Greatest Russian War Stories 1941-1945 — Albert Axell

This book contains some of the greatest stories of wartime heroism, many now recorded here for the first time in the West. The heroes are Russian men and women fighting and dying for their country that has been treacherously attacked by Hitler's Germany. At that time it possessed the most powerful and ruthless army the world had ever seen. Facing the enemy was an 18-year-old women sniper - a hefty Red Army marine called her "a dragonfly" because she was so slight. But she managed to dispatch over 300 enemy troops. Later she was invited to visit America by Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's wife. She was also invited to visit wartime Great Britain. One chapter tells of hero-poet Mussa Jalil who joined the Soviet army in 1942 and, fighting at the front lines, was wounded and then captured, imprisoned, tortured and guillotined. In three years as a POW he wrote over 100 poems, many of them with unsurpassed depth of feeling, evoking the poet's limitless courage and love for his Motherland. The author met some of the heroes in this book. One of them, a woman pilot flew almost 1,000 missions over enemy lines, at night, in a small wooden, open-cockpit plane with a top speed of under 130 mph. She told the author that once when she was on a bombing mission, one of the bombs did not release and she had to lean out of the cockpit on a very cold night and release the bomb with her freezing fingers. The final chapter is a story of pure humanism. A decorated Russian pilot seeing an enemy who can be easily destroyed holds his fire and saves the life of the German. Some years after the war they have a prearranged meeting in a cafe in Germany. The story behind the story is revealed.