The campaign opened on 26 September 1941, part of the vast German invasion of the Soviet Union known as Operation Barbarossa. Germany's 11th Army, joined by the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies, pushed onto the peninsula against the Soviet 51st Army and elements of the Black Sea Fleet. The Axis offensive routed the defenders and swept across Crimea - but two cities would not fall easily. Kerch, in the east, changed hands more than once. And Sevastopol, the great naval fortress on the southwest coast, became the obsession of the whole campaign. For its long resistance the Soviet government would later crown it a Hero City, one of the highest honors the state could bestow on a place and the people who defended it.

Sevastopol was first assaulted on 30 October 1941 and threw the Germans back with a counterattack. Reinforced by troops evacuated from besieged Odessa, the defenders held through renewed attacks in November and December, each one broken, sometimes at the last possible moment. Frustrated, the Germans hauled in extraordinary firepower - among the artillery brought to bear was Schwerer Gustav, an enormous railway gun, one of the largest ever built, firing shells that could shatter fortifications from miles away. Against such weapons the defenders endured through the winter and into summer. Only at the end of June did German forces finally penetrate the inner defensive lines, and on 4 July the city surrendered - after eight and a half months in which ordinary soldiers and sailors had absorbed everything a modern army could throw at them.

The fighting was not confined to land. In the dark early hours of 6 November 1941, the Romanian submarine Delfinul, under Constantin Costachescu, torpedoed and sank the Soviet cargo ship Uralets a few miles south of Yalta. What followed was a nerve-shredding escape: Soviet forces hunted the submarine relentlessly, and the crew slipped along the Turkish coast, enduring as many as eighty depth charges - each one a jolt through the hull, each one a chance the boat would not survive - before finally reaching the Romanian port of Constanta the next day. It was a small episode in a huge war, but it captures the whole theater in miniature: the Black Sea itself contested inch by inch, survival often a matter of nerve and luck as much as strength.

Sevastopol's fall opened three years of German occupation across Crimea - a hard time for the peninsula and its peoples. The reckoning came in 1944. From 8 April to 12 May, the 4th Ukrainian Front drove the Axis out in a swift, powerful offensive built from a series of linked operations that had begun the previous autumn at Kerch and Eltigen and ended at Sevastopol's own walls. In a matter of weeks, the Soviets undid what had taken the Germans eight months and a monstrous siege to achieve. The peninsula that had been so bitterly defended, then lost, then occupied, was reclaimed. Behind the shifting front lines and operation names lies the older truth of all such places: the ground was won and lost in the lives of the people who fought over it.