Biography of Maria Lagunova

Lagunova Maria Ivanovna Maria Lagunova-a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the holder of the orders of the Red Star and the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, awarded the honorary soldier's medal "For Courage", was one of a dozen women-tankers. Maria Ivanovna Lagunova was born on July 4 in a peasant family in the village of Okonechnikova Ushakovsky Village Council of the Kamensky district of the Yekaterinburg province, now the village council is part of the Katai district of the Kurgan region.

On the first day of the Great Patriotic War, the beloved elder brother of Maria went to the front. Maria also asked for the front, she was refused, but she was persistent and came for the second time ... In the end, he gave up the military commissar and sent her to study at the school of military tractor drivers in the Chelyabinsk region. In the winter of the year, she has already served in an aerodrome service battalion on the Volkhov Front.

In February, a military representative from the Urals arrived in the regiment to take away the people who needed to be sent to tankmen: radio operators, turrets, and driver mechanics. Mary was not taken to tankers, after which she wrote a letter to Moscow Mikhail Kalinin. A few days later, the military representative received the order to take her among the cadets. Sergeant Maria Lagunova took her baptism of the guard on the Kursk arc.

After a successful counterattack near Kursk, Soviet tank wedges with battles successfully moved further to the west.

The bold and experienced mechanized mechanic Maria Logunova enjoyed authority among colleagues. The first destroyed firing points, guns and soldiers of the enemy were already on her combat account. I fought along with other male tankers. The unhappy for Mary was her tank battle, which occurred on September 28 near Kyiv near the city of Brovary. In this area, her brigade fired very heavy battles, the village of Knyazhi had already passed from hand to hand twice.

In this attack, he was in the tank of the car commander-Lieutenant Chumakov, whose driver was Lagunova. Initially, the tank attack was well attended. Our tanks were able to break into German positions, the crew of the Lagunova tank destroyed the German gun, crushed the dugout and destroyed the enemy with fire. But soon the tank was hit by a German anti -tank gun.

The shell damaged the caterpillar and caused damage to the place of the driver. After her battle, Maria Lagunova woke up already in the hospital. The young girl had both legs amputated, the collarbone was interrupted, and her left hand did not work. In the spring of the year, she was brought to Moscow to the Institute of Prosthetics. In Moscow, special prostheses were made for Mary.

There, she began to learn to walk again. She was engaged in the same perseverance with whom she once learned to manage a tank. A severe wound was not an occasion for her to leave service in the army. Already on prostheses, she returned to her native educational Nizhny Tagil regiment, where she held the post of telegraph players, while training at the same time to walk on prostheses.

From the army, the girl was demobilized only in the year. She died on December 26 in the city of Brovary of the Kyiv region of Ukraine.