Perekop–Chongar operation
페레코프-촌가르 작전
The operation of 7 to 17 November 1920 in which Frunze's Southern Front and Makhno's insurgents broke through the Perekop isthmus, the Sivash and Chongar and destroyed Wrangel's army in Crimea. When the frontal attack on the Turkish Wall failed, the Reds crossed the shallows of the Sivash to the Lithuanian Peninsula, and on the 11th the Yushun and Chongar lines were broken. Wrangel evacuated about 150,000 soldiers and civilians from Crimea by sea, and Soviet historiography treated the operation as the end of the Civil War.
In depth
The White defences comprised the Perekop line built on the 11-kilometre Turkish Wall and its ditch up to 10 metres deep, the Yushun line 20 to 25 kilometres to the south, and lines of trenches at Chongar and on the Arabat Spit. With the Azov flotilla icebound, Frunze moved the main blow to Perekop and gave it to the 6th Army and the 1st and 2nd Cavalry Armies, while the 4th Army and 3rd Cavalry Corps made a secondary attack at Chongar. On the night of 8 November, in a gale at minus 12 degrees, the 15th and 52nd Divisions and cavalry crossed seven kilometres of the Sivash and drove off Fostikov's Kuban brigade, and Karetnik's insurgents crossed after them. Blyukher's 51st Division lost more than half its men in a frontal attack on the Turkish Wall on the 8th, but when the Kornilov Division abandoned the wall early on the 9th under threat of encirclement, it advanced on Yushun.
On 10 and 11 November Barbovich's cavalry corps counterattacked at Yushun and Karpova Balka and pushed the 15th and 52nd Divisions back towards the Lithuanian Peninsula, but it was stopped and driven off by the machine-gun tachankas of the insurgent cavalry and by Mironov's 2nd Cavalry Army. On the 11th the Yushun line was broken, and on the same day the 266th and 267th Regiments crossed the Chongar line at heavy cost. The 2nd Cavalry Army, committed to the breakthrough on the 11th, entered Dzhankoy on the 12th and Simferopol on the 13th. Wrangel had already ordered the evacuation, and from 12 to 16 November 126 ships left Sevastopol, Yevpatoria, Yalta, Feodosia and Kerch with soldiers and civilians. White prisoners left in Crimea were massacred by the Cheka on Béla Kun's orders, with estimates ranging from 13,000 to over 50,000, and on 26 November the Red Army turned on the Makhnovists who had fought beside it.