Every year there are fewer and fewer people who took an active part in the Great Patriotic War, witnessed the mass heroism of Soviet soldiers and could convincingly tell about those distant years of hard times. Recently, most mass media outlets have been reporting more and more sparingly and subjectively about the contribution of the USSR to the defeat of nazi Germany, about the reasons for the outbreak of war, and even more so about those who brought Victory closer by their daily feat of arms. Now no one is surprised that not every high school graduate can clearly say whether his grandfather fought, who he was at the front, what orders and medals he was awarded. Sociological studies show that young people can name one or two Heroes of the Soviet Union, but they do not know why they were awarded such high titles. What can we say about little-known heroes, about simple "war workers"? Almost no one knows about their front-line biography. In the archives lie unclaimed millions of documentary evidence that heroism on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War was truly massive, and people who committed heroic deeds, dearly loved their multinational Homeland. In order not to be unfounded, in this issue we decided to tell about some of them, without changing a word in the archive documents. Axe on the machine gun One day in August 1941, near the headquarters kitchen of one of our units, a group of fascists attacked the regimental commander. Cook Ivan Sereda with a bunch of grenades rushed to the rescue of the commander. He came from the rear and with a well-aimed throw, destroying 14 fascists, saved the commander. The next day, a heavy battle broke out. Our soldiers went on the attack, the fascists stubbornly defended... Suddenly, a tank came to the aid of the fascist infantry and, firing several machine-gun bursts, forced our soldiers to lie down... The invaders launched a counterattack and advanced ever closer to the site of the headquarters kitchen. Seeing this, Ivan ... Читать далее