From the operational report of 10/15/42 on the situation in the band of Army Group "B", DBD General Staff ground forces Germany: “... The 51st Army Corps (Stalingrad) at 7:30 on 10/14/42 went on the offensive and, striking in cooperation with the 14th Panzer Division, captured a group of houses on the southwestern outskirts of the tractor factory. At the same time the same tank division in cooperation with the 305th division, it broke through the enemy defenses north of the mentioned group of houses and stormed another group of houses northeast of the tractor factory. The 389th division during the offensive also managed to move further eastward ... "
The dry lines of the German document paint an apocalyptic picture: the measure of the success of the advancing corps and divisions is the capture of a group of houses. On October 14, 1942, the Germans made another attempt to take the city on the Volga. Another circle of Stalingrad hell began.
- 5 hours 30 minutes. The enemy again, like yesterday, began intensive artillery preparation on the front from the Mokraya Mechetka River to the village of Krasny Oktyabr.
- 8.00. The enemy went on the offensive with tanks and infantry. The battle is on all fronts.
- 9 hours 30 minutes. The enemy attack on the TK was repulsed. Ten fascist tanks are burning at the factory stadium.
- 10.00. The 109th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 37th Division was crushed by tanks and infantry.
- 11 hours 30 minutes. Left flank of the 112th rifle division crushed, about 50 tanks iron its battle formations.
- 11 hours 50 minutes. The enemy captured the TZ stadium.
- 12.00. The commander of the 117th was killed rifle regiment Guard Major Andreev.
- 12 hours 20 minutes. A radiogram from the hexagonal quarter, from a unit of the 416th regiment: "Surrounded, there are cartridges and water, we will die, but we will not surrender."
- 12 hours 30 minutes. The command post of General Zholudev is bombed by dive bombers. Zholudev was left without communication, in a littered dugout, we take over communication with the units.
- 13 hours 10 minutes. Two dugouts collapsed on the Army Headquarters CL.
- 13 hours 20 minutes. Air was given to General Zholudev's dugout (through a tube).
- 14 hours 40 minutes. Telephone communication with the units was interrupted, switched to radio, duplicated by communications officers. Our aircraft cannot take off from airfields: enemy fighters are blocking our airfields.
- 15 hours 25 minutes. The guards of the army headquarters entered the battle.
In almost every echelon with troops moving to the front, hares were regularly caught - pre-conscripts of pioneer and Komsomol age, striving for war. Someone sincerely believed that without him the Red Army would not be able to cope with the Nazis, someone was no less sincerely afraid that he would not have time to grow up before being drafted to the front, and some, not childishly, wanted to personally avenge their dead relatives and friends.
So at the Povadino station in the cars in which the artillery of the 112th Infantry Division was traveling to Stalingrad, 14-year-old Ivan Gerasimov from Smolensk was found. His father Fyodor Gerasimovich died at the front, the house burned down, and he was sure that his mother and three sisters had died in it.
One of the artillery commanders, Lieutenant Alexei Ochkin, recalled:
“... looking at the next platform, he was dumbfounded by surprise: the tarpaulin stirred, its edge folded back, and a trickle splashed from there. I lifted the tarpaulin and saw under it a boy of about thirteen in a long torn overcoat and boots. Get up at my command.” He turned away. The hair on his head was bristling like a hedgehog's. With great effort, I managed to pull him off the platform, but the train started moving, and we fell to the ground. The fighters dragged the two of us into the car on the move. Almost by force they tried to feed the boy with porridge. His eyes were piercing. “Does your father, I suppose, is strict?” asked the oldest soldier. - “There was a dad, but swam away! Take me to the front!" I explained that it was impossible to do this, especially now: in Stalingrad, it was very hot. After the battery commander Captain Bogdanovich found out that there was a teenager among the soldiers, I was ordered to hand him over to the commandant at the next station. I followed the order. But the boy escaped from there and again climbed onto the roof, ran across the roofs of the entire echelon and climbed into the tender, buried himself in the coal. Again they brought the boy to the staff car to the commissioner Filimonov. The commissar reported to the division commander, Colonel I.P. Sologub, and the latter - V.I. Chuikov - commander of the 62nd Army.
After several attempts to send the boy back, they decided to assign him to the kitchen. So Ivan was enrolled as an assistant cook and on the boiler allowance. The units were not yet included in the lists, uniforms, insignia were not supposed to. But they called him a fighter. Washed by a whole platoon. They outfitted the world with a thread, cut their hair, and he began to run away from the kitchen to us. ”
It was then that Vanya Gerasimov became Fedorov - sedately answering the questions "what is his name" according to the old village custom: "I am Ivan, Fedorov Ivan."
The field kitchens in Stalingrad were little safer than the front lines. The Germans generously showered our positions with bombs, mines and bullets. On August 8, in front of Ivan, the divisional commander Colonel Sologub was mortally wounded. Ivan fully mastered the "forty-five", proved to be a brave and determined fighter, when on September 23 Ochkin's gunners at Vishnevaya Balka were surrounded by enemy tanks and infantry.
In October, once again, an order came - in pursuance of Stalin's order, all teenagers should be sent to the rear for determination in vocational and Suvorov schools. However, on October 13, the admission of the fighter Fedorov to the Komsomol was scheduled. They decided that he would go beyond the Volga later, already a member of the Komsomol.
There were no questions to the candidate at the Komsomol meeting, there were wishes: to study no worse than to fight. The assistant chief of the division for Komsomol work signed a gray little book, handed it to the new Komsomol member and left for headquarters.
And at 5:30 am on October 14, the Germans began artillery preparation, and the issue of Ivan's evacuation to the east was postponed. At 8:00 the tanks went. Dozens of tanks for Ochkin's three "forty-fives" and nine anti-tank rifles.
The first attack was repulsed, then an air raid, then the Germans moved forward again. There were fewer and fewer defenders left. The guns were cut off from each other. The calculation of the cannon, which had Ivan as a carrier, was completely out of order. Vanya single-handedly fired the last two shells at the tanks, picked up someone's machine gun and opened fire on the advancing Germans from a ditch. In front of Ochkin and the commissar of the division Filimonov, his elbow of his left hand was crushed. And then grenades flew towards the Germans.
A fragment of another shell torn off Ivan's wrist right hand. The survivors thought he was dead. However, when the German tanks went around the position of the artillerymen along a narrow passage along the factory wall, Ivan Gerasimov got up, got out of the ditch, pressing an anti-tank grenade to his chest with the stump of his right hand, pulled out the pin with his teeth and lay down under the caterpillar of the lead tank.
The German attack stopped. The defense of Stalingrad continued.
And Lieutenant Ochkin survived and reached Pobeda. And he wrote the book “Ivan - I, the Fedorovs - we” about his fighting younger brother, the chapters from which, called “The Fourteen-Year-Old Fighter”, were first published by “Seeker” in 1966, and the first edition was published in 1973. After publications, it turned out that mother and Ivan's sisters survived, having managed to get out of the burning hut, but did not know anything about the fate of their son and brother, considering him missing. By the way, Ivan's two older brothers also died at the front. But one of the sisters - Zinaida Fedorovna - became famous throughout the Soviet Union as a milkmaid, Hero of Socialist Labor, was elected a deputy of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR.
The name of Ivan Fedorov is engraved on the 22nd banner in the Hall military glory memorial on Mamaev Kurgan. In the homeland of the hero, in the regional center of Novodugino, Smolensk region, there is a street named after him. A memorial plaque was installed at Volgograd School No. 3, located very close to the place of the hero’s death.
But the feat of Ivan Fedorovich Gerasimov-Fedorov was not marked with government awards, it just so happened for various reasons.
But the main reward that no one can take away from him - no one except us, the living citizens of our country, is memory. About him and about all those who went to the Victory.
Vanya Fedorov
| Milkmaid mother. The father is a blacksmith. Mother is far away. Father killed. And their son is Fedorov Ivan I fought at the age of fifteen. Now on the Don, now - now - On the Volga, the battle with the enemy is For your native Smolensk region With his soldier's fate. To the tractor factory in the morning Nemchura is impudently climbing. From the "Junkers" - darkness to the floor of the sky, And the houses collapse in flames. Yes furiously - for the umpteenth time - The clang of tank ruins shook, Like blood through a dirty gray bandage The dawn oozes, breaking through the smoke. One attack after another It rolls like a surf. But, like roots, deep into the earth Ochkin's soldiers grew up. And all the hell out | They hit the tanks almost point-blank. Fourteen of them already On that frontier is on fire. But the cannon calculation is melting, Only Fedorov leads the fire. Suddenly wounded in the left elbow, he And, holding back a groan, Fascists send for peace Grenades in the right hand. And a new explosion cuts her And the tank rushes to the flank of the guys. And Vanya gets up wounded, With a grenade full height goes Towards tank armor, As if on a pitted virgin soil, And, falling shoulder forward The pin is tearing with a jerk of his teeth. And the steel tank could not pass, Where he grew up on his way Smolensk fire guy In the battle for the Soviet edge. |
This poem is dedicated to our countryman Vanya Fedorov, who died on October 14, 1942 in the midst of the battles for Stalingrad. The poem was written by the Smolensk poet R. Velikovsky.
Vanya was born in the village of Burtsevo, Novoduginsky District, in 1927. His father, Fedor Gerasimovich Gerasimov, is a peasant. In 1930 he joined the collective farm. For several years, Vanya's father worked as the chairman of the collective farm. Lenin. In 1938 he went to Leningrad on recruitment, where he worked at a military factory until 1941. Fyodor Gerasimovich was called to the front, where he died in 1942. Vanya's mother, Natalya Nikitichna, gave birth to six children. Sons - Ivan, Dmitry, Nikolai - died at the front. Vanya studied at Burtsevskaya primary school from 1935 to 1939. His first teacher was Makarii Grigoryevich Belousov, who had a great influence on the boy. He taught Vanya to respect work, to love the Smolensk region, his fatherland. According to the stories of fellow villagers, Vanya studied at a secondary school, did not differ in particular perseverance, but he loved work, respected his relatives and fellow villagers. Before the war, my father left for Leningrad and entered the Kirov factory. He took Vanya with him to determine vocational school. Vanya began to study as a turner. Fedor Gerasimovich planned to transfer the whole family to Leningrad, but this plan was not destined to come true: the war broke out. When fascist bombers flew into the village of Burtsevo and almost burned it to the ground, Natalya Nikitichna managed to get Vanya's three younger sisters out of the hot hut: Zina, Lida, Masha, but all the documents burned down. There are no official documents about Van left. Now bit by bit they collect memories of Vanya. Father and his two eldest sons, Nikolai and Dmitry, went to the front. Vanya, together with the school, went to the evacuation, but he escaped from the train. And in July 1942, Vanya Gerasimov was found in a military train near the Povorino station, which is not far from the bend of the Don. In front of Lieutenant Ochkin was a boy in a long overcoat and large soldier's boots.
Come on, get outta here, boy! - ordered the lieutenant, who himself was only a couple of years older than this echelon "hare".
You are the boy! the guy snapped.
So for the first time two countrymen, a Smolyan, met for the first time - Alexei Ochkin and Ivan Gerasimov. And when the commander of the anti-tank division, Captain Bogdanovich, asked his name, Vanya answered:
I am Ivan, we are Fedorovs.
He answered according to the village habit, calling the name of his father. And he went down in history Battle of Stalingrad under the name Fedorov. The day before the fight, where he died, Vanya wrote a statement asking him to join the Komsomol “I ask you to accept me into the Lenin Komsomol. While alive, I will not let the fascist bastards get drunk from the Volga. I swear to fight until my last breath." He kept his oath. Only one day he happened to be in the Komsomol, but this day is equal to a lifetime. Alexey Yakovlevich Ochkin, an eyewitness to Vanya's death, tells of that day: “It happened on October 14, 1942 in Stalingrad. Hundreds of fascist planes bombed the tractor factory, where soldiers of the 37th Guards and 112th Siberian divisions stood to death. After the bombing, an endless artillery bombardment began: shells and mines dug up, tormented every piece of land. Iron melted and burned. As soon as the guns fell silent, the fascist tanks went ahead, followed by the infantry. Among the defenders of the tractor was a fifteen-year-old boy Vanya Fedorov. When the gunner and gun commander were wounded, he continued to shoot at enemy tanks until the shells ran out. And then Vanya hit the enemy infantry point-blank from a machine gun. Wounded in the elbow, he remained in the ranks. Alexey Ochkin wrote the book “Severe People” and in it described Vanya’s feat as follows: “A shell exploded, the young soldier’s right hand was torn off ... He lay motionless, then moved, tore his head off the ground. Several tanks, bypassing the square on the left, rushed along a narrow passage along the ruins of the factory wall. How to stop?! With a groan, he pressed his shattered hands to his chest. And there was despair ... Anti-tank grenades lay in front of him, but how to throw them if there are no hands? And such anger seized him ... “As long as I am alive, I will fight!” Vanya clenched the handle of an anti-tank grenade between his teeth. He squeezed so that his teeth crunched. And he can't lift. The grenade is heavy, the mouth is torn. Overcoming the hellish pain, he helped to hold her with the stumps of his hands, got out of the trench ... Both the lieutenant, and the commissar, and all the soldiers who still survived, saw how a boy without hands, with a grenade in his teeth and, leaning forward, rose above the flaming warped earth with a sharp shoulder, he went towards the roaring tanks ... He pulled the pin with his teeth and fell under the rumbling caterpillars. There was an explosion! The Nazi tank froze, and behind it in a narrow passage - the entire armored column. So the boy stepped into immortality. His name is now carved on a red marble banner in the Hall of Military Glory of the monument-ensemble to the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad on Mamaev Kurgan. All day he was in the Komsomol. And he was at that time incomplete 15 years.
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On February 3, 1973, a memorable meeting took place in Moscow between the mother of our countryman hero and his sisters and fellow soldiers Vanya, the heroes who defended Stalingrad. In a large, colorfully decorated hall, young soldiers of the Moscow garrison, boys and girls of the city of Moscow, gathered. Prominent military leaders, heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad, Vanya's mother and sisters took pride of place in the solemn presidium. Schoolchildren and soldiers of Volgograd, who came to Moscow for a meeting, presented Vanya's mother, Natalya Nikitichna, fresh flowers and a box with earth from Mamaev Kurgan in memory of the heroic defenders of Stalingrad. The young soldiers swore to the mother of the hero to selflessly serve the Motherland, guarding her peace, to sacredly honor the memory of Vanya Fedorov.
A museum was created in the Novoduginsky secondary school in 1973. Under the guidance of teacher Olga Petrovna Skvortsova, a variety of material was collected about the life and exploits of Vanya Fedorov. Now this material has been transferred to the regional museum of local history named after. V.V. Dokuchaev. In the museum of the Novodugino village there is a copy of the appeal of the party, Komsomol and pioneer organizations, teams of two schools: Novodugino high school Smolensk region and Kaliningrad secondary school No. 12 of the Moscow region to the City Committee of the CPSU and the city Council of People's Deputies of the State Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League of the city of Volgograd dated January 4, 1978.
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Here is the text of the appeal: “On February 2, 1978, the Soviet people will solemnly celebrate 35 years since the victory in the Battle of Stalingrad. On October 14, 1942, in the midst of the battles for Stalingrad, a young pupil of the 62nd Army under the command of Marshal died heroically Soviet Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, V.I. Chuikova, Vanya Fedorov, whose birthplace is the village of Burtsevo, Novoduginsky district, Smolensk region. Having gathered in the homeland of Vanya Fedorov, we appeal to you with a sincere, convincing request: to install a memorial plaque with the perpetuation of the military feat of Vanya Fedorov in Stalingrad on the building of secondary school No. 3 in the city of Volgograd on the 35th anniversary of the historical Battle of Stalingrad and invite Vanya Fedorov's relatives to this solemn act and representatives of the Novoduginsky secondary school of the Smolensk region and the Kaliningrad secondary school of the Moscow region. The appeal was adopted at a solemn joint meeting of school delegations.”
In June 1978 in Volgograd, on Dzerzhinsky Square, where he made his immortal feat Vanya Fedorov, a memorial plaque was installed at school No. 3 in memory of his feat, and in the school itself there is a desk with a memorial plaque - the most worthy students win the right to this desk. Zinaida Fedorovna, Vanya's sister, came to the opening of the memorial plaque in Volgograd. And Vanya's mother could not come to Volgograd: she became very old, often sick. Natalya Nikitichna worked all her life as a milkmaid. Together with fellow villagers, she saved a collective farm herd of cows of the famous Sychevskaya breed from the Nazi invaders. Daughters, growing up, came to work for their mother on the farm. For selfless work, all three sisters of Vanya Fedorov were awarded high awards of the Motherland, and the youngest of them, Zinaida Fedorovna, became the Hero of Socialist Labor, was repeatedly elected to the supreme bodies of the republic, to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. Natalya Nikitichna died in 1981. They say that the Fedorov dynasty originates from Vasilisa Kozhina, the same old partisan from Sychevka, who, back in the Patriotic War of 1812, armed the peasants with pitchforks and axes and took Napoleon's soldiers on the Old Smolensk road into full.
In the Fedorov dynasty, as in the dewdrops of the sun, all of Russia is reflected. All the most beautiful of our people - the Russians - were absorbed by the Fedorovs.
Hall of Fame name
Little hero, one of the defenders of Stalingrad who stopped the enemy on October 14, 1942.
In almost every echelon with troops moving to the front, hares were regularly caught - pre-conscripts of pioneer and Komsomol age, striving for war. Someone sincerely believed that without him the Red Army would not be able to cope with the Nazis, someone was no less sincerely afraid that he would not have time to grow up before being drafted to the front, and some, not childishly, wanted to personally avenge their dead relatives and friends.
So at the Povadino station in the cars in which the artillery of the 112th Infantry Division was traveling to Stalingrad, 14-year-old Ivan Gerasimov from Smolensk was found. His father Fyodor Gerasimovich died at the front, the house burned down, and he was sure that his mother and three sisters had died in it.
One of the artillery commanders, Lieutenant Alexei Ochkin, recalled:
... looking at the next platform, he was dumbfounded by surprise: the tarpaulin stirred, its edge folded back, and a trickle splashed from there. I lifted the tarpaulin and saw under it a boy of about thirteen in a long torn overcoat and boots. At my command to stand up, he turned away. The hair on his head was bristling like a hedgehog's. With great effort, I managed to pull him off the platform, but the train started moving, and we fell to the ground. The fighters dragged the two of us into the car on the move. Almost by force they tried to feed the boy with porridge. His eyes were piercing. “Does your father, I suppose, is strict?” asked the oldest soldier. - “There was a dad, but swam away! Take me to the front!" I explained that it was impossible to do this, especially now: in Stalingrad, it was very hot. After the battery commander Captain Bogdanovich found out that there was a teenager among the soldiers, I was ordered to hand him over to the commandant at the next station. I followed the order. But the boy escaped from there and again climbed onto the roof, ran across the roofs of the entire echelon and climbed into the tender, buried himself in the coal. Again they brought the boy to the staff car to the commissioner Filimonov. The commissar reported to the division commander, Colonel I.P. Sologub, and the latter to V.I. Chuikov, commander of the 62nd Army.
After several attempts to send the boy back, they decided to assign him to the kitchen. So Ivan was enrolled as an assistant cook and on the boiler allowance. The units were not yet included in the lists, uniforms, insignia were not supposed to. But they called him a fighter. Washed by a whole platoon. They outfitted the world with a thread, cut their hair, and he began to run away from the kitchen to us. ”
It was then that Vanya Gerasimov became Fedorov - sedately answering the questions "what is his name" according to the old village custom: "I am Ivan, Fedorov Ivan."
The field kitchens in Stalingrad were little safer than the front lines. The Germans generously showered our positions with bombs, mines and bullets. On August 8, in front of Ivan, the divisional commander Colonel Sologub was mortally wounded. Ivan fully mastered the "forty-five", proved to be a brave and determined fighter, when on September 23 Ochkin's gunners at Vishnevaya Balka were surrounded by enemy tanks and infantry.
In October, once again, an order came - in pursuance of Stalin's order, all teenagers should be sent to the rear for determination in vocational and Suvorov schools. However, on October 13, the admission of the fighter Fedorov to the Komsomol was scheduled. They decided that he would go beyond the Volga later, already a member of the Komsomol.
There were no questions to the candidate at the Komsomol meeting, there were wishes: to study no worse than to fight. The assistant chief of the division for Komsomol work signed a gray little book, handed it to the new Komsomol member and left for headquarters.
And at 5:30 am on October 14, the Germans began artillery preparation, and the issue of Ivan's evacuation to the east was postponed. At 8:00 the tanks went. Dozens of tanks for Ochkin's three "forty-fives" and nine anti-tank rifles.
The first attack was repulsed, then an air raid, then the Germans moved forward again. There were fewer and fewer defenders left. The guns were cut off from each other. The calculation of the cannon, which had Ivan as a carrier, was completely out of order. Vanya single-handedly fired the last two shells at the tanks, picked up someone's machine gun and opened fire on the advancing Germans from a ditch. In front of Ochkin and the commissar of the division Filimonov, his elbow of his left hand was crushed. And then grenades flew towards the Germans.
A fragment of another shell torn off Ivan's right hand. The survivors thought he was dead. However, when the German tanks went around the position of the artillerymen along a narrow passage along the factory wall, Ivan Gerasimov got up, got out of the ditch, pressing an anti-tank grenade to his chest with the stump of his right hand, pulled out the pin with his teeth and lay down under the caterpillar of the lead tank.
The German attack stopped. The defense of Stalingrad continued.
The name of Ivan Fedorov is engraved on the 22nd banner in the Hall of Military Glory of the memorial on Mamaev Kurgan. In the homeland of the hero, in the regional center of Novodugino, Smolensk region, there is a street named after him. A memorial plaque was installed at Volgograd School No. 3, located very close to the place of the hero’s death.
But the feat of Ivan Fedorovich Gerasimov-Fedorov was not marked with government awards, it just so happened for various reasons.
Know the Soviet people that you are the descendants of fearless warriors!
Know, Soviet people, that the blood of great heroes flows in you,
Those who gave their lives for their Motherland, without thinking about the benefits!
Know and honor the Soviet people the exploits of grandfathers and fathers!
In almost every echelon with troops moving to the front, hares were regularly caught - pre-conscripts of pioneer and Komsomol age, striving for war. Someone sincerely believed that without him the Red Army would not be able to cope with the Nazis, someone was no less sincerely afraid that he would not have time to grow up before being drafted to the front, and some, not childishly, wanted to personally avenge their dead relatives and friends.
So at the Povadino station in the cars in which the artillery of the 112th Infantry Division was traveling to Stalingrad, 14-year-old Ivan Gerasimov from Smolensk was found. His father Fyodor Gerasimovich died at the front, the house burned down, and he was sure that his mother and three sisters had died in it.
One of the artillery commanders, Lieutenant Alexei Ochkin, recalled:
... looking at the next platform, he was dumbfounded by surprise: the tarpaulin stirred, its edge folded back, and a trickle splashed from there. I lifted the tarpaulin and saw under it a boy of about thirteen in a long torn overcoat and boots. At my command to stand up, he turned away. The hair on his head was bristling like a hedgehog's. With great effort, I managed to pull him off the platform, but the train started moving, and we fell to the ground. The fighters dragged the two of us into the car on the go. Almost by force they tried to feed the boy with porridge. His eyes were piercing.
“Does your father, I suppose, is strict?” asked the oldest soldier. - “There was a dad, but swam away! Take me to the front!"
I explained that it was impossible to do this, especially now: in Stalingrad, it was very hot. After the battery commander Captain Bogdanovich found out that there was a teenager among the soldiers, I was ordered to hand him over to the commandant at the next station.
I followed the order. But the boy escaped from there and again climbed onto the roof, ran across the roofs of the entire echelon and climbed into the tender, buried himself in the coal. Again they brought the boy to the staff car to the commissioner Filimonov. The commissar reported to the division commander, Colonel I.P. Sologub, and the latter - V.I. Chuikov - commander of the 62nd Army.
After several attempts to send the boy back, they decided to assign him to the kitchen. So Ivan was enrolled as an assistant cook and on the boiler allowance. The units were not yet included in the lists, uniforms, insignia were not supposed to. But they called him a fighter. Washed by a whole platoon. They outfitted the world with a thread, cut their hair, and he began to run away from the kitchen to us. ”
It was then that Vanya Gerasimov became Fedorov - sedately answering the questions “what is his name” according to the old village custom:
Ivan I, Fedorov Ivan.
The field kitchens in Stalingrad were little safer than the front lines. The Germans generously showered our positions with bombs, mines and bullets. On August 8, in front of Ivan, the divisional commander Colonel Sologub was mortally wounded. Ivan fully mastered the "forty-five", proved to be a brave and determined fighter, when on September 23 Ochkin's gunners at Vishnevaya Balka were surrounded by enemy tanks and infantry.
In October, once again, an order came - in pursuance of Stalin's order, all teenagers should be sent to the rear for determination in vocational and Suvorov schools. However, on October 13, the admission of the fighter Fedorov to the Komsomol was scheduled. They decided that he would go beyond the Volga later, already a member of the Komsomol.
There were no questions to the candidate at the Komsomol meeting, there were wishes: to study no worse than to fight. The assistant chief of the division for Komsomol work signed a gray little book, handed it to the new Komsomol member and left for headquarters.
And at 5:30 am on October 14, the Germans began artillery preparation, and the issue of Ivan's evacuation to the east was postponed. At 8:00 the tanks went. Dozens of tanks for Ochkin's three "forty-fives" and nine anti-tank rifles.
The first attack was repulsed, then an air raid, then the Germans moved forward again. There were fewer and fewer defenders left. The guns were cut off from each other. The calculation of the cannon, which had Ivan as a carrier, was completely out of order. Vanya single-handedly fired the last two shells at the tanks, picked up someone's machine gun and opened fire on the advancing Germans from a ditch. In front of Ochkin and the commissar of the division Filimonov, his elbow of his left hand was crushed. And then grenades flew towards the Germans.
A fragment of another shell torn off Ivan's right hand. The survivors thought he was dead. However, when the German tanks went around the position of the artillerymen along a narrow passage along the factory wall, Ivan Gerasimov got up, got out of the ditch, pressing an anti-tank grenade to his chest with the stump of his right hand, pulled out the pin with his teeth and lay down under the caterpillar of the lead tank.
The German attack stopped. The defense of Stalingrad continued.
A lieutenant Alexey Yakovlevich Ochkin(1922 - 2003) survived and reached the Victory (by the way, he will definitely become the hero of one of the following notes). And he wrote a book about his fighting younger brother "Ivan - I, Fedorovs - we", the first edition of which appeared in 1973.
After publications, it turned out that Ivan's mother and sisters survived, having managed to get out of the burning hut, but did not know anything about the fate of their son and brother, considering him missing. By the way, Ivan's two older brothers also died at the front. But one of the sisters - Zinaida Fedorovna - became famous throughout the Soviet Union as a milkmaid, Hero of Socialist Labor, was elected a deputy of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR.
The name of Ivan Fedorov is engraved on the 22nd banner in the Hall of Military Glory of the memorial on Mamaev Kurgan. In the homeland of the hero, in the regional center of Novodugino, Smolensk region, there is a street named after him. A memorial plaque was installed at Volgograd School No. 3, located very close to the place of the hero’s death.
But the government awards feat Ivan Fedorovich Gerasimov-Fedorov was not marked, it so happened for various reasons.
But the main reward that no one can take away from him - no one except us, living citizens of our country, - memory. About him and about all those who went to Victory.
I was born in fascist concentration camp"Dimitravas" and I believe that children, especially juvenile prisoners, are the most tragic page in the history of the Great Patriotic War. If it were possible, I would ask the President of Russia V.V. Putin is the question I usually ask zealous pundits: how many teenage children (under the age of 18) received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union? Do not answer Vladimir Vladimirovich, even with the help of advisers, assistants. At best, four names will be named. Yes, I myself at one time believed the indicated figure, but when I came to grips with this problem, I found 22 Heroes, and then 23 more (I didn’t have time to process the information yet). And these figures are not final. Children rushed to the front and, in order to overcome the natural desire of military commissars to save children, increased their age. How many such teenagers - no one knows, and it is unlikely that we will know when. Much has been irretrievably lost.
Agree, dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, that a tenfold error between the official data that appear in the media and the real ones cannot be accidental. It turns out that at the beginning of the war a secret order was given in order not to give Goebbels propaganda a reason to claim that children were being drafted into the Red Army. For this reason, only children-heroes were assigned high ranks, or when their feat received a wide public outcry, like the feat of the "Young Guard". Let me give you a few stories to prove it.
History first. An ordinary rural boy Vanya Fedorov lived in the Smolensk region, his father worked in a forge. In the first months of the war, my father was killed, and a funeral came to the village. For several days, hiding from his mother, Vanya bitterly mourned the loss of his beloved father. The boy's heart was filled with hatred for the Nazis. Soon new misfortunes befell Vanya: his mother was killed during the bombing, his native village was burned down. In less than fourteen years, he was left without parents, native shelter.
 Lidia Androsova |
Vanya decided to get to the front, making his way to the front echelons like a hare. As soon as he was discovered, he was sent to the rear. In the end, he managed to attach himself to the battery of anti-tank guns of the Chuikov army, which was heading for Stalingrad. The battery commander was not much older than Vanya - he attributed two years to himself. Vanya was protected and sent to the kitchen as an assistant cook. All his free time, he began to intensively study the material part of the gun, to train in throwing Molotov cocktails. It so happened that at the most dramatic moments for the battery, Vanya found himself in the right place: either he would replace the loader, then the gunner, or he would ensure the delivery of ammunition. The resourceful, intelligent boy became the idol of adult fighters. But Chuikov ordered to start sending all the children to the rear. Meanwhile, the most difficult moment in the defense of Stalingrad had come. On October 14, 1942, the Nazis, regardless of losses, made a last desperate attempt to break through to the Volga. The battery was sent to the most difficult area - to defend the tractor plant in the Mamaev Kurgan area. The enemy fire was such that it was not possible to help each other. Each weapon operated independently. Vanya had to replace the dead gunner. He remains alone; the sight is damaged, and he directs the gun along the barrel. Vanya was wounded, his left arm was broken at the elbow, and he begins to throw grenades at the Nazi tanks with his right hand, rushing into a narrow passage. Then his right hand was torn off by a shrapnel, and he unsuccessfully tries to pick up a grenade with his teeth. With the stumps of his hands, he helped to press the grenade to his chest and, straightening up to his full height, went towards the tanks. The Nazis were stunned. Having pulled out the pin with his teeth, Vanya rushed under the lead tank, which blocked the way for the rest.
The Nazis did not break through to the Volga that day.
The award bypassed the hero, although his name is included in the Book of Military Glory of Mamaev Kurgan.
The second story. Arkady Kamanin became a combat pilot at the age of 14. The surprise of adults knew no bounds when they were in the corps attack aviation they sent a boy as a mechanic for special equipment. The captious examiners were convinced of the good training of the mechanic, who had previously worked at the airfield for two years during the summer holidays. Arkady's father was a general, but his son did not give the impression of a "general's son."
Serving aircraft, he learned a lot, but his cherished goal was to fly. Repeatedly he flew as a passenger on a mail plane, and then as a flight mechanic and navigator-observer on a PO-2 communications aircraft, and the pilots trusted him to control the aircraft, which gained altitude, and perform the simplest maneuvers in level flight.
But one day the unexpected happened. The Junkers, fleeing from our fighters, fired furiously, and a stray bullet wounded a PO-2 pilot in the face with fragments of the windshield, who accidentally ended up in the battle zone. Arkady was on the same plane. It was to him that the pilot handed over control of the aircraft, having managed to switch the radio to him. When approaching the airfield towards PO-2, the squadron commander himself flew out. He began to instruct Arkady in the air. The boy landed the plane successfully. - He opened the way to heaven. Two months later, Arkady became a pilot. He began to independently carry out communication tasks. From the headquarters of the corps, he flew to the headquarters of divisions, to the command posts of air regiments, and performed a variety of tasks.
Flying once along the front line, Arkady saw an Il-2 attack aircraft, which was smoking in the neutral zone. Seeing that no one was appearing from the plane, Arkady went to land. With difficulty, he pulled out a pilot wounded in the head by a shrapnel from a burning plane, who asked him to remove the camera from the plane and inform the unit that the task had been completed (it was a reconnaissance aircraft that was supposed to deliver the latest information about the enemy’s defenses on the eve of our planned major offensive) .
Arkady, under enemy fire, transferred a camera to his plane, and then returned for the wounded pilot. Several attempts to drag him into the plane were unsuccessful. When he finally succeeded, he lost consciousness.
Valuable intelligence was delivered to General Baidukov.
And there are many such dramatic episodes in the combat life of Arkady. He finished the war at the age of 16 with three military orders.
In 1947, the life of Arkady Kamanin suddenly ended. This could be considered an accident, if we do not take into account the tragic consequences of the war for its juvenile participants. Combat operations require incredible, transcendent efforts from each warrior, which not every adult can withstand. Children "torn" their health in the war. Nobody has studied this tragic page of the war.
History the third. The feat of the 12-year-old Belarusian pioneer Tikhon Baran was discovered by chance when they found the diary of a surviving German soldier. Shocked by the feat of the boy, he wrote: "We will never defeat the Russians, because their children fight like heroes."
The Tikhon family in full force - 6 children and parents - went to the partisans when the danger of being arrested loomed in the village. Tikhon became connected. One day, he came to his native village with his two sisters and his mother to take clothes and replenish food supplies. The policeman betrayed the partisan family.
The mother and children spent a month and a half in prison. Then the children were released, and the mother was taken to Germany. The exhausted children returned to their village and were sheltered by their neighbors, and Tikhon went to the partisan detachment.
On January 21, 1944, fulfilling the task of command, Tikhon again made his way to his native village, which at dawn was surrounded by the Nazis and decided to wipe it off the face of the earth, along with the inhabitants, as a stronghold of the partisans. In the bitter cold, all the inhabitants were driven outside the village and forced to dig a huge hole. The village was set on fire, and the inhabitants began to be shot. Tikhon calmed and pressed his sisters to him. The Gestapo man, who commanded the execution, noticed the boy while still in prison and guessed that he was a partisan liaison.
An hour later, all nine hundred and fifty-seven villagers were shot, and Tikhon, numb with horror, who was being held by two hefty soldiers, was ordered by the Gestapo: "And you will show us where the partisans are hidden."
Tikhon outwardly agreed and led into a snowstorm German soldiers into impenetrable swamps, which did not freeze even in winter. Soon, when the soldiers, one by one, began to fall chest-deep into the quagmire, the officer became suspicious.
Where did you take us?! shouted the officer.
Where you won’t get out, ”Tikhon answered proudly. - This is for everything, you bastards: for your mother, for your sisters, for your native village!
A single shot rang out. In a panic, the Nazis rushed through the swamp, which slowly sucked them in.
I am making proposals to President V.V. Putin:
1. Consider the issue of awarding the title of Hero of Russia to Ivan Fedorov, Arkady Kamanin, Tikhon Baran (posthumously to all).
2. I propose to erect on Poklonnaya Hill monument "Children of the XXI century - children - victims of war".
3. Publish a book with a brief biographical description of the life of each young Hero Soviet Union and send it free of charge to all schools at the rate of one copy per 100-200 students.