A Sea Regained

Nine months and (Moscow said) more than 300,000 casualties were the price Germany paid for the history-encrusted Crimea and its naval bases. This week, with their supply lines severed by the Red drive across the Ukraine, the Germans had lost all but a tiny, blazing corner of the peninsula. With it went their claim to full control of the Black Sea.

Attacking from north and east, the Russians wrested the Crimea back in just one week -- in one of the most complete German reverses of World War II.

Preparation. Last November the Russians began to probe the enemy defenses on Perekop ("Cross-Ditch"), the six-mile-wide northern corridor into the Crimea. One by one, Red scouts mapped the German fire points : 200 in the first line, more in the rear. Other units made ready to cross the Sivash (also called the Putrid Sea), the stagnant, shallow western corner of the Azov Sea. Then the commander, rotund General Feodor Tolbukhin, expert horseman and veteran of Stalingrad, waited.

To the east, where the Crimea stretches its small head towards the Caucasus like an eager turtle, other troops held on to beachheads seized in the winter. In December a trapped Red unit broke through the enemy lines at night, seized Kerch piers, escaped aboard waiting Red warships.

In January fresh units fought their way into Kerch, but were halted by German tanks. To head this front, Moscow brought from the north bullnecked, shrewd-eyed General Andrei Yeremenko, a 51 -year-old Cossack who headed Stalin grad's defense.

Execution. Early last week the time came. A tremendous artillery barrage erased German defenses at Kerch and Perekop, cleared paths for the two armies from north and east. The defending troops (including many Rumanians) fell back swiftly, then broke. Soviet columns raced across the dusty mid-Crimean steppe at 50 miles a day -- and better. Russian cavalry slashed at the flanks of retreating elements, cut into main bodies. Red tentacles curled and spread all over the Vermont-sized peninsula.

Simferopol, the Crimean capital (prewar pop. 80,000), fell almost without a fight. So did the key ports of Yevpatoriya, Feodosiya, Yalta on the sun-drenched, wooded Black Sea coast. In seven days the Russians reported killing 29,000 Germans and Rumanians, capturing 41,000 more.

Monday, Russian soldiers stood on the hills ringing Sevastopol. Twenty-two months earlier they had abandoned the city after a historic 245-day siege. Now the Germans were scurrying out, blowing up fuel and ammunition dumps, trying to escape by sea. But Red aircraft ruled the skies as completely as the Red warships controlled the seas. German air transports, seeking to remove high officers, were destroyed on the ground. German barges, laden with fleeing troops, were reduced to splinters by Russian shells and bombs. Rapidly the Red ring around the burning city tightened.

Five hundred miles to the northwest, another victory was won. For almost six weeks the army of Marshal Georgy Zhukov had fought in the ruins of Tarnopol. When the battle ended last week, he had the town. Moscow reported 13,600 Germans dead there, 2,400 captured.

Tarnopol's fall removed a barrier from the Red path toward the fortress of Lwow, about 70 miles away, secured the flank of the force poised to strike across the Carpathians and into the Balkans.

In Budapest, puppet Admiral Nicholas Horthy issued the war's first Hungarian order of the day: "The war is now approaching its final phase. . . . Once more [it is] a matter of the immediate defense of our fatherland. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.