The history of the Great Patriotic War is full of dramatic events, as well as examples of the amazing dedication of Soviet people who sacrificed their lives to crush fascism. Among them is the feat of senior sergeant Nikolai Vladimirovich Sirotinin, which caused sincere admiration even for the enemies who buried the hero with all military honors.
Biography
Komsomol member Nikolai Sirotinin was born in 1921 in the city of Orel. After leaving school, the young man worked for a while at the Orel factory Tekmash, and in 1940 he was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army. Sirotinin served in Polotsk, and on the first day of the war he was wounded during a raid by enemy aircraft. After a short treatment at the hospital, Nikolai was sent to the front in the Krichev region. At the time of his last battle, the young man had the rank of senior sergeant and served as the gunner of the 6th (according to some sources, the 17th) rifle division of the 13th army.
The situation at the line of defense by the river Dobrost
In mid-July 1941, Soviet troops continued to retreat along almost the entire length of the front. The division, in which Nikolai Sirotinin served, reached the line of defense near the Dobrost River and suffered heavy losses, as it did not have enough equipment and military equipment to withstand the onslaught of the 4th Panzer Division under the command of Colonel von Langermann. This unit of the Wehrmacht was part of the 2nd tank group of Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, who distinguished himself during the occupation of France and Poland.
On the day that the feat of Sergeant Nikolai Sirotinin was accomplished (July 17), the battery commander in which the hero served decided to organize a cover for the retreat of his military unit. For this purpose, one gun was installed at the bridge on the 476th km of the Moscow-Warsaw highway across the Dobrost River. He was to be served by a combat crew of two people, one of which was the battalion commander himself. Nikolay Sirotinin volunteered to stay at the crossing. He was supposed to help fire on enemy tanks as soon as they reached the bridge.
Feat of Nikolai Sirotinin in 1941: battle
The gun was camouflaged on a hill in dense rye. From this position, the highway and the bridge were clearly visible, but it was difficult for the enemy to notice and destroy it.
A column of German armored vehicles appeared at dawn. The first shot Nikolai knocked out the head tank of the column, which went onto the bridge, and the second - an armored personnel carrier closing it. Thus, a traffic jam formed on the road, and the 6th Infantry Division got the opportunity for a quiet retreat.
When the shock from the sudden artillery attack passed, the Germans began to shoot back and wounded the battalion commander of the Soviet guns. Since the combat task of apprehending the enemy tank convoy was completed, the commander retreated to Soviet positions, but Sergeant Sirotinin refused to follow him, saying that the cannon had several dozen unexpended shells left and he wanted to disable as many enemy tanks as possible.
Feat of Sirotinin Nikolai Vladimirovich: the death of a hero
The Germans tried to steal a wrecked head tank from the bridge using two other armored vehicles. Then Sirotinin also knocked them out, thereby infuriating the Nazis. An attempt was also made to cross the ford river, however, the first tank got stuck near the shore and was destroyed by the fire of Soviet guns. The battle lasted about two and a half hours, during which Sirotinin destroyed 11 tanks, 6 armored vehicles, as well as more than fifty enemy soldiers and officers.
Finally, the enemies surrounded the hero and invited him to surrender. But Sirotinin continued the battle, firing from a carbine, until he was killed.
The funeral
The history of wars knows only a few examples when the enemy showed respect to his defeated enemy, worshiping his valor. It was these feelings that the German command aroused the feat of Nikolai Sirotinin. Moreover, the evidence of several eyewitnesses has been preserved about the hero’s funeral. In particular, one of the residents of the village of Sokolnichi, who spoke German, which the occupants drove along with fellow villagers to the place where the cannon Sirotinina was, subsequently said that the "main German", before he betrayed the body of the Soviet sergeant to the ground, said a speech. In it, he praised the courage of a Russian soldier and urged his soldiers to love their homeland just like a dead hero. Even more interesting are the recollections of Chief Lieutenant Friedrich Henfeld, who in his diary was indignant at the fact that Colonel von Langermann ordered the German soldiers to fire three salvos from rifles in honor of the Russian soldier.
Memory
The feat of Nikolai Sirotinin was not appreciated by the country. The fact is that Koly’s relatives did not have a single photograph of the boy, so he was not presented to the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The young man’s only award was the Order of the Patriotic War of the first degree.
In 1948, the hero’s body was reburied in a mass grave, and his name was indicated on a marble board among others. In 1958, the article “The Legend of the Feat” was published in Ogonyok, from which the inhabitants of the Soviet Union learned about the events of July 17, 1941, which took place on the bridge over the Dobrost River. The feat of Nikolai Sirotinin shocked hundreds of thousands of people. In 1961, an obelisk was erected on the spot where the young man alone held the defense against a column of German tanks. In addition, a commemorative plaque with a short story about Sirotinin’s feat was mounted on the wall of the Tekmash factory workshop, where the hero worked before the war.
Opinions
Since more than 70 years have passed since the moment when the feat of Nikolai Sirotinin took place, it is practically impossible to find living eyewitnesses of those events. That is why some researchers, in pursuit of sensation, try to present him as a beautiful heroic legend, forgetting that the deceased young man had a family and his relatives are still alive. In addition, if the story about the feat of Sergeant Sirotinin was a fairy tale, then why for almost 20 years almost no one knew about this? And finally, on the edge of one of the Belarusian villages, today there is a mass grave, in which lie the remains of a 19-year-old boy who died for his homeland. This circumstance alone allows us to consider him a hero and admire the feat of his comrades who saved the world from the "brown plague".
Now you know what the feat of Nikolai Sirotinin is. Briefly and without emotion it is very difficult to talk about him. After all, this story cannot but take for the soul, for it is an exceptional example of selflessness and love for the motherland of a very young man who, like everyone else, wanted to live ...