The feat of a real man: the life of Alexey Maresyev

The pilot, who received leg injuries, made an emergency landing in territory occupied by German troops. It took him 18 days to crawl to the front line, from where he was sent to the hospital and had both legs amputated, after which he again went to the front as a fighter pilot. Subsequently, the feat of Alexei Maresyev became the basis of the plot of “The Tale of a Real Man” by Boris Polevoy.

Alexey Petrovich Maresyev was born on May 29, 1916 (old style May 16) in the city of Kamyshin, Kamyshinsky district, Saratov province of the Russian Empire (now the administrative center of the Kamyshinsky district of the Volgograd region).

TASS recalls the life of the legendary pilot and his feat.

Family

Father - Pyotr Avdeevich Maresyev, a soldier of the First World War, died of tuberculosis when Alexei was three years old.
Mother - Ekaterina Nikitichna Maresyeva, worked as a cleaner at a factory. Alexey was the youngest of her four sons.
Alexey Maresyev was married to Galina Viktorovna Maresyeva (née Tretyakova, died in 2002), an employee of the Air Force University Directorate.
The eldest son is Victor (born 1946), an automotive engineer, now the president of the Regional Public Fund A.P. Maresyeva "Disabled people of the Second World War."
The youngest son is Alexey (1958–2002).

Studies

In 1930 in Kamyshin he graduated from six (according to other sources - seven) classes of school, in 1930–1932. At the Kamyshin factory apprenticeship school (FZU) he mastered the profession of a turner.
In 1933–1934 without interruption from work he studied at the Kamyshin Workers' Faculty named after. M. Gorky Saratov Agricultural Institute (now Saratov State Agrarian University).
In 1940 he graduated from the Bataysk Military Aviation Pilot School named after A.K. Serov (now the Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots), in 1952 - the Higher Party School under the CPSU Central Committee, in 1956 - graduate school at the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee. Candidate of Historical Sciences (1956).

Work and service

In 1933–1934 worked at the Kamyshin timber mill as an oil worker and turner.
In 1934 he was sent to the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where from March 1935 to August 1937 he worked as a lumberjack, then as a diesel mechanic on the Partizan boat. I studied at the flying club.
In the fall of 1937 he was drafted into the ranks of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), and until 1938 he served in the 12th aviation border detachment on Sakhalin Island.
In 1939 he was sent to the Chita Aviation School.
Since 1940, he has been an instructor pilot at the Bataysk Military Aviation School of Pilots.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. sent to the Southwestern Front (first combat mission - August 23, 1941 in the Krivoy Rog region).
He was a pilot, a flight commander of the 296th Fighter Aviation Regiment, then the 580th Fighter Aviation Regiment on the North-Western Front.

A story about a real person. Page 1

Part one

The stars still sparkled sharply and coldly, but the sky in the east had already begun to brighten. The trees gradually emerged from the darkness. Suddenly a strong fresh wind passed over their tops. The forest immediately came to life, rustling loudly and loudly. The hundred-year-old pines called to each other in a whistling whisper, and dry frost poured with a soft rustle from the disturbed branches.

The wind died down suddenly, just as it had come. The trees froze again in a cold stupor. Immediately all the pre-dawn sounds of the forest began to be heard: the greedy gnawing of wolves in a neighboring clearing, the cautious yapping of foxes and the first, still uncertain blows of an awakened woodpecker, which resounded in the silence of the forest so musically, as if he was chiseling not a tree trunk, but the hollow body of a violin.

Again the wind rustled gustily through the heavy needles of the pine tops. The last stars quietly went out in the brightening sky. The sky itself became denser and narrower. The forest, having finally shaken off the remnants of the darkness of the night, stood up in all its green grandeur. By the way the curly heads of the pine trees and the sharp spiers of the fir trees glowed red, one could guess that the sun had risen and that the dawning day promised to be clear, frosty, vigorous.

It became quite light. The wolves went into the thickets of the forest to digest the night's prey, the fox left the clearing, leaving a lacy, cunningly tangled trail in the snow. The old forest rustled steadily, incessantly. Only the fuss of birds, the knocking of a woodpecker, the cheerful twittering of yellow tits shooting between the branches and the greedy dry quack of jays diversified this viscous, alarming and sad noise rolling in soft waves.

A magpie, cleaning its sharp black beak on an alder branch, suddenly turned its head to the side, listened, and crouched down, ready to take off and fly away. The branches crunched alarmingly. Someone big and strong was walking through the forest, not making out the road. The bushes crackled, the tops of small pines began to sway, the crust creaked, settling. The magpie screamed and, spreading its tail, like the feathers of an arrow, flew away in a straight line.

A long brown muzzle, topped with heavy branched horns, poked out from the pine needles powdered with morning frost. Frightened eyes scanned the huge clearing. Pink suede nostrils, emitting a hot steam of anxious breath, moved convulsively.

The old elk froze in the pine forest like a statue. Only the ragged skin twitched nervously on its back. His alert ears caught every sound, and his hearing was so keen that the animal heard the bark beetle sharpening pine wood. But even these sensitive ears heard nothing in the forest except the chatter of birds, the knocking of a woodpecker and the steady ringing of pine tops.

Hearing was reassuring, but smell warned of danger. The fresh aroma of melted snow was mixed with sharp, heavy and dangerous odors, alien to this dense forest. The black sad eyes of the beast saw dark figures on the dazzling scales of the crust. Without moving, he tensed up, ready to jump into the thicket. But the people didn't move. They lay in the snow thickly, in places on top of each other. There were a lot of them, but not one of them moved or disturbed the virgin silence. Nearby towered some monsters rooted in the snowdrifts. They emitted pungent and disturbing odors.

The elk stood at the edge of the forest, looking sideways in fear, not understanding what had happened to this entire herd of quiet, motionless and not at all dangerous-looking people.

His attention was attracted by a sound heard from above. The beast shuddered, the skin on its back twitched, its hind legs curled even more.

However, the sound was also not terrible: it was as if several May beetles, humming loudly, were circling in the foliage of a blooming birch. And their humming was sometimes mixed with a frequent, short crackling sound, similar to the evening creak of a twitcher in a swamp.

And here are the beetles themselves. Sparkling their wings, they dance in the blue frosty air. Again and again the twitch creaked in the heights. One of the beetles, without folding its wings, darted down. The others danced again in the blue sky. The beast released its tense muscles, came out into the clearing, licked the crust, glancing sideways at the sky. And suddenly another beetle fell away from the swarm dancing in the air and, leaving behind a large, bushy tail, rushed straight towards the clearing. It grew so quickly that the elk barely had time to jump into the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gust of an autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and hit the ground so that the whole forest began to roar and groan. The echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the elk, which rushed at full speed into the thicket.

The echo got stuck in the thick of green pine needles. Sparkling and sparkling, frost fell from the tree tops knocked down by the plane's fall. Silence, viscous and imperious, took possession of the forest. And in it you could clearly hear how the man groaned and how heavily the crust crunched under the feet of the bear, which was driven out of the forest into the clearing by an unusual roar and crackling sound.

The bear was big, old and shaggy. Untidy fur stuck out in brown tufts on his sunken sides and hung like icicles from his lean, lean bottom. War had been raging in these parts since the fall. It even penetrated here, into the protected wilderness, where previously, and even then only infrequently, only foresters and hunters entered. The roar of a close battle in the fall woke the bear from his den, breaking his winter hibernation, and now, hungry and angry, he wandered through the forest, not knowing peace.

The bear stopped at the edge of the forest, where the elk had just stood. I sniffed its fresh, delicious-smelling tracks, breathed heavily and greedily, moving my sunken sides, and listened. The elk left, but nearby there was a sound made by some living and, probably, weak creature. The fur rose on the back of the beast's neck. He extended his muzzle. And again this plaintive sound came barely audibly from the edge of the forest.

Slowly, carefully stepping with soft paws, under which the dry and strong crust fell with a crunch, the animal headed towards the motionless human figure driven into the snow...

Pilot Alexey Meresyev fell into double pincers. It was the worst thing that could happen in a dogfight. Having shot all the ammunition, he was practically unarmed, four German planes surrounded him and, not allowing him to turn out or deviate from the course, they took him to their airfield...

And it all turned out like this. A flight of fighters under the command of Lieutenant Meresyev flew out to accompany the ILs setting off to attack the enemy airfield. The daring foray was successful. The attack aircraft, these “flying tanks,” as they were called in the infantry, gliding almost over the tops of the pine trees, crept straight up to the airfield, on which large transport “Junkers” stood in rows. Suddenly emerging from behind the battlements of a gray forest ridge, they rushed over the heavy carcasses of the "lomoviks", pouring lead and steel from cannons and machine guns, and throwing tailed shells at them. Meresyev, who with his four men was guarding the air above the site of the attack, clearly saw from above how dark figures of people rushed around the airfield, how transport workers began to crawl heavily through the rolled snow, how the attack aircraft made more and more approaches, and how the crews of the Junkers, who had come to their senses, began to under taxi to the start with fire and lift the cars into the air.

Feat

April 4 (according to the list of irretrievable losses of the commanding personnel of the 6th strike air group of the Supreme High Command - April 5), 1942, during a combat mission, Maresyev’s Yak-1 fighter was shot down in the area of the so-called Demyansk cauldron (Demyansky, Valdai districts of the Novgorod region) and made an emergency landing behind Nazi lines.
For 18 days, the pilot, seriously wounded in the legs, crawled towards the front line. He was found by residents of the village of Plav, Kislovsky village council, Valdai district.

Online reading of the book The Tale of a Real Man 3

Quietly, as only animals can, the bear sat next to the motionless human figure, barely visible from the snowdrift that sparkled bluishly in the sun.

His dirty nostrils twitched quietly. From the partly open mouth, in which old, yellow, but still powerful fangs were visible, a thin thread of thick saliva hung and swayed in the wind.

Raised by the war from his winter den, he was hungry and angry. But bears don't eat carrion. Having sniffed the motionless body, which smelled sharply of gasoline, the bear lazily retreated to the clearing, where there were an abundance of equally motionless human bodies frozen into the crust. A groan and a rustle brought him back.

And so he sat next to Alexei. A gnawing hunger fought within him with aversion to dead meat. Hunger began to prevail. The beast sighed, stood up, turned the man over in the snowdrift with his paw and tore at the “damn skin” of the overalls with his claws. The overalls did not budge. The bear growled dully. It took Alexei great efforts at that moment to suppress the desire to open his eyes, recoil, scream, push away this heavy carcass that had fallen on his chest. While his whole being was striving for a stormy and furious defense, he forced himself with a slow, imperceptible movement to lower his hand into his pocket, feel there for the ribbed handle of the pistol, carefully so as not to click, cock the trigger with his thumb and begin to quietly remove his already armed hand.

The beast tore the overalls even harder. The strong material crackled, but again withstood it. The bear roared furiously, grabbed the overalls with its teeth, squeezing the body through the fur and cotton wool. Alexei, with a last effort of will, suppressed the pain in himself and at the moment when the beast tore him out of the snowdrift, he raised the pistol and pulled the trigger.

The dull shot cracked loudly and loudly.

The magpie fluttered and quickly flew away. Frost fell from the disturbed branches. The beast slowly released its victim. Alexey fell into the snow, not taking his eyes off his enemy. He sat on his hind legs, and bewilderment froze in his black, festering eyes, overgrown with fine hair. Thick blood made its way in a matte stream between his fangs and fell onto the snow. He growled hoarsely and terribly, rose heavily to his hind legs and immediately sank dead into the snow before Alexei had time to shoot again. The blue crust slowly floated red and, melting, slightly smoked near the head of the beast. The bear was dead.

Alexei's tension subsided. He again felt a sharp, burning pain in his feet and, falling into the snow, lost consciousness...

He woke up when the sun was already high. The rays that pierced the needles lit up the crust with sparkling reflections. In the shadows, the snow seemed not even blue, but blue.

“Well, did you imagine the bear, or what?” – was Alexei’s first thought.

A brown, shaggy, unkempt carcass lay nearby in the blue snow. The forest was noisy. A woodpecker chiseled the bark noisily. Agile yellow-bellied titmice chirped loudly, jumping in the bushes.

“Alive, alive, alive!” – Alexey mentally repeated. And his whole body, his whole body, rejoiced, absorbing the wonderful, powerful, intoxicating feeling of life that comes to a person and captures him every time after he has suffered mortal danger.

Obeying this powerful feeling, he jumped to his feet, but then, groaning, he sat down on the bear’s carcass. The pain in his feet burned through his entire body. There was a dull, heavy noise in my head, as if old, chipped millstones were spinning in it, rumbling, shaking my brain. My eyes ached, as if someone was pressing a finger on them over my eyelids. Everything around was visible clearly and brightly, bathed in cold yellow rays of the sun, then disappeared, covered with a gray veil shimmering with sparks.

“It’s bad... I must have been concussed when I fell and something happened to my legs,” thought Alexey.

Having risen, he looked with surprise at the wide field, visible beyond the forest edge and bounded on the horizon by a bluish semicircle of a distant forest.

It must have been in the fall, or most likely in the early winter, along the edge of the forest, one of the defensive lines passed through this field, on which the Red Army unit held out for a short time, but stubbornly, as they say, to the death. Blizzards covered the wounds of the earth with compacted snow wool. But even underneath it, one could easily discern the molehills of the trenches, the mounds of broken firing points, the endless potholes of small and large shell craters, visible right down to the foot of the edges of beaten, wounded, decapitated or uprooted trees. Among the tormented field, in different places, several tanks, painted in the motley color of pike scales, were frozen in the snow. All of them - especially the last one, who must have been knocked to one side by the explosion of a grenade or mine, so that the long barrel of his gun hung to the ground with its tongue sticking out - seemed like the corpses of unknown monsters. And all over the field - near the parapets of shallow trenches, near tanks and on the forest edge - the corpses of Red Army soldiers and German soldiers lay mixed together. There were so many of them that in some places they were piled one on top of the other. They lay in the same positions, frozen by the frost, in which a few months ago, still on the verge of winter, death overtook people in battle.

Everything told Alexei about the tenacity and fury of the battle raging here, that his comrades were fighting, forgetting about everything except the fact that they needed to stop, not to let the enemy pass. Not far away, at the edge of the forest, near a thick pine tree decapitated by a shell, the tall, obliquely broken trunk of which is now bleeding with yellow transparent resin, Germans are lying with crushed skulls and crushed faces. In the center, across one of the enemies, lies the body of a huge, round-faced, big-headed guy without an overcoat, wearing only a tunic without a belt, with a torn collar, and next to him a rifle with a broken bayonet and a bloody, battered butt.

And further, by the road leading into the forest, under a young fir tree covered with sand, half in a crater, also lying on its edge, a dark-skinned Uzbek with a thin face, as if carved from old ivory. Behind him, under the branches of a Christmas tree, you can see a neat stack of not yet spent grenades, and he himself is holding a grenade in his dead hand thrown back, as if, before throwing it, he decided to look at the sky, and just froze.

And even further, along the forest road, near spotted tank carcasses, on the slopes of large craters, in trenches, near old stumps - everywhere there are dead figures in padded jackets and quilted trousers, in dirty green service jackets and horned caps, pulled over their ears for warmth; Bent knees, thrown back chins, waxen faces melted from the crust, gnawed by foxes, pecked by magpies and crows, stick out from the snowdrifts.

Several ravens slowly circled over the clearing, and suddenly it reminded Alexei of a solemn picture of Igor’s Slaughter, full of gloomy power, reproduced in a school history textbook from a canvas by the great Russian artist.

“So I would be lying here!” - he thought, and again his whole being was filled with a stormy feeling of life. He shook himself. The chipped millstones were still slowly spinning in his head, his legs burned and ached more than ever, but Alexei, sitting on the already cold bear carcass, silvered with dry snow, began to think about what he should do, where to go, how to get to his advanced units.

He lost the tablet with the map in a fall. But even without a map, Alexey clearly understood today’s route. The German field airfield, which was attacked by attack aircraft, lay about sixty kilometers to the west of the front line. Having tied up the German fighters in an air battle, his pilots managed to pull them away from the airfield to the east for about twenty kilometers, and he, after he escaped from the double “pincers,” probably managed to extend a little more to the east. Therefore, he fell approximately thirty-five kilometers from the front line, far behind the backs of the advanced German divisions, somewhere in the area of the huge, so-called Black Forest, through which he had to fly more than once, accompanying bombers and attack aircraft on their short raids along near German rear. This forest always seemed to him like an endless green sea from above. In good weather, the forest swirled with caps of pine peaks, and in bad weather, shrouded in gray fog, it resembled a darkened surface of water along which small waves move.

The fact that he collapsed in the center of this protected forest was both good and bad. It’s good because it’s unlikely that here, in these virgin thickets, one could meet Germans, who usually gravitated towards roads and housing. It was bad because he had to make, although not a very long, but difficult journey through the forest thickets, where one could not hope for human help, for a piece of bread, for a roof, for a sip of boiling water. After all, the legs... Will the legs lift? Will they go?..

He quietly stood up from the bear carcass. The same sharp pain that arose in his feet pierced his body from bottom to top. He screamed. I had to sit down again. I tried to throw off the unt. The boots did not come off, and every jerk made me moan. Then Alexey clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, pulled the boot with both hands with all his might - and immediately lost consciousness. Having woken up, he carefully unwrapped the flannel wrap. The whole foot was swollen and looked like a solid gray bruise. She burned and ached in every joint. Alexey put his foot on the snow - the pain became weaker. With the same desperate jerk, as if he was pulling out his own tooth, he took off the second boot.

Both legs were no good. Apparently, when the plane's impact on the tops of the pine trees threw him out of the cockpit, something pinched his feet and crushed the small bones of the metatarsus and fingers. Of course, under normal conditions he would not even think of getting up on those broken, swollen legs. But he was alone in the thicket of the forest, behind enemy lines, where meeting a man promised not relief, but death. And he decided to go, go east, go through the forest, without trying to look for convenient roads and residential places, go, no matter the cost.

He resolutely jumped up from the bear's carcass, groaned, gritted his teeth and took the first step. He stood there, pulled his other leg out of the snow, and took another step. There was a noise in my head, the forest and the clearing swayed and floated to the side.

Alexei felt himself weakening from tension and pain. Biting his lip, he continued walking, reaching a forest road that led past a destroyed tank, past an Uzbek with a grenade, deep into the forest, to the east. It was still okay to walk on the soft snow, but as soon as he stepped onto the hard, wind-blown, ice-covered hump of the road, the pain became so unbearable that he stopped, not daring to take even another step. So he stood, legs awkwardly apart, swaying as if from the wind. And suddenly everything turned gray before my eyes. The road, the pine tree, the gray needles, the blue oblong gap above it had disappeared... He stood on the airfield near the plane, his plane, and its mechanic, or, as he called him, “the technician,” lanky Yura, his teeth shining and the whites of his eyes always sparkling on his unshaven and always grimy face, with an inviting gesture he showed him to the cockpit: they say, it’s ready, let’s take off... Alexey took a step towards the plane, but the ground was burning, burning his feet, as if he was stepping on a hot stove. He rushed to jump over this hot earth directly onto the wing, but bumped into the cold fuselage and was surprised. The fuselage was not smooth, varnished, but rough, lined with pine bark... There was no airplane - he was on the road and fumbling with his hand along a tree trunk.

"Hallucination? “I’m going crazy from shell shock,” thought Alexey. - Walking along the road is unbearable. Turn into virgin lands? But this will slow down the journey much..." He sat down on the snow, again with the same decisive, short jerks he pulled off his high boots, tore them in the insteps with his nails and teeth so that they would not crowd his broken feet, took a large downy scarf made of Angora wool from his neck, and tore it in half , wrapped his feet and put on his shoes again.

Now the going has become easier. However, “to walk” is incorrectly said: not to walk, but to move, move carefully, stepping on your heels and raising your legs high, as one walks through a swamp. From pain and tension, after a few steps I began to feel dizzy. I had to stand with my eyes closed, leaning my back against a tree trunk, or sit down on a snowdrift and rest, feeling the sharp beating of the pulse in my veins.

He moved like this for several hours. But when I looked back, at the end of the clearing I could still see the illuminated bend in the road, where a dead Uzbek stood out as a dark spot in the snow. This made Alexei very upset. It was upsetting, but not frightening. He wanted to go faster. He rose from the snowdrift, gritted his teeth tightly and walked forward, marking small goals in front of him, concentrating his attention on them - from pine to pine, from stump to stump, from snowdrift to snowdrift. On the virgin snow of a deserted forest road, a sluggish, winding, indistinct trail, like the one left by a wounded animal, curled behind him.