Where the Iron Crosses Grow

By dawn of November 17 it was over, and Gorshkov’s small craft took off the last of Batov’s troops that could be saved. Although Blagoveshchensky and Zubkov’s units were decimated, both commanders managed to extract a portion of their troops in the final evacuation. Surprisingly, the two pre-war units in Batov’s 9th Rifle Corps, the 106th and 156th Rifle Divisions, managed to save 8,214 of their approximately 25,000 personnel, but all heavy equipment was abandoned.²⁷ All told, the Soviets claimed to have evacuated 50,000 from Kerch, but fewer than a third were able-bodied combat soldiers. The 51st Army left many troops behind, some of whom were captured, and others went into hiding to form local partisan units. However, the main impact of the loss of Kerch and the bulk of the 51st Army was that Manstein’s AOK 11 could now turn its entire attention to the last Soviet foothold in the Crimea: Sevastopol.

CHAPTER 4 The Ring Closes Around Sevastopol, November–December 1941

“Our armies are all advancing

Russia is down on one knee
Our rifles need no enhancing
Victory ours will be
From Finland’s snow to Black Sea strand
Forward! Forward!
Eastward, ho! Seize more land!
Freedom is our goal
Victory our destiny
Fuhrer, our sieg is Germany’s Heil”

German newsreel from Die Deutsche Wochenschau, October 1, 1941

By November 9, it was clear to Petrov that the Germans had missed their best opportunity to seize Sevastopol before the Soviet defenses solidified. The Coastal Army, despite taking a severe beating, had reached the Sevastopol defensive perimeter and joined up with the heterogeneous collection of naval units that had been literally thrown onto the city’s ramparts. The Soviet defense of Sevastopol began to coalesce at that point and the fact that Petrov was the man on the spot was clear to the Stavka, which put him in charge of all ground forces and coastal artillery in the SOR.¹ Naval leadership was more complex, with Oktyabrsky in charge of the fleet, Zhukov in charge of the naval base, Morgunov in charge of the coastal guns, and General-Major Nikolay A. Ostryakov in command of the VVS-ChF. Ostryakov was a renowned bomber pilot who had mistakenly bombed the German pocket-battleship Deutschland during the Spanish Civil War in May 1937.

The 45-year-old General-Major Ivan E. Petrov did not seem to have the background to lead a joint army–navy command in a desperate siege. Before joining the Red Army and the Communist Party in 1918 he had studied in a theological seminary, and his glasses gave him a studious appearance. Although trained as an infantryman, Petrov spent most of the interwar period in Central Asia in cavalry units and had no previous experience with naval units or combined operations. He had briefly commanded the 25th Rifle Division at Odessa before being given command of the Coastal Army, which is where he gained his first experience with Oktyabrsky’s Black Sea Fleet. What Petrov did possess was a determination to hold on and overcome, which he instilled in the defenders of Sevastopol. His first task was to organize a coherent defense from the rag-tag elements under his command, in order to withstand the serious enemy attack that he knew was coming.

General-Major Morgunov had sketched out a defensive perimeter 3–5 miles around Sevastopol in February 1941, but actual construction work did not begin until early July. Initially, two naval construction battalions, supplemented by 2,000 civilian volunteers, began work on building the inner defensive line, which extended only 2 miles out from the city. These defensive lines would be garrisoned by local naval infantry, leaving the defense of the city entirely within the hands of the Black Sea Fleet. Yet it was not until mid-September 1941, when the Germans began attacking the Soviet defenses at Perekop, that the leadership in Sevastopol got serious about building defenses in depth around the city. The new plan was to build three lines of defense, with the outermost layer 7–9 miles out, so that enemy artillery could not bombard the harbor. Obviously, this required a much larger labor commitment, as well as more troops than the Black Sea Fleet could provide. Amazingly, the labor force was able to construct three lines of defense around Sevastopol by early November, with over 300 bunkers, 9,600 mines, and numerous barbed-wire obstacles.² None of the defensive lines were complete when Hansen’s LIV Armeekorps approached Sevastopol, but the exhausted Russian troops could slip into prepared positions.