80 years ago today, 27 June 1944. Tankers of the 17th Guard Tank Brigade, 1st Guard Tank Corps, 1st Belarusian Front, on their T-34-85.
On the photo from left to right: Senior Sergeant Boris Vorontsov – tank driver; Alik – сын полка (syn polka= son of the regiment); Jr. LT Vladimir Viktorovich Ponomarev, tank commander. To the rear of Ponomarev is Jr. LT Gennady Fatysov, a friend of his from the Kurgan Tank School.
This is the last shot of Ponomarev who was killed less than a month later, on 25 July, in the battle for Brest, in the area of the Bialostok-Brest highway, near the village of Cheremkha in Poland. He was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War and the Order of the Red Star (posthumously).
As for Alik, the son of the regiment was lost to history, as they have almost always been going back to the days of the Romans and Greeks.
He reminds me of George Dzundza’s Commander Daskal in The Beast, who retells a story of how he was a Molotov-wielding 8-year-old lad in Stalingrad who earned the moniker, “Tank Boy.”
According to the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, during WWII there were at least 3,500 front-line soldiers under the age of sixteen, a figure that did not include those in irregular underground and partisan detachments. This number is likely a drastic undercount as commanders typically did not list these “tag-alongs” on unit rolls.
Nonetheless, they often gave their all, with one youth, six-year-old Sergei Aleshkov, being decorated in combat with the 142nd Guards Rifle Regiment, which he served with for eight months across 1942-43, including being wounded and instrumental in digging out a blocked bunker entrance.