Original subtitles

June 1941. German Army Group South advances into Ukraine.

But at the powerful naval bases of Odessa and Sevastopol,

the Germans encounter fierce Soviet resistance.

Originally produced for Russian television in 2011,

this is the story of Russia s Great Patriotic War

and the Red Army s long road from defeat to victory.

13th July 1941.

Soviet DB-3s dropped their bombs over the Romanian city of Ploesti,

and turned for home.

The target was hidden by low cloud.

But the high-explosive had found its mark.

Romania was Hitler s main source of oil.

Now just three weeks into the German invasion of the Soviet Union,

this crucial supply line was under attack.

The Unirea oil refinery burned for several days.

The flames could be seen for many miles.

Romanian oil facilities were hit again and again

by bombers of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimea.

The Crimean peninsula had barely been mentioned in German plans for the invasion.

But now it was giving Hitler growing cause for concern.

On 23rd July 1941, Hitler issued Directive 33,

which gave increased priority to the operations of Army Group South in Ukraine.

On 12th August, he gave orders to occupy the Crimea, which because of its air bases,

he declared, posed a great threat to the Romanian oil-producing regions.

The Soviet bomber crews had caught the attention of the Fuehrer.

German forces were now heading south to deal with them.

The first weeks of the war were disastrous for the Red Army.

But in one arena, they had reason to feel more confident.

The Soviet Black Sea Fleet was a force to be reckoned with.

It included 1 battleship, 5 cruisers, 16 destroyers and 44 submarines.

There was no fleet to rival it in the Black Sea.

It was commanded by the 42-year old Vice-Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky.

Oktyabrsky joined the Russian navy in 1917. An ardent Communist,

he d gone as far as to change his name from Ivanov to Oktyabrskiy

meaning October, the month of the Revolution.

He d commanded the Black Sea Fleet since 1939.

In the summer of 1941 Stalin issued many orders forbidding units to surrender,

and demanding they hold their positions to the last man.

Most had little effect.

But at the Black Sea port of Odessa, it was a different story.

The defence was led by the Independent Coastal Army,

which would soon be under the command of General Ivan Efimovitch Petrov.

Petrov began his military career as a private in the Red Army.

By 1941 he was a Major General commanding the 25th Chapayevskaya Rifle Division,

named after its legendary Civil War commander, Vasily Chapayev.

Within weeks, Petrov would be promoted

to command of the Independent Coastal Army at Odessa.

The first battles for the city were fought on 5th August

against the advancing 4th Romanian Army.

The Romanian generals thought that Odessa would fall quickly.

But Soviet soldiers and civilians had been put to work building new defences.

They had dug more than 100 miles of trenches and anti-tank ditches.

Odessa would mount a stubborn defence, holding out for many weeks,

while it was kept supplied by the Black Sea Fleet.

In September, Romanian troops finally broke into the city s suburbs

and began shelling the harbour. Soviet marines launched a counterattack.

Supported by amphibious landings behind the Romanian lines,

they routed two enemy divisions.

The siege lines were driven back more than 5,000 yards.

As the Coastal Army prepared to carry the siege on into the winter,

it received dramatic new orders.

Soldiers and their commanders who have fought for the city bravely and heroically,

shall be evacuated with all speed to the Crimea.

Von Manstein s 11th Army had crossed the Dnieper

and was about to cut-off the entire Crimean peninsula.

Erich von Manstein came from a Prussian family

with a long history of military service.

He was seriously wounded in the opening stages of the First World War,

but went on to become a highly experienced staff officer.

In 1940, he devised the plan which led to the Fall of France.

He came to be regarded as one of the best generals of the war.

Von Manstein was poised to break through Soviet defences at Perekop,

the gateway to the peninsula. The cities of the Crimea would be exposed,

including the main Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol.

To try to save Sevastopol, Odessa would be sacrificed.

Leaving behind a small rearguard,

approximately 90,000 soldiers were evacuated over the course of 17 days.

They left leaflets addressed to the people of Odessa.

We re leaving our beloved Odessa, but not for good, and not for long.

Those miserable killers, those Fascist brats will be thrown out of our city.

We will be back soon, comrades!

At dawn on 16th October, the last ship left Odessa.

That evening, the Romanians entered the city.

German troops advanced through the Crimea, heading for Sevastopol.

As they rested, shells suddenly started falling amongst them.

Dozens of vehicles caught fire.

They were under attack from the massive guns of Battery Number 30

dubbed by the Germans Fort Maxim Gorky I.

Batteries Number 30 and 35 were the fulcrum of Sevastopol s defences.

Each battery had two turrets, each with two 12 guns.

They had originally been built for battleships, and had a range of 26 miles.

Construction of the batteries began in 1912, but because of the turmoil in Russia,

they weren t completed until 1936.

Electric engines were used to load and aim the guns.

A light railway carried the half-ton shells from the magazine to the guns.

Only the towers, protected by 400 millimetres of steel plate,

were visible above ground.

The rest of the battery was housed in an underground complex, 130 metres by 50.

It included storage rooms for ammunition, electric generators,

sleeping quarters, even kitchens and infirmaries.

The battery was commanded by Major Grygoriy Aleksander.

As the Germans continued their advance,

Soviet troops retreated south through the mountains,

along the Yalta highway, and to Sevastopol.

Marines, supported by the heavy coastal guns, held up the German advance.

They bought crucial time for reinforcements to reach Sevastopol.

These included the Coastal Army under General Petrov,

and Fleet Commander Vice-Admiral Oktyabrisky.

Sevastopol s defences were divided into four zones.

The first covered the harbour at Balaklava. The second, the highway to Yalta.

The third, the central and eastern approaches.

And the fourth, the road from Bakhchisaray.

Wounded soldiers and civilians were hurriedly evacuated by sea.

On 6th November, the steamer Armenia left, bound for the Caucasus.

In the chaos of the evacuation,

many passengers were not entered on the ship s register.

The next day at noon, she was attacked by a German torpedo bomber.

The Armenia sank in just four minutes.

From an estimated 7,000 passengers,

an escort vessel picked up just eight survivors.

Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff,

recorded in his diary that the assault on Sevastopol would begin on 8th December,

and last no more than 5 days.

But summer rains intervened to delay the assault.

Von Manstein had decided to make his main attack against Sevastopol s North Shore.

At first sight the Yalta highway seemed more obvious.

The open country on either side of the road was better suited to German tanks.

That was why the Soviets were hastily fortifying the area.

But Von Manstein knew that if he took the North Shore,

his artillery would dominate the harbour.

With no more supplies arriving by sea, the city would be doomed.

Realizing that Sevastopol could not hold out on its own,

the Soviets planned to land troops at Kerch, on the eastern tip of the Crimea,

and at Feodosia.

The landings would be led by the elite 79th Naval Infantry Brigade.

They would seize the ports, and clear the way for the infantry that followed.

Two days before the landings, the Germans began a brutal assault on Sevastopol.

They made rapid advances.

The Stavka High Command received an urgent message:

Should further attacks be of the same pace,

the Sevastopol garrison can hold out for no more than three days .

Desperate measures were required.

The 79th Brigade was immediately diverted to Sevastopol.

At Sevastopol, warships worked in 20 hour shifts,

bombarding German positions from within the harbour.

The Germans were finally halted at Fort Stalin .

This was the name the Germans had given to a hilltop position

held by the 365th Anti-Aircraft Battery.

It was not a real fort, although the position had some concrete emplacements

for its four 76 millimetre anti-aircraft guns.

The Germans had nicknames for all the Sevastopol defences.

They included the GPU, the Cheka, Siberia and Molotov.

Some of these defences dated back to the Crimean War of 1854.

Grygory Zamekhovskiy was at Fort Stalin.

A detachment of sailors was formed to defend the battery, and I volunteered.

We fought the German infantry right by the battery,

hand to hand combat inside the barbed wire. It was cruel.

Most of our detachment was killed .

Sacrifices such as these brought Sevastopol time.

But the situation remained critical.

The Germans could break through to the North Shore at any hour.

It was where all reinforcements and ammunition were landed.

To break the stranglehold, the Kerch landings would go ahead.

Advance detachments landed at Kerch on 26th December.

But they were able to secure only a few small bridgeheads.

Four days later, a risky night-time landing was attempted at Feodosia.

A Soviet submarine laid navigational buoys along the route.

Then it turned on its searchlights to guide in the attacking force.

A small raiding party led the way.

They captured the lighthouse and switched it on.

Now the rest of the landing force steamed in.

But one last obstacle remained: the boom that blocked the harbour entrance.

Feodosia s boom was a floating barrier made of rafts.

A Soviet submarine had made a night-time reconnaissance of it just a few days before.

It had been tightly shut.

A boat was supposed to blow up the barrier.

But its commander had suffered a failure of nerve .

He was two hours late, and then withdrew without orders.

It was a dereliction of duty for which he would later be arrested and shot.

The entire operation was in jeopardy.

Only then was it discovered that the boom had somehow been left open.

The first Soviet craft surged into the bay.

The signal went up. The landing party stormed ashore.

The German commander, Count von Sponeck,

believed his forces were about to be cut off. He ordered a retreat.

The Germans abandoned the Kertch peninsula.

For his decision, Von Sponeck, a holder of the Knight s Cross,

would later be court martialled and shot.

The landings had exactly the effect the Soviets had hoped for.

Von Manstein was forced to suspend his assault on Sevastopol.

He even had to give up ground. Von Manstein described the moment in his memoirs:

It was perfectly clear that it was necessary to move troops from Sevastopol

to the endangered areas. Any delay would have been fatal .

Von Manstein s 11th Army recaptured Feodosia on 18th January.

The Soviets withdrew to a new defensive line across the Akmanay Isthmus.

The loss of Feodosia prompted the Stavka High Command

to send its own representative to the Crimea.

The man they chose was Army Commissioner Lev Mekhlis.

Usually the Stavka sent a senior general, but Mekhlis was a pure party man,

a fanatical Bolshevik with no military expertise.

His presence undermined the Front Commander General Kozlov,

and threatened chaos in the crucial days ahead

Over the Black Sea, nine German torpedo bombers began their attack run.

The transport ship Svanetti was returning from Sevastopol.

She carried wounded soldiers and refugees.

Her skipper successfully evaded five torpedoes.

But he couldn t dodge them all.

In 1941 in the Black Sea,

the Germans sunk 23 Soviet ships and damaged 26 more.

Luftwaffe air attacks were proving lethal.

Most dangerous of all was Werner Baumbach, commander of KG30.

He led an elite bomber squadron that specialised in attacking ships,

and had recently transferred to the Black Sea from the Atlantic coast.

Without adequate fighter protection, Soviet shipping was highly vulnerable.

In just two months, German aircraft destroyed one third of the transport tonnage

available to the Crimean Front.

For the new year, 1942, Hitler s main strategic objective

was to capture the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

But first he would have to eliminate Soviet resistance in the Crimea.

Otherwise his southern flank was exposed. Orders from the General Staff stated:

The main task of Army Group South is to recapture the Kerch Peninsula

and take Sevastopol, to free up forces for further advances.

To achieve this, von Manstein was reinforced with the newly-formed 22nd Panzer Division.

He would also be supported by the 8th Air Corps,

commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen.

This unit was considered the best in the Luftwaffe

when it came to close air support.

The German offensive was codenamed , Operation Bustard Hunt .

Meanwhile in the Kerch Peninsula,

Soviet soldiers were digging a second and third line of trenches.

The commander of the 44th Army had given orders to construct defences in depth.

But under pressure from Commissar Mekhlis,

General Kozlov put an end to such preparations.

Instead the men were told to prepare for the big advance.

Neither Kozlov nor Mekhlis were discouraged by earlier Red Army disasters.

Their offensive was set for 20th May.

Meanwhile a Croatian Luftwaffe pilot had defected.

He warned of an imminent German attack.

General Kozlov expected the attack to come along the main highway,

where he d positioned the 51st Army.

Half his tanks were also dug in along this route.

An advance along the Black Sea shore was considered unlikely.

So only the weak 63rd Rifle Division covered this route.

The Germans assault boats approach through early morning mist.

For a while the landings were held up by Soviet engineers with flamethrowers.

But only until they ran out fuel.

Then the main barrage began.

German artillery targeted the minefields in front of the Red Army positions.

They blew lanes through them, through which infantry and assault guns could advance.

Meanwhile the 8th Air Corps pounded Soviet defences from above.

Once the Germans broke through the front line, they met almost no resistance.

Kozlov had spared his men the trouble of digging.

Now they had no protection on the open steppe.

Chaos and panic soon took hold.

On the second morning of the battle, Von Manstein sent in the 22nd Panzer Division.

He was, on a smaller scale, repeating the plan of envelopment

which had led to the Fall of France.

After breaking through to the Soviet rear, German tanks turned north,

trapping the Soviet 47th army.

It seemed that the battle would be over in mere hours.

But on 9th May Soviet armour fought back, led by a handful of heavy KV tanks.

Late at night, Kozlov and Mekhlis called Stalin.

They proposed to withdraw to a new defensive line known as the Turkish Bank.

But Stalin was not optimistic.

If you manage to reach the Turkish Bank in time,

we ll consider that quite an achievement .

Soviet units withdrew along the shore of the Sea of Azov, covered by their tanks.

But the Germans were first to reach the Turkish Bank.

They followed on the heels of a retreating Soviet column,

hidden in the clouds of dust.

The Germans launched an immediate assault and smashed through the line.

Now the Crimean Front was ordered to retreat to the last positions,

around Kerch itself.

In the open terrain, the Red Army was exposed to air attack.

The losses were terrible.

At the outskirts of Kerch,

the Germans were briefly held up as T-26 light tanks made desperate counterattacks.

The guns of the Black Sea Fleet joined in.

But unlike Sevastopol, Kerch had no powerful coastal batteries.

The Germans entered the city,

driving Soviet survivors to the eastern tip of the peninsula.

Their only hope now lay in evacuation by sea,

across the 6 mile-wide Gulf of Taman.

Every available boat or barge was pressed into service.

Dunka s Fleet the soldiers called it.

But here, there was to be no miracle of Dunkirk

In the face of a merciless German air onslaught,

120,000 troops got away. Many more did not.

There weren t enough boats.

Most of those who tried to swim for it were carried away by the current.

As the Crimean Front collapsed, Soviet casualties reached 160,000.

6th May 1942. The German bombardment of Sevastopol was in its fifth day.

A heavy shell had smashed through the roof of one of the turrets of Battery Number 30.

It was soon repaired but one gun remained out of action.

Enormous shells were raining down from the German lines

2 metres in length, and weighing more than two tons.

They came from two giant mortars, Thor and Odin.

The 600 millimetre guns had been built to take on France s Maginot Line.

Now they had come to Sevastopol.

Their shells could smash through three and a half metres of concrete,

or 450 millimetres of steel plate.

They mortars took 10 minutes to reload.

But the Germans had brought even bigger guns to Sevastopol.

The railway gun Dora had a calibre of 800 millimetres,

and remains the largest gun ever to be used in action.

It was manned by an artillery battalion of 500 men,

which included transport units, gunners, a camouflage unit, and a field kitchen.

Its firing position was prepared by 1,000 engineers and 1,500 labourers.

Assembly and preparation for firing took six weeks.

Dora fired 48 shells during the siege. Only one hit was recorded.

It destroyed an ammunition store 27 metres underground.

Dora was in action for 13 days, before being disassembled and sent to Leningrad.

At that moment, 11th Army contained nearly 1,000 guns of all calibres.

Von Manstein believed it was a record:

In general during the Second World War,

Germany never used as much artillery as it did during the Siege of Sevastopol .

As the siege went on, ammunition became an increasing concern for both sides.

For the defenders of Sevastopol, there was no place left to run.

There weren t enough ships to evacuate the garrison.

The orders were to hold out at all costs.

There were few illusions about what this meant.

An immense German bombardment began on the morning of 7th June 1942.

Thor and Odin fired 54 shells at Battery Number 30.

But they failed to destroy the turrets.

The Luftwaffe flew 1,400 sorties. The firepower seemed overwhelming.

But German infantry advancing along the Belbek River

were only able to advance a few hundred metres.

It cost them dearly more than 2,000 casualties.

Witnesses described the whole horizon being alive with fire and smoke.

The German onslaught was unsustainable.

Von Richthofen s bombers were running low on bombs.

His pilots had strict orders to make every one count.

The artillery magazines were almost empty.

On the night of 9th June, General Petrov committed his reserve,

the 345th Rifle Division.

Supported by fire from Batteries 30 and 35,

they were able to stem the German advance.

But four days later, disaster struck.

As the transport ship Georgia arrived in the harbour,

bringing reinforcements and ammunition, she was hit by two bombs.

Massive explosions quickly sent her to the bottom.

The loss of men, and 500 tons of ammunition, was a devastating blow.

Vice Admiral Oktyabrisky signalled the Stavka:

The shortage of men and ammunition puts us on the verge of catastrophe.

On 13th June, Manstein was able to report the capture of Fort Stalin,

which had held up the German assault the previous winter.

It had not fallen until three of its four guns had been put out of action.

Von Manstein convinced Hitler this was the crucial breakthrough.

He persuaded Hitler to give him three more infantry regiments,

and not to redeploy the 8th Air Corps to Kharkov.

The main German summer offensive towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus

could not start until Sevastopol fell.

Its garrison s bitter resistance was holding everything up.

But step by step, the Germans were closing in.

On 17th June, the Germans attempted to storm Battery Number 30.

The minefields were destroyed by artillery,

and the infantry were able to reach the turrets.

The gunners withdrew underground. They held out for four more days,

before Battery Commander Major Aleksander gave orders

to blow up the turrets and the generators.

The next day the Germans broke in and captured the survivors.

Aleksander and a few others escaped through a storm drain.

But while dressed as a civilian, he was pointed out by a local collaborator.

Major Aleksander was taken to a prison in Simferopol, tortured and shot.

The Germans had reached the North Shore.

It meant no more supplies or reinforcements could be landed at the harbour.

The cruiser Comintern , en route to Sevastopol, had to turn back.

But at Kazacha, Kamyshova, and Strilets ka Bay,

submarines and small craft could still land.

Douglas DC-3s of the Moscow Special Aviation Group

were used to ferry out the wounded. Grygoriy Zamekhovskiy witnessed the scene:

Thousands of wounded lay at the airfield. One aircraft could take just 25 people.

A pilot would point to those that were to be taken .

How many eyes looked at them with hope and pain!

At most, the aircraft could bring in a few dozen tons of ammunition per day.

But Sevastopol needed hundreds of tons per day.

On 26th June, the submarine S-32 was en route to Sevastopol carrying fuel

and mortar shells. Southwest of Yalta it was attacked by German aircraft.

The explosion was seen 20 miles away.

Soviet defences in the north had collapsed, but the city was not about to surrender.

In the south, the German 30th Corps was held up by Soviet defences

on the Sapoun Heights. In his memoirs, Manstein described his main concern:

The obvious way out of that situation

was to redirect the main blow to the southern side.

But redeploying an infantry division from the northern sector

to the south would have taken many days,

giving the enemy time to rest and reorganise .

What s more, Manstein had lost von Richthofen s Air Corps

which had finally been redeployed north.

Perhaps Sevastopol would make it after all.

The sailors were building a jetty for large ships as fast as they could.

It would be complete in just a few days.

Reinforcements and ammunition could start to pour in once more.

At 2 a.m. on 29th June, the Germans launched 130 assault boats

from Sevastopol s North Shore. Under cover of smoke and heavy artillery fire,

they crossed the bay and landed on the southern shore.

Suddenly the Germans were behind Sevastopol s two remaining lines of defence.

Von Manstein had caught the Soviets off-guard.

Crossing the bay had been considered too high-risk.

The same night, Von Manstein launched an attack along the Yalta highway,

over the Sapoun Heights.

These twin blows led to the total collapse of Soviet defenses.

Small units fought on, but were increasingly isolated and short of ammunition.

Stalin ordered key personnel to leave by plane.

That evening Vice Admiral Oktyabrskiy left for the Caucasus with 232 others.

Other senior officers made their escape by submarine.

As they boarded in full view of hundreds of soldiers and sailors,

a riot looked likely.

Shots were fired, injuring a Marine officer walking behind General Petrov.

That night the submarine left for the safety of Novorossiysk,

on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Some commanders chose to stay with their men.

Chief of Staff Kobalyuk of the Coast Guard declared that he would die with his unit.

Colonel Mikhaylov gave up a seat on the last plane,

and was killed near Sevastopol.

Colonel Rubtsov, commander of an NKVD border detachment, also remained,

and shot himself rather than be taken prisoner.

General Petrov tried to shoot himself on board the submarine,

but was prevented by those around him.

Those left behind felt doomed, and betrayed.

As many as 80,000 men many of them wounded

now faced death, or the horrors of a German prisoner of war camp.

But some refused to give up.

They put to sea in whatever boats remained, or built rafts from what was at hand.

One group of sailors built a raft from a truck and 12 inner tubes.

Many rafts were sunk by German fire.

But this one made it to the open sea.

After a few hours it was met by Soviet patrol boats heading for Sevastopol.

After taking the survivors on board the ships approached the coast.

But heavy German fire meant they couldn t even get close.

At dawn, the patrol boats picked up another boat carrying 12 more survivors.

Then they turned back to Novorossiysk.

In two years these soldiers would return to Sevastopol as victors.

In May 1944, it would be German soldiers desperately building rafts,

hoping to sail them to Romania.

The Red Army would come to settle a score,

and exact a bloody revenge for the defeat of 1942.