The biography of the pilot Meresiev

A military pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel, Candidate of Historical Sciences. In Kamyshin, he graduated from a school-and-school school and the FZU school of factory apprenticeship, after which he worked as a turner. Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev in the Batai airfield in the year in the Komsomol ticket Alexei was aimed at the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where he was engaged in the airborne club without interruption.

In October, Maresyev was drafted into the army and served as a technician in the airfield on Sakhalin. In the years, he studied, and then worked as an instructor in the Bataysky air company. Here, Alexei Maresyev was awarded the first officer rank. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Junior Lieutenant Maresyev was sent to the Southwest Front. In the area of ​​Krivoy Rog in August, he made his first combat flight.

In the spring of the year on the North-Western Front, the pilot opened a combat account, knocking down three enemy aircraft. In April, covering a group of bombers, he was shot down in the Novgorod region. Maresyev managed to cross the front line and land the plane in the forest, but, falling from a great height, crushed both feet. Eighteen days the wounded pilot through forests and swamps crawled to his own.

Aleksey Maresyev was picked up by local residents, in May of the year he was taken to the large land by plane. Alexey Petrovich Maresyev in the center. Doctors saved his life, but because of the gangrene began, both legs were forced to amputate. After a long rehabilitation and persistent walking training on prostheses, Maresyev managed to go through the medical examination and in February made the first trial flight, and then achieved sending to the front.

In August, for the downing of three enemy fighters and the salvation of the life of two pilots, the deputy commander of the squadron, Senior Lieutenant Mareziev, was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. In total, over the years of the war, Alexei Petrovich made 86 sorties and shot down 10 enemy aircraft, seven of which are flying with prostheses.

During the rehabilitation after the amputation of both legs after the war, Maresyev received, thanks to Boris Polevoy’s book, widely fame, Maresyev resigned, graduated from the highest party school at the CPSU Central Committee and defended his thesis. He worked in the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, in the years he was elected People's Deputy of the USSR.

Monument to Alexei Petrovich Maresyev in Kamyshin in the year in Kamyshin, in the square near the house in which Alexei Petrovich lived, he was erected a monument of sculptor Sergei Alexandrovich Shcherbakov.

The name of the hero is Kamyshinsky Pedagogical College.