Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  former palaces at Alupka, one of which had been presented to Manstein "the conqueror of the Crimea" by "the grateful German nation" back in 1942. It was in these palaces that the Yalta Conference was to meet less than a year later.

  It was later argued on the Russian side that if only the Red Army had begun to storm Sebastopol immediately after April 18, and had not waited till May 5, very few of the German troops could have got away at all; but the storming of Sebastopol required a high concentration of troops, guns and tanks, a thorough organisation of airfields, etc., and this needed some time. According to Tolbukhin, no successful all-out attack was possible

  without about a fortnight's preparation.

  It will remain one of the puzzles of the war why, in 1941-2, despite overwhelming

  German and Rumanian superiority in tanks and aircraft, and a substantial superiority in men, Sebastopol succeeded in holding out for 250 days and why, in 1944, the Russians captured it within four days. German authors now explain it simply by the great Russian superiority in effectives, aircraft and all other equipment. But did not the Germans and Rumanians enjoy much the same kind of superiority in 1941-2? Was there not something lacking in German morale by April 1944—at least in a remote place like the Crimea? For, as we know, the Germans could still put up suicidal resistance once on German soil.

  A moot question is how many Germans were actually evacuated from the Crimea

  between April 18 and May 13. According to a Russian general I saw at Sebastopol at the time, only 30,000 got away; according to German war prisoners taken, at least twice as many. Post-war German accounts say that 150,000 got away, but that "at least 60,000

  Germans" were "lost" in the Crimea; as well as enormous masses of equipment, while sixty ships were sunk. The Russians put the enemy losses in the Crimea much higher—

  50,000 (nearly all Germans) killed and 61,000 taken prisoner (30,000 of them at

  Chersonese)—a total loss of 111,000; but these (especially the prisoners) obviously

  included a great number of Rumanians. German authors today are surprised that the

  Russian Black Sea fleet allowed so many ships to get away; the Russian answer to this is that the sea between Sebastopol and Rumania was heavily mined, but that many German

  ships, with 40,000 men on board, were sunk all the same, mostly by aircraft between May 3 and 13.

  Anyway, whether the Germans lost (as they now admit) at least 60,000 men or (as the

  Russians claim) nearer 100,000 men, the whole Crimean operation, and Hitler's futile attempt to stage a German version of the "Heroic Defence of Sebastopol" is now admitted to have been one of the Führer's prime blunders. German histories today say that the German commander of the 17th Army, Colonel-General Jaenicke, was made a scapegoat

  by the Führer. In fact he informed Hitler that he could not hold Sebastopol and was

  relieved of his command on May 3, and was replaced by General Allme-dinger. Whether, at heart, the latter had any more hope than Jaenicke is hard to say; but he was apparently a more wholehearted Nazi. The big Russian onslaught began two days after his

  appointment.

  In his farewell message, which the Russians captured at the time, Jaenicke wrote:

  "The Führer has ordered me to take up new functions. This means a bitter good-bye to my Army. With deep emotion I shall remember your exemplary courage. The

  Führer has entrusted you with a task of world-historical importance. At Sebastopol stands the 17th Army, and at Sebastopol the Soviets will bleed to death."

  There had been some heavy fighting on the outer defences of Sebastopol since April 18, particularly in the valley of Inkerman; but it was not till May 5 that the Russians attacked Sebastopol in strength from the north, in order to draw there as many German troops as possible. Having achieved that, the Russians launched, on May 7, an all-out attack on Sapun Ridge, a hill 150 feet high, with several lines of German trenches, which was "the key to Sebastopol". The artillery and katyusha barrage, supported by aircraft, lasted several hours, and then the ridge was stormed by infantry. There were heavy losses on both sides, but once Sapun Ridge was taken, the road to Sebastopol was clear. Two days later, on May 9, Hitler resigned himself to abandoning the Crimea and ordered

  evacuation. But it was already too late and the 50,000 German troops left around

  Sebastopol were now doomed.

  The successful if costly Russian capture of Sapun Ridge was accompanied by attacks on other parts of the "impregnable" Sebastopol defences, and by the 9th, the Russians began to pour into Sebastopol from all directions. Several thousand Germans were killed or captured in Sebastopol itself, while the rest—about 30,000 —abandoned the city and

  retreated across the moors to the Chersonese Peninsula. Here there were three isthmi, one less than two miles wide, and the others less than a mile wide, and across the first isthmus the Germans had laid minefields and had built an "earth wall" with fortifications of sorts consisting of barbed-wire fences and a series of dugouts and machine-gun nests—nothing very solid, but hard to approach because of the minefield.

  The distance between the first line of defence and the tip of the Chersonese Promontory, with the ruins of its white lighthouse, was about three miles. The fortifications across the other two isthmi were much more rudimentary. It was in this small area of about three miles by about one and a half that the Germans were going to make their last stand, still in the desperate hope that ships would come to take them away.

  And so, on the 9th, after abandoning Sebastopol, 30,000 Germans retreated across the bleak moors outside Sebastopol to the Chersonese Promontory—the very place to which

  the last Russian defenders of Sebastopol had retreated in July 1942, only to be

  exterminated or taken prisoner.

  German prisoners later said that the morale was low among the troops, but that the

  officers kept on assuring them that ships would come. The Führer had promised it... For three days and nights the Chersonese was that "unspeakable inferno" to which German authors now refer. True, on the night of May 9-10 and on the following night two small ships did come and perhaps 1,000 men were taken aboard. This greatly encouraged the

  remaining troops.

  The Germans still had one small fighter airfield on Chersonese; but since it was now under constant Russian shell-fire, it could not serve much purpose.

  The Russians were not, however, going to allow any more Germans to be evacuated by

  sea; on the night of May 11-12, several more ships approached Chersonese, but two were sunk by Russian shell-fire and the rest turned tail. That was the night on which the Russians decided to finish off the 30,000 Germans. By this time the sight of the ships that had come and gone without landing had seriously demoralised the German troops. They

  had already been heavily bombed and shelled for two days and nights; and on the night of May 11-12 the katyusha mortars ("the Black Death" the Germans used to call them) came into action. What followed was a massacre. The Germans fled in panic beyond the second and then the third line of their defences, and when, in the early morning hours, Russian tanks drove in, they began to surrender in large numbers, among them their commander, General Böhme and several other staff officers who had been sheltering in the cellar of the only farm building on the promontory.

  Thousands of wounded had been taken to the tip of the promontory, and here were also some 750 SS-men who refused to surrender, and went on firing. A few dozen survivors

  tried in the end to get away by sea in small boats or rafts. Some of these got away, but often only to be machine-gunned by Russian aircraft. These desperate men were hoping to get to Rumania, Turkey, or maybe to be picked up by some German or Rumanian

  vessel.

  My trip to the Crimea on May 14-18 was perhaps the strangest Crimean holiday anyone

  had ever had.

  On the morning of the 14th I flew from Moscow to Simferopol. The plane circled over

&n
bsp; the Sivash, where the Russian offensive had started a month before, and then over the Perekop Isthmus, where the Germans had built their defences in depth. It was just as well the Russians had by-passed Perekop.

  With its poplars, the country round Simferopol looked like the Touraine. All the apple, peach, cherry and apricot trees were in blossom. Simferopol, small and nondescript,

  except for a few small mosques, had suffered some bomb-damage, but not much. More

  characteristic of the Crimea were the Tartar villages, with their mosques and the peculiar Tartar cottages with flat roofs and open verandahs. We drove through several such

  villages on our way to the mountains and the south coast, and the Tartars looked on, morose and scared.

  Then we came to the south coast of the Crimea. At Alushta many houses had been burned out, and the beach was mined and roped off by barbed-wire fences; yet the scenery was of a picture-postcard beauty—a land of vineyards and cypresses, where the fruit-trees and the lilac were now in bloom and houses were bright with the flaming red of the

  bougainvilia, the lavender clusters of glycinium and the gardens golden with the yellow bushes of laburnum. Farther west, on the pale blue sea, lay the giant shape of Ayu Dag, the rock which, according to local legend, was the devil who had been turned into a

  granite bear trying in vain to drain the Black Sea by drinking it dry. To the right, there rose into the sky the high lilac outline of Ai-Petri, its peaks wrapped in cloud.

  At Yalta, the "Nice" of the Crimea, the whole sea front had been burned down by the Germans, but there was little destruction between Yalta and the spot where the road turns inland. We passed the imperial palaces at Alupka, and several sanatoria, now crowded with Russian wounded, and many of them, though bandaged or on crutches, waved

  cheerfully as we drove past. (The Germans had also made great use of the Crimea as a gigantic military hospital ever since they had come here in the autumn of 1941).

  Nothing was more striking than the contrast between this drive along the picture-postcard coast and the country round Sebastopol. There was nothing here but bleak, windswept

  moors, and a few houses, now all destroyed. The Valley of Inkerman was like the Valley of Death. It is separated from Sebastopol by Sapun Ridge, and this also looked one of the most melancholy spots on earth, now pockmarked with shell-holes, like all the country around. God knows how many men died here on May 7. In the plains around Sapun

  Ridge and along the road that runs to Sebastopol through the Valley of Inkerman, the air was filled with the stench of death. It came from the hundreds of horses still lying there, inflated and decaying by the roadside, and from the thousands of dead, many of whom

  had not been buried deep enough, or even not yet buried at all.

  Here, more than anywhere else, one felt that one was driving over layers and layers of human bones—of those who died in the Crimean War, and in the righting in 1920, and in 1941-2 during the deadly 250-day siege of Sebastopol, and now again...

  From a distance Sebastopol, with the long and narrow bay beyond, looked like a live city, but it also was dead. Even in the suburbs, at the far end of the valley of Inkerman, there was hardly a house standing. The railway station was a mountain of rubble and twisted metal; on the last day the Germans were at Sebastopol they ran an enormous goods train off the line into a ravine, where it lay smashed, its wheels in the air. Destruction, destruction everywhere.

  Sebastopol itself, bright and lively before the war, was now melancholy beyond words.

  The harbour was littered with the wreckage of ships the Russians had sunk during the last days of the German evacuation.

  It was hard to imagine how people could have lived and fought here during that summer of 1942, in the midst of the stench of hundreds of unburied corpses. And then it all Ht up in a flash: on the remnants of the old Navy monument on the sea front, I noticed an

  inscription scratched with a knife or a nail, and written no doubt during the last days of the agony of July 1942:

  You are not the same as before, when people smiled at your beauty. Now everyone

  curses this spot, because it has caused so much sorrow. Among your ruins, in your lanes and streets, thousands and thousands of people lie, and no one is there to cover their rotting bones.

  It was strange to wander along the deserted streets of Sebastopol, so full of historic memories of the Crimean War with that Mikhailovsky Fort—still, more or less,

  undamaged across the bay—where young Tolstoy had taken part in the siege of 1854-5,

  and so full of the more agonising memories of 1942.

  In one of the few bigger buildings (patched up by the Germans since 1942) I saw the

  Mayor of Sebastopol, Comrade Yefremov; he had been mayor during the siege of 1941-

  2. Now, he said, the streets were deserted because the people living in the outskirts had not yet lost the habit of looking upon this as verboten territory. The soldiers also had gone, except for some Black Sea sailors manning the antiaircraft guns. For the last two years, these men had been day-dreaming of the day when they would stand again on

  guard at Sebastopol... The famous Naval Museum had, in the main, survived the siege, but all its exhibits had been taken away to Germany by the Organisation Rosenberg "with the Wehrmacht's permission", as a notice inside said. It was written in German, Rumanian, Tartar and Russian, Russian coming last.

  30,000 civilians had survived the 1941-2 siege of Sebastopol, but some 20,000 were

  deported by the Germans or shot as suspected soldiers in disguise; and 10,000 had been allowed to stay in Sebasto-' pol, or rather in its northern suburbs. Yefremov also alluded to the Crimean Tartars, who had played a particularly cruel game in hunting down

  disguised Russian soldiers. Altogether, the Tartars' record was as bad as could be. They had formed a police force under German control and had been highly active in the

  Gestapo...

  Chersonese was gruesome. All the area in front of the Earth Wall and beyond was

  ploughed up by thousands of shells and scorched by the fire of the katyusha mortars.

  Hundreds of German vehicles were still there, or were being carted away by Russian

  soldiers. The ground was littered with thousands of German helmets, rifles, bayonets, and other arms and ammunition. Some of this stuff was now being piled up by Russian

  soldiers assisted by meek German war prisoners who looked almost happy to be alive.

  There were also numerous German guns around, and a few heavy tanks—but only few,

  for the Germans had either lost or evacuated the rest of them long before.

  Over the ground were also scattered thousands of pieces of paper —photographs,

  snapshots, passports, maps, private letters—and even a volume of Nietzsche carried to the end by some Nazi superman. Nearly all the dead had been buried, but around the

  shattered lighthouse dead Germans and rafts were bobbing in the water, as it beat against the tip of the Chersonese Promontory—bodies of men who had tried to escape on the

  rafts. They were some of those 750 SS-men who had made a last stand around the

  lighthouse, and would not surrender. And here, among these dead bodies, on the water-edge, was another weird shape: something that looked like a skeleton with only a few rags still clinging to it: and one of the rags still had white-and-blue stripes: the telniashka (singlet) of a Black Sea sailor. Was he one of those who, nearly two years before, had fought here to the last—just like these Germans—on this very Chersonese Promontory,

  and had been left here on this desolate spot, to rot away unburied?

  Around the lighthouse, the blue sea was calm, and perhaps, not very far away some rafts were still drifting over the sea, with desperate men clinging to them, drifting over waters where only three years before, the pleasure steamers still cruised between Odessa,

  Sebastopol and Novorossisk. Of the three, only Odessa still looked like a city.

>   Novorossisk, like Sebastopol, was also a heap of ruins.

  My last night in the Crimea, I spent in the midst of the rich juicy green steppe. It had rained heavily during the previous evening and throughout the night. I was billeted in the clean little Tartar cottage; there was an old man there, and an old woman, and their son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They had, behind the house, a large vegetable garden, all their own; the vegetables were coming up luxuriantly, and beyond the vegetable plot were

  immense fields of green wheat. But the Tartar family were morose and frightened,

  scarcely said a word, and the woman claimed to be very ill. The land had been intensely cultivated. The Germans, still hoping until April to hold the Crimea, had encouraged the Tartars to sow and plant wherever possible, and the Tartars had worked hard.

  I remember the look of fear that came over the old man when a Soviet officer knocked on the door in order, as it turned out, merely to billet me on him.

  The 500,000 Crimean Tartars were, before long, to be deported en masse—women, children and all—to "the east" for having collaborated with the Germans. The Crimea was eventually turned over to the Ukrainian SSR, and nothing more was said of the

  Tartars, even though Mr Khrushchev was to be very indignant about the "racialist" and

  "un-Leninist" mass deportation of other entire nationalities. But the Crimean Tartars (or the Volga Germans, for that matter) were not mentioned, and they were never allowed to return.

  Chapter V THE LULL BEFORE D-DAY-STALIN'S

  FLIRTATION WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH—"SLAV

  UNITY"

  By the middle of May 1944 the Soviet-German Front came to a relative standstill. Except for the enormous "Belorussian Bulge" in the middle, where the Germans were still nearly 250 miles inside Soviet territory, the Soviet-German Front ran in an almost straight line from the Gulf of Finland, near the former Estonian border, down to Northern Rumania

  and Bessarabia. To the north, the Baltic Republics were still in German hands; so was most of Belorussia; but most of the Ukraine had been liberated, with the front now