Where the Iron Crosses Grow

By May 13 the Germans were across the “Turkish Rampart” in strength and quickly shoved the small Soviet rearguards out of the way. Curiously, Oktyabrsky and his Black Sea Fleet remained aloof from the Kerch evacuation, and he sent some of his destroyers on meaningless night bombardment missions against German positions near Feodosiya, which had no impact upon Trappenjagd. On May 14, the 132. and 170. Infanterie-Divisionen had fought their way into the west side of Kerch. One Stossgruppe from IR 391, supported by four assault guns from Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 190, got too far ahead and found itself encircled by Soviet troops and attacked at close quarters. Soviet infantry swarmed over the assault guns, trying to knock them out with grenades and explosive charges. In desperation, the Germans fought their way out of the encirclement, but every member of the assault-gun platoon that escaped was wounded.⁹ Warily, German troops entered the shattered port the next day, clearing out stragglers, and then set up 2cm and 8.8cm flak guns on the piers to engage fleeing Soviet vessels with direct fire.

Colonel M. Yagunov, a staff officer from the Crimean Front, had been assigned the task of conducting the rearguard during the evacuation. He gathered a motley crew of naval infantrymen, rear-area troops, and aviation cadets for his rearguard and they succeeded in holding the Germans back from the port area for a time, but ultimately found themselves cut off. Unable to reach the embarkation areas and with German artillery and air attacks pounding the entire port area, Yagunov made the decision to pull his rearguard force back to the Adzhimushkay Quarry, 2½ miles northeast of the port. The Soviets did manage to evacuate a multiple rocket-launcher battalion and some artillery, but the majority of the Crimean Front’s equipment was abandoned to the enemy. In the end, Gorshkov’s vessels were able to evacuate somewhere between 37,000 and 73,000 troops from the Crimean Front to the Taman Peninsula, of whom at least 20 percent were wounded.¹⁰

For several days after the fall of the port, small Soviet armed groups held out in various positions around Kerch. One group of about 2,000 troops made a stand in the 1890s-vintage Fort Totleben south of Kerch, while a somewhat larger number held a position near Yenikale. These forces were finally annihilated by May 20 through the use of massed German artillery and bomber attacks. Yagunov’s group in the Adzhimushkay Quarry held out for 170 days before being eliminated.

In one of the more astonishing victories of World War II, Manstein’s outnumbered AOK 11 had smashed Kozlov’s Crimean Front in less than two weeks. The three Soviet armies suffered about 28,000 dead and 147,000 captured out of 250,000 troops engaged, with nine out of 18 divisions completely destroyed and the others reduced to combat-ineffective fragments. All the Soviet tanks and artillery in the Kerch Peninsula had been lost and the VVS-Crimean Front and VVS-ChF lost 417 aircraft. German losses were light for a success of this magnitude, with a total of 7,588 casualties in XXX and XXXXII Armeekorps (including 1,703 dead or missing), as well as 12 tanks, three assault guns, and nine artillery pieces.¹¹ More significant was the expenditure of 6,230 tons of ammunition, which was more than Manstein had expended in his December attack upon Sevastopol and which would require two weeks for AOK 11 to replenish. Operation Trappenjagd was an exquisitely executed set-piece offensive, with near-perfect use of a combined-arms Schwerpunkt to quickly achieve decisive results. Although Manstein had to return the 22. Panzer-Division and some of the Luftwaffe units to Heeresgruppe Süd for the counterattacks at Kharkov, which began even before Trappenjagd had finished, for the first time he could now turn to deal exclusively with fortress Sevastopol.

On the Soviet side, Stalin was quick to punish failure of this magnitude. Kozlov was demoted to general-major and given secondary assignments for the next year, before finally being shuffled off to the Trans-Baykal military district for the rest of the war. Mekhlis tried to deflect the blame upon others but Stalin saw through this and reduced him two ranks – in the Red Army, commissars were more culpable than commanders for defeats. Lvov had the good sense to die of his wounds, but Nikolaenko, Cherniak, and Kolganov were all relieved of command and reduced in rank to Colonel; Nikolaenko and Cherniak served in secondary roles for the rest of the war, but Kolganov managed to shine in the final East Prussian campaign of 1945 and retire as a general-lieutenant. Thousands of bypassed Soviet troops went to ground in the Kerch Peninsula, in quarries and other isolated places. Most would surrender or be captured in days, but for a few determined stalwarts, surrender was not in their vocabulary.

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