Chapter 31 Conquest of Crimea

After the Battle of the Sea of ​​Azov, the battle order of the German south wing also began to be adapted.The Supreme Command now seems to have realized that no one army group can fight on two fronts at the same time.The advance to Rostov was therefore now entrusted to the 1st Panzer Army, and the Eleventh Army was ordered to hand over to it the 49th Mountain Army and the SS Division of the Führer's Guard. The Eleventh Army is now using its remaining two armies to take on the task of conquering Crimea.Among them, the 30th Army has the 22nd, 72nd and 170th infantry divisions; the 54th Army has the 46th, 73rd and 53rd divisions. infantry division.A third of the latter's forces remained outside Odyssey.

The Romanian Third Army is now returned to the command of Marshal Antonescu, and is only responsible for the coastal defense of the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov.However, after I negotiated directly with the Marshal, he agreed to assign a Romanian mountain army to my command, with a cavalry brigade and a mountain brigade under his command, and he entered Crimea along the way to take on the task of covering the eastern coastline. Now the task of the Eleventh Army has been simplified, it is only to capture Crimea, but the Supreme Command has become very impatient, hoping that an army can cross the Kerch Strait towards Kuban as quickly as possible (Kuban) peninsula.

From this requirement, it can be seen how low Hitler underestimated the strength of the enemy.The Eleventh Army was forced to feel, and must point out, that a prerequisite for such an operation was the complete elimination of the Crimea.The enemy will undoubtedly fight hard for the peninsula, and will even give up Odyssey rather than Sevastopol. In fact, as long as the Russian army retained a foothold in the Crimea, the question of sending part of the Eleventh Army (now only two in total) through Kerch to the Kuban was out of the question at all.So we took this opportunity to ask for an additional corps (three divisions), probably mainly to meet Hitler's above-mentioned requirements, and within a few weeks we had the 42nd, 132nd and 2nd corps. Fourteen two infantry divisions.These reinforcements proved to be even more indispensable later on as the Russians fought against the beasts in the Crimea.