The Fall of a City

For days, the fall of Sevastopol had been near. But the Russians had been stubborn. German artillery blazed point-blank at the concrete, steel and limestone of Maxim Gorki " Fort. Bombs chewed great craters in its upper levels. At 800 yards, then at 500, the mouths of the fort's 13-in guns yawned at the attackers, so close that the pressure from the blasts crushed tanks and men, and the orange and crimson flames seemed to singe the dead. When the Germans at last swarmed over the fort, a Nazi radio reporter's voice crackled with epic exasperation:

"Although the upper stories of Maxim Gorki Fort are in our hands and the battle line has moved some 1,400 yards forward. Soviet soldiers deep under ground in the lower stories continue to resist. We have sent negotiators to explain to them that further resistance is useless, but they won't come out. . . ." So it was at every fort and pillbox, on all the stinking, bloody hills around Sevastopol, where the dead rotted in the sun and there were always more Germans and Rumanians to be killed. So it was at Balaklava, eight miles south of the city, where the Rumanians astounded the world, charging and charging again until they took the town. So it was in the British Cemetery, now a battleground, where lay Tennyson's Six Hundred and thousands of other Britons who died, unrhymed, during the siege of 1854-55.

In the Crimean War the British, French and Turks besieged Sevastopol for 329 days before the city fell. Last week, eight months after the Germans first approached Sevastopol, 23 days after Colonel General Fritz Erich von Manstein began his final assault, Berlin announced: "Sevastopol has fallen, over the bastion, city and harbor German and Rumanian war flags are flying." It was almost true. For two more days the killing went on. Under the wings of the Luftwaffe, from the city's bombed and blazing docks, the Russian Black Sea Fleet still rescued troops, commanders, wounded. In the streets, rear guards fought until the last ship had gone and Moscow announced: "On the order of the Supreme Command of the Red Army, Soviet troops on July 3 evacuated Sevastopol." Then the rear guards and the surviving civilians retired to Khersones Peninsula, where they could kill Germans until the last Russian had fallen.

Cost. Moscow said that Sevastopol had cost the Germans 60,000 dead, 90,000 prisoners and wounded, 300 planes and 250 tanks in the final 25 days, 300,000 casualties in the whole eight months; that the Red Army had lost only 11,385 dead, 21,090 wounded, 8,300 prisoners, 300 guns, 77 planes, 30 tanks. Perhaps Moscow was still prone to exaggerate the Red Army's earned glory. But the Nazi accounts were proof that the Germans and Rumanians had indeed paid dearly.

"A victory for Soviet arms," Moscow called the siege, on the theory that keeping some 300,000 men, 900 planes, 400 tanks and many guns occupied for so long was in itself a strategical triumph. But the Germans, with Sevastopol, now had the whole Crimea, the Red Navy's last important base on the Black Sea and a southern road to the Caucasus.

After their mauling before Sevastopol, Manstein's troops probably had to rest and refit, but the Luftwaffe air fleet could fly immediately to the Kursk-Kharkov fronts. Fritz Erich von Manstein had earned his quick promotion to Field Marshal.

Berlin's dry boasts, Moscow's strained eulogies were empty of words for the defenders of Sevastopol. For them, the dead spoke well enough.

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