Russia at war 1941-1945

There continued much suspicion on both sides—right up to Stalin's speech on November 6, and the landing in North Africa a few days later. Much of the bad humour and, before long, anger on the Russian side was spontaneous, and largely caused by the pretty

desperate outlook at the front; though, for a few weeks before the North Africa landing, some of the angry comments in the press may have partly been calculated to deceive the Germans.

Chapter III THREE RUSSIAN DEFEATS: KERCH, KHARKOV

AND SEBASTOPOL

All the, admittedly superficial, rejoicing over the Anglo-Soviet Alliance in fact coincided with one of the hardest periods of the war in Russia; for in May the Russians had suffered disasters at Kerch and Kharkov, and it was also obvious that the days of Sebastopol's resistance were numbered.

After the Russians had been driven out of the Crimea in the autumn of 1941, with the exception of Sebastopol which continued to be held by a strong garrison, they undertook a combined operation from the Caucasus in an endeavour to recapture the Kerch

Peninsula, at the eastern extremity of the Crimea, and thus establish a strong bridgehead from which eventually the whole Crimea could be liberated and Sebastopol relieved. This was one of the largest combined land-and-sea operations undertaken by the Russians

during the war. In the last week of December 1941, despite highly unfavourable weather conditions and some heavy losses, they succeeded in landing some 40,000 troops,

occupying the whole Kerch peninsula, and also (for a few days) the important city of Feodosia on the Crimean "mainland".

It was at Kerch, incidentally, that the Russians received their first evidence of large-scale German atrocities: soon after the German occupation of Kerch in 1941, several thousand Jews had been exterminated by one of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen and buried in huge trenches outside the town. Needless to say, Field-Marshal von Manstein, who was in

command of the German 11th Army in the Crimea, later denied all knowledge of this.

The immediate result of the successful landing at Kerch was to reduce the German

pressure on Sebastopol, and Manstein was later to admit that the Russian landing had created an immense danger to the German forces in the Crimea.

[E. v. Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Lost Victories), Bonn, 1955, p. 246.]

But owing to shortage of trained men, or equipment, or both, or because of some very serious miscalculation on the part of the Russian High Command, the successful Kerch landing was not followed up except by a few abortive sorties, and on May 8 von

Manstein launched an all-out offensive against the Russian forces in the Eastern Crimea.

This opened with a concentrated air attack on the Russians, who suffered heavy casualties and were forced to retreat to a fortified line known as the Turkish Wall. But the German onslaught was much too strong:

Our forces proved themselves incapable of holding the Turkish Wall, and retreated to Kerch. The local command had shown itself incapable of using the air force effectively, and our troops retreated under constant German air attacks... By the 14th the Germans broke into the southern and western outskirts of Kerch, and between the 15th and 20th our rearguard units fought desperately to enable our main forces to cross the Kerch Straits to the Taman Peninsula [on the Caucasus side of the five-mile-wide straits]. Even so, it proved impossible to carry out the evacuation in an organised manner. The enemy

captured practically all our military equipment, which was then used against the

defenders of Sebastopol.

[IVOVSS, vol. 2, p. 405.]

It was in these laconic words that the recent Soviet History described the first of the great disasters suffered by the Russians in the Crimea.

This disaster is attributed by the History to a faulty organisation of defence, the "shallow operational disposition of the troops" and the lack of essential reserves. Other reasons were "the thoughtlessness of the army headquarters, the absence of camouflage at the command posts, which had failed, moreover, to move from place to place, with the result that in their very first raids, the Luftwaffe smashed up these command posts, thus

wrecking all communications. The different headquarters were, moreover, unaccustomed to the use of radio." Lt. Gen. Kozlov, the commander of the Kerch Army Group, and his top commissar, Mekhlis, as well as numerous other officers and commissars, were

demoted, and Mekhlis, who was at that time both Vice-Commissar of Defence and one of the heads of the Political Administration of the Red Army was reheved of both these