To seize the fortress, then, Manstein would need to blast it open with annihilating firepower, especially since the weak German Black Sea Fleet allowed an attack solely from land. To that end, the Germans had assembled the largest artillery pieces in their arsenaclass="underline" 305-, 350-, and 420-millimeter howitzers as well as two 615-millimeter guns (“Thor” and “Odin”) that fired nearly five-thousand-pound shells specially designed for use against concrete fortifications. The largest gun, “Dora,” was an 800-millimeter monster that was the world’s largest artillery piece. With a barrel over a hundred feet long and a bore almost three feet wide, Dora required a crew of two thousand, a sixty-car train, and six weeks to assemble. Although it could fire a shell weighing five tons forty-eight miles or seven-ton armor-piercing shells the height of a two-story building that could penetrate twenty-four feet of concrete, it demanded constant protection from two flak battalions. Although impressive, these weapons remained of limited value because of their slow rate of fire and inaccuracy.9
Arguably just as important as this unprecedented concentration of superheavy guns was the accumulation of some six hundred ground support aircraft to pinpoint strikes against enemy communications, artillery, and key defensive strongpoints as well as the use of eighty-eight-millimeter flak guns to penetrate armored strongpoints. The attack itself began on 2 June with a massive air assault that increased in intensity over the next four days as both aircraft and heavy artillery pounded incessantly at Soviet positions. When infantry attacks began on the seventh, it quickly became apparent that the softening up of the enemy’s defensive front had not achieved the desired result: Soviet resistance was stronger than expected, and German troops could achieve no decisive breakthrough. Over the next few days, as German infantry struggled to make headway against tenacious Russian defenders who were clearly not demoralized or broken, Hitler for a time seriously considered abandoning the entire offensive. Time pressure was now an issue as the Sevastopol operation had to be brought to a conclusion soon so that the vital air units could be made available for Operation Blue. Over the next few days, in a precursor to Stalingrad, small groups of soldiers on both sides fought bitter hand-to-hand struggles for control of ruined buildings. The German attackers, using flamethrowers, satchel charges, and hand grenades, inflicted appalling carnage, yet the Red Army defenders fought on stubbornly. On 13 June, German forces, in savage fighting that resulted in the death or wounding of every officer in two battalions, finally began to crack the outer ring of Soviet defenses in the north. The decisive breakthrough came on the seventeenth, although again at the cost of disturbingly high casualties, when the Fifty-fourth Corps captured six key fortifications. Over the next six days, against a backdrop of continuing high losses, German forces seized the entire northern shore of Severnaya Bay. To the south, the Thirtieth Corps also pushed relentlessly forward, with the result that, by 26 June, Axis forces had succeeded in breaching the outer defense line.10
Faced now with a lengthy regrouping of his forces for an assault on the inner belt of defenses, time that the Germans did not have and that would have given the hard-pressed Soviet defenders the chance to reorganize as well, Manstein decided on an unorthodox and risky operation. During the night of 28–29 June, as the Thirtieth Corps assailed the Sapun Heights to the south, elements of the Fifty-fourth Corps crossed Severnaya Bay in one hundred assault boats and took the steep, heavily fortified shore in a wild rush before the stunned defenders could respond. By the evening of the twenty-ninth, with the Fiftieth Infantry Division pressing through the breach in the north toward Sevastopol itself and other Axis forces rolling up the front in the south, the battle was effectively won. Deeply impressed by the courage and fanatic spirit of the Russian defenders, however, and having already paid a terrible price in German lives for his triumph, Manstein resolved to avoid costly house-to-house fighting by having his artillery and air units pulverize the city. As a result, the occupation of the city and port on 1 July took place against only slight resistance, although some Russian units fought fiercely on the Khersones Peninsula until the fifth. Soviet troops had, in fact, fought so heroically and so impressed many German observers that Goebbels forbade any mention of such courage in press reports—it undermined the propaganda image of the Soviet opponent as being subhuman.11
Manstein had again directed a brilliant battle of annihilation (for which Hitler promoted him to field marshal), one that cost the Soviets tens of thousands killed and 95,000 prisoners. German losses, too, had been heavy, estimates ranging from 75,000 to 100,000 total casualties, with perhaps 25,000 dead. The key question, however, as Manstein himself put it in his memoirs, was whether the success attained at Sevastopol had justified tying down the entire Eleventh Army or simply encircling and besieging the fortress would have been sufficient. A good jumping-off point for the summer offensive had already been secured with the triumph in the Kerch operation, while seizing Sevastopol cost the Germans dearly in lives, materiel, and, what they perhaps had in shortest supply, time. Although Hitler was jubilant at the spring triumphs in the Crimea and North Africa, where Rommel had stormed Tobruk, the benefits gained from seizing Sevastopol, despite the humiliation to Stalin, seem far less than the costs.12
If victory in the Crimea had done much to reinstall confidence in the Wehrmacht, the larger tank action to the north at Kharkov did even more to send German spirits soaring. As a result of the confused and desperate winter fighting, the front line in the south, as elsewhere in Russia, was a tangled web of protrusions and salients that planners on both sides regarded as both a threat and an opportunity. For the Germans, who began thinking of regaining the initiative even before the late winter fighting had abated, these bulges had to be eliminated in order to secure favorable jumping-off positions for their planned summer offensive. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Izyum bridgehead, a protrusion some sixty miles in depth and breadth into the German line on the west bank of the Donets River. Not only did it tie down numerous German formations, but Soviet forces jammed into the salient also posed a constant danger to the key industrial city of Kharkov, less than forty miles to the northwest, as well as threatening to roll up the entire southern front.
The menacing Soviet position, however, also posed an opportunity. To planners envisioning a summer campaign based on the rapid encirclement and destruction of enemy forces, the Izyum bulge, where the Red Army had already stuck its head in the noose, cried out to be snapped shut. As with the Crimean operation, elimination of the Izyum bridgehead would serve to create an advantageous starting point for Operation Blue as well as provide a morale boost for German troops left shaky by the rigors of the winter. To that end, Bock designed a cautious plan in which the Sixth Army, to the north, would strike along the Donets River, using the spring flood to protect its exposed left flank, while troops from the Seventeenth Army under Ewald von Kleist would attack from the south, with the intention of annihilating the enemy near Barvenkovo. Code-named Fredericus I, this operation aimed for a late April start date, when the spring flood would be at its height, but logistic problems caused its postponement. Both Hitler and Halder, moreover, raised objections to Bock’s plan, favoring a much bolder operation that would have the Sixth Army first driving east across the Donets, then turning south. Although risking a Soviet counterthrust against the German flank, a deeper strike also promised a greater haul of prisoners once the trap sprang shut. Bock, perhaps remembering the nightmare in front of Moscow, was reluctant to accept the revision. He asked Halder whether the Führer was not worried about the prospect of a Russian attack at Kharkov, to which Halder replied, “No, such strong German forces are assembling near Kharkov that the enemy… will take care not to attack us there.” Not happy, but recognizing the inevitable, Bock bowed to Hitler’s will and drew up plans for Fredericus II, with a start date of 18 May.13