The Oddities of War
Uncle Kostya's letter #2. It says that they were brought to Kharkov, but where next, of course, he didn't know
Caravans of birds fly above me
Flying past in the sky.
They fly above me as if they want to take me
Towards my native land, to my beloved region.
Song from the film "Missing in Action". Words by A. Fatyanov, music by G. Zhukovsky
Flying past in the sky.
They fly above me as if they want to take me
Towards my native land, to my beloved region.
Song from the film "Missing in Action". Words by A. Fatyanov, music by G. Zhukovsky
He didn’t live to see the victory… The publication of materials about my stepfather Petr Shpakovsky raised many questions among the reading audience of "Military Review", and many of them in their comments point out the inaccuracies and oddities in them. The first are quite understandable, since they are a retelling of a story, even with some statute of limitations. But the second... Here everything is more complicated. The fact is that, in my opinion, in any such complex and dangerous matter as war, oddities have always been and will be. And today I would like to tell you about one such oddity here. It is confirmed by a document - a letter from the front, but it sounds truly amazing.
As I have written here many times, my family lived in the city of Penza on Proletarskaya Street since 1882. The house was old, but solid, and my grandfather's half had only two rooms, so he slept on a bed in the hallway by the door. In the hall by the window there was a chest of drawers with various knick-knacks, an old Moser clock, and above it hung three large photo portraits of my grandfather Konstantin Petrovich Taratynov in his youth and his two sons, Kostya and Shura.
When I once asked who they were, I was told that they were your uncles, but they died in the war. I didn’t ask about them again until I watched the feature film “Missing in Action,” filmed in 1956 at the Kyiv Film Studio. It was released in 1957, but I watched it, of course, much later. The film about a Soviet soldier who accomplished a feat but remained nameless made a very strong impression on me, and when I returned home, I began to retell its plot. It was shown in movie theaters and on TV more than once. But at home, they didn’t like it, so I had to watch it either at the movie theater or at my neighbors’. Well, one day I asked about it…
And then my mother took out an old, worn briefcase with documents from the closet, took out a folder with yellowed letters and began to show them to me and tell me about them.
That's how I found out that my uncle Konstantin Petrovich Taratynov went to war and disappeared without a trace there in exactly the same way. And no matter how much my grandparents searched for him, they never found him, neither immediately after the war, nor many years later.
Konstantin Taratynov is my uncle
Well, what did I learn about him then? That he finished seven years of school and went to work on the railroad, since my grandfather had started his career there, and my great-grandfather was a master of locomotive repair shops and a very respected man. He passed the exam and began working in a mail and baggage car at the Penza-1 station. He liked the job because it gave him the opportunity to travel around the country. So he visited beyond the Ural Mountains and told his younger brother and sister a lot about his impressions.
According to his mother, he was a very inquisitive young man, he read many different magazines, but he was especially interested in everything related to weapons. So this interest is probably hereditary for me. I decided to learn to play the guitar, bought it, a self-study guide and learned to play. But his real passion was aviation. This is not surprising, because aviation in the USSR was rapidly developing at that time, it was the pilots who became the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, and the sky at that time attracted many, many. Boys wanted to be like Chkalov. Well, "Uncle Kostya" also signed up for the Penza flying club, began to fly gliders and training aircraft.
And then he was drafted into the army, on June 20, 1941, exactly two days before the war began. He was exactly 18 years old then. He wanted to join the air force, but he failed the medical examination for vision problems because he wore glasses. His family saw off their beloved son, who left on a train with conscripts at exactly 5 a.m. But they never saw their son again…
June 22, 1941, as everyone probably knows, fell on a Sunday, that is, a day off, and also a holiday for railway workers. The entire Taratynov family went to celebrate it in the park at the F.E. Dzerzhinsky Railway Workers' Club. Music was playing, people were walking, eating ice cream and laughing. And suddenly everything went silent, and people rushed to the exit, where a large black loudspeaker hung on a pole. V.M. Molotov was speaking on the radio. And he said terrible things about how today at 3 o'clock in the morning Nazi Germany attacked the USSR. The parents were shocked, first of all, because they immediately realized that they were sending their son off to war.
And then the first letter came from him. In it, he wrote that his train was moving west, where fierce battles were already underway. Then three more letters came, the last one from Novgorod-Volynsky. And then they received a notice that Red Army soldier Taratynov K.P. was missing in action... And then in 1942, my grandmother accidentally saw a photograph from a Belarusian partisan detachment in a newspaper. One of those depicted in it looked very much like her son. She immediately wrote a letter to the author of the article, but he replied that he, of course, did not remember all the names of the partisans he had photographed there, and advised her to contact the partisan detachment directly, and even told her how to find him.
The grandparents immediately wrote "where necessary", but were told that the entire detachment had already been destroyed by that time. They tried to find their missing son for a very long time. They wrote inquiries to military registration and enlistment offices, but the answers were always the same: "He is not listed among the killed and wounded." That is how the life of a young guy at the age of 18 ended...
At one time I read all his letters very carefully - after all, these were real documents of the war and the most valuable historical source. And I learned a lot of interesting things from them. For example, I seemed to know that letters from the war years were folded in a triangle. At least, that's how it is in all the movies about the war. But Uncle Kostya's letters were in envelopes, albeit very small ones. Moreover, one envelope even had a stamp. Isn't that strange? And how can it be explained? By the inertia of peacetime, when envelopes were still in use? Well, and then, when they were gone, the postal service switched to triangles? Of course, that's a small thing. But if I had written that the letters were "squares", people would have immediately started writing to me that it was a fiction, that "triangles" were used during the war. But here are four letters that say the opposite. That is, at the very beginning of the war, this happened.
The first letter was the shortest:
"I'm traveling on the Penza-Kharkov line. I'm writing from Povorino station. They're handing out herring and bread now. The train is going very fast. It's hard to write, it's full of people."
It shows that the train carriage was overcrowded. And that the newly drafted guys, who had never even held a rifle in their hands, were being taken to the front. But it would have been more logical to send them to Samara, train them, and only then send them to war. But... that's exactly how it was then!
Letter No. 3 of June 26th reported that Kostya was in the city of Korosten in Western Ukraine. He had to write in fits and starts, since the station had been bombed by German bombers for the second time, and the city was also being bombed. 13 planes took part in the raid. Moreover, it took a very long time to transport them from Kharkov to Korosten. At first they were transported to Lvov, but the unit where they were going to be reinforced had gone into battle, and where they would be taken next was unknown. “We are waiting for redeployment,” it was written at the end of the letter.
And here is the last letter, No. 4, dated June 27. It is the most detailed, which indicates that there was an opportunity to write it. It says that their train arrived in Novgorod-Volynsky again, was bombed, and that before his eyes our anti-aircraft gunners shot down five German planes at once! That's how it was! And they also say that at the beginning of the war we had a bad DefenseMoreover, one plane fell outside the city, but the other was shot down and landed next to the station in a field. “They took out of this plane – and here begins the most interesting, even incredible part – a 16-year-old drunk pilot, a 17-year-old girl, the rest were adults, - he writes, - (navigator, radio operator and others)».
Scan of letter #4
So what is next:
"Many spies and saboteurs are being detained at the stations." "One military train was brought here, all mown down by machine gun fire. Very few were left alive, though I didn't see it myself." "I'll finish, because things are starting to fly again that are interesting to watch."
These are the “interesting things” that my uncle managed to see and describe in a letter. And here are the questions: how did these strange individuals get on a military plane of the German Air Force and what were they doing there? After all, neither a seventeen-year-old girl nor a sixteen-year-old boy could serve in the German Air Force by definition (or maybe they could and did serve?). But, nevertheless, they ended up on it, and were immediately captured!
How did Kostya know their age and that the guy was drunk, if he reports it as an irrefutable fact? The prisoners' documents were obviously checked, and everyone in the train he was traveling on started talking about it... And he doesn't give any more details, that is, for him everything was clear anyway. But this is a real find for filmmakers, and where? In my home archive! But if they showed this on the screen, no one would believe them! They would simply say: "This couldn't have happened." But it did!
A letter from a war correspondent from the newspaper and a photograph of a machine gunner with tank DT shows a guy who looks like Kostya in a cap and with a gun
One of the answers to the query…
Well, judging by the photograph in the newspaper, he didn’t even have time to change into his army uniform (when and where was he supposed to change if the same “things” later bombed his train?), and so, in his home cap, he ended up with the partisans. And most likely, in one encircled unit, named for the sake of beauty the Kotovsky partisan detachment. And that’s where he fought until 1942, until he died along with the rest of his partisans!
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