Ostkrieg (49 page)

If in early 1942, as opposed to the previous spring, Hitler and the German military leadership had the comfort of operational clarity, they also faced a number of vexing problems, an unwelcome reminder of the winter's desperate fighting, that had to be resolved before Operation Blue could commence. Foremost among them was control of the Crimea, important both as a springboard to the Caucasus and, if left in Soviet hands, as a persistent threat to the vital Rumanian oil fields. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet's naval air arm had already bombed the oil production facilities and refineries on numerous occasions, and, while the raids were generally ineffectual, a few had caused significant damage and disruption. From Hitler's perspective, concern over the safety of his sole source of oil, coupled with his belief that Soviet long-range bombers posed a constant threat, justified an operation to seize the Caucasus. Moreover, the Führer had repeatedly expressed interest in the Crimea, which was to be cleansed of its native population and resettled by “pure Germans,” as a key area of colonization that would secure German Lebensraum as far as the Urals. Complete control of the peninsula, including the fortress of Sevastopol, would also limit the effectiveness of the pesky Soviet Black Sea Fleet as well as possibly influence the neutrality of Turkey. Finally, army planners saw strong Soviet formations in the Crimea as a persistent threat to communications and supply lines along their long, exposed southern flank.
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In bitter autumn fighting that resulted in staggering casualties, Manstein's Eleventh Army had seized the Kerch Peninsula, the gateway to the Caucasus, and all of the Crimea except for Sevastopol, only to be thrown back by fierce Soviet counterattacks. By the time the fighting had stopped in April 1942, the Germans still controlled the bulk of the Crimea, excluding Sevastopol, but were blocked from the Kerch
Peninsula by stout Soviet fortifications along the Parpach line. Retaking Kerch, Manstein realized, would be a formidable undertaking. Not only did the Soviets outnumber his forces in terms of both men and materiel, but they had also erected what seemed a nearly impregnable series of defenses. Although the narrow isthmus was only about ten miles across, at Parpach the Red Army had massed some 210,000 well-equipped troops behind three extensive defense lines. The first, the Parpach line, was protected by two wide antitank ditches, behind which lay thick mine-fields, barriers of barbed wire, iron hedgehogs made of welded railway tracks, concrete emplacements, and disabled tanks that served as protected machine-gun nests. Five miles to the rear lay the second position, the Nasyr line, while beyond it the Sultanovka line, the so-called Turkish Wall, cut across the Kerch Peninsula at its widest point. Because the sea on either side of the Parpach line excluded the possibility of flanking attacks, the only option looked to be a frontal assault. The port of Kerch, forty miles to the east, seemed a world away.
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Given the forces at Manstein's disposal—five German infantry divisions, the Twenty-second Panzer Division, and two Rumanian divisions—which the Russians outnumbered three to one, a frontal assault against the Parpach line would have been suicidal. Manstein decided, however, to take advantage of recent events and poor Soviet judgment. In a series of local attacks in the northern sector, the Russians had pushed the Germans back roughly four miles. Not only did the Russian front now protrude in the north, making it vulnerable to German counterattack, but the Soviet command had also compounded the problem by massing two-thirds of its troops in this zone. Manstein now saw the possibility, in conjunction with strong Luftwaffe support, of launching a holding attack in the north while bursting through the Parpach line in the southern sector. After a three- or four-mile advance, these units would then turn sharply north and drive into the rear of the concentrated Soviet forces, cutting them off and, eventually, destroying them. At the same time, mobile units would race toward Kerch to seize the port and prevent any effective enemy counterattack.
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Although it was a bold and risky plan, especially considering the discrepancy in forces, Hitler provided the operation a good chance at success by ordering a substantial increase in German air power in the region. General Wolfram von Richthofen, the cousin of the famous World War I ace, was ordered to support the offensive with his powerful Fliegerkorps 8 (the Eighth Air Corps), which packed a lethal combination of fighters, ground support aircraft, and bombers. Having come to appreciate the value of effective air support during the crisis months of the winter,
Hitler demanded “massed air power” as a precondition for success in the Crimea. Only then, he emphasized, could Soviet defenses be breached and enemy forces be cut off from their supplies. Manstein himself conceived of the attack as a ground operation that had its Schwerpunkt in the air, where the planes would “pull the infantry forward.” The Führer also put great faith in the employment of deadly SD2 fragmentation bombs, developed for use specifically in the east. Dubbed
devil's eggs
by the air crews, these small five-pound bombs fragmented into deadly pieces of shrapnel that sprayed out over a fifteen-foot radius. They were, he explained, “best used against living targets. A satisfactory result can only be achieved when the bombs are used against crowds.” Vital as this concentration of air power was, however, it could be accomplished only at the expense of denuding other fronts of air support, again demonstrating the serious reduction in German strength. Although Hitler took obvious murderous glee in new German antipersonnel weapons, Goering got closer to the heart of the matter when he ruefully admitted that the operational strength of the Luftwaffe was “no longer sufficient for the great tasks.”
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Since the operation, now dubbed Trappenjagd (Bustard Hunt), depended on everything going perfectly—including a bungling response on the part of the Soviet commander, Kozlov, and his political commissar, the brutally incompetent Lev Mekhlis—German commanders remained uneasy. Although Bock, now commanding Army Group South, was impressed by the “careful preparation,” he nonetheless expressed anxiety at the “enormous risk” entailed, while Manstein, who rarely underestimated himself, still worried about the weakness of German forces. Nor did the mood improve when the operation, originally slated for 5 May, had to be postponed for three days because Richthofen still had to assemble his aircraft. Surprise seemed out of the question in any case since Soviet troops had already put up placards along the front reading, “Come on. We're waiting.” Manstein, realizing that the enemy knew that an attack was coming but not where or when, decided to give them a dose of the unexpected: German combat engineers and infantry would be sent in small assault boats to circumvent the southern Soviet defenses, aiming to seize and demolish the largest of the antitank ditches in the Parpach line.
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In the event, the operation came off virtually as planned. At 3:15 in the morning of 8 May, German artillery, accompanied by antiaircraft guns and waves of Stukas and bombers, unleashed a thunderous barrage that shattered enemy bunkers and gun emplacements on the front line. As ground support aircraft struck crushing blows at Soviet
airfields, communication facilities, and logistic targets, the infantry surged forward into the barbed-wire emplacements protecting the Soviet line. Within an hour, and at roughly the same time leading elements of the infantry reached it, the assault boats carrying the combat engineers, under the protective cover of German fighters, stormed from the sea straight into the antitank ditch itself. Before the startled Russian defenders could react, German troops leaped from the boats and began spraying machine-gun fire into their positions. Even as the Landsers continued to struggle forward through seemingly endless minefields, engineers began blasting away the steep walls of the antitank ditch but were unable to bridge it sufficiently to allow heavy tanks across. Over the next two days, however, the Soviet defenses began to crumble before the skillful German attack. The Twenty-second Panzer finally crossed the Parpach ditch late in the afternoon of the ninth, drove eastward a few miles, fought off a Soviet counterattack, then swung to the north to close the trap. At the same time, a swiftly moving force of motorized infantry, the “Grodeck Brigade,” drove eastward toward Kerch and, by the tenth, exploiting a gap in Soviet defenses, had burst across both the Nasyr and the Sultanovka lines; only friendly fire from German Stukas seemed to impede their progress. The Soviet command, its communications shattered by the initial bombardment, was paralyzed and incapable of responding to the swift enemy advance.
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Early on the eleventh, the Twenty-second Panzer finally closed the gap in the north, trapping ten panic-stricken Soviet divisions, while those who escaped had devil's eggs rained on them in what Richthofen called “a wonderful scene”: “We are inflicting the highest losses of blood and materiel.” Over the next two days, 12–13 May, as disorganized Soviet units streamed to the east in disarray, perfect targets for the Luftwaffe, the limits of German power became painfully apparent. Near disaster had struck to the north, where Timoshenko had launched an armored offensive out of the Izyum bulge toward Kharkov. As a result, Hitler ordered Richthofen to transfer many of his best units northward, which caused a perceptible slackening of air activity in the Kerch Peninsula. Goering's assessment had been correct: the Luftwaffe could no longer manage the great tasks. Although Manstein feared that the Soviets would be able to pull off a Dunkirk-style evacuation across the narrow Kerch Straits, this was not Stalin's intent. By the time the bulk of Manstein's units closed on Kerch, they found masses of Soviet troops on the exposed shore below the cliffs, perfect targets for German artillery. Although Kerch fell on 15 May, sporadic resistance, some fanatic, continued for the next week. Still, on 19 May, Manstein declared Trappenjagd completed.
It had been an astounding success: over 170,000 prisoners, 1,133 guns, and 258 tanks had been taken. A much smaller German-Rumanian force had smashed through a formidable defensive system and destroyed two full armies and remnants of a third. German skill had certainly been on full display, rekindling confidence in the troops, but the Soviet conduct of the battle illustrated once more the disastrous consequences of the rigidly centralized, ideological method of command that had so often produced fatal results the year before—and that the Germans, to their ultimate regret, fully expected to continue in the summer offensive.
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The stunningly swift victory at Kerch now opened the road for a renewed attempt to seize Sevastopol, a goal that had eluded Manstein in the autumn. In retrospect, wasting further precious time, manpower, and resources on taking the fortress seemed pointless, especially since the threat to the Rumanian oil fields from the “permanent aircraft career” of the Crimea had been eliminated and access to the Caucasus secured. At the time, however, and despite the Soviet penetrations near Kharkov, there appeared to be little discussion of the issue between Hitler and the OKH. The Führer, in fact, seemed eager to keep the victorious momentum going, if only to restore the confidence and reputation of his shaken troops. The fighting here, however, would be entirely different than that on the Kerch Peninsula; instead of dealing a swift surprise blow in open terrain, Manstein's limited forces would have to blast through an entrenched enemy, who had done everything possible to strengthen his positions, in a series of elaborate fortifications. Although Sevastopol was protected by two defensive belts, its defenders had added a formidable array of concrete bunkers, gun positions, tank traps, antitank ditches, and minefields, all tied together by a labyrinth of underground tunnels, even as the battle for Kerch raged.
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To seize the fortress, then, Manstein would need to blast it open with annihilating firepower, especially since the weak German Black Sea Fleet allowed an attack solely from land. To that end, the Germans had assembled the largest artillery pieces in their arsenal: 305-, 350-, and 420-millimeter howitzers as well as two 615-millimeter guns (“Thor” and “Odin”) that fired nearly five-thousand-pound shells specially designed for use against concrete fortifications. The largest gun, “Dora,” was an 800-millimeter monster that was the world's largest artillery piece. With a barrel over a hundred feet long and a bore almost three feet wide, Dora required a crew of two thousand, a sixty-car train, and six weeks to assemble. Although it could fire a shell weighing five tons forty-eight miles or seven-ton armor-piercing shells the height of a two-story building that could penetrate twenty-four feet of concrete, it demanded
constant protection from two flak battalions. Although impressive, these weapons remained of limited value because of their slow rate of fire and inaccuracy.
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Arguably just as important as this unprecedented concentration of superheavy guns was the accumulation of some six hundred ground support aircraft to pinpoint strikes against enemy communications, artillery, and key defensive strongpoints as well as the use of eighty-eight-millimeter flak guns to penetrate armored strongpoints. The attack itself began on 2 June with a massive air assault that increased in intensity over the next four days as both aircraft and heavy artillery pounded incessantly at Soviet positions. When infantry attacks began on the seventh, it quickly became apparent that the softening up of the enemy's defensive front had not achieved the desired result: Soviet resistance was stronger than expected, and German troops could achieve no decisive breakthrough. Over the next few days, as German infantry struggled to make headway against tenacious Russian defenders who were clearly not demoralized or broken, Hitler for a time seriously considered abandoning the entire offensive. Time pressure was now an issue as the Sevastopol operation had to be brought to a conclusion soon so that the vital air units could be made available for Operation Blue. Over the next few days, in a precursor to Stalingrad, small groups of soldiers on both sides fought bitter hand-to-hand struggles for control of ruined buildings. The German attackers, using flamethrowers, satchel charges, and hand grenades, inflicted appalling carnage, yet the Red Army defenders fought on stubbornly. On 13 June, German forces, in savage fighting that resulted in the death or wounding of every officer in two battalions, finally began to crack the outer ring of Soviet defenses in the north. The decisive breakthrough came on the seventeenth, although again at the cost of disturbingly high casualties, when the Fifty-fourth Corps captured six key fortifications. Over the next six days, against a backdrop of continuing high losses, German forces seized the entire northern shore of Severnaya Bay. To the south, the Thirtieth Corps also pushed relentlessly forward, with the result that, by 26 June, Axis forces had succeeded in breaching the outer defense line.
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