Where the Iron Crosses Grow

On the evening of December 25, 1941, the Soviet amphibious operation began when elements of the 51st Army’s 224th Rifle Division and the 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade loaded aboard small craft on the Taman Peninsula and began the short, but frozen, transit across the Kerch Strait. It was not a very impressive invasion flotilla. Group Two, heading for Cape Khroni, 4 miles northeast of Kerch, consisted of the gunboat Don (equipped with two 130mm and two 45mm guns), the transports Krasny Flot and Pyenay, a tugboat, two self-propelled barges that carried three T-26 tanks and some artillery, and 16 small fishing trawlers. Lacking landing craft that could deposit troops on beaches, Gorshkov’s Azov Flotilla was forced to use whaleboats to transfer troops from the transports to the shore – a tedious and dangerous process in turbulent seas. The weather was roughly Sea State 5 (waves 2–3 yards high, wind speed at 17–21 knots) with strong westerly winds and rain – similar to that experienced on D-Day in June 1944 – but was trending towards a more intense storm in the next 24 hours. At Cape Khroni, 697 troops from 2nd Battalion/160th Rifle Regiment succeeded in getting ashore by 0630hrs on December 26, but a number of troops trying to wade ashore through the surf either drowned or became hypothermia casualties. Later in the day, another rifle battalion was landed at Cape Khroni, along with a platoon of T-26 tanks and some light artillery. The landings at the more distant Cape Zyuk were problematic; only 290 troops succeeded in getting ashore in six hours and several vessels were grounded on the rocky coastline. At Cape Tarhan, there were only two whaleboats available and just 18 soldiers out of the 1,000-man landing force actually reached the beach. The most successful Soviet landings were in Bulganak Bay, just west of Cape Khroni, where the Azov Flotilla managed to land 1,452 troops from the 224th Rifle Division’s 143rd Rifle Regiment, along with three T-26 tanks, two 76mm howitzers, and two 45mm antitank guns. Other planned Soviet landings at Kazantip Point and Yenikale were aborted due to the weather. By midday, the Soviets had five separate beachheads on the northern side of the Kerch Peninsula, with barely 3,000 lightly equipped troops ashore. Enemy resistance initially was minimal, since very few Germans were stationed along this stretch of coastline, but the Luftwaffe arrived over the invasion areas by 1050hrs with He-111 bombers and Ju-87 Stukas. Gorshkov’s Group 3, wallowing in heavy seas off Cape Tarhan, was particularly hard hit, and the 3,900-ton cargo ship Voroshilov was bombed and sunk with 450 troops aboard. Group 2 off Cape Zyuk was also bombed, and one vessel with 100 troops sank.⁴

Tolbukhin’s amateurish landing plan, apparently made with little input from the Navy, simply dumped frozen, poorly supplied troops on remote beaches and assumed that they would somehow link up and seize the port of Kerch. Instead, the troops moved less than a mile inland and began to dig in against the expected German counterattacks. The isolated regimental and battalion commanders, with little or no communication between each other or their higher headquarters, decided to wait until the rest of the 224th Rifle Division and the follow-on 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade arrived before advancing further inland. However, after the initial landings were completed, the weather worsened, preventing any further large-scale landing operations across the Kerch Straits for the next three days.

The landing of the 302nd Mountain Rifle Division at Kamysh Burun, south of Kerch, was the only opposed landing on December 26. Here, the German I./IR 42 and II./IR 42 held excellent defensive positions on high ground overlooking the sandy beaches. The first wave of the invasion at 0500hrs ran into a deluge of German machine-gun, mortar, and light-artillery fire, which prevented most of the improvised landing craft from approaching the shore. An attempt to land on the beach at Eltigen was slaughtered by II./IR 42. A company of Soviet naval infantry managed to land at Stary Karantin, but was quickly overwhelmed by Major Karl Kraft’s I./IR 42. The second wave arrived at 0700hrs and was also repulsed. However, some Soviet troops managed to land at the dock area at Kamysh Burun, where they had some cover from German fire, and the third wave was able to establish a tenuous foothold there by the afternoon. Yet only 2,175 of 5,200 troops succeeded in getting ashore at Kamysh Burun, and the Luftwaffe sank a number of ships off the beaches.