Crimean offensive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Crimean offensive began on the 8th of April 1944 and ended on the 12th of May. In just over a month, the Red Army's 4th Ukrainian Front drove the German 17th Army and its Romanian allies from a peninsula they had held for two years. What followed was one of the most complex naval evacuations of the entire eastern front. The questions this story raises are not just military ones. Why did the Germans insist on holding a peninsula cut off by land? What made the final days of the evacuation so ferocious? And how did a single bomb, buried in the fuel tanks of a destroyer, fail to detonate and change the outcome of a naval battle?

• 2. A Peninsula Cut Off

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  In October 1943, the German 17th Army pulled back across the Kerch Strait from the Kuban bridgehead into the Crimea. That withdrawal set in motion a sequence of events that would trap the army entirely. By November 1943, the Red Army had severed the 17th Army's last land connection by pushing through the Perekop Isthmus.

  Yet the Germans chose to stay. Holding the Crimea was considered strategically vital: its loss, German commanders argued, would unsettle Turkey and expose Romanian oilfields to Soviet air attack. The Black Sea supply route kept the 17th Army alive even without a land corridor.

  Soviet operations against the peninsula in late 1943 were limited to landings near the Kerch Strait and in the north-eastern sector near Sivash. For the five months that followed, the Crimea sat largely outside the main Soviet effort. That pause was about to end.

  On the 30th of March 1944, Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist was removed from command of Army Group A, which had by then been redesignated Army Group South Ukraine. His successor was Ferdinand Schörner, who would inherit the task of defending what was already a shrinking perimeter.

• 3. Collapse of the Defences

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  On the 8th of April 1944, the 2nd Guards Army and the 51st Army struck across the Perekop Isthmus. The 17th Army defended but could not hold the line. Three days later, on the 11th of April, the Separate Coastal Army reached Kerch.

  Simferopol fell two days after that. It sits about 37 miles northeast of Sevastopol, and its rapid capture meant the road to the coast lay open. By the 16th of April, the 17th Army was in full retreat toward Sevastopol. By the end of the third week of April, the remaining Axis forces had concentrated around the city.

  German high command intended to hold Sevastopol as a fortress, mirroring what the Red Army itself had done during the first Crimean campaign of 1941-42. The plan was flawed from the outset. The city's fortifications had never been rebuilt after those earlier battles, and Sevastopol in 1944 was not the defensive stronghold it had once been.

  Fighting reached the city's outskirts toward the end of April. Sevastopol fell on the 9th of May, less than a month after the offensive began. With the city gone, the only escape route left was across the Black Sea. Soviet land-based bombers were already attacking the Axis evacuation convoys heading for Constanța.

• 4. Operation 60,000

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  The naval evacuation of the Crimea was conducted under the code name Operation 60,000. The name came from the estimated number of Romanian soldiers on the peninsula, though the actual figure ran between 62,000 and 65,000. The Romanian Navy later described it as the most complex and extensive operation it conducted during the Second World War.

  From the 15th of April to the 14th of May, German and Romanian warships ran convoys between Constanța and Sevastopol. All four Romanian destroyers took part, making them the largest Axis warships in the Black Sea at that point in the war. The first phase of the evacuation, from the 15th to the 25th of April, moved over 63,000 troops out of the Crimea.

  The last phase, from the 10th to the 14th of May, was the most dangerous. Under constant attacks from Soviet aircraft and shore artillery, Axis ships transported over 30,000 troops. Romanian vessels alone carried 18,000 of them.

  On the 11th of May, the German tanker Friederike was torpedoed and heavily damaged by the Soviet submarine L-4, removing her from the final days of the operation. No Romanian Navy warships were sunk during the evacuation, though the destroyer Regele Ferdinand came extremely close. A large aerial bomb struck her and fell into her fuel tanks. It did not detonate. The bomb was extracted from the fuel tanks several days after the operation ended.

• 5. Combat at Sea

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  The evacuation was not a passive crossing. Romanian and German naval units fought the Soviet Navy throughout. On the 18th of April, the Romanian gunboat Ghiculescu attacked the Soviet Leninets-class submarine L-6 twice with depth charges and damaged her. Bubbles rose to the surface after each attack. The German submarine hunter UJ-104 then finished her off.

  The night of the 27th of April brought a larger engagement. A convoy escorted by Ghiculescu, the German submarine hunter UJ-115, one R-boat, two KFK naval trawlers, and 19 motorized ferry barges engaged three Soviet G-5-class motor torpedo boats: TKA-332, TKA-343, and TKA-344. The three Soviet craft had already attacked and damaged UJ-104 before the convoy escort responded. Ghiculescu opened fire with tracer rounds, giving the entire escort group a fix on the Soviet torpedo boats. TKA-332 was hit and sunk.

  Over 12 Soviet aircraft were also shot down during the evacuation, two of them by the minelaying destroyer escort alone.

  In total, German and Romanian convoys evacuated over 113,000 Axis troops from the Crimea across the full span of the operation. The cost on the German side at sea included five cargo ships, one tanker, three tugs, three lighters, three motorboats, and four submarine hunters. The Romanians lost three cargo ships.

  The last Axis warship to leave the Crimea was the Amiral Murgescu, which carried 1,000 Axis troops, including the German General Walter Hartmann.

• 6. The Human Cost

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  The sinking of the Totila and the Teja on the 10th of May alone caused up to 10,000 deaths. That single day's catastrophe illustrates the scale of losses the evacuation inflicted. German and Romanian formations combined lost 57,000 men, many of whom drowned.

  The detailed evacuation count recorded between the 14th of April and the 13th of May 1944 shows who actually crossed the Black Sea: 58,486 Germans, of whom 12,027 were wounded; 36,557 Romanians, of whom 4,262 were wounded; 723 Slovaks; 15,391 Soviet volunteers; 2,581 prisoners of war; and 7,115 civilians. The total came to 120,853 people and 22,548 tons of cargo.

  Axis losses across the entire campaign, as recorded by Glantz and House in When Titans Clashed, reached 96,700: 57,500 killed and missing, 39,200 wounded. Soviet losses were 84,819 in total, with 17,754 killed and missing and 67,065 wounded. The Red Army also lost 171 tanks, 521 artillery pieces, and 179 aircraft.

  The commander of the Romanian Navy, Rear Admiral Horia Macellariu, received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his role in the partially successful evacuation. The offensive itself was later listed in Soviet propaganda as one of Stalin's ten blows.

• 7. Aftermath and Accountability

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  17th Army commander Erwin Jaenecke had seen what was coming. In a meeting with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, he argued that Sevastopol should be evacuated and his army of 235,000 men withdrawn before it was too late. He was ignored.

  After the Crimea fell, Jaenecke was held responsible for the defeat. He was arrested in Romania and court-martialed. His life was saved only through the intervention of Heinz Guderian. He was dismissed from the army on the 31st of January 1945.

  The last Axis pockets of resistance in the Crimea were destroyed on the 12th of May 1944, two days after the Totila and Teja went down with thousands aboard.