Alexey Petrovich Maresyev (May 7, 1916, Kamyshin, Saratov province - May 18, 2001, Moscow) - Soviet military leader, pilot. The hero of the USSR. Due to a severe wound during the Great Patriotic War, both legs were amputated. However, despite the disability, the pilot returned to the sky and flew with prostheses. In total, during the war he made 86 sorties, shot down 11 enemy aircraft: four before being wounded and seven after. It is the prototype of the hero of Boris Polevoy's story "The Tale of a Real Man".

In March 1942 he was transferred to the North-Western Front. By this time, the pilot had 4 downed German aircraft on his account. On April 4, 1942, in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe so-called "Demyansky Cauldron", during an operation to cover bombers in a battle with the Germans, his plane was shot down, and Alexei himself was seriously wounded. He made an emergency landing in the territory occupied by the Germans. For eighteen days, the pilot, wounded in the legs, first on crippled legs, and then crawled to the front line, eating tree bark, cones and berries. He was first noticed by a father and son from the village of Plav, Kislovsky Village Council, Valdai District. Due to the fact that the pilot did not respond to questions (“Are you German?”), Father and son returned to the village out of fear. Then the already barely alive pilot was found by boys from the same village - Seryozha Malin and Sasha Vikhrov. Sasha's father took Alexei on a cart to his house.

For more than a week, the collective farmers looked after Maresyev. Medical assistance was needed, but there was no doctor in the village. In early May, a plane piloted by A.N. Dekhtyarenko landed near the village, and Maresyev was sent to Moscow, to the hospital.

The pilot's son, Viktor Maresyev, recalled in an interview with a correspondent for the Arguments and Facts newspaper: his father said that in the hospital he was already on a gurney on the way to the morgue with blood poisoning and gangrene. Professor Terebinsky passed by the dying Maresyev; he asked: “And what is this one here?” They took off the sheet from Maresyev and said: “And this is a young lieutenant with gangrene.” Then Terebinsky ordered: “Come on, he’s alive on the operating table!” Doctors were forced to amputate Maresyev's both legs in the shin area, but they saved his life.

In the post-war period, partly thanks to the textbook "The Tale of a Real Man" by Boris Polevoy (in which Maresyev is called Meresyev), he was very famous, invited to many celebrations. Meetings with schoolchildren were often organized, the example of Maresyev's feat was widely used to educate the younger generation.

On May 18, 2001, a gala evening was scheduled at the Theater of the Russian Army on the occasion of Maresyev's 85th birthday, but just an hour before the start of the concert, Alexei Petrovich had a heart attack, after which he died. The gala evening took place, but it began with a moment of silence. Alexei Petrovich Maresyev was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Such a story, such a person. Real. In fact, it is an icon for several generations of Soviet people (including for the Mua). A hero with a capital letter. Consider that Gagarin, in scale no less than a human being. Epic personality and that's it.

To the village of Plav from Valdai, along a bad grader, forty kilometers, a little more. Ten years ago, my friends and I made two attempts to visit a place near the village where local boys found a pilot: on the Niva, but they landed her safely, they searched for a tractor for a long time, they barely found it, they pulled it out by force, in general, it didn’t count; , several kilometers waist-deep in snow, reached, checked in, ticked off.

And so, 10 years have passed, and I again happened to visit those places. The reason is reinforced concrete - the son of the legendary pilot Maresyev, Viktor Alekseevich, with a large delegation of officials, came from the city of Kamyshin, Volgograd Region, to visit the place where they found their father and get acquainted with the descendants of his saviors.

Well, vooot, the text has been successfully scrolled, let's move on to viewing the photo cards.

I’ll start, perhaps, with the most powerful moment - the acquaintance of the hero’s son with the son of that same village boy, Sasha Vikhrov, who, with his friend, dragged the dying pilot to his house:

From left to right: two Viktors - Alekseevich Maresyev and Aleksandrovich Vikhrov.

Historic moment!

The son of a hero pilot looks at historical photographs:

In the middle photo in the second row, it is his father and the very villagers who saved him.

Delegation:

A few cute rustic details of the same house of the Vikhrovs:

That same house!

After that, we went to a memorial sign in the forest, at the very place where they found the exhausted pilot.

A very touching moment indeed.

On the commemorative plate, by the way, the wrong date is carved:

Such is the casus a nullo praestantur.

General photos, solemn speeches:

must go through to truly understand why we won the war

The April forest did not look like spring: snowdrifts up to a meter high, touched by the first thaw, lay heavily in places, pouring with the first moisture, and only under the old spruce forest did the snow cover reach the middle of the boots and allow you to walk without stopping your breath. A line of 12 people dressed in the winter uniform of the flight personnel of the Russian military space forces (VKS), with backpacks behind their backs, walked along the route 76 years ago.

Maybe no one has been here since then. And in early April 1942, a Soviet Yak-1 fighter of the 580th Aviation Regiment of the North-Western Front was shot down in the Demyansk sky over the village of Rabezh near the Lyutitsky swamp. Trying to land a damaged, falling apart car, the pilot fell out of it at a height of 30 meters, and only an old spruce and a high snowdrift saved his life. The pilot's name was Alexey Petrovich Maresyev. Thus began the story of the hero, which the writer Boris Polevoy would later describe in his Tale of a Real Man. Having injured and later frostbitten his legs, Maresyev crawled through these wild virgin places for 18 days in search of people, when local boys found him, already half-dead, a few kilometers from the Valdai village.

Starting point

The idea of ​​the Moscow "Club of Leaders" to follow the route of the legendary Soviet pilot was supported by the governor of the Novgorod region Andrei Nikitin and the commander of the search detachment "Nakhodka" of the expedition "Valley" Alexander Morzunov. In principle, the route itself would never have existed if the search engines had not found the crash site of the Maresyev fighter a couple of years ago. They found it not by the usual funnel and debris, but by archival documents. As it turned out, this territory was already under the control of Soviet troops by the summer of 1942, and the downed Yak-1 was discovered and evacuated by an army repair unit. Fortunately, the report of the rear servicemen contained the exact coordinates - such and such a height, a topographical mark. It has survived to this day - an iron pyramidal frame, installed by surveyors back in the 20s of the last century. This is the starting point of the Maresyev Trail. From her and went on an unusual expedition, seven people from the "Club of Leaders" and five Novgorod search engines.

From swamp to space

They prepared for the campaign in advance, laying a route on the map from a geodetic point to a memorial sign near the village of Plav, installed at the place where the pilot was rescued. Not knowing the area, the path was drawn under the ruler along the Lyutitsky swamp. It turned out not so much, about 10 kilometers. They were supposed to be overcome in a day, with an overnight stay in the forest after overcoming 2/3 of the way. Apparently, from afar, this seemed to be a task that was not difficult enough, so the expedition members decided to add difficulties to themselves. We decided to go light, without food and a sufficient supply of water, to spend the night by the fire on spruce branches, in backpacks to carry only a change of underwear. In order to bring the conditions even closer to those of Maresyev, they asked the Ministry of Defense to provide sets of winter flight uniforms for the Aerospace Forces. It turned out to be symbolic, but absolutely not adapted to the campaign: in warm, but heavy overalls and jackets with zigek collars, it is good to fly, but not to wind forest kilometers waist-deep in snow. We understood this, of course, later, already on the way. From the benefits of technological progress, a rather weighty radio station with a powerful antenna and a set of batteries was taken with me. The "Club of Leaders" has a long tradition - in all its expeditions, and they have already been in the Altai mountains, on Mont Blanc and Elbrus, in Kamchatka and in the Arctic, to conduct communication sessions with the astronauts of the International Space Station (ISS). Naturally, the time and channel were coordinated with the Energia Rocket and Space Corporation named after S.P. Queen.

"Normal heroes always go around"

The fact that the path will not be easy, everyone was convinced, having passed only 500 meters. The one walking ahead literally pushed through the snowdrifts, the second and third in the chain widened the trail. Changed every 100-150 meters. We had to walk boots in boots, so the path of the expedition team differed little from the elk trails, of which there were an incredible amount. While they still had the strength to joke, everyone recalled Maresiev's meeting with the bear, suspiciously looking sideways at healthy spruce turrets, as if under each of them there was a lair of a clubfoot. Neither a single hunting rifle, let alone knives, inspired confidence in the safety of such a rendezvous.

The reference point for the expedition was the snow-covered Lyutitsky swamp, which had to be bypassed, sticking to the shore. What looked like a straight line on the map turned out to be a hare loop. I had to go around numerous fallen trees, swampy places where the water does not freeze even at -20 degrees, dense thickets of bushes, into which, judging by the tracks, even moose did not climb. Therefore, having already traveled more than 10 kilometers, the expedition did not reach the point of the proposed overnight stay. By evening, everyone was thoroughly exhausted and drenched with sweat. At already frequent halts, they sat in silence, slowly finishing their last sips of the water they had taken. It is hard to imagine how Aleksey Maresyev crawled these kilometers alone.

forest camp

They had to settle down for the night so as not to set up camp in the dark. They were divided into three groups, 12 people could not be accommodated at one fire. Spruce branches were thrown on dry spruce poles, and bonfires were lit from the sushi collected in the district, fallen by time. We deployed an antenna for the radio station, the communication session with the ISS was scheduled for 22.40. At this time, the astronauts must fly over Sochi. The temperature in the Demyansk forest dropped to -5. From the accumulated fatigue, there was no feeling of hunger, but thirst was unbearably tormented. In the only iron mug of all, snow was drowned and poured into empty flasks. It turned out something like a forest compote: the water had a bright taste of acrid coniferous smoke with an admixture of ashes. Someone drank sips, someone just rinsed his mouth. Change into dry clothes. The rest of the evening was spent looking for and preparing firewood.

Flying over Sochi

An hour before the session, the radio station squealed, the ISS gave the setting. From an absolutely clear sky, through twenty-meter fir trees, stars looked at the aluminum structure of the antenna. Both she and the orange display of the radio station seemed alien and a little funny objects in this almost dense Novgorod forest. Now there are six cosmonauts on the ISS: two Russians, three Americans and a Japanese. More precisely, there are two astronauts, ours. The rest call themselves astronauts. At the appointed time, we heard the voice of the 118th cosmonaut of the Russian Federation, the 537th cosmonaut of the world, ISS-55/56 flight engineer Oleg Artemyev, who, together with his commander Anton Shkaplerov, was in the Russian segment of the station. The Americans and the Japanese rested in their own. We were given only 6 minutes to talk with the "celestials". Naturally, they talked about the expedition and its goals, which caused a warm reaction from Oleg Artemyev, because the cosmonauts are also pilots: “For us, Alexei Maresyev is an icon. All aviation rests on such iron people. It is important that the memory of our heroes does not disappear. Thank you for reminding us with your expedition of the feat of Alexei Petrovich.” We were also interested in what the ISS astronauts are doing now. It turned out that our communication session caught them at dinner. And when asked what kind of experiment Artemyev was personally conducting, he replied that he was studying the pain sensitivity threshold in weightlessness. Meanwhile, our expedition on foot was approaching the threshold of slow freezing.

Demyansk wolf is your friend

It was difficult to call it a dream: a forty-minute slumber was interrupted by a feeling of cold. They got up from the spruce branches, sat down by the fire in an attempt to warm up again. A hundred meters from the camp, wolves howled from different directions. They were unlikely to approach the fire, but some decided not to sleep anymore, feeling for the sheaths of knives on their sides. Therefore, when the sky began to turn gray, they even rejoiced - you can go on a journey, and it will be warmer. At 5:30 a.m. By 11 they were waiting for us at the memorial sign to Maresyev. Night frost formed a crust in the swamp, with difficulty, but withstanding a person. In a couple of hours this path will become impassable again. We decided to take a chance. We crossed wolf tracks at the entrance to the swamp: the gray paws, the size of a good man's fist, were clearly visible under the rising sun. While still cheerfully crossed the swamp. This made it possible to shorten the distance by two kilometers. And again the forest. Somewhere here, according to Alexander Morzunov, lies the crew of our Pe-2 bomber. After the war, the plane was pulled apart for metal, and the remains of three dead pilots were buried somewhere nearby by the locals. This place has not yet been found. Their names are known, a memorial sign has been erected to them a couple of kilometers near the forest winter road. But the grave is unmarked. The search engines intend to return here in the summer, we need to find the guys.

We passed, they won

By the time and place exactly reached the end point of the expedition. Behind more than 20-kilometer path. In the last 500 meters we made three halts. The fatigue of the first day and sleepless night affected. A young fighter pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Petrovich Maresyev was looking at us from the stand at the memorial sign. And now we know exactly why our country won that war.

Dream

Alexey Maresyev was born on May 20, 1916 in the city of Kamyshin, Saratov province. “I have three older brothers,” says A.P. Maresyev, “So they are smart. And I, the youngest, went to the pilots. Moreover, this happened not thanks to, but in spite of. As a child, I looked like a Chinese because I had malaria for years.” With such health, there was no question of any flight school. In 1934, the district committee of the Komsomol sent him to the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. “I got excited then, got very angry. I won’t go, I sent the documents to the MAI. And they have a short conversation: “Won’t you go? Put a Komsomol ticket on the table. "Well, I laid it out. My mother was ideological - she cried when she found out, lamented. But, fortunately, everything worked out." Alexei reassured his mother and rushed into the Komsomol cell.

A.P. Maresyev himself recalled: “It is not known how my life would have turned out if I had not gone to the Far East. When I went through a medical examination before leaving, a woman doctor came up to me and said in such a motherly way: Alyosha, of course, you can not go. But know: if you set foot on that land with one foot, all your illnesses will pass. I thought that if I could recover, then I would become a pilot. That's how it happened." In Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Alexei first worked as an ordinary lumberjack, then as a turner, in his specialty; worked at the flying club. In 1937 he was drafted into the Red Army, in the 12th air border detachment on about. Sakhalin. Then he was sent to the Bataysk Aviation School. A. Serov, who graduated in 1940 with the rank of junior lieutenant, and was left there as an instructor. There, in Bataysk, he met the war.

The battle path of A.P. Maresyev on the North-Western Front

A.P. Maresyev meets the war as part of the 296th IAP. By this time, he is mastering the I-16 fighter. The first sortie was made on August 23, 1941 in the Krivoy Rog region, and the first air battle was held in the Dneprodzerdzhinsk region. “They flew to the reconnaissance link: A. Kostygov, N. Demidov and A. Maresyev. In the battle, A. Maresyev rushed to the rescue of N. Demidov, the Messerschmitts left the battlefield. ”Late autumn, A. Maresyev was sent to Kuibyshev to retrain on the Yak-1. In early 1942, already as part of the 580th IAP in the North -Western Front Here, in the sky above the Demyansk ledge, Alexei recorded on his combat account the first downed aircraft - the Ju-52 transporter.By the end of March 1942, A. Maresyev increased the number of downed Nazi aircraft to four (some sources indicate 6 victories, In the spring of 1942, the 580th IAP of A.P. Maresyev was based at the airfield near the village of Makarovo and took part in the famous Demyansk battle in the history of the Great Patriotic War.

In order to accurately imagine the circumstances of the hero’s combat path, let us dwell in more detail on the Demyansk operation. Demyansk is a small village in the Novgorod region. Here, from January 1942 to February 1943, battles took place between the 16th German Army (commanded by General E. Bush) and the troops of the North-Western Front (commanded by General P. A. Kurochkin, then Marshal S. K. Timoshenko). The battle for Demyansk began with the Demyansk offensive operation (January 7 - May 25, 1942). During the offensive of the troops of the North-Western Front (General P. A. Kurochkin) in the Demyansk region, 6 German divisions with a total number of up to 100 thousand people ended up in the "cauldron". The surrounded units did not give up and for two months they stubbornly defended themselves, being supplied by air.

It was one of the largest and most successful German air transport operations. To keep the defense, the surrounded German units needed a continuous supply of ammunition and food. To do this, it was required to deliver at least 300 tons of various cargoes to the "boiler" daily. German pilots succeeded. The main German airfields "Pskov - Yuzhny Selo", "Ostrov" and "Pskov - Western", the airfields of Riga and Dvinsk, the airfield "Dno". Base conditions in the "boiler" itself were much worse. There were only two sites available - "Demyansk" and "Sands". Moreover, even the larger Demyansky could not receive more than 30 cars at the same time, and the Sands airfield could not accommodate more than 10 cars. Only the most experienced pilots could land on these strips, only 30 meters wide. Both sites could only be used during the day. From these materials, it becomes clear to us, who are studying this issue from the point of view of the combat path of A. Maresyev, how experienced the German pilots were, with whom our hero had to fight. The end of March - the beginning of April 1942 is characterized by a counteroffensive of the encircled fascists. In order to free the encircled divisions, German troops launched an offensive from the area southwest of Staraya Russa. At that time, Soviet aviation was still unable to ensure air supremacy: there were not enough modern aircraft. How important the Battle of Demyansk was for the Germans is evidenced by the fact that, in addition to the usual awards, German servicemen who participated in the Demyansk and Kholmsky epics were awarded special commemorative signs - sleeve shields - "Kholmsky shield" and "Demyansky shield".

By the time of his tragic departure, A. Maresyev destroyed 4 enemy aircraft, and all of them were shot down in the Demyansk cauldron. After the study, we can conclude that A. Maresyev was an ace pilot, and the number of aircraft shot down by him (German losses over the entire period - 262 aircraft) confirms this conclusion. A.P. Maresyev himself assesses the skill of the German pilots as follows: “Their skill is very high. They fought no weaker than we did." On April 4, 1942, A.P. Maresyev met with superior enemy forces and could not escape - his plane was shot down. We found out that the following information exists in the German reports: on April 4, 1942, Oberleutnant W. Brauer, commander of the 9th squadron of the 3rd Luftwaffe fighter squadron, shot down a Soviet pilot in a Bf-109°F-4. Presumably, it was this pilot who shot down the Yak-1 of the 580th IAP, which was piloted by A. Maresyev.

Yak-1 Alexei Petrovich crashed during an emergency landing. During the fall, the pilot's legs were crushed, and for 18 days he crawled to his own through a snowy forest. “In early April 1942,” recalled Alexei Petrovich, “in an air battle near Demyansk, the Nazis shot down my plane, and it rapidly went down. The trees somewhat softened the impact on the ground. Thrown out of the car, I fell into a snowdrift and lost consciousness. After a while, the freezing cold woke me up. Around white-white, complete desertion. The forest was frozen solid. I realized that I was behind enemy lines (I did not know then that the front was nearby). The very first attempt to stand up made me cry out in pain: both feet were broken. It was a difficult moment, but I decided to make my way east to my own. This journey lasted eighteen days and nights. Despite the hunger, the gangrene that had begun, a firm thought: Do not give up! - didn't leave me. When my strength was almost exhausted, I began to roll from my back to my stomach and back again; when some food supplies ran out, he ate spring cranberries, often moss. Often shouted, called for help. We conducted a comparative analysis of real events and the literary interpretation of B. Polevoy.

A story about a real person. Fiction and reality

In the work of B. Polevoy, the pilot found himself behind enemy lines. We conducted a study and found out where the front line was. It turned out that in these places it passed just to the west of Plav, 15-20 km from the village. Thus, the pilot did not have to cross the front line. The writer changed the fate of the village, allegedly burned by the invaders, after which all its inhabitants went into the forest, where they lived in dugouts in a distant clearing. Throughout the war, Soviet power existed in the countryside. People did not live in dugouts, and the last chicken of Partizanochka, which was cooked for the pilot, did not exist. Also, A.P. Maresyev could not crawl through our positions with dead soldiers and a nurse. There was nothing like this in the Black Forest (local name). A.P. Maresyev at that time did not fly on the I-16 as described in the book, but on the Yak-1 fighter.

Our attention is riveted to the circumstances of Maresyev's life, when he, wounded, without food, showing unparalleled will and courage, managed to get out of the dense snow-covered forest. There is very little information on this subject, most (of those who read the book) are confident in the veracity of the events according to B. Polevoy's Tale of a Real Man. We found out that B. Polevoy wrote the story based on the notes of his "Diary of sorties of the 3rd squadron" containing the story of the 27-year-old commander of this squadron, A.P. Maresyev, flying a fighter after amputation of both legs. Let us dwell on the time periods of Maresyev's stay in the forest. The "Tale of a Real Man", written mainly from his own words, speaks of events that took place over 11 days, after which, as B. Polevoy notes, the pilot "lost track of time." The same period of 11 days was recorded in some later publications. If we turn to the biographical directory of the Russian Committee of Veterans of War and Military Service, published in 2000, in which A. Maresyev himself worked then, then it again states his “18-day desperate struggle with death itself”. The writer does not exclude the real figure (18 days), he simply, as it were, relegates it to the background, and in the first place - the unthinkable torment of the hero and the courage to overcome it.

We tried to figure out who found the Soviet pilot. According to the book, the pilot was stumbled upon by two teenagers gathering brushwood. Then they, together with grandfather Mikhaila, transported the wounded man to the house on a sledge. In real life, Alexei Petrovich really had to crawl for 18 days to his own. And already completely exhausted, he crawled out to the crossroads of two forest roads. One of them led from the village of Plav to the forest lake, and the second to the village of Rabezha. The problem was that the memories of those who found A.P. Maresyev are very contradictory.

According to the wife of A. Vikhrov, Alexandra Petrovna, in 2005 the story of the discovery of A.P. Maresyev is very different from the book version: “At that time, a local resident was walking from Rabezha to Plav. He did not see the pilot, since Maresyev could not even sit down, he did not have enough strength. He was lying in a snowdrift, but he saw a walking peasant and called out. The local, seeing a man in military uniform, got scared and ran away. Having run to Plav, he found grandfather Mihayla and said that in the forest some man in uniform was hiding in the snow. Grandfather Mikhail began to ask whose uniform he was wearing, but, having not achieved anything intelligible, went on foot to the indicated place and, seeing a man in Soviet uniform, asked the pilot who he was and where he was from. Aleksey Petrovich replied that he had been shot down, that he was a Soviet pilot and both of his legs were broken. Grandfather Mikhail demanded to take the pistol out of its holster and throw it aside. The pilot did it. Then grandfather Mikhail came up, checked the documents and said that he was going to fetch a horse and sleigh to take the pilot to the village. Before going after the horse, he made a flooring out of spruce branches and laid the pilot on it. Having taken a sleigh in the village, grandfather Mikhail took two to help - Sergey Malin and his son Alexander. The three of them loaded the pilot onto a sled, wrapped him in a sheepskin coat and brought him to the village.” Sergei Malin and Alexander Vikhrov, (the future husband of Alexandra Petrovna) are bred in B. Polevoy's story under the names "Serenka" and "red-haired Fedka". These were, however, not teenagers, as Boris Polevoy dubbed them in his story. In the articles of the Valdai newspaper, we found that Sergei at that time was a foreman on a local collective farm, he was also responsible for protecting the village and the surrounding area, in the fall he was to join the army. Alexander Vikhrov had already participated by that time in the defense of Novgorod, was wounded twice. The wounded pilot was sheltered by Mikhail Alekseevich Vikhrov, a collective farm groom (“Mikhail’s grandfather”). That is, we see that in life everything was much more dramatic than in the book.

The next memory we found differs from Alexandra Petrovna's story. Sergey Petrovich Malin, a direct participant in the events in the fall of 1978, said: “From everything that is written in Polevoy’s famous book about the meeting in the forest with the pilot Maresyev, about what she was like, and what followed, one thing is true: she really had a place about five kilometers from our village. Sasha and I, having decided to check the rumors circulating in the village, went to the place where one of our fellow villagers heard a human voice. It was cold that day, not like spring. Yes, and it is dangerous to go deep into the forest - it was not so far from our places to the front. Let's go, though. We found the pilot in a helpless state, he was lying in the snow almost next to the road and the forest clearing. He was very thin, barely spoke, could not move independently. After making sure that we were our own, Soviet and that there were no Germans here, the pilot explained who he was, handed us his documents, a tablet, service weapons and asked us to help get to the village. I remember we moved him closer to the road, Sasha stayed, and I ran for a cart. On the way to the village, the pilot groaned softly all the time, and we, seeing the state he was in, tried not to disturb him with our questions. We found out that the first person who stumbled upon the pilot, and about whom Alexandra Petrovna Vikhrova spoke, “was grandfather Matveich from the neighboring village of Kuvshiny, who told M.A. Vikhrov“ about a stranger in the forest. ”It becomes clear that it was the family Vikhrovykh was the initiator of the search for the pilot, and he remained in this family for about two days.

They wanted to place the pilot in the largest hut, but the owners refused. They were afraid that the one they found was a spy. Then, A.P. Maresyev was placed in her small hut by the Vikhrov family. Here he did not stay for six days, as with B. Polevoy, but only for two days. M. A. Vikhrov with his wife and daughter surrounded the wounded pilot with care, because it is known that Russian mercy knows neither fear nor boundaries. M.A. Vikhrov’s daughter Olga recalls what happened at that time: “They brought a pilot from the forest, terribly thin with swollen and frostbitten legs. His clothes were all littered. My father melted the bathhouse, and then they carried the pilot there on a blanket. There he was stripped, his high boots had to be cut, washed and changed into clean linen. From the bathhouse to the house, his father carried him on his back: he managed himself, because after so many days of starvation the pilot weighed "like a feather." They put him near the windows on wide wooden beds, wrapped him up well, gave him strong tea with honey. for some reason he called me Varya. I was already 25 years old at that time, my three-year-old daughter lived with me, my husband fought at the front. I remember that the pilot kept asking for food, but I fed him a little - I was afraid, no matter how there was a torsion of the intestines. We steamed his clothes in the stove to kill the lice, then I washed them, dried them and ironed them. On the second day, when they were ready, we changed his clothes. We smeared his sore legs with goose fat. Father went to the nearest military unit - this is 17 kilometers from us - to the village of Russkiye Noviki and said that our pilot was found alive in the forest. From there, the military soon came for him. Aleksey Petrovich, however, did not want to leave, but, judging by his condition, it was to delay sending him to the hospital impossible." The pilot was taken to the nearest military medical unit, which was located ten kilometers west of Lake Shlino in the village of Ovinchishte, and from there by U-2 plane to the hospital. This is the eyewitness account. Another memory

A.P. Vikhrova in 2005: “The pilot was very skinny. He was steamed in a bathhouse, fed with broth so that the stomach began to get used to food and put to sleep on the stove. The next morning, grandfather Mikhail went to Rabezh, where the headquarters of our army was located, to talk about the fact that they found our pilot. We tried to find out where M. A. Vikhrov went. According to the old-timers of the village, these are Russian Noviki. Alexandra Petrovna spoke very interestingly about conversations with the pilot: Alexei Petrovich said that when he was shot down, he began to pull the plane towards the Black Forest, there were neither our troops nor the Nazis, from here it was quite easy to get out to your own. When I saw the ice of the first forest lake behind the trees, I decided to sit down. The engine was no longer working, the plane was flying by inertia. According to Alexandra Petrovna, Maresyev cursed himself that he had not calculated and released the chassis early. The landing gear extinguished the gliding speed, and the plane dived into the trees. During the fall, the pilot crushed both feet and shins. After that, he crawled for 18 days towards Plav or Rabezha. He knew for sure that there were no Germans there, and he had a fairly good idea of ​​​​the direction and landmarks. Alexandra Petrovna said that he repeated to them several times: when you often fly over the area, you read the area like a map. You remember signs - this is a lake such and such, this is a clearing there and then. They came for A.P. Maresyev in the evening of the day when grandfather Mikhail reached the headquarters of our army in Rabezh. It was not fellow soldiers who came for him, as they say in the book, but special officers. They took him into the back of a truck and drove away. The locals were told that he was a German and a spy. Later, after the war, Alexei Petrovich told the Vikhrovs that some colonel of aviation rescued him from a long check, who recognized him and helped him immediately to the hospital.

Where is the Maresyev trail?

For military historians and local historians, it is of undoubted interest where the plane crashed. His search was carried out by children's search teams, and various expeditions. In many literary, journalistic and memoir works about A.P. Maresyev, it is noted that the pilot took an air battle in the Staraya Russa region. This could not be, because Staraya Russa is located more than 100 kilometers from the place where A.P. Maresyev was saved. This misconception is easily explained by the fact that the main military potential was concentrated in Staraya Russa. A tragic air battle for A.P. Maresyev took place within the Valdai region. There are dense forests, numerous swamps and lakes. Due to the complete lack of roads, military operations here were limited. That is why A.P. Maresyev did not meet a single person in 18 days. A guide to Lake Seliger, published in 1955, gives a description of the hike to the place of rescue of A.P. Maresyev, but stipulates that it is not possible to establish the point where the plane fell.

Thus, only the final section of the Maresyev trail from the village of Plav to the place of its discovery is accessible. In 1955, it was possible to find this point only by notches in the trees. Three fir trees were carved with the inscription “Maresyev was found here” and the five-pointed star of the Hero. We found out that among amateur historians-search engines, ideas were repeatedly expressed about organizing an expedition to the place where the plane crashed and, possibly, raising it from the swamp. However, all attempts to reach this point, even with the use of all-terrain vehicles, were unsuccessful. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Victory, activists of the Youth Unity movement from the Tver region undertook an action to equip the place where Maresyev was saved. Newspapers reported: on May 5, activists of the Youth Unity visited the site of the crash of A. Maresyev's plane to put the site in order. In fact, a rescue place for A.P. Maresyev was arranged near the village of Plav. In 2006, a group of schoolchildren from Moscow secondary school No. 89 took part in an action dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the legendary pilot. The students were unable to locate the crash site.

We were able to discover another expedition "Front Line - 2007" while already in the village of Plav. With the help of N. S. Zhurin, a resident of a local village and a member of the expedition, we contacted S. V. Baranov, the leader of this expedition. From its participants, we learned that they accurately determined the place where four planes crashed. S.V. Baranov suggested that the plane of A.P. Maresyev most likely fell on the Lyutitskoye swamp, but at least thirty people with metal detectors were needed to find it.

No less interesting are his thoughts about how many kilometers A.P. Maresyev could crawl: “You know, last winter, when we went skiing from Plav to Lyutitsky, I realized that it was possible to crawl 17-18 days on such snow for 5 kilometers. 6. I am not kidding. The depth of the snow cover this year was about a meter, in some places even more. The temperature is stable, there were no thaws, and the snow was not packed, but loose like sand. So, when one of us fell, having lost a ski, it was impossible to stand still. There was no point of support. It was necessary to crawl up to the tree and get up, grabbing the trunk. And here we are, healthy men, not hungry and not wounded, we noticed that in the absence of support (there is nothing to push off from), we had to roll over and it took minutes to cover a distance of 10 meters! Sometimes up to 4-5 minutes. In the situation with A.P. Maresyev, everyone starts from how many days he crawled. The time is impressive, and it seems that there should be tens of kilometers from the plane to the place where the pilot was found. So now I understand that it is not necessary. Too bad we don't know about cranberries. There is a moment in the book, but it is not known whether this is true or not. If he really ate, then his path ran along the mirror of the Lyutitskoye swamp. There are no cranberries anywhere else. And this is topographically similar to the truth.

We were interested in this assumption, and we found the answer to this question: “When my strength was almost exhausted, I began to roll from my back to my stomach and back again; when some food supplies ran out, he ate spring cranberries, often moss. Based on the material we collected, we can conclude with some certainty that the crash site of the aircraft is located 6 kilometers from the place where A.P. Maresyev was discovered.

Maresyevsky stone

Local pathfinders installed a stone slab and a memorial plaque with the inscription: "At this place, after a many-day struggle for life, the Soviet pilot Alexei Maresyev was found." But instead of April 1942, another date was erroneously indicated - February. On the eve of the 65th anniversary of the Victory, the local administration, next to the memorial stone in the forest, installed a bronze plaque, but the name of the pilot was misspelled on it - Meresyev. We made a proposal to the City Administration and one of the city enterprises about a new commemorative sign for the hero. UFPUIK - 4 agreed to make signs to the memorial place, and did not mind a new board, but, however, it was made of wood - there is no other material. We found out that the participants of the Front Line 2011 off-road expedition are going to make an obelisk at the crash site of the plane they found. We turned to them with our problem - a new obelisk to the hero and received consent. We hope that this spring a new sign will be in place and without errors.

War
In May, A.P. Maresyev was transferred to Moscow, to the hospital. Doctors were forced to amputate both of his legs in the shin area due to gangrene. The pilot learned to walk again, already on prostheses. We found out that N. N. Terebnitsky operated on the pilot in the hospital (Babushkinsky Lane, Moscow). When he found out about the pilot’s desire to fly, he said: “My job is to repair you, and how you can do it, not

I know. I want your wish to come true." The impetus for the return of Maresyev to the ranks was the story of the Russian pilot of World War 1 Prokofiev-Seversky, who lost his right leg, but, despite this, returned to the sky. In the hospital, A.P. Maresyev began to train, preparing to fly with prostheses. After the hospital in September 1942, he was sent to a rehabilitation center, in the village of Sudakovo near Moscow. There he really, as B. Polevoi describes, learned to dance. At the beginning of 1943, he passed a medical examination and was sent to the Ibresinsky flight school (Chuvash ASSR).

When, after the hospital, A.P. Maresyev recalled, they wrote in my medical record that I was fit for all types of aviation, I felt at the pinnacle of happiness. In February 1943 he made the first test flight after being wounded. Got sent to the front. In June 1943 he arrived in the 63rd GIAP. The regiment commander did not let go on combat missions - the situation in the sky on the eve of the Battle of Kursk was extremely tense, they were only allowed to rise above the airfield at the approximate time of the return of our aircraft - to cover their landing.

A.P. Maresyev recalls: “Our regiment became the Guards, we were given signs, and they put me in the general line. I did not participate in a single battle, and therefore it was inconvenient for me to receive a guards badge. I got out of order and turned to the regimental commander - I ask you to send me into battle, I'm tired of flying over the airfield. The regimental commander said only one thing to my sharpness - to get in line. The squadron commander A. M. Chislov sympathized with him and took him with him on a sortie. A.P. Maresyev: “I was lucky. I flunked the Me-109, and right before the eyes of the commissar. My confidence has increased since then. In a word, Alexander Chislov is my godfather.”

On July 20, 1943, A.P. Maresyev, during an air battle with superior enemy forces, saved the lives of 2 Soviet pilots and shot down two enemy Fw.190 fighters at once. He was appointed flight commander and deputy squadron commander. The military glory of Maresyev spread throughout the 15th Air Army. The newspaper of the Bryansk Front "The Defeat of the Enemy" in August 1943 published an essay about him, but without mentioning that the pilot was fighting without legs.

After the end of the Battle of Kursk, A.P. Maresyev was sent for treatment to the Vostrikovo sanatorium, one of the best air force sanatoriums. Here, on August 24, 1943, he was found by the Decree on conferring the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Presenting the hero for the award, the regiment commander N. Ivanov wrote: A true Russian patriot, he, not sparing life and blood, fights against the Nazi invaders and, despite a serious physical handicap, achieves excellent success in air battles. In 1944, A.P. Maresyev agreed with the proposal to become a pilot inspector and move from a combat regiment to the management of the Air Force Universities. In total, during the war he made 86 sorties, shot down 11 enemy aircraft: four before being wounded and seven after being wounded.

After the war

Retired since 1946. In the post-war period, partly thanks to the textbook "The Tale of a Real Man" by Boris Polevoy, he was very famous, invited to many celebrations. Meetings with schoolchildren were often organized, the example of A.P. Maresyev's feat was widely used to educate the younger generation. He worked in the Russian Committee of War Veterans.

The death of Alexei Petrovich Maresyev

On May 18, 2001, a gala evening was planned at the Theater of the Russian Army on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of A.P. Maresyev, but just an hour before the start of the concert, Alexei Petrovich had a heart attack, after which he died. The gala evening took place, but it began with a moment of silence. O. M. Vikhrova: “Since the April days of 1942, I have not had a chance to see Alexei Petrovich. There was an opportunity to meet him in Moscow, where he invited me to celebrate his 85th birthday. I was at the theater then and was looking forward to this meeting. But who would have thought that everything would turn out differently, that the festive ceremony, after we were announced about the death, would turn into a mourning one. There was a general stupor in the hall, many then went out onto the stage, where the plane stood with the number "85" on board, and laid flowers on it. I did this too, saying only two words: "Goodbye, Alyosha." Alexei Petrovich Maresyev was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Bibliography

1. B. Polevoi The story of a real person - M .: Friendship of peoples, 2001

6. Backpack magazine - 2007, No. 7-8

9. Guide Lake Seliger, edited by N. P. Fedorov, G. A. Kerchiker, E. M. Bogdanovskaya - M .: Education, 1955

Internet sources

1.www.otvaga2004.narod.ru

2.www.veteran.naslednikislavy.ru

Novgorod search engines created a real historical sensation: they managed to find the place where the plane crashed

How did Maresyev actually survive? Novgorod search engines found the crash site of Alexei Maresyev’s plane and traced his path to salvation

Novgorod search engines created a real historical sensation: they managed to find the crash site of the legendary pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Alexei Maresyev and trace his path to salvation.

Alexander Morzunov, head of the Nakhodka Search Team, spoke in an interview with the Istoriya.rf portal about what is true in the famous “Tale of a Real Man” by Boris Polevoy, and what is just fiction.

The feat of Maresyev is the feat of our entire country, which won the Great Patriotic War. Alexey Petrovich was a living example, on which many generations were brought up. And if you remember the book of Boris Polevoy, then it was just a "real person." He never boasted of his feat, did not exalt it to the skies. There are many people who, in a critical situation, turned to the feat of Maresyev. It helped them just to survive.

We did not pursue the goal of finding exactly Maresyev's plane. We have been and are engaged in the search for the fallen soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, the restoration of historical memory. Our task: to return from the last flight of pilots who are still in obscurity.–

What does this find change in our ideas about the feat of a pilot?

- I believe that this event is not the reason or reason for rethinking what happened in 1942. But to trace the 18-day journey that the wounded pilot made until the moment when he was found near the village of Plav by local residents is not just interesting, it must be done. After all, what is described by Polev in the book is fiction.

Here, for example, what can a pilot eat in the forest in April in the Novgorod region? I now live here, 10 kilometers from the place where Maresyev's plane crashed, and I clearly imagine what can be found in the forest. In the swamp, if you dig up the snow, you can find cranberries. Here, in the area of ​​​​Lake Velyo, there is a kind of natural anomaly: winter and spring come two weeks later. When the grass is green in the city of Valdai, there is snow here

At the beginning of April 1942, the thickness of the snow was at least a meter. What can be obtained from food at such a time? Variants from the story - for example, a hedgehog - this, of course, was not

- Did you manage to determine Maresyev's route after landing? - Before our expedition, they tried to find the plane at a distance of up to 70 kilometers from the place that we determined. Now we quite clearly know that the route of Maresyev along the Lyutitsky swamp was a length, if laid out in a straight line, somewhere around six to ten kilometers maximum.

The car falls four kilometers from the village of Rabezha, six kilometers from the village of Ovinchishche and 150 meters from the road that ran along the front line and connected settlements on our Soviet territory. A pilot who has fallen from a height of 30 meters and hit the ground unequivocally perceives reality in a slightly different way: perhaps he does not perceive it at all at first. Unfortunately, Aleksey Petrovich chose the only direction for his journey, on which there were neither residents nor military men - the Lyutitsky swamp. It is elongated from west to east. A wounded pilot followed him. On the other side of the swamp, he was found by the inhabitants of the village of Plav.

– But is it possible to walk 10 kilometers in 18 days?

- It seems to me that the pilot did not go through the swamp in a straight line and he was not on the road all this time: perhaps he was lying down somewhere. We have seen fragments of "hay sheds" - small log houses where local peasants lived when they went to mowing. Three hundred meters from the crash site, a part of the wall of a similar house was preserved, and in one of these places the pilot Maresyev could spend some time recovering.

There was definitely not the whole story with the crossing of the front line described by Polevoy, because the place of the fall is definitely our rear. There were no burnt villages known from the story, wagon trains, Germans on the road, especially partisans with the last chicken - this is all a writer's fiction.

But the last mystery in the history of Maresyev remained. When Alexei Petrovich was found, his good friend Andrei Nikolaevich Degtyarenko begged the U-2 plane from the regiment commander, loaded the dying Maresyev into the plane and took him to Moscow. If he had not been helped, he would have died in these places. It was at the end of April 1942 - and a few months later, on July 17, Degtyarenko went on his last flight - he went missing here, over Demyansk. And we will try to find the plane and the remains of another Hero of the Soviet Union ...

- Presumably, the main find was made in the archives of the Ministry of Defense? It was there that documents were found that indicated the place where Maresyev's plane crashed ...

Here we must pay tribute to two factors.

Firstly, this is an initiative of the Russian Military Historical Society, which offered us a joint program dedicated to the centenary of Maresyev.

Secondly, in the last ten years we have been constantly working with documents from the archive of the Ministry of Defense in Podolsk. During this time, I have formed a decent archival database of crash sites, downed aircraft and dead pilots. Periodically, I looked through copies of these documents in order to find any "leads" related to Maresyev's plane. And such a “hook” was found: the act of transferring several aircraft to the 60th air base area by the evacuation team of the 245th Infantry Division. With another document, the write-off certificate, it coincided with the number 4649 - this is the number of Maresyev's aircraft. According to this act, the place where the plane crashed was marked four kilometers north of the village of Rabezha, at the mark 238.2.

At the same time, one of these archival documents belongs to the aviation units, and the other to the infantry. No one had ever looked for documents related to Maresyev’s plane in infantry units before - it didn’t even occur to anyone.

What happened to the plane itself?

- This is a standard procedure: the crashed plane was sent to the workshops, disassembled and put into spare parts for other machines. May 25, 1942 he was taken out - then it was not the plane of the Hero of the Soviet Union, but an ordinary Yak-1 junior lieutenant Maresyev.

- Do you propose to install a memorial sign at the crash site?

“Our present cannot exist without the past, especially without the kind of history immortalized in The Tale of a Real Man.” I would very much like that any person passing by could stop, walk 150 meters from the road to the place where the heroic story began. But I think that the sign should not be pompous: probably, Alexei Petrovich himself would like to see it like that ...

The inventions of B. Polevoy are nothing in comparison with combat sorties on A. Maresyev's prostheses

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Novgorod region, Valdai district, Plav village

Location of the pilot A.P. Mareseva

Near the village of Plav, in a picturesque pine forest, there is a memorial place where in April 1942 the village boys found the wounded pilot Alexei Maresyev. A clearing or "Maresyev's Path" leads to the memorial. Now there is a memorial stele, a memorial plate and a memorial plaque. Cadet classes of ZATO Ozerny of the Tver region regularly come here, carry out landscaping work, bring flowers and wreaths. In September 2014, a team of cadets carried out minor repairs: they corrected and painted the rickety stele, painted the memorial plate and plaque, updated the portrait of the Hero, and removed the garbage. Trips to a memorable place are an integral part of the educational and patriotic work of the cadet classes of the ZATO Ozerny.

Cadet classes ZATO Ozerny, Tver region
Cadet classes have been opened in ZATO Ozerny since 2007 on the basis of two secondary schools. The main tasks of the cadet movement in ZATO Ozerny is the patriotic education of the younger generation.
Municipal coordinator of cadet classes Kostareva O.V.
Students of grades 7-9 MBOU secondary school No. 1 and MBOU secondary school No. 2

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