Border guards in the defense of the Brest Fortress
The defense of the Brest Fortress firmly entered the consciousness of our people, becoming one of the heroic episodes of our great stories. It is known that Soviet border guards were in the ranks of the fortress garrison. On the eve of the war, the 17 th Red Banner border guard detachment under the command of Major A.P. school of border guards drivers. At the head of the border guards of the fortress was the commander of 2165-th frontier guard Lieutenant A. Kizhevatov. Already in the 3 year after the liberation of Brest from the Nazis on the wall of one of the casemates, where the fighters of the 9 frontier outpost fought, they found a scratched inscription: “I am dying, but do not give up! Goodbye Motherland! 9. " The commander of the 1944-th outpost of Kizhevatov himself died, fulfilling an important task in early July of the 9 year, with the explosion of the crossing, which the Nazis directed through the Bug. In the fall of 20.07.1941, the Nazis shot his entire family: a mother, a wife, and three children.
Initially, there was no information about the 9 outpost fight and border guards in the Brest Fortress: “According to the testimony of the residents of a nearby village, in the very first minutes of the war, the border guards took the blow of the enemy on the Western island of the Brest Fortress and fought for a long time.” At the location of the border guards on the Western Island, there were found ruins, which speak of an unusually fierce struggle, they were dug up with bullets and shrapnel. The participants of the fighting in the Brest Fortress, who managed to survive, enthusiastically told about the courage and skill of the border guards, they were, without a doubt, the best defenders of the fortress. The command of the Germans, furious with the great losses and stubborn resistance of the border guards, gave the order in the very first days of the war: if the Red Army soldier has green buttonholes on his tunic or a green cap, do not take such prisoners, even seriously wounded, on the spot. But they themselves tried not to fall into the hands of the enemy, for example, the Belarusian sergeant Petrinchik was surrounded by enemy fighters, hiding in the ruins of a house, fired to the last bullet, putting well-aimed shots to more than a dozen Nazis. The last patron killed himself.
So did a young border guard guarding two enemy saboteurs caught on June 21 in the fortress. When the battle began, he did not leave his post, and when the enemy broke into the center of the fortress through the Terespol gate, a group of Nazis rushed towards the camera, where they held prisoners of saboteurs, apparently, the enemy’s agent was in the fortress, telling where they were located. The border guard fought back, and when the enemies broke into the cell, they found three bodies — he killed the saboteurs and killed himself.
Groups of border guards fought almost all areas of the defense, but the main forces of the border guards of the commandant's office 3 and the 9 frontier guard headed by its commander lieutenant Andrei Kizhevatov fought in the center of the citadel together with the soldiers of the 333 rifle regiment. When Kizhevatov began the battle, he left his family in the basement of the commandant's office, he himself ran to his outpost. All the first day the frontier guards fought off the attacks of the enemy in the destroyed building of their outpost, including in hand-to-hand fighting, the enemy rushed through the Terespol Gate to the center of the citadel. At night, with the remnants of the detachment, he moved into the building of the 333 regiment, becoming an assistant to Senior Lieutenant Potapov, who was in charge of the defense there. In early July, Kizhevatov was charged with a group of border guards to blow up a pontoon bridge across the Bug River, which the enemy had brought near the fortress. They left, and the more we know nothing about them, whether the operation was successful or not, how they died.
Another group of border guards fought in the East Fort area, in Major Gavrilov's detachment. They were from the fortress gate next to the fortress, 22 were holding defense all day on the banks of the Bug, and 23 were breaking through the encirclement and making their way to the Brest Fortress. Lieutenant Border Guard became the head of intelligence Major Gavrilov. In the Eastern Fort, in the building, which stood in the center of the horseshoe-shaped yard, a quadruple anti-aircraft machine-gun unit was installed on the 2 floor, from which two anti-aircraft gunners from the 393 division were fired. This installation was very disturbing to the enemy; after the death of the anti-aircraft gunners, two frontier guards fired. Only an air strike managed to destroy the building, both fighters died.
When the fighters of the 333 Infantry Regiment began to run out of ammunition, they decided to break through, not in the direction of the city, but in the German rear through the West Island, on which other border guards fought. They concentrated in the destroyed barracks at the Terespol Gate and then, across the bridge and across the dam blocking the river in this place, rushed to the West Island with a sudden throw. According to the memories of the survivors, when they hit the island, a border guard with a light machine gun in his hands lay on the ground in a bush on the ground. Near it, on one side, a pile of empty, spent cartridges was piled up, and on the other, cartridges and spare disks for a machine gun. Around lay a lot of dead Germans. The fighter looked terrible - his face had become earthy gray, black circles under his eyes. Stunned, overgrown with a beard, with red, inflamed eyes from sleepless nights, he apparently had been lying here for days without food and without sleep, repelling the attacks of the Nazis. The fighters began to bother him, offered to go for a breakthrough with them, but the fighter-border guard looked up, looked at them and in a deaf, expressive voice said: "I won't go away from here." More about his fate is not known. The attempt to break through failed, almost all the fighters were killed under machine-gun fire, and only a few were able to swim across the river. There they were captured. When they were taken prisoner along the Bug the next day, they heard shooting on the West Island and saw the red flag of the border guards flying in the center of the island. There is an opinion that the fighters stayed there for more than two weeks, the last groups of border guards were kept in unfinished pillboxes on the banks of the Bug.
What is interesting, even in this terrible meat grinder of the most severe fights, not all died. Thus, an ordinary border guard Mikhail Myasnikov and a friend at the very beginning of the war lay in one of the secrets in a dense bush that descended to the very water of the Bug - these soldiers were the first to fight in the fortress. The sentinel fired at the Nazis crossing the boats, fired at the German sappers who were preparing the crossing. When the ammunition ran out, they retreated into the interior of the island and joined the group of border guards under the leadership of Lieutenant Zhdanov, who took up defenses near the unfinished pillboxes. There they fought until the end of June. And on the night of 5 on 6 in July 1941, two dozen surviving border guard soldiers fought their way through the outer ramparts. In the dark, they lost each other, and M. Myasnikov with three comrades walked through the Pinsk swamps to the east for several days, and already near the town of Mozyr, they were able to cross the front line to their own. Until the end of the war, M. Myasnikov fought with the enemy, became an officer, and in 1944, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for valor and courage during the liberation of Sevastopol.
They were captured by the wounded and survived (they were not shot, as they were without gymnasts with green buttonholes) by the commander of the transport company of the 17 frontier detachment Akim Cherny, the border guards of the ninth outpost, Grigory Yeremeyev and Nikolai Morozov. G. Yeremeyev fled and joined the partisans, fought in the lands of Italy and Yugoslavia.
At the very end of July, 1941 (radio operator K.I. Korshakov, who served as a radio operator in the border troops, remembered exactly what it was after July 25), the 262 rifle division, which was stationed near Maloyaroslavets, received a message from the Brest Fortress border station radio station : “The situation is difficult, the fortress falls, destroy the reptiles, we explode ourselves.” This message was immediately transferred to the capital, and under the city of Maloyaroslavets it was read on the same day at the party meeting. Read out and in other parts of this section of the front. We don’t know who sent this message: were there groups of border guards stationed in the unfinished pillboxes on the West Island, can a detachment of border guards of senior lieutenant Melnik or remnants of the 9 frontier post Kizhevatov fighting in the center of the Brest fortress?
Eternal glory to the famous and unknown heroes of this cruel battle!
Sources of
Aliyev R. Brest Fortress. M., 2010.
http://www.bibliotekar.ru/brest-1941/29.htm
http://podvig.gpk.gov.by/article/chronicle_of_first_battles_on_border/chronicle_17_th_of_red_brest_border_detachment_part_1/
http://rkka1941.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post_3569.html
http://www.nasledie.ru/oboz/N5-6_01/5-6_04.HTM
http://ivje.grodno.by/ru/granica/pogranhistory
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