Excerpt from The Story of the Campaign of Sebastopol But when it is considered that men in authority do not always look with a very friendly eye on the mere possession of opinions on their conduct of public affairs, it may be supposed that to express them critically might, especially when they implied cen sure, be anything but an assistance to the critic in his military career. Moreover, there are many cases in which it is the bounden duty of an officer to refrain from publishing facts or opinions which might be prejudicial to the prestige or success of our arms to a great extent, therefore, the reader is left to make his own comments on facts which I have been careful to verify and combine in a sequence which should exhibit only the significant features of the Campaign. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In late July 1941, Hitler ordered Army Group South to seize the Crimea as part of its operations to secure the Ukraine and the Donets Basin, in order to protect the vital Romanian oil refineries at Ploesti from Soviet air attack. After weeks of heavy fighting, the Germans breached the Soviet defenses and overran most of the Crimea. By November 1941 the only remaining Soviet foothold in the area was the heavily fortified naval base at Sevastopol. Operation Sturgeon Haul, the final assault on Sevastopol, was one of the very few joint service German operations of World War II, with two German corps and a Romanian corps supported by a huge artillery siege train, the Luftwaffe's crack VIII Flieger Korps and a flotilla of S-Boats provided by the Kriegsmarine. This volume closely examines the impact of logistics, weather and joint operational planning upon the last major German victory in World War II (1939-1945).