The plan was audacious and, as it turned out, beyond what the men could achieve. Beginning on 26 December 1941, two Soviet armies were to storm ashore in the German rear, retake the peninsula, and break through to Sevastopol. The first major amphibious operation in Soviet history, it was scattered across many small landings at once, on beaches north and south of Kerch and at the port of Feodosia. Winter storms, a lack of radios, and the improvised boats made a hard task nearly impossible. Yet the sheer boldness bought a real prize: the landings prevented Sevastopol from falling and seized the initiative for a moment. That moment did not last. As the Soviets dug in along the peninsula, the German 11th Army under Erich von Manstein gathered itself for a response that would prove merciless.

From January through April 1942, the Soviet Crimean Front, commanded by Dmitry Kozlov, hurled itself again and again at the German lines across the Parpach Narrows, the pinched waist of the peninsula. Each offensive failed, and each failed at terrible cost. The terrain gave no cover. Warm spells turned the ground to a sea of mud that swallowed tanks and forced men to carry artillery shells by hand. German gunners, dug into fortified strongpoints, cut down attacking infantry in the open. Superior German artillery firepower, the sources agree, was largely responsible for the debacle. Across those months the Red Army lost roughly 352,000 men in the attacks, while Axis casualties numbered around 24,120, an unbalanced ledger of suffering that speaks to how completely the offensives broke against the German defense.

The end came fast and violent. On 8 May 1942 the Germans launched Operation Trappenjagd, a name that means bustard hunt, and it lived up to its grim implication. Manstein struck the southern sector with concentrated infantry, armor, and artillery, and above it all flew Wolfram von Richthofen's VIII. Fliegerkorps, some 800 aircraft flying an average of 1,500 sorties a day. The Soviet second line broke in barely 210 minutes. A panzer division swung north, trapped the Soviet 51st Army against the Sea of Azov, and by 11 May its divisions were surrendering. Kerch itself fell on 15 May, much of it burned by relentless bombing. In eleven days, three Soviet armies were destroyed or shattered. One historian wrote that at Kerch the Soviet command threw away twenty-one divisions in a nightmare of confusion and mismanagement.

The battle's cruelty did not end with the fighting. When Soviet defenders and civilians refused to surrender and took refuge in the limestone catacombs beneath the region, the Germans deployed poison gas against them, a horror endured by soldiers and sheltering families alike. And the peninsula had already witnessed atrocity: during the offensive, the Soviet photojournalist Dmitri Baltermants documented the aftermath of a mass execution near Kerch, where some seven thousand people, among them Jewish victims of the Holocaust, had been shot and left in anti-tank trenches. These were not statistics but neighbors, parents, and children, murdered on ground that would soon be fought over by armies. To stand on this quiet, flat land today is to stand above a great deal of grief, and to owe it a moment's remembrance.