Baxter, Ian The Crimean Offensive, 1944, The Russian Battle for the Crimea

By October 1943, the German 17th Army was forced to retreat from the Kuban bridgehead across the Kerch Strait to the Crimea. In the following months, the Red Army pushed back the German forces in southern Ukraine. In November 1943, it finally cut off the 17th Army's land connection across the Isthmus of Perekop. Hitler forbade the evacuation of the 17th Army by sea because he believed that the Red Army could use the Crimean peninsula for air attacks on Romanian oil refineries. In November 1943, the Russian army launched a massive amphibious assault at two points on the eastern coast of the Crimea, but its units were unable to prevent an Axis counterattack that caused the southern bridgehead to collapse. The Red Army held the bridgehead at Yenikale and launched further offensive operations from there, culminating in a major offensive in April 1944. Although the 17th Army fought fiercely for every bit of ground, it was unable to halt the advance. The Soviet troops reached Kerch on 11 April and forced the 17th Army to retreat towards Sevastopol. The Axis forces remaining in the Crimea concentrated around the city at the end of the third week of April. The Germans intended to hold Sevastopol as a fortress, as the Russians had done between 1941 and 1942. However, the city's fortifications had not been restored and the city fell on 9 May. From mid-April, Romanian and German ships undertook an extensive and complex evacuation operation. In the final phase of the evacuation, after the fall of Sevastopol, 37,000 soldiers were transported under constant fire from Soviet aircraft and land artillery. In total, around 57,000 men were lost during the evacuation. Illustrated with rare and unpublished photographs, this book is a detailed account of the stubborn attempt to recapture Crimea in 1943-44.