Biography
The Great Patriotic War demanded from the population of courage and indescribable victims, who had to go to a simple people. It was in these difficult years that the people of the Soviet Union showed courage and the ability to self-sacrifice for the universal benefit of the independence of the homeland and the destruction of fascism.
Neither technical superiority, nor tactic and strategy of combat operations would lead to the people to the Great Victory, if not for the daily feats of individual people. Thousands of servicemen, regardless of nationality, gender, age and title, rechected their names and the entire people of the USSR, and the descendants perpetuated heroes.
Childhood and youth
Nikolai Frantseich Gastello was born in Moscow on May 6, 1908 (according to some sources - in 1907). Parents of the future hero belonged to the working class. Father Franz Pavlovich was from the Belarusian village of Plugowna, and his surname sounded like Gastullo. In 1900, a man left his native village and went in search of work in the capital, where he remained. In Moscow, Franz and renamed the greater hearing Gastello. Franz Pavlovich arranged a worker on the railway. In Moscow, Franz Pavlovich met with the future spouse Anastasia Semenovna, who worked for the seam.
Nikolai became the firstborn in the Gastello family, and his brother Victor appeared five years later. Franz lived with Anastasia and children in Barack in the east of Moscow. At six years, the boy entered the school for the boys named after A.S. Pushkin, where he studied only two years. Hunger 1918 was the cause of Nicholas's evacuation with other schoolchildren in the Volga region, where he spent one year. Returning to the capital, the boy studied two more years, and then went to master the profession of the joiner as a subset.
In 1924, the family left the capital. In Murom, 16-year-old Nikolai and his father got a job on the Muromblovoz plant. Nikolai combined the work of a locksmith at the factory with study at the city school number 33. In 20 years, the young man joined the ranks of the Communist Party. In 1930, the family returned to the capital, where the young man worked on a machine-building plant.
Military service
With a special set, Nikolai called for the Red Army in 1932. In Lugansk (Ukraine), a young man mastered military aviation. And at the end of 1933 Gastello, as a pilot, went to the aviation brigade, whose deployment was Rostov-on-Don. For five years of service (period from 1933 to 1938), from the post of the second pilot of the bomber switched to the commander of the ship, independently controlling the aircraft.
In 1938, the division was reorganized, where Nicholas served, as a result of which he switched to the first gravity border aviation brigade. Thanks to the courage and loyalty to the Soviet people, Nikolay, after a year and a half, he took the position of commander of the primary tactical unit, and another year - the Sukadrillian Department.
In 1939, Gastello participated in the local undeclared military conflict at the border of the USSR and the Mongolian People's Republic with Japan. The second war in the account of Nikolai Frantsevich became Soviet-Finnish in 1939-1940. In June 1940, the pilot participated in the Bessarabian operation, as a result of which Bessarabia, North Bukovina and the Hertz region entered the Soviet Union. The operation lasted only six days, after which Romania adopted the conditions of the USSR.
In the autumn of 1940, the location of the deployment of the part, where Nikolai served, was transferred to the Pskov region - closer to the European border of the Soviet Union, and then near Smolensk, where Gastello received rank captain. In the spring of 1941, on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union, Nikolai passed retraining courses and mastered a new combat machine - Ilyushin's two-dimensional bomber.
The biography of the famous Hero of the USSR contains an interesting fact: On June 24, 1941, Nikolai made his first feat, which then, truth, remained unnoticed. A young man with the help of rifle turret knocked down the fascist bomber "Luftwaffe" under the squall fire of a large-caliber machine gun. During the conduct of hostilities, Gastello showed itself a courageous, brave servicemen who can quickly make strategically important decisions.
Personal life
About the personal life of the pilot Nicholas Gastello information is practically left. It is known that Nikolai was married. Nikolai Frantsevich with Anna Petrovna was born two sons who did not wait for the Father from the War, but forever retained the family memory of the hero.
Time Nikolai was engaged in sports and studies to the war in his work and study (football and skis loved) and jumped with parachute.
Death of Nicholas Gastello
On June 26, 1941, on the fourth day of the Great Patriotic War, the DB-3F aircraft rose from the Soviet airfield, on board whose crew was located in four people. The crew from the navigator A.A. Burdenyuk, Lieutenant G.N. SURBORY AND RADIER RADIATER A.A. Kalinina commanded Captain Nikolai Frantseich Gastello. The crew of the car received a task to apply the aircraft by the column of the German military equipment, which moved along the way Molodechno - Radoshkovichi.
The second link was also involved in the operation, whose crew was commanded by F. Vorobyev. The names of all crew members were not preserved in history, but it is known that the Kornman A. Rybas was also in the cockpit.
In the process of performing operation, the German artillery opened fire on Soviet bombers, as a result of which the Gastello plane fell.
As a result of damage to the enemy shell of the fuel tank of the aircraft, there was a fire. 33-year-old Nikolay Gastello had the opportunity to escape by catapult, but decided to go to the ram. A burning plane, crashing into a column of enemy technician, ripped the special operation of the fascists at the cost of his own life. As a result, all members of the crew are heroically died.
With the onset of the night, residents of the neighboring Belarusian villages collected the bodies of the dead heroes, turned them with parachute and buried them. On the same day, the commander of the second link Vorobiev, together with Rybas, filed a report, which described the circumstances of the death of Nikolai Frantsevich Gastello.
Memory
Considering the heavy losses that the Soviet Union carried, each success of a separate division made public in the media. A week after the death of Nicholas, information about him appeared in Sovinformbüro, and another five days a note was published in the Pravda newspaper. And on July 26, 1941, Nikolai Frantseich Gastello received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously for the Fiery Taran perfectly. Since then, about all the pilots who committed a ram (and there were about 60 during the years of the Great Patriotic War), they said that they repeated the feat of Gastello.
Since then, the name of Nikolai Frantsevich is named a number of settlements and geographical objects in the territory of the USSR, the literary works were written on the basis of the feat of Gastello, and films were shot.
On the territory of the former Soviet Union, 13 monuments captain Gastello installed, and on the building of the gymnasium, in which the pilot studied, posted a memorial plaque in the memory of Nikolai Ftartsevich with his photo.
Already in the 1990s, some political forces criticized the feat of Gastello. At first, they put forward a version that Gastello is not a hero, and the coward, catapulted and got into German captive, and the enemy column rammed the flyer of Maslov.
This version was criticized, since the Government of Fascist Germany was unlikely to shatter on such a prisoner, while in the USSR, he was driving about the heroic death of the pilot, and no official information on the prisoner in the archives found.
The next version states that Gastello together with the crew crashed in a swamp near the place of the tragedy, like Maslov with her crew, and no fire taran was not at all. However, today Nikolai Frantseich Gastello remains a hero, a fiery ram - his feat, and followers are called Gastellovcans.
Awards
- 07/26/1941 - The title of Hero of the Soviet Union