80 years ago began the largest landing operation of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War - the Kerch-Feodosia. It lasted until January 2, 1942, as a result of which the Kerch Peninsula was occupied for some time and held by Soviet troops. How this happened and what it led to - in the material of "Gazeta Ru". On the night of December 25-26, 1941, Soviet troops, only recently surrendering Kerch to the advancing enemy, returned to Crimea as a result and a daring maneuver called the Kerch-Feodosia landing operation of the Transcaucasian Front. During this period, the Red Army, replenished with numerous reservists, was preparing to go on the offensive on all fronts, while Hitler's troops fizzled out and lost momentum. In addition, it became known that immediately after the seizure of the Kerch Peninsula, the German command transferred all the main forces to the assault on Sevastopol, not expecting such a quick return of the enemy knocked out of the peninsula.
For the landing, it was necessary to use everything that came to hand - boats mobilized for military needs, fishing seiners and even barges - and the number of paratroopers included untrained recruits, but at first the operation was a success. The maximum task of this offensive was to release the besieged Sevastopol, defeat the German and Romanian troops who occupied the Crimean peninsula in the fall of 1941, and create conditions for its complete liberation. However, the offensive that had begun soon stopped, and already in May 1942, as a result of the Wehrmacht's retaliatory operation called Trappenjagd - "Hunting for the Bustard" - the Soviet troops suffered a severe defeat: the paratroopers who landed either died or were evacuated back through the Kerch Strait, or were captured. or they left together with civilians and partisans to the Adzhimushkay quarries near Kerch, from where the Nazi punishers gradually smoked them with poisonous gases. Almost all 10-13 thousand soldiers hiding in the quarries were killed.
On January 5, 1942, a landing was also made in Evpatoria, and at the same time an uprising broke out in the city, as a result of which the Romanian garrison was driven out of the city. But already on January 7, the reserves brought up by the Germans again occupied Yevpatoria, and that landing was partially killed in an unequal battle, and partially was captured. At the end of January, the Sudak landing force, which had landed on January 6, also fell almost completely, for a couple of weeks it heroically defended the captured bridgehead as part of the "operation of distraction."
As a result of all these efforts and casualties, it was possible to temporarily prevent the capture of Sevastopol and the advance of Hitler's troops to the Caucasus, demonstrating, moreover, the possibility of successful offensive operations by the Red Army.
However, the Crimean Front on the Kerch Peninsula pulled over too many resources of the defending Sevastopol, including the supply of artillery shells, which this city was extremely lacking. In the summer of 1942, after a heroic defense, Sevastopol was surrendered and released again only in May 1944. Irrecoverable losses as a result of the Kerch-Feodosiya operation are estimated at more than 40 thousand Soviet servicemen and up to 10 thousand from their opponents. There are also estimates of 150,000 killed.
Initially, the landing operation was carried out at night in stormy conditions. The enemy put up stubborn resistance. Many ships were damaged by artillery and mortar fire, some of them were sunk as a result of this shelling or sank as a result of a storm. On December 26, the landing was carried out in the Kerch region, and on December 29 - in the port of Feodosia. The initial number of the landing force amounted to more than 40 thousand soldiers, but large losses were caused by the fact that the landing was carried out mainly on vessels not intended for this, unable to enter shallow water. The infantry was forced to jump into the icy sea and move to the shore chest-deep in water, suffering from hypothermia. A few days later, frost struck, and further landing was carried out on the ice of the frozen Kerch Strait. The initial superiority in the number of troops and equipment was on the Soviet side: in manpower - more than twice, in artillery and mortars - 2.8 times, in combat aircraft - 2.3 times.
The success of the landing was facilitated by the fact that at that time the Kerch Peninsula was defended by only one German division, all the other Wehrmacht forces were thrown into the siege of Sevastopol. The Soviet troops landing in Kerch and Feodosia possessed multiple superiority, this situation threatened the remaining German troops with encirclement, and the commander of these troops, General Hans von Sponeck, hurried to give the order to retreat. Escaping the encirclement, he abandoned all heavy weapons and violated the belated order to hold the defense. Von Sponeck was later removed from command, put on trial and shot on July 23, 1944, on the orders of Himmler. The German command was forced to urgently transfer troops from near Sevastopol to meet the advancing Red Army, which, however, was in no hurry to build on the success.
How threatening the position of the German troops on the Crimean Peninsula looked like at that time is evidenced by the statements of the commander of the 11th Army that captured the Crimea, the future conqueror of Sevastopol, Field Marshal General Erich von Manstein, the informal leader of the German generals. In his memoirs, he wrote about it this way: “If the enemy took advantage of the situation and quickly began to pursue the 46th Infantry Division from Kerch, and also struck decisively after the Romanians retreating from Feodosia, then a hopeless situation would be created not only for this the newly formed sector ... The fate of the entire 11th Army would be decided ... "
At the same time, the commander of the troops of the newly formed Caucasian Front, Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov, postponed the continuation of the offensive until the last, citing a lack of forces and means. In addition, he had a conflict with the representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme Command Lev Mekhlis.
Mekhlis reported this to Stalin: “We flew to Kerch on 01/20/1942. We found the most unattractive picture of the organization of command and control of troops ... The Front Commander Kozlov does not know the position of the units at the front, their condition, as well as the enemy groupings. None of the divisions have data on the number of people, the presence of artillery and mortars. Kozlov leaves the impression of a commander confused and unsure of his actions. None of the leading front workers since the occupation of the Kerch Peninsula has been in the army ... "
Lev Mekhlis proposed replacing the commander of the Crimean Front with Rokossovsky, Klykov or someone else, but Stalin refused him this: “You demand that we replace Kozlov with someone like Hindenburg. But you must know that we have no Hindenburgs in reserve. Your business in Crimea is not difficult, and you could handle it yourself. If you used assault aviation not for side business, but against enemy tanks and manpower, the enemy would not have broken through the front and tanks would not have passed. You don't need to be a Hindenburg to understand this simple thing, sitting for two months on the Crimean Front. "
Mekhlis clashed with the commander, looked for wreckers, the offensive was postponed, but the defense, despite the instructions of the General Staff, was not strengthened. Later, General of the Army Sergei Shtemenko described the role of Mehlis in all these Crimean events in his memoirs “The General Staff during the War”: “Back at the end of January 1942, the Headquarters sent LZ Mehlis as its representative there. Major General P.P. Vechnyi went with him from the General Staff. They were supposed to help the front command to prepare and carry out an operation to unblock Sevastopol. Mekhlis, according to his custom, instead of helping, began to reshuffle the leading cadres. And above all, he replaced the chief of staff of the front, Tolbukhin, with Major General Eternal. "
Meanwhile, the same Manstein testified: “In the first days of January 1942 for the troops that landed near Feodosia and approached from the direction of Kerch, the way was actually opened to the vital artery of the 11th army, the Dzhankoy-Simferopol railway. The weak security front that we managed to create could not withstand the onslaught of large forces. On January 4, it became known that the enemy already had 6 divisions in the Feodosia region. "
As a result of the fact that the battle formation of the Crimean Front was not rebuilt in time, the Kerch catastrophe of 1942 broke out. Soviet troops were defeated, the conquered bridgehead disappeared, on May 19, 1942, the Crimean Front was disbanded.
On June 4, 1942, by the Headquarters directive "On the reasons for the defeat of the Crimean Front in the Kerch operation," Kozlov was demoted in military rank to major general with a recommendation to use him in less responsible work, and Mekhlis was demoted two steps at once - to the corps commissar - and removed from the post of Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Head of the Glavpolitupr of the Red Army. However, later they received new posts: on August 30, 1942, Kozlov was appointed commander of the 24th Army, which took part in the Battle of Stalingrad, and Mehlis was a member of the military councils of various fronts. The ordinary soldiers and their commanders, who were dying in besieged Sevastopol, had to take the rap for their "simple deeds".
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