On 4 November 1941 German bombers carried out the first raid on Nizhny Novgorod (then The City of Gorky), which caused heavy loss of life.
Official figures
The first raid on the city was carried out by enemy aircraft on the night of 4-5 November 1941. Groups of Heinkel-111 and Junkers-88 bombers took part in it, up to 150 aircraft in all. Of that number, 11 aircraft broke through to the city of Gorky.
German airmen waved at the people of Gorky
The weather that day was cold and gloomy, fully matching the mood of the people of Gorky during the Wehrmacht's offensive on Moscow. The city, until recently deep in the rear, was in effect becoming a front-line one. Leaden clouds hung over Gorky, pierced from time to time by a faint November sun.
The day was already drawing to a close when at about 16.10 residents of the Prioksky District) district heard the roar of engines in the sky. Looking up, they saw a twin-engine aircraft that had suddenly emerged from the clouds; black crosses stood out clearly on its grey-blue wings. After making several circles over the neighbourhoods, it dropped a bomb on the Lenin Plant. Immediately afterwards a tremendous explosion thundered in the main four-storey building, and most of it collapsed. A tall column of black smoke, fire and dust rose into the sky, visible from every part of the city. Only after that did the air-raid sirens sound, and anti-aircraft guns began firing from the area of the Tobolsk barracks.
At the Frunze radio equipment plant located opposite the stricken enterprise, the windows were blown out in every shop and the plaster came down. The Heinkel's pilot, meanwhile, calmly took his aircraft towards the The Kremlin, taking in the local sights along the way. All the while the airmen, almost as in Mikhalkov's film “Burnt by the Sun 2”, leaned out of the cockpit and waved at the frightened residents.
Meanwhile two more bombers were approaching the city. These were Heinkel-111s, well known to the people of Warsaw, London, Leningrad and other cities of Europe. Passing over the surrounding villages and striking fear into the collective farmers, at about 16.20 they appeared over the Avtozavodsky district at extremely low altitude. The aircraft roared over people's heads, heading towards the plant. One bomber flew over what is now Molodyozhny Avenue, the second four hundred metres to the left, over Ilyich Avenue. Anna Sorokina, who was outdoors at the time, later recalled: “They flew as if on parade, all but scraping the roofs and chimneys with their bellies.” At those very seconds Nadezhda Nadyozhkina, at her post on the roof of the GAZ administration building, also clearly saw two aircraft against the twilight sky, approaching from the west at low altitude.
The girl nervously leafed through the photographs of bombers lying in front of her, trying to compare them with the originals growing larger by the moment. When the aircraft were already flying over the plant grounds, Nadyozhkina still hoped that they might be their own, but then she saw four bombs separate from one of them and hurtle down with a howl straight at the repair and machine shop. And a moment later everything around was shaken by the roar of explosions, and columns of fire and smoke shot up into the sky. As it turned out later, three bombs hit the middle of the building, and the fourth exploded in the street between the RMC and the electrical substation of the assembly and stamping shop.
The floors of the building came down, the eastern end wall collapsed completely, and almost all the partitions were knocked out. One of the bombs went off right in the canteen, and all the workers inside were torn to pieces. The second Heinkel dropped its bombs on the Avtozavod combined heat and power plant. One exploded in the western part of the building, then under construction, destroying it completely; the second broke through the roof but stuck in the rafters and, hanging over the boilers, did not go off.
Panic broke out at the plant, and many workers left the shops and ran towards the gates. Meanwhile one of the aircraft made a circle over the plant, its gunner firing three machine-gun bursts one after another at the gatehouse and at the people running towards it. Nadyozhkina recalled: “As I was going down into the shelter in the attic, I saw the plaster flaking away beside me under the stream of bullets, and I heard their deadly buzzing…” Departing to the west, the bombers strafed the streets of the Avtozavodsky district, as well as the cars and horse-drawn carts travelling along them.
Bötcher and his crew
The raid involved highly experienced German airmen from the KGr.100 “Wiking” bomber group, among them the well-known ace Hans Bötcher, who had bombed Moscow many times before. They had detailed photographs of the city marking all the important targets. The city's air defence had been put together by improvisation, and by November 1941 it consisted mainly of 76-millimetre guns of First World War design. The batteries fired erratically and chaotically, causing the Germans no hindrance at all.
At 16.40 another Heinkel appeared. The bomber came from the south, from the direction of the village of Ankudinovka, and flew low over the railway. The twin-engine hulk roared over Myza. Some residents even managed to make out an enormous bomb slung under its fuselage. Suddenly emerging from behind the hilly bank, the aircraft flew over the Oka and, in a shallow dive, released its “cargo” on the Dvigatel Revolyutsii plant. A tremendous explosion thundered in the enterprise's power station building, which housed the steam boilers and the diesel, compressor and transformer substations. Workers in the neighbouring shops were thrown to the floor by the shock, and then a veritable rain of glass shards from the skylights came down on them from above.
Naturally, panic broke out in the city streets: passengers jumped from moving trams, drivers abandoned their cars right in the road and ran off, crowds of people rushed headlong to the shelters. From 17.15 onwards German aircraft made several more raids on Gorky, continuing until late at night.
On the morning of 5 November the bureau of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Committee met in emergency session. Once the overall results of the raids had been established, a resolution was adopted on eliminating the consequences of the bombing.
The morning newspapers, meanwhile, came out without a single hint of the tragic events. Thus «Gorkovskaya Kommuna (newspaper)», saying not a word about the air raids on the city, ran an enormous article "Into the Fund for the Defence of the Motherland", which described how the people of Gorky, in a single impulse, were handing over grand pianos, private cars, well-fed rams and so on for the needs of the war.
"It was a terrible sight"
In the meantime, rescue work continued at the Lenin Plant amid the ruins of the main building. Large blocks were hauled away by one-and-a-half-ton trucks and tractors, and the smaller debris by hand. Welders cut through the bent and mangled reinforcement bars. "The most sickening feeling came when, raking away the rubble, you realised that your shovel had struck the flesh of a woman's or a man's leg," Boris Uvyatkin, at the time a lead engineer at the enterprise, later recalled. Some people were still trapped under the rubble and were receiving water and food through a small opening. At GAZ, the whole day likewise passed in digging. The most horrifying scene was in the destroyed repair and machine shop.
From there, again and again, mutilated human remains wrapped in tarpaulin were carried out and shown for identification to the relatives gathered there. Some recognised their own by a torn-off hand with a watch, others by a piece of a leg with a boot. Many of the bodies could not be identified at all. One eyewitness later recalled: "It was a terrible sight. There a mother recognises her daughter by a bloodstained headscarf and an earring. The woman immediately becomes hysterical, and other sobbing relatives catch her by the arms…" The identified remains were then loaded onto trucks and taken to the Avtozavodskoye Cemetery. The greater part of the plant, despite the damage, went on working.
The exact number of victims, because of the careless and frankly indifferent attitude to keeping count of them, remained unknown, but on the basis of various fragmentary data it may be supposed that no fewer than 300–350 people perished then. In the post-war years the details of this terrible raid and its consequences were concealed from the public by every means, while the actions of the air defence, on the contrary, were flaunted as supremely effective. And this despite the fact that the anti-aircraft batteries, having fired more than 13 thousand shells, did the bombers no harm at all. That is why to this day, seven decades on, 4 November has still not become a commemorative date, and not a single publicly accessible monument to the victims of the bombings has been erected in the city, apart from a couple of small memorial plaques at NITEL)" and at GAZ.
Source: "Leninskaya Smena", No. 45, 2010
Fragments from the memoirs of a woman who worked in the non-departmental guard service
kokon, NN.RU City Forum: "A year ago I typeset a book that my late grandmother wrote (more precisely, she was my grandmother's own sister). She worked in the VOKhR."
VOKhR
At the end of July 1941 I was summoned to the Komsomol committee and offered work in the plant's guard service, as a guard to protect the plant. Before that only men had worked there, but they had all been taken to the front. And so girls took their places. We lived under barracks conditions. We went on duty every other day. The food was poor. For dinner they brought us on duty a broth of water with a little semolina in that water, and here and there small pieces of fat. For the second course, choucroute, that is cabbage stewed with potatoes, carrots and onion, and all of it, of course, without butter or meat, and 650 g of bread according to the ration card. We stood on our feet 16 hours a day. Being unused to it, our legs and heels ached badly.
Our 6th separate detachment guarded Plant No. 466, where aircraft engines were made. The plant was located on the territory of the Avtozavod. On the day free of duty we had only the night to ourselves. The daytime was taken up with study. We were taught the service regulations and drill. We studied the 1888 model rifle, and afterwards fired it, and of course there were political classes. We lived in a large barracks, where several dozen beds had been set up. There was a "red corner" and a bayan. One of the commanders played that bayan very well. Youth is youth, it took its due. We had fun, though our stomachs were not always full.
The bombing of 4 November 1941
It happened on 4.11.1941. We had only just returned from duty. We came to the canteen in formation. Dinner was a holiday one. Both the first and second courses were meat. Even stewed fruit and a pie. But we were not fated to eat that dinner, which we very much regretted afterwards. We ate the first course, and suddenly there was the noise of an engine, and very low, right past the windows, an aeroplane flew by with black fascist crosses. It was a reconnaissance plane. We were immediately called to arms. And a few days before the bombing, Military commissariats), recruiting girl volunteers for the front. Many volunteers were signed up. But when the bombing began. And that was at night, at 23:30, the ardour of many of those heroic volunteers subsided. And the desire to go to the front vanished. Of course many of them did go to the front all the same. Right up until night we were in great tension, and we were not dismissed.
When the 1st bombing began. We were marched in formation into the plant to reinforce the posts. Anti-aircraft guns fired from the roofs of the workshops and from the ground, searchlights shone, aircraft engines roared, and bombs were already exploding. Every nerve clenched into a knot. A fine trembling ran through the whole body. We had to walk about a kilometre under fire, but it seemed to us that we walked a whole eternity. We were all sent out to the posts to reinforce the sentries. I went to a post at the central cash office and the design bureau, two doors side by side. The building was empty, only a single sentry guarded those two sealed doors.
On the roof an anti-aircraft gun hammered without pause, and a terrible rumble resounded through the empty building. The sentry was a girl; pressed into a corner with her rifle, she was weeping and shaking with fear, and was very glad at my appearance. Together it is not so frightening after all. After that bombing we all somehow grew up and grew wiser, and understood still more keenly the whole significance of this war. The bombing went on for 4 nights, and all that time we stood at our posts. I worried greatly about my family, and they about me and about Galina, who after the 8th grade had gone to work in the plant. She worked 12 hours a day, and 18 hours when shifts changed over.
Anything could happen in the plant. There were killed and wounded. The woodworking shop in the village of Monastyrka burned. During the bombing, watchmen stood on the roofs of the workshops and threw off the incendiary bombs that fell on them. And bad, grim news came from the front. Our army was retreating, every day closer and closer to Moscow. After every broadcast the radio proclaimed: "The enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours!" We firmly believed in it. We believed in the wisdom of our leader.
In winter a detachment from the ZIL guard service arrived from Moscow. They had been evacuated. They walked the entire way from Moscow to Gorky on foot. Weary and weather-beaten, they came to us in formation with their kitbags. The enemy was only 30 km from Moscow, and this troubled us all greatly. In the guard service I became friends with a very fine Belarusian girl, Malanya Zaikina, honest and truthful. I am very cautious in dealings and acquaintances, but our friendship with Molya was formed for a long time. To this day we correspond with her. She now lives in the town of Krichev, and has 4 daughters. Her life has not been an easy one. After the Muscovite women arrived, we Avtozavod girls were allowed to live at home, at which we were endlessly glad. Our detachment No. 6 was transferred to the charge of Plant No. 466.
The war, a hard, hungry time. As if on purpose, the winter was severe. In the buildings with central heating there was no warmth, no water and, in part, no light. Stovepipes of pot-bellied stoves stuck out of every ventilation window. We lived in a barrack and heated a stove; water came from a standpipe in the street, and the toilet was outside as well. People got by with food as best they could. Hungry people sometimes did not disdain scraps from the rubbish heap. We were spared that. Whole convoys with sledges set off to the countryside for potatoes in exchange for goods. People traded everything, whatever they had.
And they were given very little for it; things had lost their value. Our family was somehow lucky. A considerable contribution was made by my sister Maria. She worked as a forwarding agent at the Central Plant Laboratory. She had the chance to get hold of kerosene, and that was a very valuable commodity in the countryside, and it was readily taken in exchange for potatoes. Mother would travel and trade, and bring back a sack of potatoes, which lasted the 6 hungry mouths of us a very short time. Sometimes father went with her.
I too had the chance to experience that happiness. It is very hard labour. 50–60 km on foot one way. We knocked at every house. Sometimes we managed to trade something, and in another house they swore at us and threatened to let the dogs off the chain. We dragged the sack of potatoes by a rope, and the sledges drained the last of our strength. Sometimes in frost, snowstorm and blizzard. Half-starved, exhausted people in whole convoys, barely dragging their feet and hauling behind them sledges with a sack of potatoes. On the way, on the way back, there was a big long hill, and climbing it with a load was very hard. My poor mother, she left all her health on that hill.
And we were working, and had no such chance. Sometimes Maria brought us potatoes by lorry, thanks to the help and kindness of her superior Postnikov and the warehouse manager Pyaokumovich.
1943
June of that year was one solid month of large, massed raids and bombings on our city, and especially on the Avtozavod. They came day after day in groups of 150–200 aircraft, beginning at 24:00 and lasting until 3 in the morning.
They dropped illumination devices on parachutes and bombed us. It was as light as day. The plant burned, the workshops, the buildings. Bombs burst here and there. The main truck conveyor was destroyed to its foundations. Only the reinforcement bars stuck up like the skeleton of a huge animal, and it seemed that it was no longer possible to raise it from those ashes. But people, that miracle of nature, hungry, exhausted people, poorly dressed, worked a miracle, and within a single month restored everything. And vehicles the front needed began to come off the conveyor once more.
People worked around the clock. Increased rations kept people going. A great many perished in that terrible June of 1943. Whole stacks of corpses, without arms, without legs, without heads, it was a bloody mash. I saw all of it with my own eyes. After that, during a bombing my temperature would rise. The bodies were buried in a mass grave; a whole lorryload was piled up without coffins or any rites, and they were buried.
Relatives could not find their own kin in that mash. By that time I no longer stood at posts, but worked in the headquarters. During the bombing we hid in a slit trench dug beside our barrack. For a whole month we did not undress or take off our shoes. Not far from our barrack there was an anti-aircraft battery. The gunners lived nearby in a barrack, and we could hear the alarm being raised at the battery. They were the first to learn of the approach of enemy aircraft. Then the radio, which was never switched off, would begin to announce it with the heart-rending howl of a siren, and the announcer would say several times: "Citizens, air raid warning", and at the end: "All clear, all clear". But those 3 hours of bombing dragged on like an eternity, and carried away hundreds of lives.
Once a 500 kg bomb fell beside the anti-aircraft battery. Two soldiers, girls, were killed; the batteries were served mainly by girls only, apart from the commanders. During the explosion of that bomb, beneath us in the trench where we sat the earth swayed as if we were in a boat on the water. That same time a bomb whistled right over our heads. Everyone froze, even the children stopped crying. Our death was falling, but God spared us, a miracle occurred. It fell nearby, 7–10 metres from us, and did not explode; otherwise there would have been nothing left of us. In the daytime the bomb was dug up. It had fallen into our vegetable garden. When the sappers extracted it, it was a bomb weighing 200 kg. When the bombing ended, people wandered the streets worn out, with red, inflamed eyes from sleeplessness. Incendiaries burned themselves out on the roads. The bodies of the killed lay about.
Lorries loaded with corpses were driven out of the plant to the morgue, and the wounded were taken to hospitals. All the schools had been taken over as hospitals. Alongside front-line soldiers lay civilians too, children and old people.
On that ill-fated evening, 2 covered lorries once arrived carrying people evacuated from Moscow. There was no time to house them, it was already late. The people stayed the night in the vehicles, and in the night there was a bombing, and neither the vehicles nor the people were left.
This was near the plant, by the 6th gatehouse. Human bodies and entrails hung on the wires. A direct hit — it was no rare occurrence for bombs to fall straight into a slit trench, that is, a shelter, and in the morning human bodies of women, children, old people and everyone who had been there were dug out along with the earth. Once we came back after a bombing, and the cat was gone. It was mewing somewhere, and we simply could not find it. It had climbed into the case of the sewing machine, whose back panel had been broken off, and it too had made itself a shelter there.
Once, escaping the bombing, our family went to Gnilitsy, to acquaintances. The goat Zorka was left in the shed. In the morning Valentina went for the goat; she was only 14, and she worried greatly about it. Tying it to a rope, she wanted to lead it away, but the goat dug in its heels and would not go. Valentina could do nothing with it, and cried and was afraid that the bombing might start again. Suddenly a gun shot rang out somewhere, then a second. And the goat ran ahead of its mistress. It too had had its fill of fear in the night, and it too wanted to live. After that bloody month we were not bombed any more. Our troops went over to the offensive. People breathed more easily. Faith among people grew stronger. Our abandoned cities began to be recovered.
P.S. The text here is unedited, that is, just as it is, and the mistakes have not been corrected either. Because I lost the file meant for printing. What remains is the edited pdf version.
Kovalikha (disambiguation)
|
The point is that this tragedy must not be forgotten. There are still people alive who remember the bombing of the city.
One person in our family saw a child's torn-off little hand on Kovalikhinskaya Street during the war; it was lying on the outside windowsill of one of the houses. If I am not mistaken, at Bugrovsky Cemetery there is a mass grave of those killed at the Avtozavod. |
|
Flights over the royally glorified city "as if on parade"
|
|
My mother told us about that raid. What surprised them was precisely that the fascists did it as if on parade. The pilots waved their hands and guffawed as they flew over the barracks. Opposite the UGZhD there is a shop in a five-storey building. An anti-aircraft gun stood on its canopy. I remember the stories poorly, but it seems that was where my grandfather on my mother's side was on duty. |
|
The Germans and Fedyakovo (disambiguation)
|
|
For some reason the Germans liked the name " Fedyakovo " - they even used it for NITEL and Frunze.
The Swedes liked it too - when choosing a site for "IKEA" they poked straight at "Fedyakovo" on the map. A mystery... |
|
The deaths of "Sokol" workers at night and during test flights
|
|
My grandmother worked at the Sokol Aircraft Manufacturing Plant at that time.
She told us that they would come in for the morning shift and there, beside the machine tools, were the bodies of sixteen-year-olds who had died on the night shift from cold and malnutrition. And before their shift they went to clear the snow from the airfield where the tests were carried out. She also told us how many people were killed during the test flights. And the women workers of the plant cleared away the bodies and the wreckage, cleaned the snow again and went to their machines. In 1941 she was 17 years old. |
|
Air raids on the Petrovsky Plant
— Somehow I cannot find the Petrovsky Plant on the /German/ map, was it really not bombed during the war?
— The Petrovsky Plant is not local. In fact it is an enterprise evacuated from Ukraine. That is, it appeared in our city only after the war began, taking over workshops that had existed before. Most likely the Germans did not know about it at the time the plan of the operation was drawn up.
— Later it was bombed too. My grandmother worked at the Petrovsky Plant during the war, I don't remember whether from the first days of the war or not. She told us about the bombings, of course. If the plant stood in the same place during the war, then it simply cannot be seen on the map - it is on Sennaya Square, and that piece is missing.
— My grandmother worked at the Petrovsky Plant during the war
— Oh! Mine worked there too! She also told us about that time. The Petrovsky Plant was bombed more than once.
— Mine told me about it too, but I remember it poorly. They seem to have said that an anti-aircraft gun stood where the Sennaya bus station is, and that this area was countryside.
— Right, I have now questioned my grandmother about it all. She came to the plant in March 1942 (she was almost 17 then). The Petrovsky Plant itself was evacuated to us in December 1941. It was housed in several parts of the city: the main office and several shops - in one of the buildings of the mill on Chernigovskaya Street, and the other part - at the Ulyanovsk plant down below the hill under the Otkos or further on (I honestly did not work out where that is on a modern map). My grandmother worked on Chernigovskaya in a shop at a machine tool; she says they were bombed often, but the bombs fell into the Oka.
Although, she says, the target may have been not so much the plant as the mill. She remembers the raid of 4 November perfectly. Her own district was not bombed (on Oshara), but the Lenin Plant was bombed heavily; neighbours from her building worked there, a father and daughter, my grandmother's friend, both were killed in the first raid.
— And does your grandmother not recall what used to be on the spot where the Petrovsky Plant now stands? And where, at least roughly, was that "Ulyanovsk plant down below the hill", and what did it produce?
— On Sennaya Square there was the "Krasny Metallist" plant; in 1943 it was merged with the Petrovsky Plant and part of the production was apparently moved there. My grandmother worked in the shop on Chernigovskaya until 1949. Tomorrow I will dig out a book about the plant, it was made for some anniversary, and look for more detail there. Yes, by the way, above you wrote about the Sennaya area. That was already the city, ordinary two-storey houses stood there even before the revolution (they are still there now). Perhaps further along Rodionova Street there were village houses, as there are now, but all the same it is the city. In the area of the "Mayak" there was the city cemetery (Pecherskoye), and then a park with a dance floor.
— I was writing about the Sennaya Square. And about the bus station I was told that roosters and hens wandered about there, and opposite the rivermen's building wooden houses have survived to this day. Below the slope there was a village. I know the cemetery, that is further on. Where Usilova Street is now there were private village houses, right up to the 1980s.
— Exactly, my great-great-grandfather was a riverman - a senior engineer, and one of the houses belonged to his family.
"There were no 50-200, neither at the start nor at the end of the War"
|
|
There were no 150-200, neither at the start nor at the end of the War.The numbers were not even measured in tens.Granny reported :) she served as an anti-aircraft gunner throughout the Great Patriotic War in Gorky.She also said that their girlish shooting did the Germans no damage at all, it was purely to create a barrage of discomfort and to make aimed bombing harder.The only thing she told about was a ramming at the beginning of the war, our pilot, despairing of shooting the plane down with his machine gun, rammed it over the Oka, brought it down and survived himself by jumping with a parachute.I also heard from local residents that in the Pavlovo area one was shot down by fighter aircraft, in 1943 in fact. Although many said that supposedly yes, they flew out to bomb in large groups of 100 and more, but only a handful got through. |
|
The hunt for saboteurs
|
|
My father was 7 in '41, when the war began. They lived in Gordeyevka, where the Meshcherskoye Ozero neighbourhood is now. There were three yellow stone houses standing there, one of which, by the way, still stands beside the road leading to the Borsky Bridge - it is the former railway workers' school, during the war an army unit was stationed there. When Meshcherka was being built in the 1970s-80s two of the three houses were demolished. So he remembers how often the fascists tried to bomb the bridge across the Volga, once everything around was filled with trucks carrying soldiers, as he put it they were looking for saboteurs, possibly the ones dropped in to blow up the bridge. His mother, my grandmother, worked on the railway, they were put on barracks duty and in '42 he was sent to live in a village in the Gaginsky district with relatives. |
|
A car for the military commissar
— Well put. Hitting a plane flying at treetop height with an anti-aircraft gun is practically impossible. I liked the bit about "the people of Gorky handing over their cars in a single impulse". There were barely a few dozen private cars in Nizhny before the war, and they were all confiscated in the very first months. Ours was driven around throughout the war by that bastard of a Military commissariats) of the Avtozavodsky District. The most remarkable thing is that after the war he never gave it back.
— Did you get your revenge for the car?
— Dad took revenge as best he could - he pelted the car with chunks of ice from the roof in winter. The most galling thing was that it had been a personal gift from Henry Ford to my grandfather.
— Please tell us more about your grandfather and Ford, it's very interesting!
— Back in '93 I asked the same question of a worker at the GAZ museum who was showing us around. He stared at me wide-eyed and said nothing of the sort had ever happened. I may get the figures a bit wrong now, because my dad told this story a very long time ago, and all the documents are in the family archive.
In short, at the dawn of GAZ, i.e. even before it was launched, presumably the late 1920s, a large group of young specialists was sent from The City of Gorky to America, to be trained by Henry Ford, who had sold the USSR ALL THE TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION for producing the Ford-A and AA cars (whatever the pen-pushers fantasising about the alleged involvement of Soviet engineers in developing the GAZ-A may say, the cars were produced ENTIRELY to Ford's drawings and on Ford's equipment, initially even with the Ford badge, and that is exactly why the first GAZ badge was oval), and my grandfather was lucky enough to be among them.
Contrary to the opinion current today, it was not only communists who went abroad - my grandfather died without ever having been a party member. They stayed there a year and a bit, starting out as workers on the very sections they were later to head at home, then working as assistant foremen, assistant shop managers and assistant production managers (translating into our job titles). Before returning home, each of them was presented with a Ford-A car by Henry Ford.
We still keep the deed of gift, signed by H. Ford.
Unfortunately, as far as I know from my father's stories, practically all the participants of that trip were repressed. My grandfather was saved by his peasant instinct - even before the "great purge" he gave up the post he held and took a job as a foreman in an auxiliary GAZ workshop, where he worked until he retired. My father said that until 1953 a little plywood suitcase with warm clothes, a mug, a spoon and a plate stood in their hallway.
Apparently it was on the wave of the campaign against "kowtowing to the West" that this "shameful page in the history of the glorious factory" was torn out by the root, and we are all supposed to believe that a dozen and a half competent production managers, thoroughly versed in their own fields, suddenly appeared at GAZ out of nowhere. I should probably dig through the archive, pick out all of grandfather's photos from America and put them in the gallery.
..
Picked them out and posted them: [1]
The bombing as described in literature
from the book "The Swastika over the Volga. The Luftwaffe against Stalin's Air Defence". Mikhail Zefirov, Dmitry Degtev, Nikolai Bazhenov
"1941
... On the morning of 4 November, across the enormous front of Army Group "Centre" from Kalinin to Tula, the weather began to improve and the precipitation stopped. After midday it started to clear, accompanied by a drop in temperature and a light frost.... Over the Seshchinskaya airfield, north-west of Bryansk, the weather also improved, but the runway was in poor condition, which allowed only single bombers to take off. Nevertheless the commander of I./KG28, Oberst Ernst-August Roth, decided to carry out the planned raids on the industrial facilities of The City of Gorky. The targets chosen for the first attack were the car plant on the left bank of the Oka, the neighbouring "Dvigatel Revolyutsii", and also the former "Siemens und Halske" works (Gorky Plant No.
197 named after V. I. Lenin)... The gloomy, cold day was already drawing to a close when at about 16.10 a twin-engined aircraft suddenly appeared out of the clouds over the Oka, from the direction of Dzerzhinsk. Passing over the settlement of Strigino, it headed for the Voroshilovsky district, situated on the high right bank of the river. It was a He-111 with an almost three-metre cigar-shaped object slung under its fuselage – a 1000-kg BM-1000 mine. It was not detected by the VNOS posts, and the city MPVO headquarters again failed to sound the alarm. By the time the tower observer at Plant No. 197 named after Lenin saw the rapidly approaching aircraft, it was already too late…
The mine fell directly onto the plant's main four-storey building. This was followed by an enormously powerful explosion which brought down most of the building. Only after that did air-raid sirens wail long and loud in different parts of the city, and anti-aircraft guns began firing from the area of the Tobolsk barracks. Anatoly Ivanovich Kurmayev[57], who was at that moment in Kanavino, near the public garden on the Oka embankment, later recalled: "First I saw the little black puffs of exploding anti-aircraft shells in the sky. Then I noticed a tall column of black smoke, fire and dust rising over the Lenin plant in the upper part of the city. Moreover, soon after the first explosion several more could be made out, throwing new columns of flame and smoke into the sky. Only after that did the distant signals of the air-raid alarm become audible"....
In the course of the bombing the assembly and woodworking shops were completely destroyed, and two neighbouring shops at the ends of the building suffered severe damage. The powerful blast wave partially destroyed electrical substation No. 3 and put several power transformers out of action. The echo of the explosion rolled across the whole Voroshilovsky district of Gorky. At radio equipment plant No. 326 named after Frunze, standing opposite the stricken enterprise, windows were blown out and plaster showered down in every shop. Many workers abandoned their work in panic and ran towards the gates, and some climbed straight over the high factory fence. Everyone was gripped by a single desire – to get as far away from the scene of the tragedy as possible. The panic at what they had seen also seized the neighbouring railway station of Myza. The station duty officer Davydova and her assistant Sulimov, frightened by the bombing, abandoned their post. The result was a terrible confusion. The wounded men in a troop train standing at the semaphore began jumping out of the carriages and scattering across the area.
The pilot of the "Heinkel", meanwhile, calmly took his aircraft towards the city centre, inspecting the local sights along the way. Over the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin he made a sort of "lap of honour", demonstrating his complete impunity. Anna Aleksandrovna Korobova, an employee of the regional committee of the VKP(b), recalled: "During the break between sessions we went outside and to our horror saw a black aircraft with a swastika describing a circle over the Kremlin. The pilot even leaned out of the cockpit and waved to us! After that we went back into the building and were told – the Lenin plant has just been bombed, its director Kuzmin has been killed…"
Meanwhile two more bombers were approaching the city. Passing over the surrounding villages and striking fear into the collective farmers, at about 16.20 they appeared over the Avtozavodsky district at extremely low altitude. The aircraft roared over people's heads, heading towards the plant. One bomber flew along Molodyozhny Avenue, the second four hundred metres to its left, along Molotov Avenue (October Avenue).
Rafail Rivin[58] was at that moment coming out of the building of the Avtozavodskaya polyclinic[59], which stood not far from the plant. He recalled what he saw: "Suddenly I saw an aircraft flying at very low altitude right over the polyclinic fence. When it swept past me with a terrifying roar, I clearly made out the figure of the pilot in his flying helmet, and then the fascist markings. After that I began waving my arms to attract the attention of passers-by and shouted: 'A plane, a plane!' The bomber went on towards the plant, and panic broke out in the street. I remember one woman in a long dress climbing over the high polyclinic fence and getting stuck at the top." Anna Sorokina was outside at the time as well and also saw the "Heinkels" flying over the houses: "They flew as if on parade, almost brushing the roofs and chimneys with their bellies."
At those very seconds N. V. Nadyozhkina[60], at her post on the roof of the GAZ works administration building, also clearly saw two aircraft against the twilight sky, approaching from the west at low altitude. The girl nervously leafed through the photographs lying in front of her, trying to compare them with the originals growing larger before her eyes. At the same time the second member of the post reported the looming danger to the GAZ MPVO headquarters by telephone in a trembling voice. When the aircraft were already flying over the factory grounds, Nadyozhkina still hoped that they might be their own, but then a frightening sight met her eyes. Four bombs separated from one of them and hurtled down with a howl, straight at the repair and mechanical shop. And a moment later the roar of the explosions shook everything around and columns of fire and smoke shot up into the sky.
As it turned out later, three 250-kg bombs hit the middle of the building, and the fourth exploded in the street between the RMC and the electrical substation of the assembly and stamping shop. In the shop the floors collapsed over an area of 800 square metres, and the eastern end wall came down completely. Inside the building almost all the partitions were blown out. One of the bombs went off right in the canteen, and all the workers inside were torn to shreds.
The second "Heinkel" dropped its bombs on the Avtozavodskaya thermal power station. One exploded in the western part of the building, which was still under construction, destroying it completely; the second broke through the roof but stuck in the rafters and, hanging over the boilers, did not go off. This happened because it had been released from too low an altitude, as a result of which the half-tonne high-explosive bomb had not had time to build up the necessary speed.
Panic broke out at the plant, and many workers left their shops and ran towards the gates. Meanwhile one of the aircraft made a circle over the plant, its gunner firing three machine-gun bursts one after another at the gate and at the people running towards it. Nadyozhkina recalled: "As I was going down into the shelter of the attic space, I saw the plaster beside me crumbling under the stream of bullets, and heard their deadly buzzing…" As they left to the west, the bombers strafed the streets of the Avtozavodsky district, along with the cars and horse carts travelling along them.
Meanwhile, at 16.40 yet another "Heinkel" appeared. The bomber came from the south, from the direction of the village of Ankudinovka, and flew low over the railway line. The residents of the Voroshilovsky district, who had not yet recovered from the first blow, now watched in fear as the twin-engined giant roared over Myza station. Some even managed to make out the huge bomb slung under its fuselage. Emerging unexpectedly from behind the hilly bank, the aircraft flew over the Oka and in a shallow dive dropped a BM1000 mine on the "Dvigatel Revolyutsii" plant. A tremendous explosion thundered in the enterprise's power station building, which housed steam boilers, the diesel, compressor and transformer substations.
Workers in the neighbouring shops were thrown to the floor by the shock, and then a veritable rain of glass fragments from the skylights came down on them. A fierce fire broke out in the assembly section of shop No. 6, later spreading to the roof of the ferrous metals warehouse as well. The plant's MPVO headquarters was completely destroyed. The blast wave and fragments damaged power lines; in particular, at the neighbouring machine-tool plant the small feeder No. 620 and distribution kiosk No. 251 of Gorseti were cut off, leaving part of the Leninsky district without electricity.
After that, panic gripped almost the entire city. Many residents saw German aircraft flying over the houses and columns of smoke rising up, accompanied by the thunder of explosions and bursts of machine-gun fire. Passengers jumped out of moving trams, drivers abandoned their cars right in the road and ran off, crowds of people rushed headlong towards the shelters. At GAZ itself the situation became critical. At the main entrance the guards refused to open the gates, so dozens of people climbed straight over the fences, trying to get as far away from the workshops as fast as they could.
Not counting on protection from the pilots and the anti-aircraft gunners, the plant's MPVO headquarters ordered the men of the fighter battalion to take up their rifles, climb onto the roofs of the buildings and "repel the raid". Rafail Rivin was among them: "After the first bombing I immediately grabbed a rifle (it was a Polish carbine) and ran to my post. The other men of the fighter battalion dragged over boxes of cartridges and, stuffing their pockets with them, climbed onto the roofs of the workshops to repel the raid with whatever we had." By now electric sirens were wailing anxiously everywhere, somewhere in the distance the anti-aircraft guns were firing in short bursts, and fire engines raced through the streets ringing their bells. The air defence forces also went into action. Fighters were scrambled from the airfields at Seima and Arzamas, and the duty flight of Major Alifanov's air detachment arrived in the area of the automobile plant. But the German aircraft did not appear again.
The consequences of the daytime raid proved horrifying. In the Voroshilovsky district, at the Lenin radio-telephone plant, 101 people were killed, including almost the entire management staff. Another 190 workers received wounds and concussions. Many others were trapped under the rubble. In the basement of the destroyed main building, the members of the MPVO headquarters, headed by the party committee secretary P.P. Shumsky, were buried. Rescue work began almost immediately after the explosion, but then dragged on for several days. Fortunately, a small opening was soon made in the rubble, through which water and food were passed to the victims.
At GAZ things were no better. While the power station miraculously survived the bombing, the repair and mechanical workshop, which produced 82 mm mortars, was a sorry sight. The blast wave knocked out all the glazing of the production part of the building and of the neighbouring forge No. 2, the floor was broken through in several places, about 400 sq. m of internal partitions collapsed, 45 pieces of equipment were destroyed, along with tools, materials, semi-finished products, finished mortars, technical documentation and spare parts. Directly above the sites of the explosions the reinforced concrete floor slabs came down. Everywhere among the debris lay the mutilated bodies of workers, parts of bodies and bloodied shreds of work clothes. In addition, the power substation was destroyed and the power cable was torn in many places. The nearby building of the main store (warehouse) of component parts also suffered....
List of the dead
Bugrovsky Cemetery, plot 12. They lie there: workers of the Lenin plant who died on 4 November 1941.
ALEKSEEV Yu.P; ANDREICHEVA T.S; ANKUDINOVA S.A; ARKHANGELSKY B.L; BAIMOV E.V; BARANOVA N.G; BOLOTOVA A.I; BORISOVA N.A; BUBNOV K.G; BUYANOVA T.P; BYBINA A.A; VALUTIN A.M; VANDAEVA O.F; VOLKOV P.E; VORNAKOVA E.A; GERASIMOVA M.I; GORDEEV F.I; GORODNOVA A.I; DANILINA E.S; DUBOV P.P; DYATLOVA K.I; EGUTOVA Z.P; ERSHOVA V.P; ERYSHEVA V.M; ZHDANOV S.M; ZABELINA A.D; ZAKHAROVA V.I; Zinoviev E.A; ZINOVIEVA A.V; ZUBKOVA L.S; IGNATIEVA M.I; KALASHNIKOV A.A; KALASHNIKOVA L.A; KIRPICHEV A.I; KOZHUKHOV N.N; KOZLOV S.S; KOPYLOV G.D; KOROTAEV A.I; KOSYRKIN A.V; KOTIK R.I; KOCHENKOV V.S; KUZNETSOVA A.I; KUZMIN A.P; KULIKOV F.I; LAVRENTIEV B.G; LAPSHOV N.N; LARIONOVA A.E; LEVIN K.V; LISYATNIKOVA E.G; MALKINA A.D; MARINYCHEV A.S; MOROZOV S.K; NAZAROVA A.M; NAZAROVA P.L; NUZHINA K.M; PARSHINA K.A; PEREVODOVA E.A; PESTRETSOV E.N; PETROV V.P; PIYASHOVA A.P; POZDNYAKOVA S.I; PUDOVA T.T; REKINA M.M; RYZHOV N.P; SAVENKOV A.V; SAUTKINA V.D; SENKOVA A.A; SERDITYKH G.A; SKVORTSOV V.V; STENYUKOV M.A; SUDAKOVA T.N; SUSEKIN N.F; TABAKOV S.F; TERENTIEV I.V; TERENTIEVA V.F; TIPANOVA A.F; TREFILOV N.I; TROFIMOV A.F; TRYUKHOVA A.G; TUMANOV A.P; TUCHINA V.I; ULYBYSHEV A.T; FEDYANTSEV A.E; FEDYANTSEVA M.S; FILIPPOV Yu.K; FIRSOV N.A; FOKIN N.N; KHALIZOVA K.V; KHARITONOV D.G; KHARITONOVA E.G; CHELYSHEV V.F; CHEREDANOVA A.E; SHIRSHOVA T.O; SHULAEVA N.D; SHULGIN A.T; SHULGINA E.V.
Eternal memory. Small people fallen in a great war. They were beyond number, but as long as we are alive, we who have not lost our memory entirely, who have not betrayed the truly bleeding dates for the sake of festive simulacra forged in Kremlin test tubes, it is our duty to keep their bright memory. Let us bow our heads and be silent.
http://breviarissimus.livejournal.com/57688.html
A dummy GAZ plant to draw off the bombers
— In the village of Mordvintsevo, where the fields lie next to Fedyakovo (village) (where the Mega is), during the war of 1941-1945 an enormous dummy of GAZ was built in the fields. Made of plywood and glass, supposedly to confuse the Germans when they tried to bomb GAZ, which was working for the defence industry. Bombs fell on the village too and nearby; in those days our grandmothers, young back then, hid in the cellars with their children. All from what I was told.
Griljash, City forum NNRU, 28 January 2012 at 01:42:41.