Its natural defenses alone ensured that the fight for the city would be a hard one. It was clear that nothing less than an all-out assault by the Eleventh Army could hope to take the city. The heroism of the “five sailors of Sevastopol” was remembered in many a song and poem. One incident saw a politruk (political instructor) and five Black Sea sailors hurl themselves and their last grenades on German tanks to stop a breakthrough to the city. The defenders counterattacked and flung back General Eric Hansen’s 54th Corps’ probing attacks. Master of the blitzkrieg, mobility, and the open battlefield, Manstein was to be tested in one of the most brutal sieges in the history of warfare.īlack Sea Navy guns and crack Marines stiffened Soviet resistance. The Soviets were determined to do one better. In the Crimean War of 1854-1855, Sevastopol defied the British, French, Turks, and Sardinians for an incredible 345 days before surrendering. There, the Soviet Military Council opted to make its last stand. By November 16, all of the Crimea except Sevastopol was in their hands. There was no way of stopping the Germans on the open steppes. The Axis troops fanned out east toward the Kerch Peninsula and south toward Sevastopol. With the main base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol and within air range of the Caucasus and Rumanian oilfields, the Crimea held strategic importance to both the Nazis and the Soviets. Now the invaders were the Germans of the Third Reich, whose Führer planned to turn the Crimea into a pure German colony. Ancient Greeks, Scythians, Goths, and Tartars came and went. Through the centuries, a myriad of peoples had fought for and settled in the Crimea. The 10-day, hotly contested battle for the Isthmus netted 100,000 Soviet prisoners and opened the door to the Crimea. On Rundstet’s southern flank, General of Infantry Erich von Manstein’s Eleventh Army punched through the tough Soviet defenses of the Perekop isthmus. The German Sixth Army, part of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, occupied Kharkov with the First Panzer Army striking for Rostov. Leningrad lay under siege and panzer spearheads reached to within 40 miles of Moscow. By late October 1941, the armies of the Third Reich had swept deep into western Soviet Russia.
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