Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Nor did Petrov set a good example with his own headquarters, which was bloated with over 200 officers, many of whom should have been leading troops at the front. Before Störfang began, Petrov relocated his headquarters to an abandoned coastal battery on the Chersonese Peninsula south of Sevastopol – which kept him out of range of most of the German artillery, but exacerbated his already poor communications with his frontline units. Due to the limited number of tactical radios in Soviet frontline combat units, Petrov was almost totally dependent upon field telephones for command and control, which greatly delayed his reaction time to any German initiative. Most of the landlines were not buried very deep, so Zuckertort’s heavy bombardment disrupted much of Petrov’s connections with his frontline units. During the night of June 7/8, Petrov ordered General-Major Kolomiets, commander of Sector III, to organize a counterattack against LIV Armeekorps with the reserves located around the Mekenzievy Mountain station, but the fallacy of delegating control over the reserves to the sector commanders was revealed. Instead of using Guz’s 345th Rifle Division to mount a major counterstrike, Kolomiets decided to leave Guz’s division in place and commit only small forces to a counterattack, without significant artillery support. Consequently, the Soviet counterattack at dawn on June 8 was little more than a pathetic gesture, consisting only of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Perekop Naval Infantry Regiment and six T-26 light tanks from the 81st Separate Tank Battalion. Furthermore, rather than attempting to recover any of the heights overlooking the Bel’bek River, Kolomiets misdirected this counterattack toward the Trapeze position in order to relieve some of the units from his own 25th Rifle Division that had been encircled. This puny effort struck II./IR 32 and accomplished nothing.⁵⁰ It is also a good example of how Soviet commanders tended to make decisions that benefited their own command, rather than their overall objectives. Often, Soviet commanders assumed that “someone else” would deal with German breakthroughs, and selfishly conserved their own resources.

Hansen waited until 1000hrs before resuming his offensive, allowing his forward troops time to receive ammunition and rations. Zuckertort’s HArko 306 provided a 30-minute artillery preparation, focused on the Mekenzievy Mountain station area and the western end of Haccius Ridge. The German attack on July 8 was more narrowly focused than on the previous day, relying once again upon Wolff’s 22. Infanterie-Division as the Schwerpunkt, reinforced by IR 437 from the 132. Infanterie-Division. The battered regiments of Laskin’s 172nd Rifle Division still held good ground in front of them, but no longer had a continuous front, and were defeated in detail. IR 437 pushed west from the Ölberg along Haccius Ridge, rolling up the 514th Rifle Regiment’s positions, while Wolff’s three infantry regiments and a battalion’s worth of assault guns smashed through the remnants of the 383rd Rifle Regiment and advanced 1¼ miles southward from the Ölberg. The lead German battalions advanced to within 600 yards of the Mekenzievy Mountain station and were not stopped until they ran into the second line of defense held by Guz’s division, which was situated behind a 2-mile-long antitank ditch. However, Guz could do nothing for the collapsing right flank of Colonel Aleksandr G. Kapitokhin’s Sector IV. Kapitokhin’s troops had been little engaged on the first day of the German offensive and he still had the bulk of his 95th Rifle Division defending positions north of the Bel’bek River. With German infantry advancing deeply into his right flank and heading toward Coastal Battery No. 30, Kapitokhin was forced to pull a battalion from his 241st Rifle Regiment to block IR 437’s advance. Altogether the 22. Infanterie-Division took 232 prisoners on June 8, mostly from Laskin’s 172nd Rifle Division.⁵¹ Meanwhile, the German 50. and 24. Infanterie-Divisionen continued to push back Potapov’s 79th NIB and the 25th Rifle Division on Kolomiets’s right flank. At the cost of another 1,745 casualties, Hansen had gained a firm foothold in Sevastopol’s outer defenses.