Only after the great encirclement battle at Kiev did the Wehrmacht commit significant combat power to the taking of the Crimean Peninsula: Army Group South assigned the 11th Army with two Romanian corps to the conquest. He started to consider Germany’s exploitation of Soviet resources and the protection of key resources supporting the Reich’s war effort, particularly the oil fields and refineries in Romania, which seemed vulnerable to Soviet air and naval attacks launched from Crimea. During this period, Hitler began to shift his attention away from the lightning campaign. Hitler and his generals began to quarrel in July 1941 when it became apparent that the frontier battles had not destroyed the Red Army and that Germany would be engaged in a longer and more difficult campaign. Adolf Hitler and his generals had counted on destroying the Red Army along the western borderland of the Soviet Union and then advancing deep into the U.S.S.R. Crimea was the last bastion of Russia’s White Movement during the Civil War and fell when Red Army forces under the command of Mikhail Frunze defeated Baron Wrangel’s defenders and forced the evacuation of the Whites from Sevastopol.Ĭrimea did not figure prominently in the Wehrmacht’s planning for war on the Eastern Front, but plans do not survive contact with the enemy, and Crimea did become a major battleground. In the 19 th and 20 th centuries, war came to Crimea when the Anglo-French expedition took Sevastopol and destroyed Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in order to protect the Ottoman Empire from Russian naval power. Crimea was a point of struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, which conquered it during the reign of Catherine the Great. Army and published author on tank warfare on the Eastern Front, has written about the campaigns fought in Crimea from 1941 to 1944 between the Wehrmacht and its Romanian allies and the Red Army for control of the peninsula and its key naval base at Sevastopol. In the book under review Robert Forczyk, a former armor officer with the U.S. This bloodless campaign led to Crimea’s annexation by Russia and renewed tensions between Russia and the West. In this case, the military campaign was short and decisive with Russia’s “little green men” and pro-Russian irregulars seizing Crimea in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution in February with its anti-Russian program. Robert Forczyk, Where the Iron Crosses Grow: The Crimea, 1941-1944 (Osprey Publishing, 2014)Ĭrimea, once a place remembered for the Yalta Conference and the summer retreats of the tsarist and Soviet elites, now has the world’s attention as pawn in the new struggle between Putin’s Russia and revolutionary Ukraine.
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