Forgotten foothold. Storozhevsky bridgehead. The right flank of "Stalingrad on the Middle Don" Storozhevsky bridgehead

We continue the theme of the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation. And again the Storozhevsky bridgehead.
I think that among those who are interested, many have heard about the Orekhovaya grove - a place of its kind legendary.
For those who do not know, or heard, but forgot, let me remind you.

Half a kilometer north of the modern village of Uryv (Ostrogozhsky district of the Voronezh region), on a hill, there is a grove, or rather even a small forest.
Even my grandfather, who was originally from those places, said that they were afraid to go to that forest back in the 60s. They even tried not to go there for firewood: they were often blown up. The battles for this grove were among the bloodiest on the entire Storozhevsky bridgehead.
Why? An intelligible answer is given in his memoirs by Vsevolod Pavlovich Shimansky, an officer of the 116th Alexandria Red Banner, Order of the Suvorov Tank Brigade: “Because the grove was located on a dominant height, not far from the front line. The enemy stronghold created there was a key point, and its capture undermined the entire defense troops that opposed us at the Storozhevsky bridgehead. In addition, the Orekhovaya grove was located at the junction of two enemy corps. And, thus, it was a weak point in the enemy's defense. " (Shimansky V.P. "Call signs of our hearts"). From myself I will add - to the east of the grove from north to south there is a deep ravine, from the south and west - lowlands, which makes the "Nut" almost impregnable fortress. To the north - height 185.5, another strong Hungarian stronghold. The goal of almost all Soviet attacks in this direction was height 185.5 and "Orekhovaya". In fact, they held the entire southern flank of the bridgehead.

Hungarian positions in the Storozhevoe area

If you go into this forest, you will find that it is all dug up: the eastern part - almost only trenches, the western - residential dugouts and communications. Many generations of search engines and "diggers" sifted the earth here. But she again and again gives evidence of the events that took place here. In 2007, when plowing a virgin area adjacent to the grove from the south, a tractor plow turned out the remains of a Soviet officer. We were late literally for a day: the bones and the medallion were collected by the local "shepherd", about which he boastfully told. When asked to hand over the remains to us, he said that he himself would look for relatives - they would pay him more money ...

During the planning of the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation, reconnaissance in force, carried out in the area of ​​​​the grove by units of the 25th Guards. The SD was so successful that the command was forced to order a full-scale offensive, and the enemy was forced to retreat and leave Orekhovaya. And also aboutI really remember the story told to the search engines by a resident of the village of Uryv (Storozhevskoy bridgehead). During the attack, one of the Soviet soldiers on the run had his head blown off by a shell. At the same time, the body did not lose balance and continued to run until it stumbled on the parapet of the front line of the Hungarian trenches, falling exactly on the Hungarian machine-gun crew. The Hungarian soldiers, in superstitious horror, threw down their machine gun. After all, the Russians continue to fight without a head ...

For a couple of years now, I have been wanting to write about the legendary Storozhevsky bridgehead, but I still can’t do it. Even to write about the Great Patriotic War, you need to internally mobilize and find some courage in yourself. Reading the little information that is available about the Storozhevsky bridgehead, and mentally transferring the described events and human destinies to the modern landscape I have seen many times near the village of Storozhevoe First, it is so scary and bitter to imagine what soldiers and civilians experienced in that war. But we must know this. Required. Know and remember. Moreover, the Storozhevskaya bridgehead (especially against the background of other, undoubtedly also great battlefields) by the will of fate was deprived of the attention of military writers and correspondents and undeservedly forgotten. Many hang gliders, paragliders, rock climbers, tourists and landscape photographers who so often visit these majestic chalk mountains on the right bank of the Don are completely unaware of the heroic history of one of the most picturesque places in the Voronezh region.

Today, on the eve of Victory Day, I will nevertheless publish the story that I planned so long ago.

02 . So, first the thesis. So to speak, to understand the essence. In July-August 1942, the high steep bank of the Don near the ancient village of Watchtower First was occupied by the Nazis, or to be more precise, by units of the 2nd Hungarian Army. The Magyars, who were pursuing the Red Army troops retreating from Kharkov itself, having appreciated the strategic and defensive potential of the place, took advantageous positions and began to strengthen them. In August 1942, as a result of an offensive operation, the Storozhevskaya bridgehead was taken by separate forces of the Voronezh and Bryansk fronts and held until January 1943. On January 13, 1943, during the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh offensive operation, called by modern historians "Stalingrad on the Middle Don", it was from this bridgehead that the offensive of the troops of the 40th Army of the Voronezh Front under the command of General K. S. Moskalenko began.

Well, now in more detail.
This is approximately the picture that was opened by the Magyar sentries: the Don, and behind it oxbow lakes, water meadows, rare trees, and a little further a young pine forest.

03 . In the shortest possible time, the Hortists dug a many-kilometer winding line of trenches and communication passages, which only occasionally interrupted, stretched along the right bank of the river from the village of Arkhangelskoye to Storozhevoy, to the village and beyond. Any movements on the opposite bank, where the Red Army units had somehow dug in, were clearly visible.

04 . Why somehow? And look carefully at the pine forest behind the street of the village of Anoshkino, which is located opposite the Storozhevsky chalk spurs. There is sand under the pines, in which it was problematic for our soldiers to even dig a decent trench, not to mention dugouts. The shelters dug out by the fighters were quickly covered with quicksand.

05 . Approximately such a view was opened to our soldiers from below. The depth of the enemy's defenses from our shore was not visible at all.
On military maps, these chalk cliffs were designated as height 187.7. And it had to be taken.

06 . At a depth of a couple of meters, groundwater was already beginning to ooze. Due to the high humidity in these crumbling trenches, it was unbearably hot in summer, and cold and wet in autumn and winter. Not a single tin can, nor rusty cartridge cases or any other kind of trophy that fell over was found in these trenches in the post-war years.

07 . Another thing is the full-profile Magyar trenches dug in chalk, and indeed the entire right bank of the Don.
Until now, lovers of digging come here, they still find a lot of "interesting", and they simply throw the little value on the side of the road.

08 . And until now, search parties are "raising" fighters in these places. Here is a quote from one of the forums: Basically, the dead Red Army soldiers were found in dugouts, cells in the Titchikhinsky forest - closer to the Don. The guys worked with MD and probes. The work was hard. There was still riding water in the positions. In the field - opposite the forest, helmets caught on rifle cells. They found two fighters there - a barrier. The Hungarians bombarded them with 50 mm and 80 mm mines. The soldiers fired back from rifles, prepared grenades for close combat. But they could not break away from the Horthys. They fell into the Voronezh black soil. 100 meters south of the dead soldiers, according to the remains of armor, a mass of parts from the Hungarian light tank Toldi, torn to shreds, the search engines were lucky enough to find the remains of another soldier. Apparently he was one of the tank destroyers (there were bundles of PRGs in the niche of a deep trench). A piece of flying armor tore off his head. The guys found her head under this very piece of metal. But now all 26 dead soldiers of the Red Army are buried with their comrades-in-arms buried in the previous Memory Watch at the Storozhevsky Bridgehead. The victorious Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation on January 13, 1943 began with him. But these dead guys were preparing this Victory back in July - October 1942.»

09 . Despite the order No. 138 “On the procedure for the burial of dead servicemen of officers, sergeants and privates” of People's Commissar S. Timoshenko dated March 15, 1941, local residents who returned from evacuation found the bones of soldiers for a long time, restless, washed by rains and washed out by melt water, and they were buried until the fifties in mass graves in Selyavnoe and in other large villages, which the war did not bypass. The burial place of the soldiers found by the search engines directly on the Storozhevsky bridgehead appeared relatively recently.

10 . This place was the short-term headquarters of General of the Army G.K. Zhukov, who at the end of November 1942, together with the front command, personally visited the Storozhevsky and Shchuchensky bridgeheads, where he got acquainted with the state of the troops.

11 . On August 9, 1942 (that is, 3 days after the capture of the Storozhevsky steeps by the 25th Guards Rifle Division), units of the 309th Rifle Division, having defeated the 54th Infantry Division of the Germans and their two reserve battalions, recaptured a narrow strip of land between the villages of Shchuchye from the enemy and Moving. Shchuchensk bridgehead or height 160.7. For a long 158 days and nights, Soviet soldiers held the defense here, and on January 14, 1943, units and formations of the 18th separate rifle corps and the 40th army of the Voronezh Front went on the offensive from here, initiating the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation.

12 . Judging by the photo above, you have already understood that the post-war fate of the Shchuchensky bridgehead was somewhat more successful than that of Storozhevsky. A worthy memorial was erected here for the 40th anniversary of the Victory. Next to the steles-bayonets and the Eternal Flame, the legendary “thirty-four” froze. And only a few people know that this T-34 was found and raised from the oxbow lake near the Storozhevsky bridgehead.

13. What an irony of fate: having shared the memorial glory with the “neighbor”, the Storozhevsky bridgehead itself is still in disgrace. The chaotic memorial complex, which appeared several years ago, seems to be maintained only by search parties. Meanwhile, in the Voronezh region there are two equipped (one even with the Eternal Flame) Hungarian military cemeteries, which I wrote about.

14 . However, next to the mass grave, several Orthodox crosses and a commemorative plate announcing the arrival of Zhukov, a ZIS-2 anti-tank gun was installed on a concrete pedestal.

15 . But back to August 1942. How did the Red Army soldiers, who until recently retreated in panic, manage to take this seemingly impregnable height of 187.7? Let's take a closer look at the picture below. Do you see a small island overgrown with trees around the bend of the river, almost clinging (from this angle) to the left bank? It was formed in April 1821 as a result of a collapse of a slope overgrown with forest, after which the Don channel was divided into two branches, and a sloping hollow formed in place of the fallen off block. From year to year it was overgrown with black forest and it was these dense thickets that served as a natural camouflage for the first shock battalions of the 25th Guards Division. The island, overgrown with willows, carefully hid in its thicket the punt boats necessary for forcing the wide Don channel.

16 . Here is how the commander of the 25th Guards Division P.M. describes these events in his memoirs. Shafarenko: " On the night of August 5, the division took up its starting position for the offensive. Ferry facilities were brought to the bank of the Don and carefully disguised. Our aviation did not give the enemy rest, exhausting him with raids. The next night, when the forcing was to begin, the pilots of the 291st Assault Aviation Division, hanging flares, unmistakably bombed the targets reconnoitered during the day. And at exactly 3:30 am, the roar of artillery, the howl of guards mortars, flashes of volleys broke the darkness and silence of the night. A fiery wall of explosions rose on the enemy shore. In the Storozhevoe area, the forcing began immediately after the first fire raid. The high bank, occupied by the enemy, formed a "dead" space at its base. It allowed the fighters to accumulate below the slope even in the course of artillery preparation. The soldiers of the 2nd battalion of senior lieutenant G. L. Relin on rafts, boats and improvised means quickly crossed the Don and from the "dead" space began to climb steeply upward. As soon as our artillery moved the fire into the depths, they attacked the enemy, broke into the trenches and in hand-to-hand combat - with grenades, fire, bayonet and butt - began to beat the Nazis, stunned by the sudden appearance of the guards. A new threat was growing in the area of ​​the Anoshkinskaya crossing. When, after a salvo from a Katyusha battery, Vasyukov's battalion seized the first position and began to develop success, the enemy began to prepare a strong counterattack from the Dovgalevka area. Bilyutin reported that Relin from the Storozhevoye area saw the enemy infantry reaching the deployment line. In that situation, it was impossible to allow a counterattack. I asked the commander of the army to strike the enemy with aircraft. Under the blows of the attack aircraft of Colonel A. N. Vitruk, the enemy units scattered and lay down. After the assault, when the Horthys tried to continue the counterattack, the fire of our artillery crushed their thinned chains, and the remnants of the Magyars turned back. The 1st Battalion began to move forward. Stubborn street fighting was already going on in Storozhevoe. Relin's battalion, repelling continuous counterattacks, advanced slowly. On the left flank, the situation again became more complicated. When Vasyukov's 1st battalion went to the forester's house, enemy submachine gunners cut him off from the crossings, creating the appearance of a complete encirclement. A company of submachine gunners of the 81st regiment was sent to help the battalion. Having dispersed the enemy soldiers, she covered the flanks and rear of the battalion, creating conditions for a further offensive..

17 . Reading this and trying to imagine how the Magyars overlooked such a global preparation for the assault, I come to two conclusions. It is possible that preparations for crossing the river were carried out in such thick fog as happens on the Don at dawn, or on black moonless nights, and the Hungarians themselves, obviously, did not expect that the Red Army would quickly recover after the retreat, and even launch an attack. in such a bad place.

18 . Until September 17, bloody battles for the bridgehead continued. The enemy lost up to 9 thousand soldiers and officers killed and wounded, 48 guns, 28 tanks, 4 aircraft, many other equipment and weapons, and finally went on the defensive. At least 12,000 of our soldiers and officers died, of which 4,000 were soldiers of the 25th Guards Division.

19 . As Suvorov said: "The war cannot be considered over until the last soldier is buried."
And how many of them are still in the impassable Titchikhinsky forest, which was the center of the Storozhevsky bridgehead?

20 . The defeat on the Don banks of the 2nd Hungarian Army was the largest defeat in the entire thousand-year history of this state. And it began with small Liskinsky bridgeheads near the Don - Shchuchensky and Storozhevsky. Both of them, not only for almost half a year, reliably covered the railway station from different sides, which was driving under military cargo. In January 1943, the Stavka predetermined these same “patchets” of the Don land to become the main breakthrough sites in the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation.

21 . Let's keep this in mind. And when we come to these majestic places, we will mentally thank and commemorate all those who gave us the opportunity to call them our own, relax here and admire the beauty of the Middle Don.

Happy Victory Day!

According to materials:
- Newspaper "Commune"
- P.M.Shafarenko "On different fronts" (notes of the commander of the 25th Guards Rifle Division)
- A.P. Tyunin "Territory of War". "Storozhevskoy bridgehead near the village of Storozhevoe"

I remind copy-pasteurs that when reprinting photos and text active reference to the source is required. Without noindex And nofollow.
Paper and electronic media must first

The past January days, the Voronezh public celebrated the next, 65th anniversary of the liberation of the region from the Nazi invaders. The memorials and obelisks, where they are, are lined with traditional wreaths and flowers. In the frosty wind, thin rallies of veterans (inexorably thinning their ranks by cruel time) were dissuaded by short ceremonial speeches. Under the front-line "one hundred grams" they recalled how it all happened here in the icy January of the 43rd. Toward the end of the celebrations, one of the representatives of the authorities, having fished out an old Suvorov truth in his memory, once again reminded: "The war cannot be considered over until the last soldier is buried." In general, everything is as always ...

And on the sidelines of these unsmiling and quiet celebrations, the 65th year resignedly and forlornly froze in the January cold, an outcast of our memory, the legendary Storozhevskaya bridgehead - the right flank of the heroic Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation, "Stalingrad on the Middle Don". But it was from him that the units of the 40th Army began the liberation from the Nazis of the Voronezh region.

This is now known: the defeat on the Don banks of the 2nd Hungarian Army was the largest defeat in the entire thousand-year history of this state. And it began with small Liskinsky bridgeheads near the Don - Shchuchensky and Storozhevsky. Both of them, not only for almost half a year, reliably covered the Liski railway station from different sides, which drove military cargoes to Stalingrad. In January 1943, the Stavka predetermined these “patches” of the Don land to become the main breakthrough sites in the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation.

This operation to defeat the Nazis on the Don between Kantemirovka and Voronezh and the liberation of the Liski-Kantemirovka and Liski-Valuiki railways was personally instructed by Supreme Commander I.V. Stalin on December 21, 1942 to develop and carry out the commander of the Voronezh Front, Lieutenant General F.I. The preparations for the operation were supervised by representatives of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, General of the Army G.K. Zhukov and Colonel-General A.M. Vasilevsky. On January 4, 43rd, together with the front command, they personally visited the Storozhevsky and Shchuchensky bridgeheads, where they got acquainted with the state of the troops of the 40th Army and the 18th Separate Rifle Corps.

The Storozhevsky bridgehead was "born" three days earlier than Shchuchensky - on August 9, 1942. The front-line fate predetermined him two days ahead of schedule to start a breakthrough with reconnaissance in force. On January 12, 1943, at 11 o'clock, from the Davydovka area, two batteries of long-range artillery and four artillery regiments, supported by bombers of the 291st assault air division, unleashed a flurry of fire on the fortified steep slopes of the melogorya, on the Nut Grove near Storozhevo, on the strongholds in Uryv and Goldaevka .

The fire strike completed a powerful volley of two divisions of the Katyusha guards. The captive Magyar will later tell with horror about those first hours of Storozhevsky hell: “At 10 o'clock the infernal machine spoke. Heart stopped. Everyone ran wherever they could. A sea of ​​smoke rages all around. 15-20 planes bombed us. The earth trembles, blood covers the earth. The rattle of death fills the moments of calm, and then hell begins again, smoke, fire, explosions ... "

Battalions of the 25th Guards and 107th Rifle Divisions rushed into the gaps in the barbed wire, blown up by sappers on the night of the 12th 33rd land mines, following the tanks of the 86th Tank Brigade. The 700th German tank group with 60 tanks and 60 assault guns rushed from Ostrogozhsk to plug the gap in the Storozhevsky bridgehead. But in the battle near the village of Boldyrevka, the commander of a tank company, senior lieutenant P. Zakharchenko, rammed a German armored vehicle with his "thirty-four", fished out of her womb and captured the commander and chief of staff of this tank group.

To stop the furious breakthrough of the Soviet units, two German infantry regiments were thrown from Kamenka. So the Storozhevskoy bridgehead, causing fire on itself, facilitated the task of breaking through to its Don "brother" - the Shchuchensk bridgehead. And in three days of fighting, from January 12 to 14, he ground three German infantry divisions (7th, 12th and 20th) to dust and burned 56 of the 60 fascist tanks that were eager to destroy him.

... Pridonsky bridgeheads. Their post-war fate, like that of the soldiers - their defenders, developed in different ways. On Shchuchensky, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Victory, a grateful human memory erected a worthy memorial. On a high-rise above the Don, next to the bayonet steles and the Eternal Flame, the legendary “thirty-four” guards the sensitive silence. Next to her armor, the marble of fresh obelisks turns white: the ashes of soldiers raised from the ground by search parties are still buried here.

In January, veterans and residents of the surrounding villages celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the Liskinsky district at this memorial. And not everyone knows: the T-34, raised on this pedestal, was found and raised from the oxbow lake of the Storozhevsky bridgehead. The tower from another tank, found here, was transported to the courtyard of the Voronezh Regional Museum of Local Lore. Such is the fate: having shared with the front-line "brothers" - Voronezh and Shchuchy - memorial glory, the Storozhevsky bridgehead itself is still in disgrace. Tanks, which could and should have stood for a long time on the memorial that has not yet been built here, are still silted up, like our scanty memory, in the Don channel near Uryv and Korotoyak.

A noteworthy fact: there are two Hungarian military cemeteries in the Voronezh region. Ironically, both of them are adjacent to the borders of the Storozhevsky bridgehead. In the Ostrogozhsk village of Boldyrevka (in the same place where the tank lieutenant Zakharchenko rammed a fascist armored car and captured the command of a tank group), the ashes of more than eight thousand Magyars rest. And in Khokholsky Rudkino there are over 77 thousand of them. But if we erect monuments to those who came to us with a sword, paying tribute to the soldiers of the enemy, why are we so humiliatingly stingy in memory of our own courage?

Here is another fact: in search of this terrible and holy place, no one could tell me exactly the area of ​​​​the Storozhevsky bridgehead - neither in the Liskinsky district administration, nor in the local museum, nor, especially, in the surrounding schools. Is it because our historical indifference and ignorance made such a gap in the memory of contemporaries, because that springboard has not been marked with a peg or a stick for 65 years? And this is despite numerous publications about the battles in the Middle Don and the local historian M. Zyubin from Lisk, and the research writer from Rossosh M. Timoshechkin, and the Voronezh historians S. I. and M. I. Filonenko, A. Abbasov!

Meanwhile, on the front-line map, which I managed to find, the Storozhevskoy bridgehead is indicated by a small horseshoe, one end resting on the Don near Storozhev opposite Anoshkino, and the other extending to the river beyond Titchikha and Selyavny. Now it is the junction of two districts - Liskinsky and Ostrogozhsky. And I managed to find people who scrupulously know every inch of the Don stronghold. They turned out to be employees of the Liskinsky Department of the Ministry of Emergencies and ... "black trackers".

The first - involuntarily, ex officio, every year literally with a pinch of fingers measure this rusty earth smelling of burning, taking out of it the deadly "echo of war" - mines, shells, grenades. They have neutralized more than three thousand units lately. But not only the land of the bridgehead is still endlessly stuffed with them - large-caliber bullets, unexploded shells and mines, together with fragments, have tightly grown into the trunks of powerful trees of the Titchikhinsky forest - the center of that bridgehead. Our memory would pierce into us just as firmly as those bullets and fragments into centuries-old trunks ...

I met the "black diggers" at ... the Liskinsky market. This time, they offered for sale the Red Army star, a soldier's medallion, a Magyar pince-nez and the Order of the Red Star with broken enamel, dug out by them at the Storozhevsky bridgehead.

All this is not in demand here, - the “digger” complained to me. “The Magyar medallions are another matter. Using them, you can contact the relatives of the Hungarian soldiers - for this "good" they pay crazy "grandmothers" ...

Another "collector-digger" took me around his barn, as if in a museum on Poklonnaya Hill. The Storozhevsky bridgehead supplied this “barn museum” with everything that the opposing armies on the Don were armed and equipped with - from the cockade from the Magyar cap, schnapps bottles and Italian cans to an anti-tank rifle, a heavy German machine gun, numerous PPSh and Schmeisers ...

On my proposal to transfer all this wealth to the regional museum, the “pathfinder” just did not twist his finger at his temple: they say, ok, uncle, this is potential money! And this money is taken out by cunning people from the wounds of bridgeheads. We recently saw such pits-wounds with the head of Rodina LLC Alexander Tsarenko: on the ground dug up by "diggers" - soldiers' buttons, the skeleton of a broken radio, placers of shells and ... human bones. In the distance - unexploded shells slightly sprinkled with earth. Bones are pulled apart by wild beasts, historical memory – by bipedal beasts…

Yes, memory is a difficult burden. But this is our burden, and we cannot get away from it. With a proposal to equalize in memory the heroism of the defenders of the Liskinsky bridgeheads, I turned to the Liskinsky head Viktor Shevtsov.

Viktor Vladimirovich supported the idea of ​​building a memorial on the Storozhevsky bridgehead - in this regard, he has both opportunities and good experience. Only last year, bronze busts to the Heroes of the Soviet Union Ch. Tuleberdiev and P. Kozlov, a tank-monument at the site of the death of the latter at the Pukhovo junction, and a memorial sign "Ikoretskaya shipyard" were installed in the region. Yes, and Alexander Boldyrev, the head of the Ostrogozhsky district, on whose territory the village of Storozhevoye-1 is now located, has a chance to bow to the courage of fellow countrymen and defenders of the bridgehead by the feasible participation of the district in the construction of the memorial.

The South-Eastern Railway could also take part in the nationwide construction. After all, the bleeding Storozhevskaya bridgehead covered her with her chest. And this important, frontline, saving for Stalingrad highway, and not just the embrasure of the German bunker, was covered with their bodies near the village of Dolgalevka by machine gunners Ivan Voilokov and Alexander Strokov.

There will be a memorial - then the words about the last unburied soldier will cease to be ordinary ornate. Or will we continue to live by the market memory of "black diggers"?

Nikolai Kardashov

Storozhevsky bridgehead

The Ostrogozhsky district of the Voronezh region during the Great Patriotic War became a real arena of large-scale military operations. It was there, from the impregnable right bank of the Don River on January 13, 1943, that the offensive Ostrogozh-Rossosh operation was launched, which put to flight the allies of the Nazi invaders who had entrenched themselves on Voronezh land. Due to the huge losses on our and enemy sides, these places are sometimes called "small Stalingrad" in military literature.

The Storozhevsky bridgehead, the right flank of the victorious Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh operation, covered itself with truly unfading glory. School history textbooks do not tell about this bridgehead, war veterans rarely talk about it in their memoirs. Meanwhile, it was from this place that the defeat of the 2nd Hungarian and partly the 8th Italian armies began in the banks of the Don.

business of life

Almost all his life he devoted to the revival and perpetuation of the memory of the Soviet soldiers who died in these battles, an employee of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel of Police Pavel Zolotarev. Forty years ago, he became one of the initiators of the creation of the Don search squad. And it was like that.

Pavel Mitrofanovich is a native of the village of Mastyugino, Voronezh region. His youth passed in this village, and he remembers very well that the favorite pastime of the Mastyugin boys was playing with ammunition dug out of the ground during the war, although the “iron gifts”, which had time to rust, were fraught with mortal danger ...

Over time, children's fun grew into a serious hobby. And the impetus for this was the arrival in the Voronezh region in 1974 of the Moscow archaeological expedition, which specialized in excavations of ancient Scythian barrows. Some members of the expedition took their children to the excavations. The guys, in turn, quickly found a common language with the local boys, and quite friendly relations began between them.

Once, during excavations, archaeologists discovered the remains of a Soviet officer. He did not have any documents with him, only by head over heels on his buttonholes they determined what rank he was in in the summer of 1942. The hero was reburied and a monument was erected by Moscow and Voronezh archaeologists.

Then the search detachment "Don" appeared, which included boys - the children of archaeologists and village children, among whom was Pavel Zolotarev.

More than 5,000 remains of soldiers and commanders were found and reburied by the detachment during its existence, but only about eighty of them were able to establish personal data. It is considered a great success for search engines to find a token with the name of the deceased next to the remains, or a spoon, bowler or flask signed by him. However, such finds are very rare.

From excavation to excavation

Today, the Don detachment is part of the association of search detachments, which, in addition to it, includes several more: Patriot (Voronezh), Brig-Voronezh, Storozhevsky bridgehead (Storozhevoye village, Ostrogozhsky district), Skif ( Ostrogozhsk), "Memory" (Bogucharsky district of the Voronezh region), "Voronezh front" (Voronezh region), "Potudan" (Repyevsky district of the Voronezh region), "Fiery arc" (Belgorod region), "Imeni Glazkov" (Tambov region ), "Search" (Voronezh), "Peresvet" Novovoronezh NPP. They are excavating on the territory of the Bryansk, Belgorod, Smolensk, Moscow, Kaliningrad regions.

In 2013, the efforts of the detachments discovered and raised the remains of 377 soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who died during the Great Patriotic War. Five of them have been identified. The identity of the soldiers was established thanks to the preserved medallions, which was a real success for the participants in the search and reconnaissance expedition.

In addition to the remains of soldiers, in one of the search areas, a burial place of 14 civilians who had been shot, including children, was found.

The “Memory Watch” was held this year as well. But even before its completion, information about the work of the Don search detachment continually appeared in regional news feeds. So, on June 22, on the Day of Memory and Sorrow, in the church of St. Sergius of Radonezh, in the village of Mastyugino, a funeral service was held for the dead soldiers discovered by the detachment during search work. The rite of burial for them was served by the rector of the temple, Priest Nikolai. The fallen were buried to the sound of the Russian national anthem and triple gun salvos.

“In 1942, fierce battles took place on the territory of the Storozhevsky bridgehead, during which many people were killed,” says Pavel Zolotarev. - The guys from the search teams of Moscow, Voronezh and Novovoronezh during the excavations discovered the remains of seventeen soldiers. Based on the found tokens, it was possible to establish the identity of two soldiers. They were Russian Alexander Ponomarenko and Uzbek Gani Faziev.

“There were five children in our family. Sasha was the eldest, - recalls Nikolai Ponomarenko, who was present at the burial of his brother Alexander. – In September 1942, at the age of 18, he went to the front. Three months later, we received a message about his death. We didn't know where his ashes were buried. Today, relatives came to bury the remains of the soldiers, including our Sasha.

Involving the youth

Since 2002, on the basis of the Moscow secondary school No. 377, the youth section of the Don search detachment, headed by Pavel Zolotarev, has been working. Together with their older comrades, schoolchildren annually travel to the Moscow and Voronezh regions to search for the remains of Soviet soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War. The motto of the detachment: "We will be worthy of the feat of our ancestors!"

Any finds for the guys, on the one hand, is grief for the dead, and on the other, the joy of knowing that they are returning one more fighter, the defender of our Motherland, from oblivion. With the next name won back from obscurity, no less painstaking work begins to search for the relatives of the deceased. Letters are written to the old addresses indicated in the archives of the Ministry of Defense, requests are sent to the military registration and enlistment offices, from where the fighters were called up, to the administration of those settlements where they lived before the war.

Relatives who respond to letters are sent personal belongings of the dead, which can be found next to the remains.

However, excavations carried out on the battlefields are fraught with many dangers. With explosives and ammunition, according to the instructions and with special permission, search engines understand on the spot. Some of the weapons are handed over to the police, others are transferred to museums. So, the search engines handed over the Maxim machine gun to the Museum of Defense of Moscow.

The guys do not forget about the replenishment of the exposition of their school museum. It has two rooms. The events of the Great Patriotic War are not limited. One of the rooms is occupied by exhibits of those times when the warriors were armed with spears and arrows, swords and shields. Collected here are ancient vessels, women's jewelry, and coins. All this was found by the guys who annually go on expeditions to the gatherings of young archaeologists in the Voronezh region.

But not only the search and reburial of the dead is carried out in the youth section of the Don detachment. Veterans who are still alive are not left without attention either: they visit them, invite them to their school, hold meetings.

perpetuate history

The Storozhevsky foothold is a heroic and holy place. How much human blood has been shed on this long-suffering land, how many lives have been ruined. This must not be forgotten.

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the large-scale, historically significant battles in the Ostrogozhsk Pridonye, ​​the book "Storozhevskaya bridgehead" was published. The book is based on the memories of the participants in those fierce battles. In addition, a commemorative medal, stamps and envelopes were issued, united by the theme “Military Glory of the Land of Voronezh. Storozhevsky bridgehead.

In the photographs in the book, on stamps and envelopes, we see the winners who survived the hard times, and those who died a heroic death on the outskirts of a decisive height, we learn about their feat. This is a kind of story of a great confrontation in the faces! And all educational and patriotic work is a worthy contribution to the common cause of preserving and passing on to posterity the greatness of the feat accomplished by compatriots of the military generation.

Evgeny Kaplun
Photo from personal archive
Pavel Zolotarev

Photo caption "The search is done by Don":

Medal "For Courage", by the number of which the name of the defender of the Fatherland was established - Fedor Frolovich Malakhov

02.10.2014

ABOUT h e R To

Broken armies learn well.

V. Lenin.

Seventy years have passed. The term is considerable. The smoky cloud of the past war has long since dissipated. But my memory persistently brings me back to the year 1942, to the same territory. In Storozhevoe First - the village of my childhood. Please look at the map of the Voronezh region. On it, you can easily find the nearby villages and farms of Arkhangelskoye, Osinki, Anoshkino, Titchikhu, Selyavnoye, Uryvo-Pokrovskoye, the cities of Korotoyak, Ostrogozhsk. About them and some other settlements will also be discussed.

And also take a close look at the bright photographs taken by modern authors from the height of the flight of paragliders, hang gliders. On them are the villages of Arkhangelskoye, Anoshkino and the Titchikha farm. Unfortunately, in this selection of photographs there is only a “edge” of Watchtower and also from a bird's eye view. But the right-bank chain of chalk mountains appears in full glory, in places almost hanging over the left bank of the Don. And behind the "Collapse", about this cliff - we will talk ahead, delighting travelers, towering in groups and singly, boiling-white remnants - huge chalk blocks that have survived from time immemorial. * (Footnote 1 : According to one of AndInternet. And sources: “…these are the highest and most beautiful chalk mountains in Europe ". And here is what we find from our fellow countryman N.V. Stankevich, a famous Russian philosopher with the soul of a poet: "I hardly liked the Alps more than the chalk mountains in the village of Uderevka above the Pine River." As you know, Quiet Pine is the right tributary of the Don River. Its left bank rises above the low plain. It is decorated, like the right bank of the Don, with chalk remnant mountains, some of which the ancient monks turned into unique monasteries inside the chalk hulks ... Approx. A.T.)

I, scanning black-and-white photographs of my childhood and youthful memory, reinforce them with comments from the memoirs of several authors who wrote about the Storozhevsky bridgehead.

V a r var o v

So, having stumbled in front of a water barrier, on a high and curved semicircular chalk ridge, a large army of the Hungarian Admiral Miklos Horthy in July of the distant 1942. What stopped them then? Wide and full-flowing Don, unwillingness to get involved in open clashes with the Russians? Yes, yes, with the Red Army soldiers, who finally came to their senses across a deep river after a disorderly flight from Kharkov? And who else? Perhaps the reasonable and final decision of their command prevailed: to firmly gain a foothold on the strategically advantageous cape, stretching from the village of Arkhangelskoye and further beyond Selyavnoye Vtoroye?

No matter how you rack your brains now, the damned Magyars are in a fateful hour and for them they were very lucky. They found themselves and immediately dug in at almost a hundred meters above the channel of a wide and deep, sometimes up to ten meters, water surface. This allowed them, not fearing at first serious counterattacks from scattered units of the Red Army, to take up a tough and reliable, as it seemed to them then, defense, burrowing thoroughly into our land in a very short time. A many-kilometer winding line of trenches and communication passages meandered over the mountains, only occasionally interrupted, from the village of Arkhangelskoye to Storozhevoy, the Titchikh farm, the village of Selyavnoye Vtoroye and down, further, further along the right bank of the river. * ( Footnote 2: The village of Arkhangelskoye, unlike the other villages mentioned above, is located in a wide bowl-shaped coastal depressionmountainousright bank of the Don. - Approx.A.T .)

In a short time, the Magyars (more often by the hands of Soviet prisoners of war and Hungarian Jews from special work teams, forcibly brought from Hungary) prepared mortar and machine-gun nests, even bunkers on the chalk hills. From them, continuous firing was carried out, preventing our soldiers from sticking their noses out of their solitary trenches in the rare growing Storozhevsky, Anoshkinsky and Starokhvorostansky pine forests on the sandy loamy left bank of the Don. Then irreconcilable opponents were at a distance of rifle, machine gun or mortar shots in a straight line (from the mountains occupied by the Magyars to the advanced positions of the Red Army on the opposite bank).

The defending Red Army units found themselves in a completely disadvantageous position. It was difficult for them to dig into the ground, or rather into the sand. As boys, we often climbed their already crumbling individual cells, trenches, not connected by passages, scanty trenches, with swollen mounds, parapets. There we did not find a single deep dugout. The shelters dug by the soldiers were immediately covered with quicksand. At a depth of 1 - 2 meters, groundwater oozed. In the summer in these trenches it was unbearably hot, in autumn and winter it was unbearably cold and wet. Wet lowland all the same. And not a single tin can, even rusty cartridge cases or some other kind of overwhelmed trophy - the goal of our campaigns - was not found in the trenches.

But the Magyar trenches, the trenches of a full profile, in comparison with the Red Army, were richer in the most attractive military enticements, so desirable for us. What they just did not have! Scattered here and there are cans and jars, glass weaves from schnapps, reliable metal boxes ("cases" to school) from under machine-gun belts, small copper rifle, huge artillery shells. Even the figurine of the Mother of God, especially revered by Catholics, was donated from noble metal to Slavik Lebedyansky, the son of the headmaster.

Not only children, but also adults were most impressed by their engineering structures, which were created in unyielding mountainous soil or even in chalk, as they say, with intelligence and conscience. The same can be said about the dugouts covered with several logs - their decent winter quarters. Trenches, dugouts of that war have retained their geometric contours that have not been erased by time to this day.

Well, whatever you say, but the subconscious animal fear of the unpredictable Russian Ivans, in the literal sense of the word, drove uninvited guests to great depths into our land and hollowed out, well-equipped and spacious chalk dungeons. The Magyar sappers laid mines against our troops in the fields, on the approaches not only to Storozhevoe, Arkhangelsk, Titchikhe, Selyavnoe, but also on mountains, hillocks and multi-stage slopes. Ten meters from the trenches and dugouts, towards the positions of the Red Army, Bruno's spirals bristled - multi-row (from three to five rows!) High barbed obstacles on wooden "goats". The origins of numerous lairs, which began from the Hungarian positions on the mountains, even in the village, and descended, deepening and expanding, directly to the Don or into the field, were especially sharpened. (You can easily find these logs, spoons and hollows of the most intricate configurations in the pictures.)

Mines - "surprises", carefully masking, they dug in on the right bank, one or two meters from the Don water. And with the onset of the then early bitter frosts, the Magyars also mined the ice surface of the river with Italian (as our soldiers called them) anti-personnel mines. So, imagine, long and narrow tin boxes filled with tol, resembling a strip of toilet soap not cut into pieces. Mines lay on icy irregularities and in numerous vents, sprinkled with snow.

When did they manage to do so much and prudently heap up?! But that's not all: about a hundred meters, downhill, on the path of the alleged sorties of our eager hunters for "languages", the cowardly Hungarians put up not "sleeping" sentry guards at night.

Recesses-beds, necessarily for two persons, remained for a long time in the middle of the mountain, just opposite the parent's garden. Until one of the more economic neighbors pulled out the telephone wires along with the aluminum pegs. They stretched out from the dugout in the garden towards the observers, stiffening in the uninterrupted mountain draft. How not to freeze the warriors who have become mangy in winter ?! Although, let me remind you, they gradually wrapped themselves in robes from stolen scarves and blankets, which were strung in layers, like leaves on a head of cabbage, over their “all-weather” light uniforms, not at all designed for our cold weather. So, the number of oblong pits on steep slopes was multiple. However, no one has ever counted these pig individual beds. Their real purpose gradually faded from human memory.

How did the "Storozhevskaya bridgehead" begin?

In theory, it turned out that not a single weak spot in the front line of enemy defense from Arkhangelsk to Selyavnoye and beyond was not found by any of the Russians. However, in war, the impossible becomes possible if the Red Army ingenuity is added to the search for the necessary loopholes. A smart one, as they say, will not go uphill, a quick-witted one is likely to bypass any mountain. This is almost what happened in the most critical sector of the Voronezh Front. Not for long, even by the standards of peacetime, and even more so wartime, the command of the Red Army had to look for the desired gap or whole gaps in the front line of the enemy. And they were found.

From now on, we will turn to the memoirs of Lieutenant General Pavel Mendeleevich Shafarenko “On Different Fronts”. (Footnote 3: Started an operation to capture the "Storozhevsky bridgehead" P.M. Shafarenko with the rank of colonel, he received the rank of major general during the final phase of the defense of the Storozhevsky bridgehead, lieutenant general ... in 1962. Until a certain time, we will call him a colonel. But also not for long. - Approx. A.T.)

It was the scouts of his division who first began to look for and pinpoint weak links in the enemy front line on our mountains. This is his the first division will undertake to recapture the enemy has almost forgotten in our time "Storozhevskoy bridgehead" near the village of Storozhevoe. Moreover, during the five months of 1942-1943, the soldiers of the 25th Guards Division, together with the soldiers of other divisions, regiments and units of the Voronezh Front, stood to the death against superior enemy forces, holding a strategically important patch of mountainous territory in the Storozhevsky forest. Defending and itself undertaking constant counterattacks, the division was for the Germans and Magyars, rushing to help the Nazi troops besieging Stalingrad, an unextracted bone in their cold throat. But to smoke out of the forest and push desperate Russians from the mountains into the increasingly cold waters of the Don, as the Goebbels propagandists frightened in leaflets dropped from aircraft, the enemy did not succeed.

“25th Guards, learn to swim, tomorrow you will be in the Don,” - this is how the Germans and their allies caustically reminded our soldiers of their unsuccessful summer crossing of the river during a hasty retreat. But this time, neither the paper horror story, nor the retaliatory unsuccessful counterattacks of the Red Army positions on the bridgehead, which the Nazis were forced to cede to ours forever, did not help the invaders.

By that time, Soviet soldiers had learned a lot, first of all, to hate the invaders fiercely, to know their weak points thoroughly. And they persistently and successfully learned not to be afraid of water, to make landing punts, to build pontoon and ordinary bridges across the Don.

On them and hidden (as the omniscient village rumor told us) under the water Anoshkin bridge, opposite the “Collapse”, they began to transport the most diverse and very serious weapons to the bridgehead. Guns, light and medium tanks "T-60", "T-34", even heavy "KV", multiple launch rocket batteries "Katyusha", etc. .

But most importantly, the Red Army soldiers and their commanders successfully learned a more important and necessary thing for every soldier - to believe in themselves and their sacred cause: to cleanse their native land from motley demonic evil spirits. And they started to get it. And in the end it ended with an unexpectedly high result.

From memoirs of Lieutenant General Pavel Shafarenko

Here about all this in a military dry, stingy, but on a real basis and with a high degree of reliability, only occasionally giving vent to emotions (in my comments of the 5th chapter of “On the Storozhevsky bridgehead” there are much more emotions!), narrates the division commander P. M. Shafarenko in the book "On different fronts". I will note right away that this is not a work of art, which, for example, is the exciting novel by Viktor Nekrasov “In the trenches of Stalingrad”. In it, as you remember, the author, without deviating from the realities of trench truth, successfully used fiction.

Memoirs of P.M. Shafarenko, in my opinion, are even too realistic. But, unfortunately, either due to the then military and political circumstances, or at the request of the author himself, they are not without significant reticences.

This is especially true of the problems of evacuation and the further fate of the civilian population caught in the combat zone. So he assigns only one single paragraph to the inhabitants of Storozhevoye, and then not to the living, but to several collective farmers shot by Hungarian punishers. As for the losses among the Red Army soldiers and their commanders, there is nothing to be done: the secrets of the military and post-war almost the same secret time were inaccessible to us, mere mortals, for many, many long post-war years.

There is no particular reason to retell the content of the small chapter “On the Storozhevsky bridgehead”. (Footnote 4: I have only the fifth chapter of P.M. Shafarenko "On different fronts", scanned by enthusiasts from their native me Voronezh University. - NoteA.T.).

It is preferable to quote the chapter “On the Storozhevsky bridgehead” so as not to distort the harsh and unadorned reality of the second year of the uncontrollably flaring war: "August 1 menya (P.M. Shafarenko. - Note A.T..) calledto the auxiliary control center 6th Army near the village of Davydovka. * (Our then regional center was already 20 (!) To siltmetrahfrom Watchdog. - Approx. A.T.). From here, a panorama of the Don and its right bank was visible in the areas of the villages of Arkhangelskoye, 1st Storozhevoye, Titchikha, Selyavnoye. The most impregnable was the coast near Storozhevoy. The chalk cliffs there descended almost vertically into the river.

More than once in their centuries-old history, Russian people fought against the invaders on the Don. Back in 1380, on the eve of the Battle of Kulikovo, which marked the beginning of the liberation of Rus' from the Mongol-Tatar yoke, Dmitry Donskoy said: “Now we will go beyond the Don and there we will either win and save everything from death, or lay down our heads.”

The magnificent photographs I have chosen will help you to consider in detail and more voluminously represent that very right-bank mountainous panorama. They show picturesque landscapes of chalk mountains and numerous ravines, already "familiar" to many readers of the cycle of essays "War did not catch me as a soldier."

Now, right from Poltava, far from Sentry, once again I wanted to visit this tiny territory of a long-standing war with you at least for a moment. There, on the top of the chalk mountains, seventy years ago, protracted and bloody battles were fought.

However, no matter how you dream, no matter how you fantasize, it is still difficult to clearly imagine a picture of thunderstorm events remote from time. (Footnote 4: To many of today's young glider pilots, rock climbers, just tourists, young peopleshould be, and it doesn’t occur to me that in these almost fabulous places a war once swept like a fiery whirlwind. - Note. A.T.)

And by this very reason, in the author's word, like living water, resurrecting the past tense, you will have to look more often at the pages of the chapter: "I received an order, - continued aet P.M. Shafarenko, - concentrate the division (without the 73rd regiment) in the forest northeast of the Osinki farm, force the Don near the northwestern outskirts of Anoshkino and capture a bridgehead with a forward edge along the Storozhevoye line, height 187.7» (I emphasize again - A.T.).

What does it mean: to take and capture by that time a heavily fortified and defended by the enemy bridgehead, recapture it and, which is also important, “saddle” height 187.7? After all, it’s not like going downhill at the “fifth point”, and even lightly, as the completely exhausted Red Army soldiers did in July 42, which was unlucky for them. Now the “grown up and wiser” soldiers of the 25th division had to climb the tall and steep chalk ridges familiar to some of them. And even at a virtual distance, you will be convinced that these cliffs in a stereo tube also attracted close attention and puzzled the divisional commander in earnest. But soon, very soon, the guardsmen P.M. Shafarenko will still have to storm them and, most likely, where he is crawling, where he is crouching, but running, trotting under a hurricane of fire from a seriously alarmed enemy.

You really believe me, then a post-war ragamuffin, that the most inveterate and enduring climbers from among my bare-chested friends, out of breath, took two or three breaks when climbing steep mountains in these memorable places. Trained nest destroyers, by the way, made ascents on an empty stomach, climbing chalk mountains and cliffs, moreover, in which their mother gave birth. Not that zealous hunters find it unbearably hot in the summer heat, not at all. Most of all, because of the strict instructions inspired by the parents to save already! for many summer and winter seasons their "fashionable" rags. (Footnote 5 : Likecurrent denim trousers with holes. However, we will certainly clarify that mutilatedbelongingsand clothes of our well-fed time withintentionally- for the sake of "awesome" chic, to look likehooligan,not like everyone else. Then none of us are particularly differentseparated from each other "by clothes", everyone looked, like everyone else, poor).

And what, let's estimate, will the Red Army men, especially the first assault groups, have to carry an unbearable load on their shoulders uphill? In addition, like our guys, not always and not quite full. Rifles or machine guns with a full combat set of cartridges, four or even six mortar mines (back and forth over both shoulders), two or three grenades on the belt or under it (as it is more convenient for anyone), several Molotov cocktails in special bags, small sapper shovels. And this is not all of the listed pre-combat equipment, it is necessary to add unaccounted ammunition "in reserve" to it, which are no personal soldier things. All this will pull in general far beyond the thirty kilos laid down according to the army charter. In a word, without a bulky burden uphill, none of the fighters in pitch darkness will have to climb.

Retreat is not yet defeat

Really in fact (even now it’s cold on the skin!) Our soldiers became not afraid of the Don water cooling down after Ilyin’s day, or the steep chalk mountains, or the hurricane mortar and machine-gun fire from those cliffs that, by satanic will, became accomplices of the Hungarian fascists?

At this point in the essay, perhaps, we will ask ourselves by no means an idle question: how and in what way, in such a short period of time on our territory of the war, by the end of the first week of August forty-second, the retreating Red Army was transformed and bolder so that it began to recapture the captured fascists Soviet lands? And not only to win back the meager patches of horseshoes so far (please take a look again at the map found in the archives by the journalist N. Kardashov!). But, expanding them day by day, turn them into bridgeheads fortified according to all the rules of modern warfare for the upcoming major offensive operations.

Once again, deliberately looking ahead, I will dispel the current doubts and skepticism on this subject among some young readers. Yes, our army was preparing and was capable of an offensive on the middle Don already in the first days of August 42nd.

Because downstream of the river, southeast of the large railway junction of Liski, almost at the same time, the Headquarters planned and the Red Army successfully carried out the capture of the "Shchuchensk bridgehead" from the enemy. And with the same goal: on a vast sector of the Voronezh Front, simultaneously crack open the enemy defenses in several of the most vulnerable places in the very near future. And, without delay at all, to develop in January of the new, 43rd year, from the occupied and defended bridgeheads, the advance of the Red Army in the opposite direction.

As you probably know from other reliable sources, the war has moved forward on all fronts since January of that year. She rolled inexorably to the west, only occasionally slowing down in front of especially impregnable enemy defensive lines. Nothing and no one could stop the Red Army.

This time, the defenders near the Watchtower One also held out. They did not run away from the stinking Magyars, as in the bitter forty-second year. And, on the contrary, they drove them back, increasing the pace of advancement of all branches of the armed forces.

Even the highest German military officials spoke about the significant and first successes of the Red Army. As, for example, the fascist Oberst General G. Fisner, commander of the German Army Group South Ukraine. Timely, and surprisingly sincere, he confesses in his diary: “The Soviet command became more and more experienced, showed skill in creating bridgeheads". And such bridgeheads, threatening the Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Italians with very unpleasant and far-reaching consequences, only in the small territory of the war we are describing, became more and more. “To the right, we were crossed by the Don units of the 53rd fortified area of ​​Colonel A.G. Dashkevich. He was tasked with releasing Storozhevoe and securing the right flank of the division. To the left, from a small foothold on the right bank, the 24th motorized rifle brigade of Colonel V.L. Savchenko. She must take possession of the village of Titchikha, the forest to the west of it and the northeastern outskirts of Selyavnoe ", - this is another quote, but already from the memoirs of the author of the book “On Different Fronts”.

Coordinates of the "Storozhevsky bridgehead"

So as far as the crossing of the Don by the division and the release of Storozhevoy is still far away, so we will try to focus on the coordinates of the newly created Storozhevsky bridgehead, which is of particular interest to us. Within five and a half months, as already mentioned, it will become a stumbling block between the Red Army and the Hortists on the right bank of the Don, opposite the village of Anoshkino. More precisely, in the Storozhevsky forest, more in its northeastern part.

At this point in the essay, we again have to make a lengthy digression. And here's the reason. In the published article of the already mentioned Voronezh journalist Nikolai Kardashov “The Forgotten Bridgehead” (the Kommuna newspaper, No. 96 dated July 5, 2008, it is written :“Here’s another fact: in search of this terrible and holy place, no one could tell me exactly the area of ​​​​the Storozhevsky bridgehead- neither in the Liskinsky district administration, nor in the local museum, and even more so, in the surrounding schools. Is it because such a gap in the memory of contemporaryVpierced our historical indifference and ignorance, that neither a peg nor a stick has marked that bridgehead for 65 years? And this is despite numerous publications about the battles on the middle Don and the Lisk local historian M. Zyubin, and the research writer from Rossosh M. Timoshechkin, and Voronezh historians S.I. and M.I. Filonenko A. Abbasov!

Meanwhile, on the front map (I also refer to it. - Note. A.T.), whichI managed to find you, watchmanRussian bridgeheadmarked by a small horseshoe, with one end resting against the Don near Storozhevo opposite Anoshkino, and with the other facing the river behind Titchikha and Seobvious ... ”The anger and bewilderment of the author of the sharply critical article is completely justified. However, we will try to calm him down, albeit belatedly. But how could modern cabinet officials know about the location of some bridgehead that had long been erased from their sloppy memory? This, let's put it mildly here, is not in their official competence. Yes, and local historians are unlikely to have personally visited our forest or climbed the chalk cliffs. We would visit the museum at the Pervo-Storozhevskaya School, created by local history enthusiasts headed by the history teacher O.I. Azarova. Didn't visit. But in vain! We would have learned a lot of interesting and detailed things by getting acquainted with the unique exhibits dedicated to the Storozhevsky bridgehead. After them, Olga Ivanovna, together with her students, went to Moscow. There, the teacher and schoolchildren met with the widow of General P.M. Shafarenko, visited his grave.

The young employees of the Liskinsky branch of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, to whose rather shaky awareness the journalist ultimately refers, only approximately indicated to him the boundaries of the forgotten foothold. The front map is also not a reliable assistant. It is marked with thin horseshoes, most likely the original Gfoothold wounds. Those behind the Titchikh farm, occupied by the Magyars until August 6, represented a piece of coastal land completely unprofitable and even unsafe for our troops. The fact is that in this place there is the left and right banks of the Don, open to enemy observers, and higher, in front of the farm, there is also a then rare edge of mixed undergrowth, perfectly visible from the air.

But this "horseshoe" will become a productive territory for our troops only after the Titchiha farm and the village of Selyavnoe were recaptured from the Hungarians. This will happen in the first days of August 1942 precisely in the area of ​​these settlements and opposite the village of Anoshkino. It was here that daring sorties of our reconnaissance groups were carried out, looking for more advantageous gaps in the enemy defenses. Suffice it to recall the feat of Ch. Tuleberdiev, who, with a group of Red Army soldiers of eleven people, on the night of August 6, attacked an enemy bunker on Lysa Gora near Selyavnoye, distracting the command of the Hungarian command from the simultaneous throw of the main forces of the assault detachment to the bridgehead under the "Collapse", opposite Anoshkino . Unfortunately, we also learned about the courageous feat of the Kyrgyz youth Cholponbai several years after returning from evacuation.

Although in the post-war period, and without prompting from military or civilian officials, it was not at all difficult for us to guess where the Hungarian troops were and where ours were. But over the unmarked by anyone, according to N. Kardashov, the territory of the Storozhevsky bridgehead, until very recently, a veil of unjustified secrecy hung. Most likely, the memory of him absorbed the popularity of operations to defeat the Nazi troops near Moscow, near Stalingrad, the battle of Kursk. But how can you hush up the fact that on the middle Don was completely defeated the 2nd Hungarian army. In destruction 150,000 thousand! Magyar took part and The 25th Guards Division, which occupied, defended the "Storozhevskaya bridgehead" and was the first to attack from it during the "Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh" operation.

Thank God, three or four years ago, the shadow of undeserved oblivion began to slowly dissipate. But for me, there remains one more task that has not yet been solved: how and how to ensure that the residents of Watchtower and all interested persons finally know the names of the war heroes who were released several times and who finally freed Watchtower One on January 14, 1943? And why hasn't a worthy monument to many soldiers-liberators been erected in the village yet? Our village deserved such a monument, on which names and surnames would be carved, except for P.M. Shafarenko, K.V. Bilyutin and other soldiers of the 25th division, fighters and officers of the special penal battalion of the 141st division of the 40th army of the Voronezh front, who forever drove the Magyars out of the village.

In the first essays “The War Didn’t Catch Me as a Soldier,” I already wrote that after the war, on the edge of the Storozhevsky forest, after the war, the skeleton of a burnt Katyusha towered for a whole year, that on the Storozhevsky field there were several lined our medium tanks and one heavy one - “Klim Voroshilov” . And at the beginning of Progon Street, the skeleton of the charred T-34 Emelyan Pugachov, along with the burnt crew, froze inside a steel box. In total, enemy tanks from Watchtower to Uryv, according to the data provided by P.M. Shafarenko, more than sixty were destroyed. Is it a lot or a little? I think it's still a lot. But we did not see all of them, especially German tanks and most of ours too. The Germans were in a hurry to remove their own vehicles from the battlefield, ours - their "thirty-fours". Some copies of the special teams were stolen for remelting, others were restored by mechanics in the field and returned to the front. So it was in our troops, so did the Germans, moreover, the latter often grabbed our KV and T-34 tanks. They really liked our combat vehicles. The Nazis restored them and, decorating them with fascist symbols, used them against the troops of the Red Army.

Having returned from evacuation, from our grandfathers-neighbors Ilya Kondratievich, grandfather Filka Gurov, Akim Petrovich, we, the children, who ran to the "Collapse" for strawberries, heard and remembered conversations about the tank road. She, according to them, started from the Anoshkinsky bank of the Don and stretched along a gentle hollow into the middle of the forest. Then they learned about the underwater bridge below the "Island", south of the village of Anoshkino (and, according to General Shafarenko, there were several of them!). The edge of the Storozhevsky forest, pitted with trenches and trenches, later chosen by stubborn strawberries, went far and wide and not in one summer. But the fact that we are trampling on some kind of strategic foothold, which was visited in the autumn of 1942 by prominent Soviet military leaders Zhukov and Vasilevsky, was not known to adults, and even more so to teenagers. Everything was classified, everything was kept behind seven seals. Is it not for this reason that the “Storozhevskoy bridgehead” was forgotten so soon, about which none of the inhabitants of Storozhevoye, Anoshkino, Selyavnoye and Titchikhi, as they say, knew either in sleep or in their spirit. Our troops occupied the forest, and the Magyars sat in Storozhevoe for half a year, so what of that. After all, the Red Army drove the invaders out of their native village, what else do you need? Besides, having returned from the evacuation, our Storozhevites only thought about how they, the unfortunate sufferers, could start their lives anew?

And now let's pay attention to the pictures, which depict the chalk cliff "Collapse" and "Island", which divided the Don River in half, and try to somehow reconstruct old events. So, not far behind a sheer chalk wall, covering the assault detachment of the Red Army from big-eyed enemy observers from the Vostroy Bark and from the village of Arkhangelskoye, there was a gentle depression under the crowns of trees. She, this depression, served our fighters in good stead at the first attempts to get from the left bank and gain a foothold on the right.

For me, in my now distant places, everything is so close and everything is so familiar even now. Therefore, for you, dear readers, if you don't mind, I will become a virtual guide for a while. Do you agree? Then go ahead, follow me to the top of the mountain you can see, as if flattened, cut up along the northern slope with steep-sided ravines. On it is (take my word for it) a rather vast and even, like a table, glade. This is a former Khazar settlement. The ancient nomadic tribes knew perfectly well where and how it was safer for them to settle. The slope of the mountain, pitted with deep ravines, and especially the sheer "Collapse" from the eastern, Anoshkinskaya, side, now invisible to us, was practically insurmountable for other warlike tribes, coveting someone else's property. Those unreasonable neighbors-enemies (almost like according to A.S. Pushkin!) From the invader tribes (perhaps distant ones - raids on neighbors-cattle breeders and tillers living in "our" clearing.

Most likely, the unreasonable warriors from the Magyar civilized tribes considered a natural bastion this time to be the same inaccessible obstacle, but already for the Soviet liberators of their native land.

Therefore, we will introduce (in relation to that area) clarifying details, corrected by time. Yes, the ancient settlement was impregnable in a long, long time ago. But by no means fateful for the Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1942.

Since a little over a hundred years before those described by Colonel P.M. Shafarenko events, in 1821, an enormous block of chalk, clay and earth fell out of a continuous chalk ridge. And this “Leaning Tower of Pisa” landed straight into the waters of the Don, forming an “Island” in the middle of the river, washed by two narrower channels formed later. (Footnote 6 : “In the “Notes of the Fatherland” in 1848 it was reported that in April 1821year atWith. Storozhevoe of the Korotoyaksky district, a collapse of the slope of the Don overgrown with forests occurred, which is why the riverbed was blocked by more than half.- Wikipedia. - INworld eencyclopedia. - Approx. A.T.).

So the long-standing natural "cataclysm" turned out to be a gift from God for our soldiers in the hot August of the forty-second year. See for yourself, as a result of the collapse of the rock, as I have already said, a sloping hollow was formed in the place of the fallen off block. From year to year it was overgrown with black forest: oak, maple, linden, hazel, buckthorn and euonymus. It was in this place, and in no other place, that the mountain thickets in hollows and ravines served as an excellent natural camouflage for the first shock battalions of the 25th Guards Division. The guardsmen, by the shortest and rather secretive route from the Osinki farm and from the suburbs of the village of Anoshkino, quickly penetrated the patch of the settlement and the southeastern corner of the Storozhevsky forest.

Before that, let's be more specific, the soldiers had to force the shallow old channel of the New Don on punt boats, followed by the first channel of the Don River, then wade through the vine-grown Ostrov. And once again to cross, but now through the last wider channel of the river. And then, along the narrow strip of the Don bank and the sloping slope of the hollow, jump out onto the mountain as soon as possible. The “Storozhevsky foothold” will be a wooded area between the “Collapse”, the Titchikh farm (after the expulsion of the Hungarian garrison from it) and Selyavny II. (Footnote 6: Steep to the right in 1821 chalk wall, and behind it ravines and hollowswas called with me - “Collapseohm», so this whole tousled arraywe will continue to refer to. - Approx. A.T.).

The Red Army soldiers from the shock group not only managed to successfully carry out a covert landing in the Storozhevsky forest near the Khazar settlement, but also to push the enemy from well-fortified positions. Our soldiers thus opened the way for the near future for the main forces of the 25th and other divisions to the land cleared of the enemy over the Don.

From these two patches, marked on the map, the heroic "Storozhevskaya bridgehead" will take the fighting start. Just a small area (today it can be bypassed and explored in detail in a few hours) of liberated land, two kilometers from the village of Storozhevoe. Only our warriors of the division will have to move towards the village soon and, to bitter regret, more than once along the deadly front field. In our beautiful black soil (did not the warriors of the infamous Admiral Horthy dream of hosting for centuries on it?), Deeply plowed over these summer and autumn months with bombs and shells. A field sown in winter not with cereals, but with the corpses of Red Army soldiers and enemy soldiers.

But it was on this black soil and in the village itself that this time the vaunted fascist tanks, howitzers and armored vehicles stalled. Without looking back, the miserable remnants of the inglorious squad of the zealous accomplice of the Nazis Horthy fled to their kingdom, without reaching the desired goal - to throw the Red Army soldiers into the icy waters of the Don and become the owners of someone else's tasty land. The land allegedly promised to the Hungarians, who were hungry for other people's goods, by Adolf Hitler himself.

On the bowl-shaped field between the forest and the village, the Soviet “thirty-fours” of the breakthrough, accompanied by the shock battalions of the guards, managed to break through the enemy’s defenses several times and even occupy Storozhevoye, which was heavily fortified by the Magyars. But then they had to retreat under the blows of the German troops, who each time rescued their cowardly allies. Yes, our soldiers had to back away until, in January 1943, a sufficient number of division personnel and various types of weapons were accumulated for a more powerful and successful throw in the Ostrogozhsko-Rossoshsky operation.

Reflections of the division commander on the operational map

But we are in too much of a hurry, since the desired and effective throw will occur much later.

In the meantime, the commander of the 25th Guards Division P.M. Shafarenko leans over the opened operational map and wonders what benefits the forthcoming rather risky and the first (!) Offensive operation in that black 42nd year promises to his division. Let me "voice" his thoughts "to himself": “Looking at the map, one can easily assess the significance of the future foothold. A large cape, stretched to the east from the Storozhevoye, Uryv line, skirted around the Don, reliably protecting it from flank attacks. The forest to the west of the village of Titchikha blocked the area of ​​possible crossings from the enemy. The dominant heights on the bridgehead provided us with good observation, and deep ravines to the west of Selyavnoye and Storozhevoy created natural anti-tank obstacles.

All this is indeed true. But on the map to the general, agree with me, no matter how you look at it, you won’t see in the face either the self-confident Nazis or the cowardly Horthists, who are essentially hiding behind their backs. All of them hid high and deep in trenches, trenches, dugouts of a full profile. The Magyars, most likely, did not even allow the theoretical thought that the Red Army was so strong there, across the wide river, that it would appear before their watchful eye.

Here, in fairness, it should be clarified that the “valiant” royal divisions of Admiral Miklos Horthy, a reliable accomplice of Hitler, in any case avoided head-on collisions with the guards of the 25th division. They especially avoided fighting at night, they were afraid, like fire, of a bayonet fight (in each of which our soldiers showed themselves to be excellent masters) in their own trenches, and even more so in positions occupied by the Russians.

But, as the previous and subsequent events in the occupied Storozhevo will show and show, the vicious Hungarians have shown and will still show themselves as masters of the most sophisticated torture of prisoners of war and civilians. Yes, and they fought not only under the strict supervision of, of course, the brave and smart Germans, but also under their constant and reliable cover. So, if the wards of the revanchist admiral were in danger, the German fighter and bomber aircraft were always ready to help, but not without reason, panicking and abandoning combat positions of the Magyars, successfully attacked by the units of General Shafarenko. Powerful fascist artillery, multi-barreled Vanyusha rocket launchers, tanks, armored vehicles, accompanied by Wehrmacht motorized infantry, promptly responded to the screams of alarmists.

But our soldiers, recent workers, and most of all the same yesterday's non-literate collective farmers, a certain number of enlightened intellectuals, had no one to rely on. And at the beginning of the reorganization of the Don, imagine, and there is nothing. And all because of the lack of even ordinary rifles for the entire personnel. More often, as we have long been accustomed to rely on our own hands and our natural ingenuity. Therefore, in an unthinkably short period of time, it was necessary to rearm, and where it was necessary to rearm all branches of the armed forces.

The author of the memoirs, without going over to specific individuals, tells how the difficult ABC of military art was comprehended by the majority of untrained and unfired workers and peasants, cut off by the war from peaceful economic concerns. As regular soldiers - the "old men" who survived the retreat, the seconded sailors of different fleets went to the rescue of the recruits. These volunteer mentors were excellent assistants to the commanders. And the personnel of the division had a lot to learn. In order to force the wide and rather deep Don near the northwestern outskirts of Anoshkino and downstream, army, front-line and divisional sapper battalions worked daily, covertly and secretly. In advance and for future use, they delivered rafts, punt boats made by soldiers with a capacity of three to five people, barrels and just boards to the places of the planned crossings. (Footnote 7 : The then width of the Don behind the "Island" and in front of it, downstream and upstream, was up to 130 m, its depth reached from 7 to 8 mnomoat andeven muchdeeper. - Approx. A.T.)

So, says the colonel, the sappers dispersed and camouflaged about a hundred of their own and peasant punts on the "Island", which for a while became for them an island of their own treasures. Opposite the cliff "Collapse", as well as on the left bank, in front of the village of Anoshkino, in the thick thickets of the willow, they dispersed and disguised primitive rafts, barrels, in a word, all the means necessary for forcing. (Footnote 8: The last time I managed to visit the "Island" was in 1974. Together withthose same sonsyamiforeman Mark Ivanovich. In childhooddthriftybullies,laterbosom friends: Andengineer from Lugansk Anatoly Kuryanov and hisjuniorbrother, also an engineer at Novovoronezh NPP, Vasily. We landed peaceful landing on the "Island", bpurposefully wandered back and forth along the narrow sandyoh stripe.This hitvery clean pathbordered with impassable willowAndprickly blackberry shootshumpbackedthe surface of the island, inaccessibleus,floorcoal travelers.It is thought toakim "Island" wasdiscovered by scouts of the 25th division during the war years, so, but even more dreamy, He appearedbefore us in the seventies. -Note. A.T.)

To the south, downstream of the Don, opposite the Titchikh farm, on the Starokhovostansky left bank, bulky military pontoons were brought in and also carefully camouflaged for the future regular ferry crossing of the main forces of several divisions. The ferry service will operate regularly until mid-December, when the ice on the river becomes thick and reliable enough.

But already from the first days of August, the entire personnel of the 25th Infantry Division, from ordinary soldiers to their commanders, ending with political instructors and staff officers of all units, did not sit, as they say, idly by. Former civilians, in order to become experienced fighters and outplay the more experienced fascists in the art of war, according to the author of the memoirs, around the clock, in any weather, step by step worked out in similar hilly areas, remote from the future bridgehead, phased episodes of the upcoming responsible battle: “The preparation of units for forcing, the construction of rafts and boats was carried out on the Bityug River near the town of Bobrov on similar terrain (forty kilometers fromfuture "Storozhevsky bridgehead". - Approx. A.T.). There we trained in the order of battle in which we were supposed to act. Regimental commanders constantly increased their demands, carefully polished each element of the upcoming offensive. We spared no effort: everyone understood that the success of the operation largely depends on the organization and speed of forcing and attacking. And the day and hour "X" of the first offensive operation of the 25th division was inexorably approaching.

Difficult in learning - not easier in battle

In the operational plan of the combat operation it seemed that the most unpredictable options that could arise in the course of the offensive were envisaged. The specific tasks of each soldier, squad, company, battalion were determined. In parallel, there was a competent staff work of the highest officers of all branches of the armed forces to coordinate the joint actions of ground and air forces. And it must be said that the commanders of aviation, artillery, tank units, and infantry, while clarifying the tactical tasks of the upcoming battle for the bridgehead, observed increased precautions and camouflage. Because they had to work collectively in close proximity to the front line of enemy defense. Under the noses of the Magyars, who had settled on the chalk cliffs, they calculated options for attacking these mountains, including the enemy’s powerful sentry node of resistance: by days, hours and minutes from the beginning and so on until the end of the operation.

The result of the fruitful cooperation of the persons involved in this event was the high coordination of the various branches of the armed forces in the first minutes and hours of the fighting to seize the bridgehead, in the subsequent defense of the conquered patch of our land. Courage and heroism have already been shown by truly combat-ready infantrymen, artillerymen, tankers, pilots, mortarmen of the Guards volley fire divisions - the famous Katyushas.

From the height of the years of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be surprised at how the then complex military mechanisms with knowledge of the matter began to be controlled, to conduct aimed and effective fire, our most ordinary peasants and the children of peasants, recent workers. Superhuman circumstances and hard military labor in the war prompted intellectuals, workers and collective farmers to become highly qualified specialists in a short time. For people of subsequent generations, these are real epic heroes of a fateful time for our vast Motherland. Therefore, when reading the memoirs of the division commander, you have no doubt about the dramatic change that began to occur to our soldiers in the second half of the forty-second year. The primordial love of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian peoples for the Fatherland called, called for revenge for our land, for the grief of the elderly, widows and mothers who found themselves on the other side of the front.

In addition, at the Storozhevsky bridgehead, the fighters of the 25th division, along with the breaking of consciousness, which, as you know, is the most difficult to change, with accumulating anger against the Nazis, will begin to fight in a new, higher and honorary status - guards. It was on the bridgehead that the twenty-fifth division received this high and binding name. At the same time, the soldiers who distinguished themselves in the first vital battle were awarded brand new badges of the guards. Which, undoubtedly, was an important step in raising the morale and authority of the fighters and commanders.

How the Guards Recaptured and Expanded the Storozhevskaya Bridgehead

A significant role in the success of the skillfully thought-out Stavka private operation on the Don near Storozhevoy was played by the effect of surprise. Such an unexpected assault and breakthrough of a reliable defense, being in the euphoria of swift marches across the Voronezh land, the Horthy people did not expect at all. And, it turns out, in vain they overestimated their capabilities: “On the night of August 5, the division took up its starting position for the offensive. Our aviation did not give the enemy rest, exhausting him with raids. The next night, when the forcing was to begin, the pilots of the 191st Assault Aviation Division, hanging flares, unmistakably bombed the targets reconnoitered during the day. We didn't sleep that night. At the NP (observation post. - Note. A.T.) the commissar was with me E.V. Bobrov and artillery commander Colonel V.P. Chistyakov. We keep track of time. And finally, Chistyakov orders into the phone:

- Charge... Pull the cords...

There are seconds left. And it's exactly 3 hours and 30 minutes. Turning to me, Chistyakov says:

- It's time!

The roar of artillery, the howl of guards mortars, flashes of volleys broke the night darkness and silence. A fiery wall of explosions rose on the enemy shore.

In the Storozhevoe area, forcing began immediately after the first fire raid. The high bank, occupied by the enemy, formed a "dead" space at its base. It allowed the fighters to accumulate below, under a slope, still in the course of artillery preparation.

Soldiers of the 2nd battalion of senior lieutenant G.L. Relin on rafts, boats and improvised means quickly crossed the Don and from the "dead" space began to climb steeply. As soon as our artillery moved the fire into the depths, they attacked the enemy, burst into the trenches and in hand-to-hand combat - with grenades, fire, bayonet and butt - began to beat the Nazis, stunned by the sudden appearance of the guards. (As for bayonets and butts, the division commander, Colonel P.M. Shafarenko, does not exaggerate here at all. Russian soldiers mastered the art of hand-to-hand combat in all past centuries. The German soldiers of Fedor von Bock, advancing on Moscow: "Yesterday I dismissed the division commander, who reported that the Russians repelled his attack, fighting with hammers and shovels. "From the report of Field Marshal Theodor von Bock, November 24, 1941. To be frank, it was the twentieth century in the yard, and not year 1812! And not from a good life, Soviet soldiers grabbed hammers and shovels at the beginning of the war. On the occasion of the next anniversary of Victory Day, in a television interview, former sapper Viktor Martynenko admitted: "Our rifle, due to its length (with mounted on the barrel bayonet) in hand-to-hand combat, especially in narrow trenches, was unsuitable. While you turn around with it, the German managed to bang you on the head with a machine gun. Therefore, the Red Army went on reconnaissance with German machine guns). Height 186.2 was captured, the first resistance of the enemy was broken, and the battalionbegan to move forward in battle.

It was not easy for the advancing battalions to overcome our chalk steeps. Movement through the mountains and ravines was especially difficult for artillerymen with anti-tank guns, who found themselves in the "dead zone" at the foot of the chalk mountains, between the "East Bark" and "Collapse". After processing frontal, army and divisional artillery, volleys of rocket launchers, bomber aircraft of the front line of the enemy in the enemy trenches, a fleeting hand-to-hand fight began between the attacking fighters and the defending Magyar soldiers. There, on the mountains, the gunners who had crossed over hurried to occupy the previously planned firing lines. They had to immediately provide real assistance to the fighting comrades. Especially those who, having left the first line of the Hungarian trenches, began to successfully move deep into the defenses of the enemy, stunned by surprise.

Climbing up the difficult and slippery slopes of the mountains, the artillerymen were forced to cut out with axes and picks the corresponding tracks for the wheels of the cannons in centuries-old chalk and rocky rock. Along those man-made paths, they pulled them uphill on ropes, on their overworked shoulders and calloused soldier's hands.

Look once again carefully at the high peaks of the chalk mountains. And if you can, then visit them. What? Do they really impress you? Abstracting from those distant events, it is still difficult for us to imagine how it happened that the preparation of Soviet troops to capture the bridgehead reliably fortified by the Magyars and the beginning of the operation itself went unnoticed by enemy observers. Moreover, the night itself (which the Hungarian boyguzes were so afraid of!) The Russian counterattack was so unexpected for the big-eyed enemy.

Even the leader and eyewitness of a private, so to speak, operation is surprised about this. Because, P.M. Shafarenko, over the location of the division entrusted to him, annoying, constantly circled, tediously buzzed, looking out and photographing, the twin-body German reconnaissance aircraft FW-189, "Rama". (Snoska 9: Whatthereneithersteal, butGerman air reconnaissance was at a high level. Stepan, the eldest son of our hosts in Mastyugino, storyyvalbrothersVasily and Alexey: "Enemy reconnaissance on motorcyclesdrove through their streetsvillages andreachedoutskirts. Far, to the southeaste, survivedbuildings Watchtower. The Germans stopped at once.And here, out of nowhere,an airplane chirped over their heads. We thought, Stepan continued, that it was the "maize man" who had flown in to bomb the Fritz. But the plane, unlike the U-2, was single-winged. Having made a circle over the motorcyclists, he flew away towards Watchtower. Returned their air scout, and thiswasexactlywingedscout, pretty fast. Descending, he dropped motorcyclists some thing that looks like a tube for drawings,Anddisappeared over the horizon. The Germans ran up to this thing, opened the lid of the pencil case. And in it - map, probably,Storozhevskyth terrain. The guys from the hillock could still see how the scouts over itoval, conferred for a very short time, then jumped onmotorcyclescages, making surefinally,that the path is completely safe for them, and drove off to your village» . In a word, promptly, however, not quite “perfectly well” they then succeeded. "Thirty-fours", disguised by tankers in the Romanov gardens, did not notice enemy scouts, both air and ground. Having arranged a short halt in our street, the Germans managed to credit a whole bucket of boiled frogs, which the boys had caught in the pond. And only after finishing with the frog legs, without suspecting anything, the Germans drove off to where they had come from.)

Yes, you will see for yourself that from the height of the mountains and without an air reconnaissance officer, everything that moves or hides from them on such a close opposite coast should have been visible to the Magyars. But it turns out that our enemies overlooked what the soldiers of the 25th Guards Division were preparing for them. An incredible miracle happened then. It is incomprehensible to the mind how smart men and guys managed to outwit the enemy? While preparing for the operation, they seemed to have disappeared into the Don fogs of August nights, turning into invisible men capable of solving complex combat missions.

“One can have different attitudes towards the personality of V.I. Lenin,” writes Alexander Plekhanov, “but what cannot be denied to the leader of the world proletariat is an extremely clear assessment of certain events.” In our case, a brief but capacious conclusion by V.I. Lenin, which became the epigraph of the essay: "Broken armies learn well." He definitely noticed such a metamorphosis with defeated armies at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Vladimir Lenin, the defeat of the army of any country gives it not only a deplorable result, but also a useful shake-up and the possibility of serious work on mistakes. "Homework" after the defeat, which had to be done by the leadership of the country or the command of the armed forces in the very near future, given the serious mistakes and shortcomings. There are more than enough such examples in the military history and deplorable practice of many states. The same Workers 'and Peasants' Army during the life of V.I. Lenina, battered and beaten more than once in battles with the enemies of the young Soviet country, is no exception.

A lot of useful and necessary was learned in a matter of months of the forty-first and forty-second years of the Patriotic War by the generals and soldiers of the defeated and demoralized divisions of the Red Army. But their defeat, and then their rebirth into a qualitatively different army, took place under different, more difficult, circumstances. So many unimaginable changes took place in military affairs that even the brilliant Lenin could not foresee. At the end of the thirties, on the battlefields in Europe and on the open spaces of the oceans and seas, the countries at war at that time demonstrated the unprecedented power of weapons being created or already created. The latest methods of warfare were radically different. Fascist Germany was especially successful in mastering advanced technologies and the experience of modern wars, crushing many neighboring large and small states under itself by 1941. She had absolutely nothing left - to add the former mistress of the seas, England. However, the demoniac Fuhrer, having played tricks once again and not finally finished with his sworn enemy - Winston Churchill, recklessly turned the high-class divisions of the Wehrmacht to the Soviet Union. Neither the still young socialist power, nor its armed forces, as former and current military experts and historians of our days prove, were neither morally nor physically ready for such a sharp turn of events. The steel columns of German tanks almost unhindered captured many large cities and villages, reaching almost the suburbs of Moscow itself and taking the city of Leningrad into a suffocating ring of blockade. Having received an unexpectedly tangible defeat near Moscow in the winter of forty-one, the Nazis, nevertheless, did not abandon the notorious blitzkrieg. And in the summer of the forty-second year, having been forced to refuse to take the tasty Stalinist Moscow, the Germans with their allies moved east and south. Again, as in June 1941, they did not encounter any serious resistance on their way from the randomly retreating units of the Red Army. So the fascist armada reached Kharkov, Belgorod, Kursk, then the regional center, the city of Voronezh, were next on their way. That's when 2nd Hungarian Army unexpectedly for us, she ended up on Voronezh land and moved along the right bank of the Don towards our village.

So the inhabitants of Storozhevoye, to their great regret and amazement, saw with their own eyes in July of the forty-second year how our unarmed soldiers trotted from German avalanches equipped with advanced technology and their allies - the Magyars. There was no one to stop the Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, Slovaks, Finns, rushing countless locusts from the Voronezh land further to the city on the Volga - Stalingrad.

Until now, still no, no, yes, and the angry voices of bewildered and angry, frightened Glinov women will sound in their ears, carried away by time: , right up to . s heels are stuck in them. We are being handed over to the Germans, damned devils!

Dense grandfathers, especially those who are more pompous, like grandfather Filka Gurov, Ilya Kondratievich, grandfather Lazar, let go after the fugitives in sweaty torn tunics and windings words and expressions much saltier and more offensive. Our local fathers-benefactors, who drove off beyond the Don and betrayed us, also got it in pursuit. You will forgive me, these sophisticated phrases of purely Storozhevsky folklore, even in our time of democratic permissiveness, it is still a shame to voice them.

It seemed that an irreparable and irreversible universal misfortune had happened and was seen in reality by my fellow villagers both for the army and for the whole country. However, that was, I repeat, July of the black one thousand nine hundred and forty-two.

Having retreated behind a wide natural water barrier, our troops occupied many kilometers of defense from the unconquered Voronezh to Liski and downstream of the Don. Far away, across the river, as mentioned above, they did not gather for long with new strengthmi. Commanders hastily formed new battalions, units, regiments, and divisions of the 40th Army of the Voronezh Front from scattered retreating Red Army groups and sparsely manned units. P.M. Shafarenko, the future commander of the 160th Division, soon renamed the 25th Guards, arrived from the Kalinin Front. Having strengthened physically, having noticeably learned military affairs, not quite thoroughly (the Stalingrad Front demanded a lot of money), but nevertheless, having rearmed, the guardsmen had no moral right to retreat deep into the country. And indiscriminately, as it was a year ago, they did not want to surrender.

In order to win back an advantageous foothold not far from Watchtower One (for me even now it sounds like a repeated chorus), they were the first (!) Attacked a stronger and more numerous enemy, believing in themselves and their commanders. P. M. Shafarenko turned out to be not lumpy at all.

Watchtower's first short-lived release

And now imagine the following picture: no sooner had the guardsmen of the 25th division managed to win back the strategically important patch-bridgehead from the Nazis, when they immediately, as they say, immediately made an attempt to liberate and liberated the Titchikha farm, occupied the suburb of Selyavnoye and approached the village of my childhood - Storozhevoe , thus expanding the area of ​​the future foothold. How they did it, read the author's memoirs: “By this time, Relin’s battalion crossed the Don and fought on the outskirts of Storozhevoe. The units of the fortified area could not overcomethe river (failed, because the Red Army had to advance in open areas and cross under enemy dagger fire, up settled in the village of Arkhangelskoye, a kilometer from Storozhevoy the course of the Don. - Approx. A.T.) The situation demanded first of all to master Storozhev. We decided to move the main efforts of the first echelon of the division to the right in order to free Storozhevoye and the adjacent heights, and then, having brought the 81st regiment into battle, from the rear to strike at the Horthy grouping against our left flank. Calling Bilyutin to the phone, I ordered him to send the 3rd battalion of captain V.Ya. Trifonov, so that he bypassed Storozhevoe from the southeast and mastered a height of 195.0.

Height 195.0 is most likely the "Eastern Baroque" and the streets adjacent to it - Hillock, Romanov Order, Otrog. (Footnote 10: It is in the Spurmany, many years later, a memorial sign will be erected and Otrog Street renamed in honor ofregiment commanderKondraty Bilyutin and his soldiers, who were the first to break into the villageat the beginning of August forty-two... This was reportedI recently Tatyana Tsukanova (Osipova), a resident of Storozhevoe. - Approx. A.T.)

Here you should at least mentally sympathize with me and even for solidarity, experience together. And that's why, reading the colonel's memoirs, I quickly wanted to know what and how happened on the very, very first day of the offensive in Storozhevoe? Even now I still clearly imagine our pre-war village. Often, hobbled along its crooked streets and lanes on crooked and unstable legs, with my mother on major holidays, with one of my two older brothers on weekdays, we went to the "guests". So we called visits to relatives, or even just to good neighbors and numerous namesakes. Thanks to these frequent trips, I still remember well the solid and beautiful house of Father Mikhail, which became the board of the Soviet collective farm, the vast priests' garden, which no one in the village had, especially the pre-war Glinovka Street. And on it - a short order of the Tyunins. At its end, almost above the steepest and most memorable Chalk Mountain, stood our spacious hut. It was from her that those trial steps into the exciting world of rural childhood began. If for a child of my age at that time it would take more than one day, or even a whole week, to get around Storozhevoe, which consisted of a thousand farmsteads, then for an adult, anyone can walk diagonally, slowly, through the village for forty minutes or from forces in an hour from the extreme huts of the Run to Glinovka or from the beginning of Samodurovka to the last huts of the Otrog.

And yet, nevertheless, when in the notes of P.M. Shafarenko, the description began - a coil, "in my imagination, I could not reconstruct a holistic picture of hand-to-hand combat between the Red Army and the Magyars. ( Footnote 11: Perhaps also because the division commander did not have specific street names on the map. He justlistingl titlessurroundingsat down and villages. Mspruce heights from behind of the same military expediency were designated and readhimjust two andwhetherthree-digit numbers with fractions.- Approx. A.T.) How did our fighters, in my impatient look, for too long, downright snail's pace, moved through the village, with a fight recapturing from the Magyars someone's, let's say, surviving or already destroyed hut. But each of the rural buildings was neither Pavlov's urban multi-storey brick house in the city on the Volga, nor a long Stalingrad street with similar tall buildings, even if dilapidated. But still, let's assume so, at least for a few meters, heaping or towering empty-eyed ruins on both sides.

Therefore, no matter how you fantasize, no matter how you strain your inflamed imagination, it was impossible to imagine and really perceive anything like that. It was simply that at that time in the village, as, say, in the same Stalingrad, there were no multi-storey stone buildings. In the end, I was also forced to slow down my pace, to belittle the misplaced impatience. And step by step, no longer, as in childhood, step by step, so as not to miss something important, mentally "follow" ... on the heels of our soldiers.

It is imperative to remind you at this point that even before the Nazi invasion of the village of Storozhevoye, our brand new brick "skyscrapers" - a two-story school and a one-story maternity hospital, except for the four dome pillars (disassembled into bricks for the Davydov drying plant) of the Epiphany Church, were bombed by crusading vultures to the foundation, or rather, to the most ruined foundations. And many village huts were also not saved by the beginning of the fighting in Storozhevoe.

Mournful, brightly burning, especially at night, torches, remembered for many years, they saw us off. At that time, we all involuntarily moved away from them under the escort of the Magyars and the merciless August sun, first to the collective farm field camp, not far from the present Voronezh-Ostrogozhsk highway. On it, anxious old men and sobbing women, and with them frightened children, spent the first and not the last sleepless night. And all this happened in the light of the nearby Storozhevsky and distant Voronezh conflagrations. In the morning we continued our mournful journey to the enemy's rear. This nightmare happened to us a few days earlier, shortly before the capture of the village by the Red Army division P.M. Shafarenko.

And then I read, not looking up from the commander's text, and I can't believe my eyes:

« In Watchdog (as if in the destroyed Voronezh or Stalingrad!? - Approx. A.T.) stubborn street battles were already going on, Relin's battalion, reflecting continuous counterattacks, moved slowly." I repeat, it is very difficult for me to imagine how it was that on the streets and in the lanes of our beautiful village there was once a battle and not just a battle, but a heavy and protracted one. Therefore, my soul was tormented this time by rather contradictory feelings. Yes, for me it was, indeed, the day when my heart was torn to pieces from sadness and at the same time overflowed with bright joy. But how could it be otherwise? Firstly, the main characters in that long-standing battle were our helpless and miserable soldiers who did not run away from the Germans and Magyars at the end of July 42. This time, on the contrary, already steadfast warriors went into battle, having mastered the offensive initiative and the desire to bring the work they had begun to its logical conclusion.

How not to admire even now, so many years later, such a noticeable and important change in the ranks of the attacking Red Army: “Heavy fighting was still going on in Storozhevoe. Only by the morning of August 8th (the operation to capture the bridgehead began on the night of August 6! - Note. A.T.) two battalions of the 78th Regiment and one battalion of the 81st Regiment completed the liberation of Storozhevoy and captured Hill 195.0, holding which firmly blocked the right flank of the division from enemy counterattacks ". Say what you like, the Hungarian occupiers settled down thoroughly and, most importantly, for a long time in the village and dug in its environs. However, in the very first battle they were forced to give up their "impregnable" positions to the Russians.

Now I will explain why the difference between the enthusiastic beginning of the operation to liberate the village and its final completion was striking. They liberated the village. But I, without reading the commander's notes, knew that Storozhevoye would be completely deserted until it was released. So you, dear readers, will finally be convinced: it was not the fruit of a childhood fantasy that roamed on the pages of my memoirs. I mean the cycle of essays “War didn’t catch me as a soldier ...”, in which he described how we, adults and children, every single one, were pushed by the bloodthirsty Magyars with rifle butts first from our homes to Polyana, to the center of the village, and then out of Storozhevoe . This happened, I remind you, in July of the forty-second year, before the first and not the last, unfortunately, the battle of the guards for our village . Footnote12 : Strongplease pay your attention to thisimportantth fact: alreadythe order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Joseph Stalin dated November 17, 1941 gOh yeah. In it he obligedcommanders of the retreating units of the Red Army to evacuate the civilian population along with their belongingsand living creaturesinland. Pabandoned housing stock - to destroy, not leaving it to the enemy as winter quarters.

In Storozhevoye, the well-known order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief on the evacuation of the civilian population to the rear by our command, to the great chagrin of the inhabitants, left to the mercy of the invaders, was not carried out. Or carried out only for a limited circle of people: from among the rural and collective farm leadership. For example, our local bosses even got ahead of the retreating Red Army soldiers, having driven off in advance, together with their household members and the good, "acquired by overwork", beyond the Don - first to Anoshkino, and later to Davydovka and even further.

As for the housing stock, even before the first liberation of Watchtower, it was completely destroyed. But it is difficult to say who tried more to wipe out one hundred percent of the village huts from the face of the earth. Most likely, both opposing sides, who did not want to cede the territory of the war to each other, succeeded to the same extent.

You will not envy the inhabitants of our village

But, I repeat intentionally, the evacuation was carried out at an accelerated pace by the Hungarian escorts, driving us in a completely opposite direction and with more tragic and life-threatening consequences for us. (ABOUT some of these troubles I told in the first and subsequent essays of the cycle "Me is a war soldierom didn’t find ... ”- Approx. A.T.) Since in the dead village, which also became a fiery dividing line between our troops and the Nazi troops, it was dangerous for civilians to be. Overnight, not a single living soul remained in Storozhevoe.

A year or a year and a half later, the residents who returned from the evacuation will be confirmed: not a single one! Unless, except for the wild domestic cats that have run wild and fled away from the explosions of bombs and shells. By that time, the invaders had managed to shoot all the dogs. Village mongrels caused pathological rabies in the evil and cowardly Magyars. These "civilized" barbarians hated them just as fiercely as, indeed, the Russian people, mistaking both for partisans or for indirect accomplices of the partisans.

And as the residents of Storozhevoe wanted, let's imagine a similar street rejoicing that everything was happening, but quite the opposite. Without any doubt, then the soldiers of the 25th Guards Division P.M. Shafarenko, who broke into the village, were joyfully met by old men and women, women, their children, leaving the primitive and temporary shelters in which they sat out during an unexpected battle. All of them, immensely happy, jumped out into the light of day, began to hug and kiss their dear liberators.

However, this “if only yes if only” did not actually happen. . (Footnote 13: Since the guardswere at that timein the neighboring village of Mastyugino and other nearbyvillages andfarms, from which the occupiers will drive them out to a more distant rear in a week or two.

To our Fortunately, many moved then onevillagers, including our family, from Mastyugino toI buy Potudan on my own,without the bastard Magyar convoy.- Approx. A.T.)

But a completely bleak episode of the terrible panorama of the war appeared before the eyes of the Red Army in a destroyed and depopulated village: “... freeing Watchtower,- the author of the notes reflects further, - guardsmen of the battalion V.G. Kazakov was found in one of the public barns, seven corpses of executed collective farmers. Nearby, in the former government buildingcollective farm (priest's house. - Approx. A.T.), hosted a military post office. In addition to correspondence, there were many parcels with stolen items. When I told about it, I thought how natural everything was: those who were shot and loot".

Again, conditionally scroll the events in reverse order, if the division commander with his fighters had been in the village a few days earlier, they would have seen a more terrible picture. When the relatives of the non-military and wounded Red Army soldiers, tortured and torn to pieces by the Magyars, hastily buried their corpses in the front gardens, in the gardens. All of them, without trial or investigation, the Hungarian punishers tortured and tortured with a cruel death. Just think about it, in one village there are eighty innocent people who have nothing to do with the partisans, who do not have firearms. For a long time I was worried about the same question: did our soldiers surrender Storozhevoe to the Nazis without firing a shot? Why, in the end, none of the Storozhevites made even the slightest attempt to somehow "annoy" the Germans or the Magyars?

I received an unexpected answer quite recently from a native of our village, R.N. Karaulova . I quote her first letter almost without corrections and abbreviations: "This is from my stories.mothers,at that time sevensummer girl Masha,- writes Raisa Nikolaevna.- INJuly 1942, the author of the letter then repeatsmom's words then inserts withOprivatethoughts, ourthe Belkin family lived at the end of the street, whichI was then called Run. Directly from usosse road ledto the westV side of Mastyugino village. In one morningpre-war village life was disturbed by the chirping of motorcycles with foreign soldiers. Notmtsy, and it was they, wheel for a long timewhether in the village and, making sure that there are no owls in the villagechildren's soldiers and partisans, after a whiledisappeared. And only thenappearedlongconvoy, loadednammunition and other military ammunitionaccompaniedHungariansoldier. But dthe Magyar wiggledconvoy not along the main rural road, but across the field, beyondgardens of the residents of Kiselevka Street. ABOUTbosethiskept the waydirectlyto the guard forest.

Justunhurriedstringarmywagon, harnessedgiven by short-tailed bityugs, disappeared fromand Kiselyov gardens, likefromambushes, rumbling engines, rolled outthree of our "thirty"fours. Womenblihlying houses immediately jumped out into the street, not really understanding what was happening? Tonly that there were Germans with the Magyarsand suddenly our tanksappeared. Soldiers and old womenhave become hastily treat young tankersWhobreadWhofat, but most of all- milk. Holothese guys togetherdevoured delicious village grubs. Having frozen the worm, tankers rushed on theirformidablecars following the retreating convoy. It was these three tanks that destroyed the Hungarian cartsalong with the soldiers.

My grandmother Alyonka, adds Raisa Nikolaevna,also endureda bowl of milk, asunexpected meeting andsoonparting with the tankers took place from the beginning to theircompletion near ourhuts and therefore remembered for a long timeWithto my relativesand then grandchildren.

Hereplanes have flownmost likely ourstarteddisorderlybomb the village. Grandmother was very sick, she could hardly move around the house. Oneand the bomb fell close toHouses. It exploded so that the blast wave threw the grandmother off the stove onto the floor. During the following bombings and artillerymother's lerian shellingthe family began to hide in a brick house, because bullets and shrapnel easily pierced throughwooden house walls.

Very soon they broke into the village Hungarian punishers, and the hunt for partisans began. Indiscriminatelythey grabbedold people dragged out of the hutsand shedsimmobilized wounded KrasnoarMeets. Along the way, they were taken away from peasant estatesfor your own sake cows,piglets,calves, sheep, lovil poultry. We thentook away the only wet nurse- cowMilku.

Prudent neighbors even before the raidexecutioners andmarauderstriedhide from predatory aliensezemtsev their simple goodness. Mom'ssisters, Marfusha and Dunya (fourteen and fifteen years old respectively) managed to bury two chests with clothes in the ground among plum trees, and a basket with chicken eggs- into the potato furrow.But can you hide everything from bandits in military uniform?

After another bombing, the Nazis began to expelbadults and childrento the clearing, again in front of our house. Driven fifty people,lined up a circle and orderedeveryone sit downsquatting. Then dragged outfrom those sitting on the ground young fellow villagerThey tied his hands behind his back and put him on his knees. Moh my mom wasalmost next to thosem a man. ABOUTon very afraid and tried to hide behindmy mother- Alena's grandmother Here the Magyars, apparently, Forforestintimidationwomen and childrenset fire toGrandma's closest houseShusherin's neighbor Tikhon. Wooden house burst into flamesinstantly and burned like a match. INworried about the yard andcackledsurvivorschickens, scattering in all directions,heart-rendinglythe cattle roaredsensed something was wrong. On the street, livehumancircle, weptfrightenedchildren, followed by women.

Suddenly, women's and children's crying drowned outsharprifle fire. And it beganterriblebloodyperformance organizednone other than satanists: in front ofcrazy women andexecutioners cut off children to a manat firstnose, then ears, began to cut the skin on the hands togetherwith muscles. His wife, mother of twox small children, sobbed out loud. But maDyar put a pistol to her templeand the woman, frightened to death, fell silent. And the executioners, on the contrary, enjoyingbloody scene, continued slow execution, constantly shoutingthe same wordfor all present: "Partisan! Partisan!"Athat young manby the way, grandmother'sneighbor, alsoeNotwas nothingpartisan. poor guy, Withtoya nbut on his knees, did not say a wordunifiedwords. From itopen wounds ooze profuselyblood, lots of blood. Instead of a beautiful human face- disfigured bloody mess. Those present involuntarily remembered his white, completely bare teeth. It seemed that the manSowIroko smiled at the audienceneighbors, and perhaps laughed at his tormentors. Bydi, find out now!Spectacle exclusivelycreepy. Then put the damned sadistswhethersilent victimsaton your feet, pushedand toditch and firedinto the temple Manimmediately fellbattleyonny on the spot with a bullet, outstretched hands. With the toe of his boot, the fascist pushed the behelloKhan's corpse in a ditch to the rootsyoung ash. So the disfigured corpse of Dmitry remained lyingTurishchev, mother's friend's father, above the ground,because the armed monsters did not allow him to be buried.

When they returned from evacuationhissurvivors relatives, then buried Mitya's bones in the ground. Only in the 70s the remains of Dmitry Turishchevthey areinterred in the village cemetery, as expectedetsya, Pabout Christian practice. I, completing the letter, informsRaisa Nikolaevnaa, I remembered this story from childhood, repeated by my grandmother Alena and my mother.

After years, returninghome lateand eveningsmAnd, Mom and Ibypassedand ash side. Every timewefty was".

There would have been much more corpses of executed collective farmers and wounded Red Army soldiers if it were not for the heroic deed of a brave girl, whom we then called in an urban manner - Toska. In fact, she had a completely Russian surname - Neupokoeva, and her real name was Tatyana.

At the edge of the village, where Romanov order and Otrog streets go, there were public barns. And in one of those barns the Magyars herded many people. They drove them inside to shoot them in the pasture or burn them alive right in the barn. Foreign warriors did not even bother to put a sentry at the door. Apparently, the bastards believed that they intimidated every single inhabitant with their guns and inhuman antics. However, as we will see, intimidation was intimidated, but not everyone. Moreover, returning after some time to the barn to complete the atrocity, the Magyars saw the barn door open, and the room itself empty. Some were shot or burned alive. They rushed to look for the fugitives in the yards, but go and find the wind in the field, and even more so in the forest, which was very close by.

That is why those prisoners doomed to death, locked in a barn and released by a young girl to freedom, were not found either dead or alive in public barns on the southern outskirts of the village of Storozhevoye by the guards of the battalion commander V.G. Kazakov from the 25th Guards Division of P.M. Shafarenko, who cleared our village from the Hungarian invaders.

About who and how helped the hostages escape from captivity, Raisa Nikolaevna described in more detail in the following letter: « timid maidenabaloneTanya, in whom you can hardly find the heroic even with a very strong magnification, not afraid of the armedpunishers, opened the doorslockedof that warehouse and freedprisonersdoomed to die. All of them, tothen running, and who somehowhobbled, supporting one another,towards the forest andsafelyhid in its thickets. Magyars searched for a long timeNotpreviously identifiedpartisan”, who dared to a daring act under their very noses.

A cheekyoh girl, also not a partisan, out of fearhid inclosest to the barntoilet andstoodBythe mostearsin faeces until pitch darkness. In the village toilet "clean"Magyar satraps, of course,and did not think to look.

After the war,- at the endthisletters Raisa Nikolaevna does not forget to tell about the happy ending of a long history,- Tanya with my momMaria Ivanovnawere on peat extraction far from nace cityArkhangelsk. But alsoSofar from our villageher ex was looking for herthe prisoners of the barn, of course, from among the then Red Army soldiers. Tanya was nominated for an award(Vtoo much time has passed, and I don’t remember which one), but I know for sure that Tatiana and her son were givenurban fourroom apartment.

This is how it endedold story, a real heroinewhich was the unconquered Storozhev woman with the memorable bright name Tanya.

Something, but the Magyars knew how to avenge a far-fetched offense, mock the civilian population, rob other people's property and urgently transport it to their Hungary more efficiently and more efficiently than fighting in open battle with our military. This has been said more than once and is said in many reliable literary sources. I never tire of repeating this. So the bastards annoyed.

Therefore, the Hungarian warriors received the coveted land allotments, the most important, in the form of an uncountable number of graves on Voronezh land. One of them - unknown Magyar - in the garden of Storozhevsky grandfather Lyovka, next to the fence of the parental garden, I can show from memory to curious descendants who often come to us from Hungary - to take a walk through the places of "combat" glory of their inglorious ancestors.

The Germans rush to the rescue of unreliable allies

At all soon, the Germans hurried to Storozhevoy, recaptured from the enemy, to help the unfinished Hungarian warriors, who abandoned their positions and randomly retreated to the rear. The eternal hawks of all the wars they start, more brave and experienced than anyone in the battles on the fields of the Second World War, this time they quickly flocked and fled to the Watchtower at a critical time for the Hungarians: “ Already September 9th,- etcOshouldno general,- at 5:30, after a long artillery preparation and German air strikes, a new powerful counterattack of the enemy troops began. At 6:00, about twenty Junkers bombed Storozhevoy (!), And five minutes later 14 enemy aircraft bombed the height of 187.7 ... " It is difficult to judge what was left as a result of another shelling and bombing (this time by the Germans!) of our long-suffering wooden village. As if the author of the memoirs also took water in his mouth. More about the village - not a word ...

But we can say with full confidence that there were no chips left from those public barns. From the very ones in which there were seven unidentified corpses of my fellow countrymen. In all likelihood, the Magyars also mistook the elderly collective farmers for terrible partisans, which the poor fellows really were not. Most likely, the invaders continued to take revenge on the old men and wounded Red Army soldiers who, on their orders, did not have time to leave the village along with everyone else. They took out their anger, of course, for the sortie of the brave “thirty-fours” who destroyed the Hungarian soldiers and their military convoy.

But it is not surprising to figure out where and how our soldiers could hide during enemy bombing and shelling. They had just liberated the village and organized the defense of the strategic positions conquered from the enemy. Of course, in the dugouts and deep trenches of the expelled enemies. True, it was not necessary to sit out in other people's shelters for a long time. Since after the air raid and artillery fire, an enemy counterattack began, but already with tanks and infantry of the Wehrmacht. Once again, one will have to turn to the testimony of the author of the memoirs in order to more accurately recreate the subsequent stages of the defense of the captured positions and the German counteroffensive on them: "Commander of the 53rd UR (fortified area. - Approx. A.T.) Colonel Dashkevich reported that a heavy battle was going on in Storozhevoe. Having successfully repulsed two attacks by the Nazis, the machine gun and artillery battalion, unable to withstand the subsequent blows, began to retreat. The reserve thrown into battle did not change the situation. Germanscaptured the northern outskirts of Storozhevoe. (Yes, yes, these were no longer Magyars! The latter will be reorganized, replenished deserters and under the threat of a military tribunal will be returned to the positions abandoned by them as soon as the Germans finish the counteroffensive and restore the previous situation. - Approx. A.T.) As I suppose, the Germans captured the streets of the former Samodurovka and our Glinovka (how bad, I regret to say again that I don’t have a detailed map with the names of the streets of the village at hand, it would be much easier to navigate the terrain): "In the meantime, in the Storozhevoe area, events were taking on an increasingly formidable character."

The superiority in manpower and equipment in a protracted battle (with heavy losses among the Magyars and Germans, but even greater in the ranks of our soldiers advancing and defending the bridgehead) and this, not the last time, turned out to be on the side of the Germans. The Guardsmen had to leave the village of Watchtower First for the second time.

However, as the popular rumor of that time said, it would change hands several times between the warring parties: "Having mastered the village (again and completely! - Approx. A.T.), the Germans tried to develop the offensive south of it, along the right bank of the Don. Consequently, the offensive of the enemy troops went along the southwestern outskirts of Kiselevka (through the ravine, which we call Kalinnik) and the south - Polechka and Otrog, along the burnt hollow of the field already familiar to us, to the sentry forest. And there, you see, to the farm of Titchikh and the outskirts of Selyavny II they are within easy reach. This is, in fact, almost the entire territory Storozhevsky bridgehead, recaptured with incredible difficulty and with significant human losses.

But, fortunately, no matter how hard the Germans and their allies tried, no matter how hard the Germans and their allies tried, they did not reach the ancient Khazar settlement adjacent to the “Collapse” cliff, nor the Titchikh farm. Pretty battered German units returned with nothing to their places of permanent deployment in Dovgalevka and Ostrogozhsk. And the cowardly Hungarians, strictly warned by their German masters, took up abandoned positions and began to dig even deeper into the unyielding Storozhevsky earth.

And our soldiers got real combat practice.

The truth about poisons

"Let's go back, though.Byquickeron the Storozhevskaya bridgehead,- there the author of the memoirs persistently invites us, - eleventhAugust was relatively calm. In the morning the enemy fired at the observation post of the 53rd Artillery Regiment with several shells, which, when burst, gave off thick white smoke with a bluish tint and a sharp, irritating smell. The commanders and fighters who were on the NP did not pay attention to this and did not put on gas masks, and then for two hours they experienced weakness, nausea and vomiting. I immediately reported this to the commander (The sixth army of Lieutenant General F.M. Kharitonov, which until November 1942 included the 25th Guards Division, moved south, and its place was taken by the 40th Army under the command of Lieutenant General K.S. Moskalenko. - Approx. A.T.) Together with the head of the chemical service of the division, Major N.A. Budreyko, the division headquarters organized an inspection of the state of protective equipment in units and subunits, and established chemical observation posts. The readiness for a chemical attack by the enemy has increased throughout the army.

From the same day, both sides began intensive work on equipping the lines. All our commanders and staffs worked day and night in positions, checking the quality of their equipment and camouflage, viewing and shelling conditions, organization anti-tank and air defense.

In the battles for the important "Storozhevskaya bridgehead", in the territories adjacent directly to our village, the Germans or their zealous assistants - the Magyars, used, as you just learned, chemical poisonous substances. What exactly, the author of the memoirs does not specify, perhaps it was mustard gas, phosgene, or some other poisonous substance. But not chlorine oxide, because, as chemists tell me, after an attack with chlorine, a yellow-green cloud appears. And in our case, the smoke was thick and white with a bluish tinge. So, what kind of poison did the Nazis specifically treat our soldiers to? Now it's hard to say. And it would be desirable to know what kind of substance it was?

And what do they write and say in other sources on this topic? So the author and presenter of the serial film "second worldnew war. Day after day. 1939- 1945" Viktor Pravdyuk in the 56th episode admits his own version of why and why the Germans did not use poisonous substances on the eastern and western fronts. Germany, he said, possessed a large amount of toxic substances. But the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, including the USSR, had them in such numbers that they could cover the entire territory of Nazi Germany with a poisonous cloud. Is that why Hitler and his generals did not dare to use poisonous substances either against the Russians, or against the Americans or the British? The Fuehrer and his militant camarilla became more fearful of chemical retribution from the Allies after the boastful Luftwaffe, first under the command of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and then his successor, Field Marshal Robert Greim, irretrievably lost dominance over the air force on all fronts and over Germany itself. space.

Of course, the temptation to use weapons of mass destruction, especially among the retreating Germans, even suppressed any fear. And long before their inevitable and complete defeat, they used these weapons in sufficient quantities. Let us recall how the Nazis “smoked out” our partisans from the Adzhimushkaysky quarries in Kerch with chlorine oxide, how throughout the war they poisoned the victims of concentration camps in gas chambers using the asphyxiating gas “Cyclone”. The German troops also had gas chambers on the Eastern Front. In 1974, as I have already said about this more than once, I had to live for some time in a dormitory room No. 2 of Voronezh University with a graduate student from Rostock, then the GDR. That spring, Seventeen Moments of Spring was often shown on television. Naturally, in conversations between us, viewers of the exciting Soviet film, judgments were spontaneously expressed not only about the intelligence officer Stirlitz, but also about the recent war, which swept like a fiery tornado throughout our country, the city of Voronezh and other cities and villages of the Voronezh region. Helmut Pribs , that was the name of the GDR graduate student, the future scientist- chemist , in fairly frank discussions (he was fluent in Russian), he did not hide the fact that his dad, a soldier of the Nazi Wehrmacht, "worked" as a driver in the same "gas chamber", fighting in the foothills of the Caucasus. It was not difficult for me and Vasily Vorobyov, a future specialist in French philology, to guess that it was not oranges from Morocco that had to be delivered to Helmut's parent in a special vehicle by brave German soldiers by Christmas or their Easter. We heard about carbon monoxide, which was used to kill Soviet prisoners of war and civilians in the Krasnodar Territory in gas wagons ...

The Americans, the historian and host of the series mentioned above, Viktor Pravdyuk, also do not forget to mention this fact, in the Pacific islands they used mustard gas against Japanese militarists who were hiding during American air raids in deep dungeons.

However, I happened to learn about the use of an unknown poisonous substance against the defenders of the Storozhevsky bridgehead only from the memoirs of P.M. Shafarenko. Apparently, the warriors of Vice-Admiral Horthy felt that their complete collapse was close and they could not resist the Red Army that had risen to its feet, since they had already dared to commit a vile crime, fraught with far-reaching consequences for their tiny Hungary.

Results of bloody battles

Only by the second half of September, statements of inspiring optimism appear in the general's notes. Already Major General P.M. Shafarenko is sure that the 25th Guards Division managed not only to create the “Storozhevskaya bridgehead” strategic for the Voronezh Front, but also held it in continuous counterattacks from the still strong enemy. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Stavka entrusted the 25th Guards Division with the further defense of the bridgehead. This high trust from the High Command was earned by her warriors with blood and sweat: “The enemy never succeeded. Until September 17, bloody battles for the bridgehead continued. The enemy lost up to 9 thousand soldiers and officers killed and wounded, 48 guns, 28 tanks, 4 aircraft, many other equipment and weapons, and finally went on the defensive. Please read these numbers: for a piece of mountainous terrain, for the villages of Storozhevoe, Selyavnoye, the Titchikha farm - so many enemy casualties! Unfortunately, he keeps silent about the specific losses among the soldiers and officers in the division entrusted to the major general. Of course, it was a military secret, although what seemed to be hidden? The memoirs were written almost two decades after the victory over Nazi Germany. . (Footnote 14 : Aoursoldiers and officers in the battles for the "Storozhevskaya bridgehead" killed at least 12 thousand, of whichth four thousandfighters25th Guards Division. This information has been taken from my website.: "We Remember - War Memorials Voronezhregion". - Approx. A.T.)

But my parents, like many fellow villagers, in the distant forty-second year and much later, in addition to thoughts about the bread of tomorrow, the same thing was spinning in their heads: what is there, in Storozhevoe? Most of the unfortunates still had a sky-high hope: her or their hut remained safe and sound and the family would return to their corner. Only in vain did the exiles in their hungry delirium and homelessness dream in vain of the unrealizable. Without any doubt, the state of mind of the evacuated Storozhevo residents, who were, as they would now say, also in the information blockade, is simply impossible to comprehend now. One must see the emaciated, hungry faces of homeless people, experiencing daily and nightly the misfortune that has fallen on them. It was hard for everyone: adults, and especially children. I cannot say anything about those who ended up in temporary German concentration camps. God took pity on our family, and these camps were far from us.

However, the news from Watchtower, if they, say, reached our ears, were completely bleak. Because the accursed Magyars, Romanians, Italians and Rusyns, with the effective help of the Nazi troops, settled permanently in the gardens and outskirts of the destroyed Storozhevoy, on the nameless heights near the Don.

Throughout November and December, on the already so-called Storozhevoy streets, scorched, reared up, pitted with shells and bombs, hand-to-hand fights often broke out, tank counterattacks continued from both warring sides. On the heads of our fighters and on the heads of the Germans, their satellites alternately rained down and poured "over-planned" bombs, mines and shells.

And everything that was left of our village, its streets, roads was plowed up again and again by Katyusha rockets. And the positions of the Red Army soldiers defending the bridgehead were fired upon by the mines of the German Ishakov *. (Footnote 15 : Such ironiceskoh nickname for the Fritz mmortargave our comedian soldiers. Sothey called thembehinddiscordantsound whenmissilevolleyssimilarto the heart-rending roar of a donkey. Cases from mines for 6or 10barrel "Vanyush", this is anothernot the lastmortar nickname,in large numbers they were lying on artillery positions abandoned by the Germans near Storozhevoe.

Laste return of residents to their homesin their devastated households, they were used as convenient and reliable "dishes" for various purposes.Moreover, at that time it was believed that the rich andindependent was the resurgenta farm that had its own millstones, steelyard and butter churn. To the owners of the itemsmostessentials neighbors came to bow, who needed togrind rye or wheat flour, weigh a pound ora couple of pounds of the same flour or milletAfinally cow butter.

The churn was taken by those who had a cow, it was necessary to churn the butter for food requisition or for sale in Davydovka andwhether evenVoronezh. In our house there were steelyardsand a butter churn madeolder brother frompapercase for mines fromVanyusha. Primitive millstones (two flat grinding wheels) for grinding grain into flourdid not exist on our farm. However, most of the rich owners of "miracle mills", fortunately for us, was notsteelyards orchurn. And they are forcedborrowbmissingingitemslife with us, allowing"in return"grandmother or mother namolot of pain. So they livedmore often,unselfishly helping each other. - Note. A.T.)

As the then omniscient "word of mouth" rumor claimed: eight (!) times (until the final liberation by the penal battalion of the 141st division) the earth under Storozhev himself will burn, burn out in the hellish flame of breaks. What was the last thing the gluttonous fire got to eat? General P.M.Shafarenko is also silent about this. Not a single word did he show his concern about where our little children, the elderly, women, adult sons, whose husbands and fathers may have fought under his direct command, will have to wait for the end of the unfinished war.

Only at the end of the chapter did the general again mention the losses of the division’s personnel only in a streamlined form, without indicating the number of killed and wounded soldiers and commanders who fought for the bridgehead and defended it: "Our losses were great ”, - reports P.M. Shafarenko, - but obviously avoids specifics : « Tohelp the regiments in the evacuation of the wounded,I had to direct the transport of the medical battalion directly to the rifle battalions. On one of these trips, the commander of the medical and sanitary battalion, military doctor 2, was killedthrank V.V. Silina» And on that, as they say, thanks to the author.

Neither the division commander nor his subordinates are yet talking about a new, larger-scale offensive from the territory of the bridgehead. Even recovering fighters in the hospital seem to be worried about the most important thing: whether their comrades will hold the foothold: « In those days, the commissar of the division E.V. visited the medical battalion. Bobrov. He came from there somehow gray, agitated. He began with the fact that, nervously stretching his cigarette, he lit up. Then he told how doctors and nurses work around the clock, without leaving the operating tables, even during enemy air raids.

- Is it possible to distinguish work from a feat! he said. Yevgeny Vasilyevich walked around the wounded and talked to them. Nobody complained about anything and nobody asked for anything. But many asked him the same question: will we surrender the foothold to the enemy? Bobrov assured that as long as at least one guardsman was alive, he would fight only on the bridgehead.

Much of the general is covered with a veil of secrecy. Okay, he does not report on the number of wounded and killed, missing his fighters and commanders, does not indicate the places where the dead were buried.

Here you can still understand it. He himself, most likely, did not know the exact number of the dead. And that is why, as soon as we returned from the evacuation, the skeletons of our soldiers were already in half-decayed form, but with full combat equipment, we found in deep ravines, in dense thickets of prickly hawthorn on the tops of the mountains. They, seriously wounded, at one time, apparently, were not found by orderlies, corpses - later "funeral teams" of Storozhevsky and Selyavensky women and teenage boys. The Red Army funeral teams, which the Germans and their allies had, simply did not exist in our army. The bones of infantrymen, restless, washed by rains and washed out by melt water, were buried until the fifties in mass graves in Selyavnoye, in the Storozhevsky forest, in other large villages, which the war did not bypass. The search engines of the youth detachments still find their decayed remains and betray them to the ground, on which and for which the heroes of the "Storozhevsky bridgehead" laid down their lives.

But it is not clear why the author of the memoirs does not indicate the location of the medical battalion, which was visited by the commissar of the division E.V. Bobrov? I think that once I visited, it means, at least for a short time, but I left the bridgehead. And most likely, he went to Davydovka - the regional center and an important railway junction, which the Germans constantly bombed. On the outskirts of Davydovka, hidden by gardens, before and after the war there was a district hospital - a one-story capital brick building of pre-revolutionary construction. Vasily, Alexei, brothers, and I, too, had to be treated in it, in my opinion, already twice. Of course, in this very hospital, adapted for a military hospital, doctors, nurses and nannies worked around the clock. They worked, as the commissar informs the general, not paying attention to the continuous bombing. And the Germans bombed the railway tracks, filled with trains with military cargo, continuously moving along the unoccupied branch of the southeastern railway to the besieged Stalingrad.

It was there, across the wide river, twenty kilometers from the bridgehead, in the hospital, that Commissar Bobrov assured the guardsmen on the mend that the 25th division would not yield an inch of the Storozhevsky bridgehead to the enemy. And he will, according to him, defend it as long as at least one guardsman is alive. About any offensive, mind you, and there was no hint in this conversation.

Meanwhile, the General Staff of the Red Army was thinking about a large-scale operation just from the Storozhevsky bridgehead and preparing for it. Very soon, officers and ordinary soldiers of the 25th and other divisions in the Middle Don will start talking about it ...

What happened on the other side of the front?

To end In the harsh winter (that's exactly how it is, very cold, more than ever blizzard and snowdrift, the author of the notes recalls), the Magyars in Storozhevoe will not be allowed to sit out. They will drive out the damned invaders to our strong frost, although the fighters of the penal battalion had to do this with enormous efforts and new human losses.

However, almost until the middle of January forty-three, the Germans and Hungarians fought stubborn defensive battles or sat out in underground apartments. The cruel and insidious enemy was forced to resign himself to the disadvantageous position that was imposed on him and continued to be imposed on him by the guardsmen of the 25th and the soldiers of other divisions, regiments, units and battalions that arrived in time for the bridgehead. But our soldiers seriously thought about the upcoming major offensive, despite the adverse weather conditions. And the heat-loving nemchura was waiting for the heat in order to present a worthy lesson to the "presumptuous" Russian clumsies during the summer campaign. And what did the Magyars expect and wait for? Our command will soon become aware of this.

Even from the first military winter of the forty-first year, painful problems began to manifest themselves with particular acuteness in the camp of the Hungarian troops, caused by their unenviable role in a war alien to them. It couldn't be otherwise. In the conditions of a very unkind Russian stepmother-winter, hourly questions about daily bread and warm uniforms arose more and more sharply. As the captured Magyars showed, the Germans, as "masters" of the war, at that time took away warm clothes from their allies, which were sent to them from distant Hungary. Hitler's officers and soldiers were fed much more nutritious and tastier than Hungarian ones. The rear services of the Wehrmacht managed to dress the Germans in winter uniforms, but no one thought to take care of the Hungarians:

“... in the area of ​​​​the Orekhovaya grove( V two kilometers from the village of Uryvo-Pokrovskoe. - Note. A.T.) we took prisoners , - the general will write in the midst of the January "Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh" offensive operation . - Judging by the preliminary survey, they belonged to the 429th Infantry Regiment of the 168th German Division. Before us stood two tall Nazis, dressed in new winter uniforms.- jackets and trousers in white and green. This is the first time we've seen this."

Despite the severe winter cold, which naturally annoyed the soldiers of the Red Army, the 25th Guards Division was in full swing secretive and corresponding to the harsh season of the year, serious preparations for the upcoming major operation from the "Storozhevsky bridgehead": “Don froze on December 13th. There was deep snow. He filled up trenches, communications, roads. We got more trouble. In order not to lose maneuverability, it was necessary to clear it all.

In order to increase our mobility in the upcoming offensive, the rear of the army issued 500 sledges and skis for the entire personnel for each division. The commander ordered everyone, without exception, to take possession of them. But on this, as they would say today, Russian know-how has not exhausted itself: “On the bridgehead, in a zone sheltered from enemy observation, classes began, and then skiing exercises. Machine guns, mortars and "forty-five" were also put on skis and special sleds. For a month of study, our connection has achieved good results. We summed up the results on the ski cross-country skiing of the units, which were held in units and divisions. The cross gave us hope - we saw that in winter off-road conditions one can gain mobility and maneuverability.

Experienced warriors immediately drew their conclusion from these activities. Somehow, bypassing the front line, I approached a group of guards from the calculation of tank destroyers of Sergeant G.I. Brekhunov. Dressed in warm uniforms and felt boots, they looked in the direction of the enemy, where soldiers who did not have winter clothes, wrapped in looted blankets and scarves, stood in the trenches like stuffed animals, dancing their endless dance in the cold. Then one fighter from the calculation said:

- It would be good to attack now. Frost, snow and wind towards the Fritz. We are on skis, and he is on foot - he can’t get away from us». This, as you understand, is a meaningful and promising hint in a conversation between a commander and his subordinates. Yes, our savvy soldiers wisely and businesslike began to talk about the upcoming offensive and scrupulously prepare for it. National appeal: “No mercy for the German occupiers! Death to the German occupiers!” - did not leave the guardsmen indifferent. At that time, they perceived these calls as the readiness of each fighter to fight to the bitter end for the Motherland, in order to completely cleanse the Fatherland from fascist evil spirits.

On the eve of the strike from the Storozhevsky bridgehead

So, at the Storozhevsky bridgehead, soldiers and officers were impatiently waiting for the upcoming turning points. In connection with them, but not by chance, high military ranks frequented the division's location with strict inspector checks. The first to visit it were the new commander of the 40th Army of the Voronezh Front, Lieutenant General K.S. Moskalenko, together with a member of the Military Council of the Army, I.S. Grushetsky. In detail and meticulously, having familiarized themselves with the state of affairs in the regiments, units and companies of the distinguished division, both important and strict inspectors were satisfied.

On November 20, 1942, in the 25th Guards, they first heard about the successful counteroffensive of the Red Army near Stalingrad: "Intelligenceeeat, - Major General P.M. shares important news. Shafarenko, a little regretting and at the same time not holding back his delight , - we did not know the situation, did not know that in the most difficult conditionsThe General Staff of the Red Army accumulatedforces for a decisive blow ... And now this moment has come.

Footnote 16: But, celebrating the defeat of the Nazi troops near Stalingrad, the commander of the 25th Guards Lieutenant General Shafarenko did not suspect then that the merits of the Storozhevsky bridgehead and its defenders would long remain in the shadow of victory on the Volga.

It seems to me that the unfair oblivion of the bridgehead was aggravated by the fact that correspondents of central newspapers, front-line writers, like K. Simonov, A. Tvardovsky, B. Polevoy, V Ovechkin, other prominent journalists, poets. All-Union "recognition" in wartime also largely depended on news reports on the radio, publications in newspaper essays, stories, and promptly published books about the ongoing war. In fact, the defenders of the bridgehead near the village of Storozhevoe were very unlucky in this regard.

Before the decisive offensive, well-known Hungarian communists came to the location of the famous division - employee of the Executive Committee of the Comintern Matthias Rakosi and prominent writer Bela Illesh, author of the novel "Tissa is on fire". But the Hungarian comrades had not military, but political tasks. Having got to the “Storozhevskaya bridgehead”, they agitated their compatriots to surrender in order to avoid unjustified victims (I wanted to write human losses, but the inhabitants of Storozhevoy would not agree with me, because they did not consider Magyars people and still do not consider them.

It is after the creation of the Warsaw Pact that we will become “friends” with them, or rather, they will be imposed on us as friends, who more actively and more often fought not with the regular Red Army, but against the civilian population.
As always, by the way, “native” rulers acted and act in our country - everything is done under their pressure, but not in agreement with their own people.

Before the approaching offensive in the main direction of the "Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh" operation, namely on the "Storozhevsky bridgehead", an extraordinary event took place even in wartime. To the guardsmen of the 25th division under the command of General P.M. Shafarenko himself was visited by Comrade Konstantinov (the army pseudonym of G.K. Zhukov. - Approx. Divisional Commander.) And General Zhukov, as it is now becoming known, at that anxious time, it was not without reason that he found himself in problem areas of the fronts, where front-line or army operations were developed and carried out. It happened that time too. First of all, Georgy Konstantinovich went to the right flank of the division, which was at a close distance from our village: “Zhukov’s attention was attracted by the powerful stronghold of the enemy in Storozhevoe:“Here you need to hide well,- he noticed immediately- seize this point as soon as possible. The only pity is that Comrade Zhukov did not specify then who exactly would take possession of this powerful stronghold? And who should solve this crucial problem: the representative of the General Staff, the commander of the front, the army, or, nevertheless, the division commander, Major General P. M. Shafarenko? The question is indeed very curious, even intriguing. But we will not wait for an answer to it in the chapter “On the Storozhevsky bridgehead”. Therefore, we will try to inquire about this in other sources.

But it’s enough for us that General Zhukov drew attention to the history of the Storozhevsky bridgehead: “Tell me, how did you capture this bridgehead?- He asked the division commander P. M. Shafarenko. -I reported very succinctly on the methods of preparation in the rear, on the operation to seize a bridgehead in August and repel an enemy counterattack in September. G.K. Zhukov and K.S. Moskalenko listened with interest, without interrupting.

- Yes, the bridgehead is of paramount importance to us,- noticed GeorgeKonstantinovich…». How you see, the soldiers of the 25th Guards Division fought very effectively in such a short period of time. Zhukov noted their feat, but noted it orally and, most likely, forgot about his words, as well as about the feat of arms of the creators and defenders of the bridgehead.

During the visit and the subsequent final meeting with the commanders of the 25th and other divisions, Georgy Konstantinovich was interested in the broadest aspect of the problems related to the upcoming far from private operation on the middle Don: “Unexpectedly, G.K. Zhukov turned to me (P.M. Shafarenko. - Approx. A.T.) with the question of what is known about the mood of the enemy. I reported to him that on the basis of the interrogation of the captured Hungarians, it could be concluded that the mood of the soldiers and officers was bad. They did not receive winter uniforms. They feed the Hungarians worse than the Germans, and they consider them second-class soldiers (This inequality between the Germans, on the one hand, the Magyars, Romanians, Italians and Finns, on the other, did not escape the attentive eyes and sensitive ears of the refugees from Storozhevoy, who found themselves behind enemy lines. - Approx. A.T.). They are shocked by the heavy losses during our capture of the Storozhevsky bridgehead and the counterattack that followed in September. In addition, already now, in defense conditions, they are suffering heavy losses from the fire of our snipers, who literally do not allow them to raise their heads. especially bad moode have Rusyns (A these warriors, one wonders, why in Russia did not see? - My response. - A.T.)They don't want to fight for a long time. - Think,- I said in conclusion - if by nit’s good for them to hit, they will run” . (Footnote 17 : On site for a short time G.K. Zhuk ovafinally, a memorial stele was erected in the Storozhevsky forest, not far from which there are two mass graves. See the 3rd essay of the cycle “The war didn’t catch me as a soldier…” - Note.A.T.)

Colonel General A.M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, who arrived to support the morale of the guards.

But, perhaps, the most recent of the highest army officials visited the positions of the 25th division, the deputy front commander R.Ya.Malinovsky. He wanted to get acquainted in her units with the latest creative achievements of the fighters and their commanders, who were ready for an offensive in the difficult conditions of a snowy and frosty winter, honing their skills every day: “At the exit from the forest west of Titchikhi, I drew Malinovsky’s attention to the ski training of the units of the 81st regiment, withdrawn to the rear for training. There was a company occupation. Not far from us in stOA green rocket flew over the Don’s crown, and we saw a company chain on skis, guardsmen in white camouflage suits, going “on the attack”. They walked, taking sticks under their left hands and firing volleys from rifles as they went. On the right flank of the company, the soldiers dragged two Goryunov machine guns on skis, opening fire in turn and changing positions.

On the ledgebehind and to the left was the calculation of 45-millimeter guns, arranged on a special sled. Artillerymen moved a white-painted cannon, deploying according to the situation to destroy the firing points of the "enemy". The fighters very quickly approached the conditional front line and, at the same time throwing grenades, rushed forward. Rodion Yakovlevich watched the course of the classes with interest.

- On skis after throwing grenades - I have not seen this before, - he said.- But it's very cool! … UsTorozhevsky bridgehead» there was silence."

The 25th Guards Division, which will be called after the war " Chapaevskaya”, was finally prepared for the decisive capture of the “powerful stronghold of the enemy”, who settled in the village of Pervoye Storozhevoe.

However, the changeable fortune of the war this time disposed of in its own way. Divisions of General P.M. Shafarenko will not be destined to participate in the last and decisive battle for our village.

At the beginning of January 1943, they will throw ... special penal battalion 141st Infantry Division of the Voronezh Front.

However, let's not get ahead of events just yet. And let's read the pages of recently opened archives, shedding objective light on the silent details that took place on the bridgehead and in the village of Storozhevoe 1st in the cold January of forty-three. In the meantime, let's make a working title for the future essay - continuation:

"In the Shadow of the Battle of Stalingrad".

The final liberation of the village Storozhevoe ...

penal battalion".