[4] On 23 November, it joined the 51st Army,[5] and by early December the division command post was located at Taman on the coast of the Kerch Strait.

[6] In December 1941 and January 1942, the division and the rest of the 51st Army fought in the Kerch–Feodosiya landing operation, which began the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula, an attempt to relieve the trapped Soviet garrison at Sevastopol.

[8] As a result of mass desertions of the Caucasian troops during the previous fighting,[3] the Armenian officer Colonel Simon Zakian replaced Vinogradov as commander of the division on 24 February.

[9] On 20 March, the Germans counterattacked with the 22nd Panzer Division, which had recently arrived in Crimea, and took the Soviet defenses by surprise in the early morning fog.

They attempted to eliminate the penetration that the 390th and 398th Rifle Divisions had made into their lines and break through the hastily prepared forward defenses of the 51st Army.

Parts of the 390th began to retreat towards Height 28.2, but the situation was restored by the personal intervention of the 143rd Rifle Brigade's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Georgy Kurashvili, who rallied the troops to defend Korpech.

German tanks, supported by a company of infantry, broke through the 390th's line and attacked the divisional command post, forcing Zakian and his chief of staff to lead rear units in a counterattack.

[12] In late April the Chairman of the Presidium of the Armenian SSR Supreme Soviet, Matsak Papian, presented the division with a battle flag.

Around this time, at the insistence of the Crimean Front commissar Lev Mekhlis, all troops were concentrated into one single defensive line with few reserves.

[13] On 8 May, after days of heavy aerial bombardment, the final German offensive in the Kerch Peninsula, Operation Bustard Hunt, began.

The 390th, in reserve, was sent into battle at Arma-Eli, and its 789th Regiment delayed the German advance, gaining time for the rest of the division to set up a defensive line in preparation for a counterattack.

At this point, the 789th Regiment, now commanded by its commissar, S. Sargsyan, launched a counterattack, throwing the German troops back on the slopes of Mount Mithridat.

[18] The division began re-forming from a cadre of rifle brigades on 22 November 1944 as part of the Far Eastern Front,[1][19] commanded by Colonel Ivan Teplyakov.

[16] The division advanced as part of the 5th Separate Rifle Corps (an independent unit reporting directly to the front command) on the left of the 15th Army, with the objective of taking the towns of Raohe, Baoqing, and Boli in eastern Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria in northeast China.