The Soviet Campaign to Retake the Crimean Peninsula

This latest installment in the Casemate series “Eastern Front WWII Battles,” takes the reader through the Soviet 1944 campaign to retake the Crimean Peninsula. It is extensively illustrated with many excellent photographs of the fighting and, as is typical of the series, full-color plates of equipment and soldiers involved in the fighting, though, inexplicably a Soviet T-34-76 is identified as a T-34-85 in one plate!

The book begins with the German invasion of Crimea by Erich Von Manstein’s Eleventh Army in 1941. The successful First Siege of Sevastopol is recounted and the failed Soviet counter-offensives into Crimea of 1942 and 1943. Then the narrative swings to the Russian Summer-Autumn of 1943 Dnieper Offensive, which opened up the path to Crimea.

Soviet forces were able to cross the Kerch Straits and establish a beachhead on the Crimean peninsula in November 1943, but it was not until April 1944 that Soviet forces were able to break the German lines in Northern Crimea and advance on Sevastopol. The German forces collapsed quickly when faced with the overwhelming force of the 4th Ukrainian Front under General Fyodor Tobulkhin. The Germans were able to evacuate a significant part of the Crimean garrison by sea, with an estimated 38,000 escaping versus 26,700 killed and captured when Sevastopol surrendered on May 12, 1944.

Compared to the Osprey Campaign book on the same subject, I found Casemate’s entry to be lacking. The large number of photographs and plates do not make up for the limited text and the lack of good maps. I hope Casemate will improve on this with subsequent books in the series.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre, The Farthest Valley, The Soldier's Reward, The Traitor of Arnhem, Che Guevara's Final Adventure, and The Italian Army in the Balkans, 1940-41.

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Note: The Crimean Offensive, 1944is also available in e-editions.

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