Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Wrangel believed that the Whites might be able to hold the Crimea indefinitely, since even his depleted Volunteer Army could defend the only two practical land routes: the Perekop and Chongar. He stationed General-Lieutenant Aleksandr P. Kutepov’s 1st Corps behind the old Tatar Wall at the Perekop Isthmus, which was heavily fortified with barbed wire, machine guns, and artillery during the fall of 1919. The 38-year-old Kutepov, last commander of the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment, was one of the best fighting generals of the Volunteer Army and a stern disciplinarian who kept his troops in good order. Kutepov’s troops dug three lines of trenches at Perekop, fronted by three to five rows of barbed wire. He had 8,900 troops holding a 5½-mile-wide front at Perekop, with another 7,500 men holding a reserve position at Ishun, 12 miles south of Perekop.[20]

General Yakov Slashchev’s 2nd Corps deployed 3,000 infantry on a ½-mile-wide front at the Chongar, which was also heavily fortified with barbed wire, six lines of trenches, and even a few concrete bunkers. Several large coastal guns were taken from Sevastopol to reinforce the Chongar position. Slashchev ordered the Salkovo railroad bridge blown up, leaving a mile-wide gap across the Sivash. Wrangel kept the 12,000 mounted troops of the Don Cavalry Corps back at Dzhankoy as a mobile reserve. Given that the Bolsheviks had absolutely no naval forces on the Black Sea, Wrangel believed that his forces, led by these two skillful and experienced commanders, could hold the only gateways into the Crimea. British military aid continued to arrive in Sevastopol, enabling Wrangel to rebuild the battered Volunteer Army with fresh equipment and uniforms; the British even provided 45 tanks and 42 aircraft to reinforce the White defenses in the Crimea. Meanwhile, those remnants of the Black Sea Fleet that had not yet been scuttled sat rusting in Sevastopol, and although short on both coal and trained sailors, were available to provide Wrangel with naval gunfire support.

With the Russian Civil War in its final spasms by late 1920, the Red Army was finally able to direct sufficient forces to retake the Crimea. Mikhail Frunze’s Southern Front dispatched five armies toward the Crimea in October 1920, consisting of 186,000 troops. Yet despite an overall 5-1 superiority in manpower and 4-1 in artillery, Frunze would be able to deploy only a fraction of his forces at either Perekop or Chongar. It was the same kind of situation that faced the Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC, where terrain greatly reduced the advantage of superior numbers. With this in mind, Kutepov waited at the Perekop, trusting to barbed wire and machine guns to keep the Reds out.

CHAPTER 1 The Crimea Under the Hammer and Sickle, 1920–41

“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order.”

Vladimir Lenin, October 1917

The men marched silently in long columns through the cold, ankle-deep mud, which held the stink of a stagnant sea. It was a cold night on November 7/8, 1920, with temperatures around 50˚F (10˚C) and very windy, which brought a chill to each man, locked in the solitude of the stealthy march. These men were soldiers of Augustus Kork’s 6th Army, who were marching 3 miles across the Sivash to outflank Kutepov’s White troops at Perekop. Frunze had wanted to make his main effort at the Chongar Peninsula, but the Azov Flotilla could not move its small craft into the Sivash due to ice at Henichesk, which was the only place where shipping could enter the confined waters. Without boats, Frunze did not believe that he could move enough assault troops across the water to overwhelm Slashchev’s defensive position. Instead, Frunze was forced to shift his main effort to the Perekop, with Kork’s army deployed to conduct a frontal assault on the Tatar Wall.[1] Then by chance, high winds and unusual tide conditions lowered the water level in the Sivash and opened a new avenue of approach. Frunze ordered Kork to send nearly one-third of his army – the 15th and 52nd Rifle Divisions and the 153rd mixed brigade, a total of 20,300 troops – to cross the Sivash during the night. Once the Sivash was crossed, Kork would begin the main attack on the Tatar Wall the next day. Frunze believed that if Kutepov’s corps was hit from in front and behind simultaneously, it would lead to a rapid collapse. Neither Kutepov nor Wrangel expected a serious attack across the Sivash, but just in case, they deployed 2,000 Cossack cavalrymen under Mikhail A. Fostikov to screen the coast along the southern side of the Sivash.