt). 8th — 21st May, 1942.
However, by early Spring, with the situation in Sevastopol stabilised under the watch of General der Kavallerie Erik Hansen, von Manstein knew he had to deal with the massive Soviet build up on the Kerch peninsula.
Von Manstein moved the remainder of his forces North with a view to retake the Kerch peninsula; five German infantry divisions, one panzer division, and General der Artillerie Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s two and a half Romanian divisions up to the Parpach Line to face off against a whopping nineteen, yes 19, Soviet divisions and four armoured brigades (1).
Still woefully undermanned, von Manstein noted, “the ratio of forces in the Crimea provided no grounds for any real optimism regarding the outcome of both (Sevastopol and Kerch, which were) massive undertakings.”
In fact, von Manstein was probably hugely underestimating the strength of the Russian forces which vastly outnumbered his own men, and more particularly in Kerch, than at Sevastopol. The Soviets were indeed so tightly packed in the the Kerch peninsula that anything approaching rapid, or for that matter, even effective deployment was all but impossible for them (1).
At the first line of defence, the Parpach line, at the waist of the peninsula measured only 18 kms across, and yet there were some 210,000 men defending it, an oddity noted in a Red Army staff report which detailed “an unacceptable density of (our) forces.”
Recent Soviet gains around the Northern sector had been partially maintained, leaving a bulge that protruded some 7 kms in front of the rest of the line. The Soviets, seeing this as the weakest point, and therefore the most likely focus of any German attack, had packed it with men; the whole of General-Lieutenant Vladimir Lvov’s 51st Army stood by, with nine full divisions, making a total of 17 men to defend every single metre of the frontline (1).
The Southern, Black Sea coast, deemed far more defensible, sitting as it was behind three well prepared defensive lines, was held by the 44th Army under the command of General-Lieutenant Stepan Cherniak (1).
With the 47th Army in reserve, the Soviets outnumbered the Germans by more than two to one; this combined with the swampy terrain across much of Parpach perhaps made the Soviets too confident. Certain that the Germans would not try any offensive actions against such numbers, they were taken by surprise by the brazen audacity of von Manstein’s plan when it was finally engaged.
Despite his increasingly insistent meddling in military affairs, Hitler had gained an appreciation for the tactics and strategy involved in air support for any ground offensive, and had now begun to interfere in von Manstein’s Crimean campaign. Having personally discussed the air operations with Generaloberst Richtofen, whose powerful Fliegerkorps VIII had just returned the theatre after a period of R & R in Berlin, Hitler was confident he was the man for the job.
He tasked Lohr’s Luftflotte 4 with disrupting the Soviet supply of men and arms across the ice road, as well as keeping Soviet shipping from ports as far away as Novorossiisk and Tuapse at bay. Given new aircraft, both fighters and bombers, as well as extra personnel including pilots and ground crew, they were also to ferry in the supplies needed to rebuild the Crimean airfields.
By May, when von Manstein was ready to move, Hitler, aware that the Parpach Line would be an extremely tough line to break, had ensured the bombers had enough SD2 fragmentation bombs, known as Devil’s eggs — that might be considered the behavioural equivalent of today’s ‘cluster bombs’ that Biden has just given to Zelensky’s Ukrainian forces — for a 14 day bombardment of the densely packed Soviet defensive lines.
As the time came close, Goring, under Hitler’s orders, reinforced Luftflotte 4 to the “heaviest possible concentration” of aircraft in readiness for the assault (1).
And Lohr’s Luftflotte 4 were to be ably supported by General der Flieger Wolfram Freihert von Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VIII during the assault. Richthofen, his genealogy apart — he was the cousin of the infamous WWI ace, the Red Baron — had risen to personal infamy during the Spanish Civil War, where the German’s had first used, and then perfected the art of supporting a ground offensive (7).
It had been Richthofen’s infamous ‘Condor Legion’ that had led the dreadful attack on civilians during market day in Guernica, the devastation later made famous by Picasso’s raw, tonal imagery (see above).
Jose Antonio Aguirre, President of the Basques, denounced the attack; “German aviators, in the service of the Spanish rebels, have bombed Guernica, burning the historic city venerated by all Basques,” a claim dishonestly disputed by Franco, who tried to deflect responsibility and pin the blame on the Comunistas (7).
I digress once more…the rabid, cowardly dishonesty of dictators through history is a common theme, one maintained to this day…
Hitler knew the importance of this coming operation and was in no doubt about how hard von Manstein’s task would prove to be. Indeed, so vital was this operation to Hitler’s future plans, that he stressed to the commanders of the rest of the German Southern front, that once the assault was underway they would be without air support until Kerch was taken (1).
In the event, Operation Trappenjagd (or Bustard hunt) (see Figure 1. above) went almost exactly as planned by von Manstein. A brief artillery bombardment up and down the Parpach Line preceded the frontal assault (#1, Figure 1).
The victory was achieved by focusing the infantry assault on the Southern, Black Sea section of the Parpach Line (see Figure 1.), which had the most thoroughly prepared physical defences, but was the most sparsely manned, rather than going for the anticipated attack on the densely defended Northern bulge.
A daring amphibious assault by the four companies of the 436th Infantry regiment, along with two companies of engineers, pushed off in the dead of night on the 7th May. Loaded into 30 small boats, they made their way to a coastal inlet behind the Russian lines, at a time when the Black Sea fleet was mostly inactive, in large part due to the recent activities of Luftflotte 4 (#2, Figure 1.). They landed a mile or so behind the Soviet anti-tank ditches and fell on the unsuspecting Soviets who were guarding the rearmost of the three lines of defences, the anti-tank ditch, at the very moment the frontal assault commenced.
The bombardment, which erupted at 03.15am on the 8th, was only 10 minutes long, and was immediately followed by the frontal attack up and down the Parpach Line. The Northern section was kept tied down by four divisions of the 42nd Army Corps, whilst the German 30th Army Corps, backed up by a vicious aerial assault by the bombers and Stukas of Fleigerkorps VIII, attacked the Southern section. They punched a hole big enough to eventually allow the 22nd Panzer and 170th Infantry divisions to push through the gap (#3, Figure 1.), before they were to wheel North, falling on Lvov’s 51st Soviet Army from the rear, (#6, Figure 1.) even managing to crush a counter-attack by a Soviet tank brigade as they went (#4, Figure 1.).
Soviet fighters were kept from the skies by a constant barrage of attacks on Kerch airfields by Stukas and the new Henschel Hs 129’s, while German fighters patrolled a line in the sky above the the Soviet rear preventing Soviet aircraft from breaking through to attack the German forces.
However, a heavy Spring downpour late in the day on the 8th slowed the advance, and von Manstein, despite early successes, worried that it might yet all fall apart if the bad weather continued. The 22nd Panzers had been caught in the mud forestalling their move to the Soviet rear.
But by the early afternoon of the 9th, the weather had brightened a bit, allowing the Panzers to lumber slowly forward, and straight into a heavy Soviet artillery bombardment. Richthofen, watching the battle unfold from on high in his reconnaissance aircraft recognised the problem immediately. The Soviet guns were quickly silenced though by Richthofen’s Fliegerkoprs VIII allowing the Panzers to press on once again.
Once the major obstacle of the Soviet line had been broken, again with massive air support from Luftflotte 4, Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VIII, von Manstein quickly pushed the mobile Groddeck brigade, which had initially been von Manstein’s reserve force, through the breach created by the 22nd Panzers, to link up with the 436th and together continue to push Eastwards towards the Soviet airfield at Marfovka (#5. Figure 1.), which lay a short distance West of the Sultanovka Line, the final Soviet defensive barrier before Kerch itself (Figure 1.)(2).
During thick fog of the 10th and 11th the encircled companies of the Soviet 51st Army were breaking under relentless bombardment from the 22nd panzers and from the air.
Enjoying total air superiority by now, the German aircraft clobbered the fleeing Russians with everything they had, including the anti-personnel ‘Devil’s eggs.’ Richthofen wrote later that they left “corpse strewn fields,” that were “terrible” to see. The scene shocked even the battle hardened Richthofen who wrote, “I have seen nothing like it so far in this war.”
The Soviet reserves forces, caught out by the speed of the German advance across the peninsula, fell apart and crumbled. In fact the Groddeck brigade moved so quickly, in spite of a thick, low fog that impeded vision and seriously hampered Richthofen’s efforts at air support, they even outran their own communications links, and got caught in the onrushing waves of German bombers who were attacking the Sultanovka Line and lost a few tanks to friendly fire as a consequence (1).
As the remnants of the Soviet Northern pocket were crushed, whatever German forces that could now be spared rushed Eastwards to join up with Groddeck’s panzers.
By dusk on the 12th May, the first companies of German infantry along with the 22nd panzers had caught up with Groddeck’s panzers, all of the German units now far behind Koslev’s command HQ.
Koslev had been ordered by the Stavka two days earlier to retreat and hold the Sultanovka Line at all costs, but wracked by indecision he had stalled, and now the appearance of the Germans at Sultanovka saw the Soviet command structure break, the Russian units disintegrating, as disordered and bewildered they broke and ran.
The Richthofen’s war took another turn as on the same day he received orders from the Luftwaffe high command to take his Fliegerkorps VIII North to Kharkov to fix a “colossal mess” which had seen German line broken by yet another determined counter-attack by Russian tank brigades (1).
The morning of the 13th May saw the Sultanovka Line breached by the Germans, and the bombardment of Kerch began in earnest. Two days later Kerch fell, and the mopping up operations began. Many fleeing Russians were killed on the beaches near Kerch where tank and artillery fire kept the motorboats of the Black Sea Fleet, who were trying to rescue the men, at bay.
Sporadic fighting continued for a few days, but von Manstein recorded Operation Trappenjagd as a “stunning success.” More than 170,000 POW’s were taken; 1133 artillery pieces and 258 tanks “fell into our hands,” he recalled. Two full Russian armies had been completely destroyed, and the greater part of a third as well. The VVS (Voyenno-vozdushnyye sily) — the Red Air Force — in the region was also utterly annihilated (1).
Von Manstein was not ungracious in his victory. He was quick to acknowledge the skills and sacrifices of the Luftwaffe units of Lohr and Richthofen. But he knew, the battle for Crimea was still far from won.
Next week von Manstein tackles the tough nut that is Sevastopol once again…
Thanks for reading.
- Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler’s defeat in the East 1942–1943; Joel.S.A. Hayward, 1998.
- Stalingrad; Anthony Beevor, 2007.
- The Future is History: How totalitarianism reclaimed Russia; Masha Gessen, 2017.
- The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The hidden truth at the centre of WWII’s greatest battle; Iain MacGregor, 2022.
- Sevastopol 1942: von Manstein’s Triumph, Robert Forczyk, 2008.
- Victory at Stalingrad; Geoffrey Roberts, 2002.
- The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939; Anthony Beevor, 2006.
