Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Although the Soviet High Command was very concerned about the possibility of enemy amphibious landings in the Crimea, there was actually little possibility of that occurring. The Royal Romanian Navy was little more than a coast guard, with only four destroyers, one submarine, a single minelayer, and a few assorted auxiliaries. Romanian vessels were mostly obsolete and too outclassed to risk a head-on action against even part of the Black Sea Fleet. Furthermore, Romania’s merchant marine was tiny, with only 35 vessels of 111,678 GRT (gross register tonnage). Five of these merchantmen were modern vessels that would be useful for convoy operations, but the fact is that Romania lacked the ability to move more than limited quantities of troops and supplies across the Black Sea and had no ability to conduct an opposed landing.

CHAPTER 2 The Onset of War, June–August 1941

“The beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of an Autobahn. For us Germans, that will be our Riviera.”

Adolf Hitler, July 5, 1941

The exact details of Soviet strategic planning prior to Operation Barbarossa are difficult to quantify, but a number of Stalin’s pre-war strategic assumptions are clear. Foremost, Stalin believed that the Red Army was strong enough to deter a German invasion for the time being. Even if the Germans were tempted to commit aggression against the Soviet Union, Stalin believed that there would be adequate early warning to provide the Red Army time to prepare and deploy its forces for combat. Soviet military leaders were not ignorant of the threat posed by Germany after the sudden fall of France in 1940, but believed that their forces and plans would prevail. A series of war games conducted by the Soviet General Staff in Moscow in December 1940 suggested that the Germans would make their main effort in Ukraine, but that their forces would be pushed back to the border long before they reached the Dnepr River.¹

When war came, the mission of the Black Sea Fleet was to assist the Red Army’s Southern Front in defending the coastline of the Black Sea. To that end, one of the primary tasks was laying defensive minefields outside Sevastopol and the other Black Sea ports. However, the fleet also wanted to use its naval air arm and submarines to attack enemy naval targets and facilities in the Black Sea – but little real planning had been put into this concept. At the start of the war in June 1941, the Soviet Stavka (high command) was wary that Turkey might allow Axis air and naval forces to move through her waters in defiance of the Montreux Convention, so Batov’s 9th Rifle Corps was ordered to deploy its forces along the coast from Yevpatoriya to Kerch to repel potential amphibious or airborne attacks. No effort was made to construct ground defenses at either Perekop or Sevastopol, since the Stavka believed that the fighting would be confined to the border regions. Instead, the Soviets would use the Crimea as a springboard for air and naval attacks on Romania in order to distract German forces from the main area of battle.

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Although Barbarossa did not address the neutralization of the Black Sea Fleet, the Luftwaffe included it in its first-strike plan. Before dawn on June 22, 1941, a small number of He-111 bombers from Fliegerkorps IV’s 6./KG 4 approached Sevastopol unchallenged and managed to drop their bombs near Vice-Admiral Oktyabrsky’s headquarters. It was only a raid, not a serious attack, but it rattled Oktyabrsky and inflicted 230 civilian casualties.² Thereafter, Fliegerkorps IV conducted occasional raids and reconnaissance flights on Sevastopol, as well as some aerial mine-laying operations off the port, but the main fighting was occurring in the western Ukraine.

Shortly after the attack on his headquarters, Oktyabrsky initiated defensive mine-laying operations, and his ships emplaced about 3,000 mines by mid-July. He also decided to commit the VVS-ChF to a campaign of attacking the Romanian ports of Constanta and Sulina. The first raid conducted by 3 DB-3F from 2 MTAP and 6 SB-2 from 40 BAP on the afternoon of June 22 met little resistance and succeeded in inflicting minor damage. However, the Royal Romanian Air Force was alert when the VVS-ChF sent 73 naval bombers on June 23, and Romanian Hurricane fighters shot down three. The next day, German Bf-109 fighters from III./JG 52 also got involved and shot down ten of 32 naval bombers.³ Within the first five days of the war, the VVS-ChF lost 22 naval bombers, including some of their best-trained aircrew. Oktyabrsky was apparently ignorant of the arrival of significant Luftwaffe strength in Romania, which threatened his surface warships and made raids on Romania costly.