Where the Iron Crosses Grow

The Crimean partisans were almost totally ineffective in the winter of 1941/42 due to the lack of food and weapons. Most of the new recruits were teenagers, like 15-year-old Vilor P. Chekmak, eager to display their patriotic ardour, but completely untrained and amateurish. Chekmak blew himself up with a hand grenade when approached by a German patrol – heroically according to the Soviet version, but more likely due to mishandling the weapon. Winter hit the unprepared partisans hard, and many starved or froze to death in the mountains, while others were reduced to eating corpses. Virtually all of the enthusiastic Komsomol teenagers from Sevastopol and Simferopol were dead before spring arrived. Mokrousov aggravated an already bad situation by refusing to allow any Tatars to join his partisan groups and raiding Tatar villages to steal food – which helped to encourage the Tatars to assist Axis anti-partisan measures. On January 6, 1942, the Red Army conducted a regiment-size landing at Sudak, southwest of Feodosiya. The landing was ultimately a failure, but a good number of isolated troops from the landing force joined the partisans. In late February 1942, Soviet commissars ordered the Crimean partisans to assist an attempt by Petrov’s Coastal Army to break through the siege lines around Sevastopol. A total of 134 partisans were sent to attack AOK 11’s rear areas and 117 were killed – it was a complete fiasco. Soviet commanders viewed the partisans as a “Fifth Column” that could attack enemy rear areas, but the German appreciation of them as “Bandits,” suitable only for raiding unarmed villages or lone Axis vehicles, was closer to the truth. In March 1942 a single Soviet plane landed with medical supplies, food, and ammunition for the partisans, but this was clearly a drop in the ocean. The main German anti-partisan unit in early 1942 was Feldgendarmerie-Abteilung 683, which was more concerned with hunting down paratroopers than partisans. Romanian anti-partisan operations rolled up hundreds of half-starved partisans, too weak to escape. Further weakening the partisan effort, Mokrousov defined the partisan struggle in the Crimea as a “two-front war” – against the Axis occupiers and against Tatar collaborators.¹⁷

By mid-1942 it was apparent that the Crimean partisans had achieved nothing of note, and that Mokrousov’s erratic command style prevented effective recruiting or operations. Partisan strength in the Crimea dropped to fewer than 600. Soviet accounts are unusually candid about Mokrousov’s continual drunkenness and casual execution of his own partisans for various alleged infractions. Indeed, under Mokrousov, the Crimean partisan movement was floundering, and was no hindrance at all to the Axis. Mokrousov sent communications to the North Caucasus Military District that blamed the Crimean Tatars for his failures due to their collaboration with the enemy. With the destruction of the Crimean Front in May 1942 and the fall of Sevastopol in July, Mokrousov’s inability to orchestrate an effective partisan campaign in the Crimea was no longer tolerable to the Stavka. A plane was sent into the Crimea to collect Mokrousov from a clandestine landing strip on July 8, and he was flown back to the Caucasus. Although some officers wanted to put Mokrousov before a military tribunal, he had plenty of party and NKVD friends who protected him. Instead, Petrov promoted him to Colonel and made him the chief of intelligence for the North Caucasus Front.

While the partisan movement languished in the Yaila Mountains, there was resistance in other places in the Crimea. Colonel M. Yagunov, commander of the rearguard at Kerch in May 1942, had retreated into the Adzhimushkay Quarry. These underground limestone quarries had been used as hiding places by local partisans in the winter of 1941/42, as well as underground storage shelters for artillery ammunition. Yagunov pulled his small command back into the underground quarry, which consisted of deep catacombs that had been excavated for decades and were impervious to bombing. Other Soviet troops that had been abandoned in Kerch, as well as civilians, made their way to the Adzhimushkay Quarry, swelling Yagunov’s “command” to purportedly between 10,000 and 13,000 people. Soviet sources claim that these resistance forces held out in the Adzhimushkay Quarry for 170 days with negligible water and supplies, and stole what they need from nearby German units. Claims are also made that the resistance in the Adzhimushkay Quarry tied down large numbers of German troops. Unfortunately, this version of what happened at the Adzhimushkay Quarry is a patriotic exaggeration. Although water was a major problem for those in the quarry, post-war excavations revealed that the defenders succeeded in digging deep wells through the rock.