Battle of the Kerch Peninsula

• 1. Introduction

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  Three Soviet armies ceased to exist as fighting forces in the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula. The campaign ran from the 26th of December 1941 to the 20th of May 1942, across the eastern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. Erich von Manstein's 11th Army fought the campaign on the Axis side, outnumbered roughly two to one throughout.

  On the 8th of December 1941, Stavka, the Soviet supreme command, ordered the Transcaucasian Front to begin planning. The objective was to cross the Kerch Strait and break the siege of Sevastopol. What followed was the first major amphibious operation in Soviet history. Four consecutive offensives in the spring of 1942 failed against the German defensive line. A Luftwaffe air campaign gradually dismantled the supply shipping keeping the peninsula alive. When Germany attacked in May 1942, the defending force fell apart in eleven days. How that sequence unfolded is the story of Kerch.

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• 2. The December Landings

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  General-Major Fyodor Tolbukhin, chief of staff of the Transcaucasian Front, drew up the landing plan at Stavka's direction. It was founded on Stalin's belief that the German Wehrmacht was close to collapse. Rather than one large simultaneous landing, the plan called for multiple small landings at separate beaches and separate times. Five transport groups would put 7,500 soldiers ashore on eight isolated beaches north and south of Kerch. The Soviets had the troops and the transports. What they lacked were landing craft.

  Fishing trawlers and whaleboats substituted for purpose-built assault vessels. Before the first ships even departed, a German Messerschmitt Bf 110 reconnaissance aircraft spotted the Soviet naval buildup and reported it to Sponeck's XXXXII Army Corps headquarters. Sponeck's forces were stretched thin: the 46th Infantry Division was holding the entire Kerch Peninsula, and most of his other units had been transferred to the siege of Sevastopol.

  The landings on the 26th of December 1941 went badly north of Kerch. At Cape Khroni, 697 men from the 2nd Battalion of the 160th Rifle Regiment reached the beach by 0630 hours. Many drowned in the waves or were laid low by hypothermia before they could dig in. A cargo ship carrying 450 troops was bombed and sunk at Cape Tarhan that same day. At Cape Tarhan itself, Group 3 arrived so short of whaleboats that only 18 soldiers out of a landing force of 1,000 made it to the beach. By noon, about 3,000 men were ashore in five separate beachheads with no radios and no contact with headquarters. Reinforcements were delayed three days by winter weather and never arrived.

  Colonel Ernst Maisel's 42nd Infantry Regiment held the high ground overlooking the sand beaches at Kamysh Burun, south of Kerch. The landing there began at 0500 hours and ran straight into machine gun, mortar, and light artillery fire from fortified positions above the waterline. The first and second assault waves were driven back. Only 2,175 of the 5,200 troops assigned to the Kamysh Burun landing force made it ashore.

  At Feodosia on the 29th of December, the operation found more success. Lieutenant Arkady F. Aydinov led naval infantrymen who seized the lighthouse at the harbor mole and fired green flares to signal the follow-up forces. The cruiser Krasnyi Kavkaz unloaded 1,853 soldiers from the 633rd Rifle Regiment despite being hit 17 times and having its No. 2 gun turret set on fire. Soviet forces controlled the port by 0730 hours and had 4,500 troops ashore by morning. The slow Soviet advance inland from Feodosia was what Manstein later identified as a decisive missed opportunity. The 44th Army had 23,000 troops ashore by the 1st of January but could not sustain offensive operations against the German reinforcements arriving by road.

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• 3. Sponeck's Decision

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  At 0830 hours on the 29th of December 1941, Lieutenant General Hans Graf von Sponeck ordered the 46th Infantry Division to retreat west from Kerch. He cut contact with 11th Army headquarters before issuing the order. Soviet forces had landed at Feodosia in the German rear, and encirclement appeared imminent. Manstein had refused Sponeck's earlier request to withdraw, ordering him to hold and wait for reinforcements.

  Gruppe Hitzfeld was already on the way, carrying infantry, artillery, anti-tank guns, four StuG III assault guns, and an anti-aircraft detachment. Twenty thousand Romanian troops were in the vicinity. Sponeck did not wait.

  The 46th marched 120 kilometers through a snowstorm over two days, from the 30th through the 31st of December. Several vehicles were abandoned when fuel ran out. Soviet forces had established a roadblock on the coastal road. The division found a narrow 10-kilometer gap between Soviet forward elements and the Sea of Azov and pushed through it. It reached a new defensive line east of Islam Terek, intact but not without equipment losses.

  Sponeck was relieved of command on the 29th of December and court-martialed in Germany three weeks later. Army Group South's commander, Generaloberst Walther von Reichenau, issued a formal condemnation declaring the 46th Infantry Division forfeit of soldierly honor. Decorations and promotions were suspended until further notice. General der Infanterie Franz Mattenklott replaced Sponeck in command of XXXXII Corps. The 302nd Mountain Rifle Division attacked from its Kamysh Burun bridgehead and captured Kerch on the 31st of December. Soviet forces liberated the eastern Kerch Peninsula on the 1st of January. The 44th Army's slow pursuit squandered any chance of destroying the 11th Army. Within two weeks, the battle had settled into a stalemate at the Parpach Narrows, where both sides began constructing trenches, dugouts, and barbed wire.

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• 4. Four Offensives Fail

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  Stavka reinforced the Crimean Front with nine rifle divisions and Soviet engineers built an ice road across the frozen Kerch Strait. That road carried 96,618 men, 23,903 horses, and 6,519 motor vehicles to reinforce the peninsula. Stavka representative Lev Mekhlis arrived at Crimean Front headquarters in late January and backed Stalin's demand for an offensive by the 13th of February. Three 76 mm artillery regiments had no ammunition. Soviet troops lacked food. The first offensive did not begin until the 27th of February, when Kozlov had assembled 93,804 troops, 194 tanks, and 200 aircraft.

  Kozlov's 230-gun artillery preparation at 0630 hours on the 27th of February had little effect on the German strongpoints. Only 30 of those guns were heavy 122 mm pieces; the rest were light 76 mm weapons whose rounds left the fortified villages at Tulumchak and Koi-Asan largely intact. KV-1 heavy tanks sank into the mud and could not advance. Soviet soldiers carried artillery shells by hand across the bog. Confusion was so severe that troops trampled their own comrades to death in the congestion.

  The Romanian 18th Infantry Regiment collapsed on the northern part of the line. The 77th Mountain Rifle Division captured the hamlet of Kiet, briefly threatening to outflank the entire 11th Army. Otto Hitzfeld's reserve force counterattacked and retook Kiet the same day. At the strongpoint of Koi-Asan on the 2nd of March, Soviet forces admitted losing 93 tanks in a single day. Kozlov called off the first offensive on the 3rd of March with 40 tanks lost in three days and an exposed, indefensible salient to show for it.

  Mekhlis blamed General Tolbukhin for the failure and had him removed from his post. The second offensive began on the 13th of March. On that day alone, a single StuG III assault gun commanded by Lieutenant Johann Spielmann destroyed 14 T-34 tanks. His colleague Fritz Schrödel destroyed eight more Soviet tanks in the same period, two of them KV-1s. The 56th Tank Brigade lost 88 tanks in three days. Total Soviet tank losses across the second offensive reached 157.

  A third offensive on the 26th of March failed on its first day. The fourth offensive in early April ran into the newly arrived 28th Light Infantry Division, equipped with the 2.8 cm sPzB 41 light anti-tank gun. One soldier from that division, Obergefreiter Emanuel Czernik, used the weapon to destroy seven T-26 tanks and one BT tank in a single day. By the 15th of April, Kozlov had withdrawn to his February starting positions. From January through April 1942, the Crimean Front lost 352,000 men against Axis 11th Army casualties of 24,120, a loss ratio of 14 to 1. The spring thaw arrived in early May, and both sides prepared for the battle that would decide the campaign.

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• 5. The Air Stranglehold

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  Alexander Löhr's Luftflotte 4 began attacking Soviet shipping in late January 1942 with orders to sever the supply lines feeding Kerch. The 7,500-ton transport Emba was damaged on the 29th of January, though early Luftwaffe attacks failed to prevent some 100,000 men and hundreds of artillery pieces from reaching Kerch in the weeks that followed. Then the specialist torpedo-bomber unit KG 26 arrived in the theater.

  On the night of the 1st to the 2nd of March 1942, KG 26 damaged the 2,434-ton steamer Fabritsius so badly it was written off. The 4,629-ton oil tanker Kuybyshev took a hit south of Kerch on the 3rd of March, depriving Soviet forces of fuel. After the tanker withdrew to Novorossiysk for repairs, Ju 88s of KG 51 crippled it again on the 13th of March. KG 51 sank the 3,689-ton transport Georgiy Dimitrov on the 18th of March. On the 23rd of March, nine KG 51 Ju 88s sank the minelayers Ostrovskiy and GS-13 in Tuapse harbour, destroyed a motor torpedo boat, and damaged two submarines. The steamer V. Chapayev sank with 16 crew and 86 soldiers.

  In eight weeks from early February through the end of March, the Black Sea Transport Fleet shrank from 43,200 tons of shipping to 27,400 tons. Six transports were lost and six more sat in repair. Soviet land forces were ordered to halt all offensive operations to conserve what remained. On the 17th of April, KG 26 sank the 4,125-ton steamer Svanetiya during an attempt to resupply Sevastopol, with approximately 535 men lost.

  By late April, even firewood had to be brought in by sea. Wolfram von Richthofen had meanwhile expanded his airfield network to reduce bomber sortie times and had arranged for the delivery of more than 6,000 canisters of SD-2 anti-personnel cluster bombs by the end of April. By the 8th of May he had 800 aircraft under his command in Crimea. Soviet air superiority in the area had already collapsed before the ground offensive began.

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• 6. Operation Bustard Hunt

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  Trappenjagd, German for bustard hunt, began at 04:15 on the 8th of May 1942. Within hours, Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers had knocked out the 44th Army's critical communications and mortally wounded the 51st Army's commander. German fighters shot down 57 of the 401 Soviet aircraft in the area during 2,100 sorties that morning. The artillery bombardment included four Nebelwerfer rocket batteries and lasted only 10 minutes. Within 210 minutes of the ground assault beginning, the second defensive line of the 44th Army was broken.

  Richthofen's VIII Fliegerkorps operated from newly expanded airfields built to reduce bomber sortie times. Stukas, Henschel Hs 129s, Ju 88s, and He 111s struck Soviet positions, armored units, field fortifications, and troop columns without pause. The 56th Tank Brigade and 126th Separate Tank Battalion launched a counterattack with 98 tanks, including seven KV-1 heavies. Stukas and Hs 129s arrived and destroyed an estimated 48 of them, including all seven KV-1s. In one separate engagement, 24 Soviet tanks were destroyed by StuG IIIs at a cost of one German assault gun.

  On the 9th of May, German engineers finished bridging the anti-tank ditch. The 22nd Panzer Division moved through the gap and swung north. By mid-day on the 10th of May it had trapped the 51st Army against the Sea of Azov. Richthofen's units flew 1,700 sorties on the 9th and claimed 52 Soviet aircraft shot down for the loss of 2. A rainstorm gave the Soviets a brief pause on the evening of the 9th. When it cleared, VIII Fliegerkorps returned and destroyed the remaining isolated Soviet tanks, including 11 KV-1s.

  Soviet morale collapsed and a retreat toward Kerch began. The eight divisions of the 51st Army surrendered on the 11th of May. On the 12th of May, Richthofen conducted 1,500 sorties without significant Soviet opposition, dropping 1,780 bombs on Kerch and burning it to the ground. That same day, with the air battle effectively won, he was ordered to send the bulk of his units north to support the 6th Army at the Second Battle of Kharkov. Kerch fell on the 15th of May. The last pocket of Soviet resistance south of the city was destroyed on the 20th of May. German casualties in the eleven days of Bustard Hunt totaled 7,588 men. Richthofen later described his bombing operations during Trappenjagd as concentrated air support the likes of which had never existed.

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• 7. Aftermath

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  The Crimean Front lost 176,566 men, 258 tanks, 1,133 artillery pieces, and 315 aircraft across the eleven days of Bustard Hunt. The five-month battle as a whole cost the Soviet Union 570,000 casualties, against Axis losses of roughly 38,000. Historian John Erickson wrote that Lev Mekhlis had thrown away twenty-one divisions of three armies in a nightmare of confusion and mismanagement.

  In the catacombs beneath Kerch, groups of Soviet soldiers who refused to surrender took shelter alongside civilians who had fled the fighting. They held out for months. The Germans deployed poison gas against them. During the sea evacuation, three transports carrying 900 wounded soldiers were sunk by German bombers, along with a gunboat and six patrol boats. Between 37,000 and 116,045 Soviet troops were evacuated by sea, of which an estimated 20 percent were wounded.

  On the 2nd of September 1942, German forces used the Kerch Peninsula as a launching pad for Operation Blücher II, crossing the Kerch Strait as part of the drive toward the Caucasus oilfields. Before that, Manstein had turned his freed divisions west and conquered Sevastopol within six weeks of Trappenjagd's conclusion. The Soviet photojournalist Dmitri Baltermants took a photograph near Kerch during the campaign, titled Grief, showing grief-stricken people searching among corpses in the muddy snow. It became one of the defining images of the Eastern Front, made at the same place where the opening gamble of December 1941 first came ashore.

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