Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (83 page)

Colonel-General von Manstein was acquainted with all these facts. He had read all the literature about the Crimean War. He also knew that under the ancient forts the Soviets had built entirely new modern defences—huge casemates,

reinforced-concrete gun emplacements with armoured cupolas, and a labyrinth of underground supply stores. There was no doubt that in 1942 Stalin would defend this naval fortress every bit as stubbornly as the Tsar Nicholas I had done in 1854-55. Sevastopol with its favourable natural port was the main base of the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea. If it fell the Navy would have to withdraw to some hide-outs on the eastern coast.

Manstein and Captain von Wedel were engrossed in conversation when the boat was suddenly shaken by a crashing, splintering noise.

"Enemy aircraft," shouted Manstein's orderly, First Lieutenant Specht. The Italians racing to their anti-aircraft machine-gun were too late. Out of the sun two Soviet fighters from Sevastopol had pounced down on the boat and shot it up with their cannon.

The deck had been ripped open, and fire was beginning to spread. Captain von Wedel, who had been sitting next to Manstein, collapsed—dead. The Italian mate was slumped over the rail—also dead.

Fritz Nagel, Manstein's faithful companion in every battle since the first day of the war, had been flung against the after ventilation shaft with a severe thigh wound. His artery had been severed. Blood was welling out of his wound in quick spurts. The Italian commander tore off his shirt to tie up Nagel's artery.

Lieutenant Specht threw off his clothes, dived into the sea, and swam to the coast. Stark naked, he stopped a surprised lorry-driver and made him race to Yalta. There the lieutenant grabbed a motor-launch, raced back to the blazing motor torpedo-boat, and towed her back into Yalta harbour.

Manstein himself took Nagel to the military hospital. But it was too late. The sergeant was beyond help.

Two days later, when all round Sevastopol the squadrons of General Richthofen's VII Air Corps were starting up their engines for the first act of the great battle, Manstein stood at the open grave of his driver in the cemetery of Yalta. The words spoken by the Colonel-General over the coffin of his sergeant are worthy of record in an otherwise so frightful chronicle of a frightful war: "Over the years during which we shared both the daily routine and major events we became friends. This bond of friendship cannot be severed even by the vicious bullet which struck you. My gratitude and loyal affection, the thoughts of all of us, accompany you beyond the grave into eternity. Rest in peace and farewell, my best comrade."

The rifle salvo rang out over the tree-tops. From the west came a sound like distant thunder: Richthofen's squadrons had gone into action against Sevastopol. The great twenty-seven-day battle against the world's strongest fortress had begun.

From the rocky hilltop there was a magnificent view of the entire area of Sevastopol. Sappers had blasted an observation post into the rock-face, reasonably secure against enemy artillery and aircraft. From there the entire town and fortified area could be surveyed by stereo-telescope as if from a viewing platform.

At this observation post Manstein spent hour after hour with his chief of operations, Colonel Busse, and his orderly officer, "Pepo" Specht, observing the effect of the Luftwaffe's and artillery's bombardment. The date was 3rd June 1942.

At the spot where the ancient Greeks had established their first trading-post, where the Goths had built their hilltop castles during the great upheavals of the early centuries of the Christian era, where Genoese and Tartars had fought for the harbours and fertile valleys, and where in the nineteenth century rivers of British, French, and Russian blood had been shed, a German general was now sitting, pressed close to the rock, once more directing a battle for the harbours and bays of the Crimea, that idyllic peninsula in the Black Sea.

"Fantastic fireworks," Specht remarked. Busse nodded. But he was sceptical. "Even so I'm not sure that we'll punch sufficiently large holes into those fortifications for an infantry attack."

Manstein was standing by the trench telescope, gazing across to the Belbek Valley with its prominent peak which the

troopers had named the Mount of Olives. Squadrons of Stukas were roaring overhead. They dived down on Sevastopol. They dropped their bombs and fired their cannon and machine-guns. Then they turned away again. Ground-attack aircraft skimmed over the plateau. Fighters tore across the sky at great height. Bombers droned along steadily. The Eleventh Army had unchallenged control of the air within a few hours of the beginning of the bombardment. The weak Soviet Air Force of the coastal Army had been smashed. It had gone into the battle with only fifty-three aircraft.

General von Richthofen's VIII Air Corps flew 1000, 1500, and even 2000 missions a day. "Continuous attack" was the Air Force experts' term for this conveyor-belt type of raid.

And while a rain of bombs fell on Sevastopol from the sky, German guns of all calibres were pumping their shells into the enemy positions. The artillerymen sought out the enemy gun emplacements. They levelled trenches and wire obstacles. They sent shell after shell against the firing-slits and armoured cupolas of concrete gun positions. They fired their guns day and night—throughout five times twenty-four hours.

This was Manstein's idea of a really decisive overture to the attack—not, as usual, just one or two hours' concentrated artillery and Luftwaffe bombardment, followed by an infantry charge. Manstein knew that a conventional preliminary bombardment would be ineffective against Sevastopol's massive defences with their hundreds of concreted and armour-plated gun emplacements, the deep belt of pill boxes, the powerful armoured batteries, the three defensive strips with their total of 220 miles of trenches, the extensive wire obstacles and minefields, and the rocket cannon and rocket mortars mounted in positions hewn out of the cliff-face.

That was why Manstein's plan provided for five days of massive annihilating fire by artillery, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and assault guns. Altogether 1300 barrels hurled their missiles against the identified fortification works and field positions of the Soviets. To that must be added the bombs dropped by the squadrons of VIII Air Corps. The earth was covered with a hail of steel.

It was a murderous overture. Never during the Second World War, neither before Sevastopol nor after it, were such massed artillery forces employed by the Germans.

In North Africa at the end of October 1942 Montgomery opened the British offensive against Rommel's positions at El Alamein with his now historic 1000 barrels. Manstein employed 300 more at Sevastopol.

À particular rôle in the artillery bombardment was played by the mortars. This eerie weapon was here for the first time employed in heavy concentration. Two mortar regiments—the 1st Heavy Mortar Regiment and the 70th Mortar Regiment— as well as the 1st and 4th Mortar Battalions, had been concentrated in front of the fortress under the special command of Colonel Niemann—altogether twenty-one batteries with 576 barrels, including the batteries of 1st Heavy Mortar Regiment with their 11- and 12'/2-inch high-explosive and incendiary oil shells, which were particularly effective against fortifications.

Each second the bombardment lasted the barrels of this regiment alone spewed forth 324 mortar bombs against strictly limited sectors of the enemy's field fortifications. The effect on the Russians' morale was as destructive as the bombs' physical effects. The effect of thirty-six monstrous missiles with fiery tails whooshing from one single battery and slamming with a nerve-racking whine into an enemy position was unimaginable.

The fragmentation effect of a single mortar bomb was not as great as that of an artillery shell, but the blast of several of them exploding close to one another burst the troops' bloodvessels. Even the men lying a short distance away from the point of impact were demoralized by the deafening noise and paralysing pressure of the explosion. Terror and fear grew into panic. Only Stukas had been known to produce a similar effect on the usually so impassive Russians. It is only fair to say that, faced with concentrated fire from Russian rocket mortars, "Stalin's organ pipes," the German troops were often similarly gripped by fear and terror.

Among the conventional artillery battering against the doors of the fortress of Sevastopol there were three special giants which have gone down in military history—the Gamma mortar, the mortar "Karl" (also known as "Thor"), and the railway gun "Dora." These three miracles of modern engineering, the last word, as it were, in conventional artillery

development, had been specially built for employment against fortresses. Before the war the only fortresses in existence, apart from those in Belgium and the French Maginot Line, were Brest Litovsk, Lomsha, Kronshtadt, and Sevastopol. Leningrad was no longer a fortress in the true meaning of the word, and the ancient French fortress towns along the Atlantic coast had long since ceased to count.

The Gamma mortar was a revival of "Big Bertha" of the First World War. Its 16-8-inch projectiles weighed 923 kg.— nearly a ton—and could be hurled at targets nearly 9 miles away. The length of its barrel was twenty-two feet. This unusual giant was serviced by 235 artillery men.

But "Gamma" was a pigmy compared with the 24-2-inch mortar known as "Karl" or "Thor"—one of the heaviest pieces of the Second World War and a special Army weapon against the most powerful concrete fortresses. Its 2200- kg. (2V4-ton) concrete-piercing bombs, which shattered the strongest concrete roofs, were hurled by a monster which barely resembled a conventional mortar at all. Its relatively short barrel of a little over sixteen feet and its colossal carriage and bogies made it look rather like some factory with an eerie stub of a smokestack.

But even "Karl" was not quite the last word in gunnery. That last word was stationed at Bakhchisaray, in the "Palace of Gardens" of the ancient residence of the Tartar Khans, and was called "Dora," or occasionally "Heavy Gustav." It was the heaviest gun of the last war. Its calibre was 31 1/2 inches. Sixty railway carriages were needed to transport the parts of the monster. Its 107-foot barrel ejected high-explosive projectiles of 4800 kg.—
i.e.,
nearly five tons—over a distance of 29 miles. Or it could hurl even heavier armour-piercing missiles, weighing seven tons, at targets nearly 24 miles away. The missile together with its cartridge measured nearly twenty-six feet in length. Erect that would be about height of a two-storey house.

"Dora" was able to fire three rounds in one hour. The giant gun stood on two double rails. Two flak battalions were permanently employed to guard it. Its operation, protection, and maintenance required 4120 men. The fire control and operation alone included one major-general, one colonel, and 1500 men.

These data are sufficient to show that here the conventional gun had been enlarged to gigantic, almost super- dimensional scale—indeed, to a point where one might question the economic return obtained from such a weapon. Yet one single round from "Dora" destroyed an ammunition dump in Severnaya Bay at Sevastopol although it was situated 100 feet below ground.

Manstein had been standing in his eyrie on the rock for the best part of three hours. He was closely watching the shell- bursts and comparing them with the exact data supplied to him by his Army's two chiefs of artillery, Lieutenant- General Zuckertort, the chief of artillery of LIV Corps, and Lieutenant-General Martinek, chief of artillery of XXX Corps. With all his genius for strategy, Manstein was a man of detail. Indeed, this may have been the secret of his success.

"Wherever the 8-8 scores a direct hit there's no Ivan left looking out of the strongpoint," said Pepo Specht, who was just then looking through the telescope.

"Yes, the flak is quite indispensable against this kind of fortification," Manstein replied. As if to underline his words, the metallic crump of the 8-8-cm. guns rang out clearly through the hurricane of noise.

These anti-aircraft guns were indeed indispensable. It was in the siege of Sevastopol that the 18th Flak Regiment gained its fame. The flat-trajectory 'eight-eight' was the best weapon against fortifications projecting above ground- level. Employed ha the foremost line, just like the mortars, the 8 • 8 guns, these fantastic miracle weapons of the Second World War, cracked pillboxes and gun emplacements at point-blank range. The 8-8-cm. batteries of the 18th Flak Regiment alone fired 18,787 rounds in the course of the battle for Sevastopol.

From Manstein's observation post the three deeply echeloned defence systems protecting the core of the fortress were clearly visible.

The first of them was one to two miles deep with four sets of wire-protected trench positions in echelon, with timber strongpoints and concreted emplacements between them. Mines detonating by shell-bursts in front of and among the

trenches indicated that the Russians had additionally laid thick belts of anti-tank mines. It was to be expected that many of these invisible obstacles had also been laid down against infantry assault.