Heroic truth and speculative fiction intertwined in the fate of Captain Ivan Datsenko's guard
Guard captain Ivan Datsenko - Hero missing in the war. And the prototype of the hero of the film, "based on real events."
If the Hero of the Soviet Union, Captain Ivan Datsenko, the Guard, had become a Kozopasm in the Andes or a winemaker in Provence, perhaps his fate would not have caused such interest. But legend has it that the pilot hero became the "leader of the Indians." Therefore - hundreds of articles, dozens of researchers, and even a feature film with fantastic content ...
The constant author of "Motherland" tried to separate truth from fiction by visiting the Hero's Ukrainian homeland.
Last vacation. Khtern Chernechy Yar
Ivan’s native street in Chernechye Yaru, on a farm near Poltava Dikanka, has not changed much since the fall of 1943, when he last came here on vacation. Rut in fatty black soil, squishing rainwater. Slanted wooden fences. Heavy apple trees. Even before the two thousandths on the mountain stood a mill built by Datsenk grandfathers.
Chernechy Yar itself is a part of the large village of Great Budyshis, hidden away under this mountain, which also includes Pisarevschina. The name comes from the Chernitsky Savior monastery skete, which became a Holy Trinity Monastery in the late 19th century. The local Cossacks were cut with the Tatars, and fought for Peter I, and for Charles XII, who had a headquarters on the eve of the Battle of Poltava in the village. And later, for grenadier growth and bearing, they were recruited into the Russian Imperial Guard.
“Such a land,” says a distant (by grandfathers) relative of Ivan Datsenko, a respected local historian and honorary inhabitant of Great Budyshch, Grigory Titarenko, with ill-concealed pride. The front wall of the 130 rural school is hung with memorial signs as an iconostasis. The locals recall that when the captain Datsenko guard, shining a golden star and two orders, told the rural youth how they beat the German, the ancestors' spirit awoke in the guys. All together they added to themselves years and went into the army.
Ivan's younger brother, Vasily Datsenko, who served as an air gunner in the 233rd assault air division, managed to receive the Order of the Red Star until he died in November 1943. After him, senior Datsenko took revenge in his native 10th Stalingrad Red Banner Bomber Regiment after a vacation aviation long range.
And never returned home.
Everything is known about his life until April 1944. He graduated from the Zoovettekhnikum in Pisarevschina. Called on special forces in the Orenburg Flight School. Chkalov. In the CPSU (b) - with 1940, the standard-bearer of the regiment. In the battles of World War II - from June 22 1941go. He flew the IL-4 long-range bomber “For Soviet Ukraine!”, By the autumn of 1943, the total flight time on all types of aircraft - 4 is thousands of hours, of which 3786 is at night.
The war for Datsenko ended on the night of 18 on 19 on April 1944 of the year, with a raid on the Lviv-2 freight station near the village of Kleparov.
This is also preserved evidence.
V. Luzhetsky. Heroes of the Soviet Union I.I. Datsenko and G.I. Bezobraz. 1955 year.
The last battle. Village Kleparov
The crew of Datsenko as part of the Hero of the Soviet Union, navigator Gregory Bezobrazov, gunner-radio operator Ivan Svetlov and deputy chief of the political department of the division, Major Major Nikolai Zavirokhin, who took the place of the air gunner, had to drop light bombs. The task was carried out, the regimental machines sighting worked on the station. As reported in the 1987 year, the newspaper Lvivska Pravda, citing witnesses, "... was" complete hell. "The fire lasted more than a week. All the time, shells and tanks with gasoline and alcohol were torn."
But the success came at a high price: the German anti-aircraft gunners groped for Datsenko’s aircraft and, igniting in the air, he collapsed into the forest. None of the pilots who were in the air at that time (and later shared memories) did not see parachutes ...
Already in 1980, students from the Budyshansk school wrote a request to the Lviv regional committee of LKSMU about finding a burial site and the circumstances of the death of their countryman. The case was entrusted to the club "Search" of Lviv school N 42, which was led by Guards Colonel Gleb Rokotov, former editor of the newspaper 53 Army "For the Motherland!". The probable place was indicated by the retired captain Belozerov, a fan of “quiet hunting,” who saw aircraft wreckage in the Briukhovetsky forest. But the pioneers did not find anything. As a result, it was decided to put a symbolic monument in Bryukhovichi, on the territory of the pioneer camp.
And ten years after Ivan Datsenko and his crew were immortalized on a granite block, the country was dispersed news: The Union Hero became the leader of the Iroquois, and after the war he lived not far from Montreal under the name of John McComber, the leader of the Poking Fire.
Although the news is called wrong. Twenty years before the sensational publications, the famous dancer Makhmud Esambaev spoke about the "Ukrainian Indian." True, without mentioning the names ...
An entry in the Named list of irretrievable losses about datsenko and Bezobrazov who did not return from a combat mission
Last movie. From Esambaev to Ilyenko
In 1972, in the book “The Story of Dance”, Gennady Pozhidaev told about Esambaev’s visit to Canada, to the exhibition “Expo-67”. One day, Mahmud filmed a "dance festival" of Indians on the Kanawake Reservation (apparently, this was the annual Pow Wow festival). At some point, the leader appeared, “a tall handsome man with a bronze-colored face,” who greeted in Russian and Ukrainian, invited me to his hut, treated him with vodka and tatters, and sang “Spry, boys, horses”.
"Tears streamed down the leader’s face. And he told Esambaev history own life. His family, in search of work, moved to Canada before the revolution. He grew up here. Then he married the daughter of the leader of an Indian tribe. And when the leader died, the Indians chose him as their head and protector. "
In 1984, Mahmud Esambayev himself repeated the story in an interview with Soviet Screen magazine, but adding the name Ivan Dotsenko: "It would seem that a man was born in Canada, and Ivan cannot speak of Ukraine without tears." However, there is not even a hint that the name belongs to the hero-pilot.
Perhaps that is why the real explosion of interest in the “Indian from the farm near Dikanka” occurred only after March 19, 1997, when the Trud newspaper decided that the Canadian Dotsenko and Poltava Datsenko were one person! Journalists did not provide any evidence of this. But the chain reaction began.
Native pilot niece Olga Ruban took up active searches around the world. From Canada, the answer did not wait, but the famous program "Wait for me" immediately jumped at the interesting plot. In 2002, in the next program, host Igor Kvasha quoted some transcript of the All-Union Conference of 29 culture workers in March 1991 in Zhytomyr. Here already appeared the leader from Poltava, the pilot, the Hero of the Soviet Union ...
So about Ivan Datsenko learned millions of people.
Show must go on!
How mushrooms began to breed articles with dizzying stories. That Ivan managed to jump out of a burning plane, was captured by the Germans and then - in the American zone of occupation. So, on the contrary, he fled from the Germans, fell into the clutches of the NKVD, was sent (of course) to the camps, from where he fled again - through the Bering Strait and Alaska to Canada. And the whole director’s film Michael Mikhail Ilyenko crowned this vulgar set of “He Who Passed Through the Fire”, released on 2012 on the screen. In the tape, the creator of vigorous brushstrokes added the obligatory decorations for modern Ukraine: a surplus, an aggressive rebellion, an eternally drunk NKVD officer, convicts, and snow-covered Siberia. And the curtain - a bunch of Indian children, mastering the Ukrainian language.
A massive kinoklyukva won the Grand Prix of the III Kiev International Film Festival. But the film didn’t bring the clue of the pilot Ivan Datsenko to a single step.
Memorial plaque at the school where Ivan Datsenko studied. Photo: Dmitry Zaborin
The last witness. John mccomber
During the war in Chechnya, a shell came to the apartment of Makhmud Esambayev in Grozny, destroying the entire archive. If there was a film with a record of an Indian holiday in it, it disappeared irretrievably. And the "evidence" of the Canadian life of the hero-pilot remains quite a bit.
First, the video interview of Marfa Danko, Datsenko’s neighbors, which was taken to Germany to work during the war, is stored in the personal archive of Grigory Titarenko. In 1945, Martha went to a filtration camp in the American occupation zone and seemed to see Ivan there, alive and healthy. He offered to go with him to Canada, but she refused.
Second, the coincidence of the names of an Indian friend whom I know for Esambaev and a former commander of the 10 long-range Guards air regiment discovered by the researchers.
Actor Ivan Tetyushny played a major role in the film "He Who Passed Through the Fire." Photo: frame from the film
But a simple check shows: Ivan Datsenko could not have been John McComber. "Piercing Fire" - a real historical figure, this man opened the Indian Museum back in 1936, when Datsenko twisted footcloths in a flight school. In Kanavaka, this is the last name from the founding fathers. The first of these, the Protestant Jarvis McComber, in 1796, moved from Massachusetts to Canada, where he turned into a Catholic Gervaev and a fur earner. He married Indian Charlotte, and then another two women, and left behind 26 children.
One of his descendants and invented a good business. The Iroquois "Long House" with fake exhibits, dances for tourists (like Esambaev) in feather headdresses, sale of souvenirs and photographs. Naturally, the owner of the museum-scan was not less than the "leader". Although, quite possibly, McComber really was him, heading the reservation board. Another thing is that they categorically could not be a foreigner.
In a fundamental study of the genealogical tree "Gervawe McComber and his 26 children in Kanavac", compiled by one of his distant relatives, John Macievich (this year it survived the third edition), it states that "Piercing Fire" had three sons: Joseph, Dominic and Cornelius, born in 30 years. In one of the 50x advertising shots collected by the Canadian local historian Gary Biron, you can see a bright Europoid similar to Ivan. A wide smile under the eagle feathers, next to a dark-haired woman, wrapped in a motley robe. The caption reads: "Princess Word Gatherer and Son (Leader - Author) Going to Heaven."
Good name for the pilot!
His stubborn countryman, Grigory Titarenko, having been in a Canadian reservation, even managed to find the descendants of the person from the picture. Only Thomas McComber's date of birth of his grandfather called a very different one. Well, and with me the other McCombers, abundantly represented on social networks, refused to speak at all ...
The latest clue to supporters of the "Indian history" - the book "Heroes of the Soviet Union. Handbook", published in 2010 year in St. Petersburg. It reads in black and white: "Datsenko Ivan Ivanovich ... Died in Canada. Reservation of the Iroquois. In the 1980's."
That's just on the graveyard of the grave reservation with the same name there.
On the monument to the dead crew of Ivan Datsenko, the last letters will soon fall off. Photo: Dmitry Zaborin
PS In the 1945 year, the newspaper "Radyanska Dikanschyna" reported: when the news of the pilot's death came, "the village owners started talking about the construction of a monument to a famous countryman, but the matter did not move further." And now it is unlikely to advance, given the attitude of the new Ukrainian authorities to the history of the Great Patriotic War.
And in order to seriously start the development of the "Indian trace" (and, I hope, to close it forever), you need to do just one simple thing. Find and raise the plane with the remains of the crew. After all, even those who, in search of Ivan Datsenko, reached Canada, have never been to the Bryukhovichs, over whom the guard captain from under Dykanka took his last fight.
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