Russia at war 1941-1945

Führer has entrusted you with a task of world-historical importance. At Sebastopol stands the 17th Army, and at Sebastopol the Soviets will bleed to death."

There had been some heavy fighting on the outer defences of Sebastopol since April 18, particularly in the valley of Inkerman; but it was not till May 5 that the Russians attacked Sebastopol in strength from the north, in order to draw there as many German troops as possible. Having achieved that, the Russians launched, on May 7, an all-out attack on Sapun Ridge, a hill 150 feet high, with several lines of German trenches, which was "the key to Sebastopol". The artillery and katyusha barrage, supported by aircraft, lasted several hours, and then the ridge was stormed by infantry. There were heavy losses on both sides, but once Sapun Ridge was taken, the road to Sebastopol was clear. Two days later, on May 9, Hitler resigned himself to abandoning the Crimea and ordered

evacuation. But it was already too late and the 50,000 German troops left around

Sebastopol were now doomed.

The successful if costly Russian capture of Sapun Ridge was accompanied by attacks on other parts of the "impregnable" Sebastopol defences, and by the 9th, the Russians began to pour into Sebastopol from all directions. Several thousand Germans were killed or captured in Sebastopol itself, while the rest—about 30,000 —abandoned the city and

retreated across the moors to the Chersonese Peninsula. Here there were three isthmi, one less than two miles wide, and the others less than a mile wide, and across the first isthmus the Germans had laid minefields and had built an "earth wall" with fortifications of sorts consisting of barbed-wire fences and a series of dugouts and machine-gun nests—nothing very solid, but hard to approach because of the minefield.

The distance between the first line of defence and the tip of the Chersonese Promontory, with the ruins of its white lighthouse, was about three miles. The fortifications across the other two isthmi were much more rudimentary. It was in this small area of about three miles by about one and a half that the Germans were going to make their last stand, still in the desperate hope that ships would come to take them away.

And so, on the 9th, after abandoning Sebastopol, 30,000 Germans retreated across the bleak moors outside Sebastopol to the Chersonese Promontory—the very place to which

the last Russian defenders of Sebastopol had retreated in July 1942, only to be

exterminated or taken prisoner.

German prisoners later said that the morale was low among the troops, but that the

officers kept on assuring them that ships would come. The Führer had promised it... For three days and nights the Chersonese was that "unspeakable inferno" to which German authors now refer. True, on the night of May 9-10 and on the following night two small ships did come and perhaps 1,000 men were taken aboard. This greatly encouraged the

remaining troops.

The Germans still had one small fighter airfield on Chersonese; but since it was now under constant Russian shell-fire, it could not serve much purpose.

The Russians were not, however, going to allow any more Germans to be evacuated by

sea; on the night of May 11-12, several more ships approached Chersonese, but two were sunk by Russian shell-fire and the rest turned tail. That was the night on which the Russians decided to finish off the 30,000 Germans. By this time the sight of the ships that had come and gone without landing had seriously demoralised the German troops. They

had already been heavily bombed and shelled for two days and nights; and on the night of May 11-12 the katyusha mortars ("the Black Death" the Germans used to call them) came into action. What followed was a massacre. The Germans fled in panic beyond the second and then the third line of their defences, and when, in the early morning hours, Russian tanks drove in, they began to surrender in large numbers, among them their commander, General Böhme and several other staff officers who had been sheltering in the cellar of the only farm building on the promontory.

Thousands of wounded had been taken to the tip of the promontory, and here were also some 750 SS-men who refused to surrender, and went on firing. A few dozen survivors

tried in the end to get away by sea in small boats or rafts. Some of these got away, but often only to be machine-gunned by Russian aircraft. These desperate men were hoping to get to Rumania, Turkey, or maybe to be picked up by some German or Rumanian

vessel.

My trip to the Crimea on May 14-18 was perhaps the strangest Crimean holiday anyone

had ever had.

On the morning of the 14th I flew from Moscow to Simferopol. The plane circled over