For the 80th anniversary of the Victory Day, we are starting a series of publications about the employees of the IEE RAS, participants in the Great Patriotic War.
And the first hero of our stories will be Zakharenko Anton Illarionovich.
"The war found me in Moscow, although I served not far from Brest, in the city of Kortuz-Bereza. On June 20, I arrived in Moscow on leave for 30 days, but on Sunday, June 22, I was already back at the front. Of course, I did not meet my unit, although, overcoming many obstacles, I still made it to Minsk, which was engulfed in flames. The Minsk city military registration and enlistment office sent me and other singles, also unarmed, to Smolensk, where I was enrolled in the 64th rifle division (separate reconnaissance battalion Ш63).
At first it was very difficult and scary; it was necessary to obtain information about the enemy that interested the command, for which it was necessary to crawl near the enemy's location. It was hot, the ground around was dug up by bombs and shells, strewn with corpses of people and animals, it was simply impossible to breathe. But then I somehow got used to it and became embittered, and it became much easier. At that time, our division repeatedly went on the counterattack, and although we inflicted great losses on the enemy, we ourselves suffered significant losses. I received my first wound - a concussion - on September 3, but three days later I was back in action and continued the difficult work of a reconnaissance officer.
Then we had to retreat beyond the Dnieper. At the significant and sad Solovyova crossing, I saw a terrible picture: we were continuously bombed by the fascists, one group of planes was flying away, and another was already approaching. Soon we were sent to Voronezh for reinforcements, then to Kursk and further to Serpukhov, where I went behind the German lines three times with a group of fighters. One night we blew up two dugouts, covered mortars that were standing in a cemetery with sand, and took a tablet with a map and letters from a dead officer.
On our way back, we ran into an ambush, but noticed it in time and were able to fight off the Germans.
There were some sad stories, too. One forester reported that the Germans were going to the neighboring forest guardhouse to have a drink. We set up an ambush at the edge of the forest near the guardhouse and lay on the frozen ground until morning. In the morning, a whole hundred Germans entered the courtyard of the guardhouse, and three horsemen rode to the river. I raised the soldiers and ran to the river to intercept the horsemen, but my legs were not obeying me, it was very cold, and the soldiers fell behind. The horsemen quickly turned and went straight for me. I fell behind a tree and pointed my machine gun at the first horseman, but the shot did not happen - the machine gun froze, and we lost the targets. We were unable to catch up with the horsemen, only a thrown grenade injured a horse. This was worse than death, since we lost the enemy, and I got hurt in the attempt.
Then our division became the 7th Guards Division, and many fighters received awards for defeating the Germans near Moscow. Our company, renamed from the reconnaissance battalion, took part in the battles near Kryukovo station and advanced along the Leningrad highway. After reinforcements, we were sent to Staraya Russa on the Northwestern Front.
On March 5, 1942, a group of 22 people, led by the commander, Captain F. Tsapurin, and me with the remaining nine fighters of the platoon, were sent to the rear of the Germans with the task of mining three roads and taking a prisoner. On the evening of March 7, we dug into the snow at a fork in the road and waited for the enemy. It was a very bright moonlit night, there was a severe frost, but no one got up. Two horses harnessed to a sleigh rode out of the forest, each of which had two people with machine guns. I fired at the first group, and the soldiers fired at the second with rifles, but the horses carried the Germans into the forest, and only two Nazis, both in straw bast shoes, fell down dead; a full pillowcase with letters from Germany lay near them. After waiting a little, we went around this place through the forest and came out onto the road.
We took everything we needed and left the corpses lying around. At 10 a.m. an empty cart was moving back, with 15 soldiers walking behind it with rifles at the ready, three paces apart. They threw the corpses on the sled and drove away; we did not touch them. Of course, they decided that we had left, but they were still on guard, apparently afraid of this place. I decided that a larger and bolder group would return, and sent a messenger to the company commander with a request to gather everyone at the fork. The commander agreed, everyone gathered there and settled down on three sides. At 6 p.m. the wind picked up, and we saw that more than 100 Germans were moving along the clearing straight toward us. We let the head of the column onto the road and opened fire from three sides. The German captain was killed, the rest rushed about, got stuck in the snow, and no one escaped. One German non-commissioned officer raised his hands and surrendered. We seized the captured weapons and, without wasting time with the prisoner, went back the other way, crawled across the front line under the illumination of the rockets and returned safely. We were hungry, tired, but very happy, and then it became known that 13 Germans had been killed. This was written in the newspaper Izvestia under the headline "Pathfinders".
(Note from the institute wall newspaper for the 30th anniversary of the Victory).