World War: Two Guesses on the Crimea

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Crimea is no Crete. It is three times as big as Crete. It is a peninsula, not an island. It is a center of trade, the linchpin of a whole sea, not just an olive grower's paradise. It boasts a great naval base, not just a great, bare bay. It has several bristling military airports, not just four improvised plane-patches. Its fortifications have been planned for years, not mere days.

If the Germans attacked Crimea last week believing it was another Crete, they had a second guess coming.

The attackers opened up with nocturnal bombing. At midnight they sent a wave of tanks and motorized infantry down to the narrow neck of Perekop, which joins Crimea with the mainland. Simultaneously they dropped swarms of parachutists behind the Russian lines and sent naval parties to land at many points.

The Russians were ready. They let the attackers blow themselves up on some of the tightest mine fields ever planted. The Russians used land mines, complained a German reporter, "in quantities surpassing those used in any other war or campaign and in a manner that can be envisaged only by brutal minds, long trained to insidious methods of warfare." The Germans, despite their long training in techniques more or less insidious, were shocked into retreat.

Within eight hours they guessed again and came back. This time they attacked on a vaster scale. They landed parachutists at such widely separated points as Eupatoria and Feodosiya (see map), bombed the opposite extremes of Perekop and Yalta, sent landing parties ashore along the Crimea's Black Sea coast and across the shallow, stagnant enclosed sea called the Putrid.

Early this week the battle was still undecided. The Russians were cocky. They said they had sunk many naval landing parties. On the Crimean Peninsular, said a spokesman in faraway Moscow, "there is not a single German soldier in a position to fight." As in the first two days of the attack on Crete, German losses exceeded German gains. But, as in Crete, the Germans kept attacking.

If they prevailed, they would have a short cut to the Caucasus. They would also have more experience in the sort of assault which makes no distinctions between a Crete, a Crimea and a Britain.