The Siege of Sevastopol, WWII 1941-42. The Largest Military Invasion in Recorded History.

The battle for Sevastopol, and the wider fight for Crimea, siphoned off critical German divisions from the southern push toward the Caucasus, delaying the drive for oil and momentum. At the same time, it gutted Soviet naval power in the Black Sea, silencing it for nearly two years and leaving the coastline exposed and vulnerable.

Sevastopol. October 30, 1941 - July 3, 1942.
Nazi Forces: ~ 204,000 Soldiers, 670 Siege Guns, 655 Anti-Tank Guns, 720 Mortars, 450 Tanks, and 600 Aircraft.
Soviet Forces: ~ 106,000 Soldiers, 600 Heavy Guns, 100+ Mortars, 38 Tanks, and 55 Aircraft.

Additional Reading and Episode Research:

• Morozov, Vasili. The Siege of Sevastopol.
• Werth, Alexander. Russia at War., 1941-1945.
• Ansimov, N.I. Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945.

Similar Episodes:

• The Battle for Moscow.
• The Siege of Sevastopol (1854-55).
• The Siege of Stalingrad.

Transcript

 Thanks for tuning into this episode of History's Greatest Battles, season two, where we explore history's greatest sieges. If you know somebody that enjoys this genre of history, please share the podcast with them and leave us a review.

In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany launched the largest military invasion in recorded history. Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, it was a full-scale assault on the Soviet Union across a front stretching over two thousand miles. Hitler’s strategic goal was clear: destroy the Soviet state, capture its industrial heartlands, and seize control of the oil fields that fueled its war machine. The invasion was divided into three massive army groups. One drove toward Leningrad. Another toward Moscow. The third, Army Group South, pushed deep into Ukraine and toward the oil-rich Caucasus, where control of the Black Sea became essential.

This campaign was not simply about territory. It was about annihilation. Nazi ideology viewed the East as a space to be conquered and its people subjugated or destroyed. What followed was a campaign marked by extremes, extreme violence, extreme resistance, and extreme demands placed on both soldiers and civilians. It was on the southern front, on the edge of the Black Sea, that one position became critical. Not just as a port, but as a strategic anchor. Its capture would strip the Soviets of their naval presence in the south. Its defense would delay the German timetable, drain German strength, and force decisions that rippled across the entire Eastern Front.

The consequences of what happened there shaped the war’s trajectory. Because of what it cost the Germans to take it, and what it took from them to hold it, subsequent operations in the Caucasus were weakened. Key units were tied down for months when they were needed elsewhere. When the Red Army regained the initiative, the German defenses in the south were too brittle to hold. The Soviet advance, once it began in earnest, pushed past that point and never stopped.

What took place on those cliffs and harbors did not decide the war on its own. But it was one of the places where the war began to decide itself. And its effects are still visible in the borders, alliances, and geopolitics of the world today.

Let’s now experience, the siege of Sevastopol.

Welcome to History's Greatest Battles, Season Two, Episode 41: The Siege of Sevastopol, from the 30th of October, 1941; to the 3rd of July, 1942.

Nazi Forces: two hundred and four thousand soldiers, six hundred and seventy heavy guns, six hundred and fifty five anti-tank guns, seven hundred and twenty mortars, four hundred and fifty tanks, and six hundred aircraft.

Soviet Forces: one hundred and six thousand soldiers, six hundred heavy guns, a hundred plus mortars, thirty eight tanks, and fifty five aircraft.

The battle for Sevastopol, and the wider fight for Crimea, siphoned off critical German divisions from the southern push toward the Caucasus, delaying the drive for oil and momentum. At the same time, it gutted Soviet naval power in the Black Sea, silencing it for nearly two years and leaving the coastline exposed and vulnerable.

When the Nazis kicked down the door to the Soviet Union in June 1941, they didn't come swinging wildly. No, this was a precision strike split three ways. Army Group North was gunning for Leningrad. Center had its crosshairs set on Moscow. And to the south, the hammer came down hardest, Army Group South was charging full-force toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. Fuel. Power. War blood.

As the German war machine rolled south toward the Black Sea, one name started echoing through command rooms and war councils, Sevastopol. Anchored in the rocky heart of the Crimean Peninsula, it wasn’t just a port, it was the Soviet Union’s naval spine in the south. And the Germans wanted it broken.

If the Germans took Sevastopol, the Soviets would be choked off from their only warm-water lifeline. No more resupply. No more fleet. No more Black Sea defense. This was the jugular.

By the fall of ’41, the Germans had swept the Crimean Peninsula clean of most Soviet resistance. It wasn’t subtle. It was brutal, fast, and calculated. They weren’t just moving in, they were carving their path in steel.

The man given the job of finishing the job was Erich von Manstein, commander of the XI Army. Sharp mind. Cold resolve. His orders: take Crimea, break Sevastopol, and hold it until the map bled.

The first German blow came down on 30 October and dragged through to 21 November. But they hit a wall, three layers thick, Soviet-built and manned by soldiers who had no intention of folding. Manstein's troops bled for every meter, and still, the lines held.

The Soviet Navy in the Black Sea wasn’t just sitting pretty. Their guns barked from offshore, pounding German positions, covering their brothers in arms. Their fire was precise. Their timing, ruthless. They were the edge that kept Sevastopol breathing.

Then came round two, 17 December. This time, the Germans dug in and kept pushing for two punishing weeks. Blood and grit bought them progress, especially to the north and east, where the Soviet lines began to buckle under the weight.

But just as Manstein thought he had the upper hand, the Soviets punched back. A counteroffensive in late December forced him to lock down the city with five divisions. Sevastopol became a trap, for everyone.

Then came a Soviet move as bold as it was massive, 40,000 troops landing on the Kerch Peninsula. It was one of the biggest amphibious assaults the Red Army would pull off during the entire war. The tide wasn’t just resisting, it was surging.

The Soviets hit hard and took Feodosia early. But what they found there made the victory taste like ash, thousands of Jewish civilians dumped in mass graves outside the town. It wasn’t just war anymore. It was evil, barefaced.

With Soviet boots crashing onto the Kerch Peninsula and Feodosia under their control, Manstein was suddenly fighting on two fronts. He had no choice, he left a hardened holding force at Sevastopol and swung around to deal with the Soviet dagger aimed at his back.

Those early 1942 gains gave Sevastopol a heartbeat again. The siege slackened, and for the first time in months, civilians crawled out of basements and caves like ghosts stepping into daylight. They started repairing what little they could. It didn’t last.

On 8 May 1942, the Germans came roaring back. They hammered Soviet forces across the Kerch Peninsula, and the Luftwaffe owned the skies. Dive-bombers screamed down like predators, turning Soviet trenches into craters and steel.

And just when the Soviet defense needed brains, they got Commissar L. Z. Mekhlis, a political bulldozer with no understanding of the battlefield. His orders weren’t just bad. They were disastrous.

Thanks to Mekhlis’ blunders, Soviet movements were sluggish, their resistance dull-edged. He stalled the withdrawal to Kerch’s final defensive lines. By 15 May, the town was gone, taken right out from under him.

In the chaos that followed, 86,000 Red Army troops managed to escape to the Taman Peninsula. But 176,000 were left behind, dead, wounded, or captured. And every Soviet heavy gun was now in German hands. For Sevastopol, it was a nightmare made real.

With the Crimean Front in ruins, Manstein turned back to Sevastopol like a wolf returning to a wounded stag. He pulled in five more divisions, swelling the German assault force to over 200,000 men. The hammer was ready.

The firepower Manstein assembled was obscene. 420 mm siege guns, 615 mm mortars, and the monstrous 800 mm railway cannons, giants of steel, built to obliterate cities. In total: 670 artillery pieces, almost as many antitank guns, and 600 aircraft to darken the skies. Sevastopol wasn’t going to be stormed, it was going to be pulverized.

Facing this avalanche, the Soviets had half the manpower. They scraped together 600 artillery pieces, just 38 tanks, and only 55 aircraft. It wasn’t a fair fight, it was survival against overwhelming force.

Sevastopol’s lifeline was the sea, and the Germans knew it. They ringed the harbor with over 50 patrol boats and sub-hunters. In the skies above, 150 bombers hunted Soviet ships like prey. The noose was tightening.

The Soviet Navy, depleted and outgunned, managed to slip through the blockade only with small craft and submarines. These were desperate supply runs, low and fast, dodging death at every turn.

Yet somehow, the city kept breathing. Even in the final month, 24,000 fresh troops made it in, and 25,000 sick and wounded were pulled out under fire. Sevastopol wasn’t giving up. Not yet.

While shells rained from above, the Soviets carved their resistance deep into the earth. Beneath Sevastopol, hidden factories churned out mines, mortars, grenades, along with the uniforms and boots to keep soldiers in the fight. They even ran schools underground. The city wasn’t just holding out, it was alive below ground, defying death overhead.

But when Kerch fell and German pressure surged, the bombardment became relentless. Supplies could barely move. Civilians who’d once made weapons now carried them. Every hand, young or old, turned toward the front line.

Among Sevastopol’s defenders, none were more fiercely remembered than the local Komsomol, young communists, boys and girls, side by side with the Red Army and the marines. They didn’t just support the fight. They were the fight.

On 2 June, the German guns opened up with a fury that hadn’t yet been seen. Five days later, the final offensive began. Soviet air defenses crumbled, fighters were shot out of the sky or pulled back out of reach. The Luftwaffe had full control now, and the skies belonged to Germany.

The German spearpoint slammed into the northeastern defenses, aiming to punch through Inker-man and the edge of North Bay. If they broke here, the city’s spine would snap.

But it wasn’t fast. It wasn’t clean. The Soviets fought like men with nothing left to lose, every trench, every slope, turned into a stand. After a week of grinding, bloody stalemate, even Manstein began to doubt. He called for backup, occupation troops from Kerch, fresh blood from the north. This was going to take everything.

Manstein’s own losses were stacking up, but the Soviets were gasping. No fresh reserves. Only what could slip through the blockade, a trickle of men and bullets that couldn’t keep up with the bleeding. By mid-June, both sides were hurting, but only one had anything left to give.

By 18 June, German lead elements pushed up to North Bay. Soviet artillery, starved for shells, was forced to fire only at close range. Every round counted. Every blast was a gamble.

To the south, the Soviets fought like cornered animals, impossible to root out. But by 30 June, Manstein’s two spearheads finally met near Inker-man. From there, the Germans pushed west with a unified front. The jaws were closing.

That night, German boots hit the very edge of Sevastopol. The evacuation began, not retreat, but escape. Anything that could move was put to use.

Minesweepers, fishing boats, battered subs, anything that floated became lifeboats. In the air, the last aircraft made suicide runs to broken landing strips under Luftwaffe fire. It was chaos. It was desperation.

Only a handful got out. Most stayed behind, fighting until the end, or if fate allowed, slipping into the mountains to fight again as ghosts among the hills.

By 3 July, Sevastopol, once defiant, once roaring, was silent. The Germans held it all.

When German boots marched into Sevastopol on June 30, they ended a siege that had lasted 250 days. That’s not a campaign. That’s a crucible of willpower and war. A test of who could break the other first.

The Russian stand was savage, and it bled both armies. The Germans claimed they bagged 90,000 prisoners, out of a force of 106,000. Among them, 26,000 wounded were left lying on the sand, waiting for a rescue that never came.

The German XI Army, by Soviet reckoning, was "bled white", and they weren’t exaggerating. Manstein won, but it cost him.

It wasn’t just the dead that hurt the Germans, it was the time, the manpower. So many divisions tied down in Sevastopol meant the main push near Kharkov lost steam. The grand offensive toward the Caucasus? Delayed. The calendar slipped, and in war, that’s a death sentence.

By the time the Soviets came swinging back in late ’41 and again in ’42, the XI Army was still licking its wounds. Hitler couldn’t use it. It was shattered, burnt out, and stuck in recovery.

The Soviets turned the loss into legend. Medals were minted. Survivors were honored, thirty-seven of them named Heroes of the Soviet Union. They’d lost the city, but not the story.

Still, the medal couldn’t change the map. The Germans had stripped the Soviets of their Black Sea stronghold and positioned themselves to launch into the Caucasus with naval muscle behind them.

But the prize wasn’t worth the price. Hitler fixated on Crimea, and in 1944, it came back to haunt him. He dumped far too many top-tier units into holding it, units he couldn’t spare.

Strategically, the peninsula mattered. Whoever held it controlled the Black Sea, and with it, striking distance to the oil fields of Romania. Fuel meant survival for the German war engine.

But by May ’44, the war had shifted. American bombers were already hitting Romania from Italy, and Soviet forces were storming past Odessa. Crimea wasn’t the linchpin anymore. It was a liability.

When the Red Army came back, they didn’t crawl, they stormed. What had taken the Germans months, the Soviets reclaimed in weeks.

This time, half the defenders were Romanian. They lasted a month. Then they broke.

The Soviet assault kicked off on 11 April. In just 48 hours, the northern half of Crimea was theirs. No slow siege. Just power.

The Axis had about 174,000 men in place. The Soviets came at them with nearly three times that. The math wrote its own ending.

As the Wehrmacht retreated toward Sevastopol, Romanian forces threw down their arms. The fight was collapsing from within.

Around 50,000 German troops burrowed into 25 miles of trenches, bracing for the storm they knew was coming.

The Red Army didn’t charge. They paused. They brought in the big guns. Sevastopol wasn’t going to fall fast, it was going to fall hard.

Those three weeks were a gift the Germans used to the last second, fortifying, delaying, and pulling out what men they could before the hammer dropped.

What Hitler dreamed would be a glorious last stand morphed into a chaotic, desperate echo of Dunkirk, except here, there was no miracle, and no glory.

The numbers? Murky. Soviet and German records clash. Some fled. Many didn’t. The truth’s buried somewhere under the rubble.

The last fight for Sevastopol didn’t drag on. It didn’t echo the long agony of the siege that came before. When the Red Army returned in 1944, they tore through the city in just four brutal, thunderous days. By May 9th, it was over. Sevastopol had fallen again. But this time, it wasn’t ripped from Soviet hands, it was taken back.

And still, it is the first fall that haunts the soul.

Two hundred and fifty days. That’s how long the defenders held. Men and women, soldiers and schoolteachers, engineers working in caverns, children learning to read between air raids. For two hundred and fifty days, they fought not just for a city, but for the very idea that it could survive the unstoppable. The siege didn’t just break bones, it built myth. And in the hearts of millions, Sevastopol became sacred ground.

It is remembered with tears, with pride, and with silence.

And as the dust settled, as the smoke curled off shattered stone and the guns finally fell quiet, the world bore witness to what a people can endure when the fire inside refuses to go out.

Sevastopol did not surrender.
It was carved into legend.

Thanks for listening. Let's now descend into the killing fields of the common section on our episode on the Battle of Atlanta in the March to the Sea, season one, episode 36. A listener by the name of user 1 9 4 6 7 9 3 4 6 wrote convenient. God completely forgot to address the fact that the North purchased slave picked cotton.

Sold slaves to southern states and lynched black people over military integration. Absolutely a vital point You're raising in one that deserve serious attention by all. You're right to highlight that the North's hands were, uh, not clean. Northern textile mills thrived on slave picked cotton in many northern banks and.

Corporate shipping interests profited directly from the slave economy. Even as slavery was abolished in their own states. Many in the North were complicit in perpetuating the system by reaping its economic rewards. The selling of enslaved people in the deep south from the upper south. Often via northern intermediaries and the racism that persisted long after slavery's formal end, including violent resistance to black military integration.

These are shameful chapters in American history, and these truths must be reckoned with. Honestly. That said, though, it's also important to recognize complexity without flattening the historical landscape. While the north was complicit in many injustices, it was also where the abolitionist movement gained traction, where thousands of black and white citizens risked and gave their lives to destroy slavery.

And where the union ultimately waged war that culminated in emancipation and perfect actors can still do consequential morally significant things. Acknowledging northern hypocrisy doesn't diminish the importance of the uh, union's role. In ending slavery, it deepens our understanding of the war as not a simple moral tale, but a brutally ruthlessly complicated conflict in which justice emerged perhaps not fully for either side, but it emerged not from purity, but from struggle.

Thanks for listening. See you guys tomorrow.