Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Oktyabrsky committed the cruisers Molotov and Krasny Krym, six destroyers (Tashkent, Bezuprechny, Bditelny, Kharkov, Soobrazitel’ny, and Svobodnyi) and eight Tral-class coastal minesweepers to the June supply runs. Except for the elderly Krasny Krym, these vessels were relatively fast and capable of 30 knots or better, and the Italian-built Tashkent was a greyhound that could conduct 39-knot dashes. The Luftwaffe pilots simply could not hit a warship that was maneuvering at these speeds. Yet while the destroyers could bring in 300–400 troops each and a cruiser 1,000–2,000, the warships were ill-suited for carrying and offloading heavy cargo such as vehicles and palletized ammunition. The Soviet merchant marine contributed three cargo/passenger vessels (Abkhazia, Belostok, and Gruziya) and the tanker Mikhail Gromov to the Sevastopol run. None of these vessels could move faster than 12 knots, so the fast Soviet escorting warships were chained to slow-moving targets. This is where the Achilles Heel of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet became apparent: a lack of air-warning radar and inadequate antiaircraft ammunition. The heavy cruiser Molotov was the only one of Oktyabrsky’s fleet to carry an air-search radar, and it was a primitive set at that. Almost all of Oktyabrsky’s warships relied upon the obsolescent 45mm 21-K antiaircraft gun in single mounts as their primary antiaircraft weapon, but this weapon was inadequate for dealing with multi-aircraft attacks. The Molotov and the Type-7 (Gnevnyi-class) destroyers carried the 21-K, which had a very low rate of fire and ammunition unsuited for engaging aerial targets. The Tashkent and new Type 7U destroyers received the 37mm 70-K gun just before the start of the war; this weapon was similar to the Swedish 40mm Bofors gun and combined a high rate of fire with improved HE-Frag rounds. Despite the lack of up-to-date antiaircraft weaponry, Soviet convoys to Sevastopol during the spring were often aided by morning fog, which could rise 100 yards or more and make it difficult for aircraft to spot vessels.¹⁸ Thus, Oktyabrsky believed that his warships would continue to be able to run the Luftwaffe’s aerial gauntlet into Sevastopol at acceptable cost.

During the night of May 27/28, the heavy cruiser Molotov and two destroyers delivered Colonel Nikolai V. Blagoveshchensky’s 9th Naval Infantry Brigade from Novorossiysk. Instead of providing the 15,000 replacements that Petrov had requested, the Stavka sent a single brigade with 3,017 troops. Blagoveshchensky’s brigade consisted of survivors from the fighting in the Kerch Peninsula and had a high percentage of recently wounded men, released from hospital and sent right back to the front. As Störfang began on June 2, the destroyers Tashkent and Bezuprechny, plus the passenger ship Abkhazia, brought 2,785 replacements right into Sevastopol harbor without much interference from Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps IV. Captain Vasily N. Eroshenko was fond of using the 39-knot speed of his Tashkent to evade German bombers, and when a trawler instructed him to slow to 14 knots while moving through a lane in the outer harbor minefields, he ignored this and swept into Severnaya Bay at maximum speed:

Bombers caught the Tashkent approaching the Chersonesus. We defended ourselves, without reducing speed. Bombs were falling pretty close, but they are not from dive-bombers. It is terrible for the army troops, encamped on the deck, where there is overcrowding and one fragment can hit ten men.¹⁹