Alexei Petrovich Maresyev (1916–2001) was a Soviet fighter pilot who was shot down behind German lines in the spring of 1942, crawled and walked for eighteen days through frozen forest to reach his own side, lost both legs – and then fought his way back into a fighter cockpit. He flew again in the great air battles over Kursk in 1943, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, and became the “real man” of one of the most famous Soviet books.
From the Volga to the air force
Maresyev was born on 20 May 1916 in Kamyshin on the Volga. He trained as a lathe operator and in 1934 was sent to help build an aircraft factory in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Far East, where he learned to fly at the local flying club. In October 1937 he was called up into the army and went on to military flying school. On 1 April 1942 he opened his score by shooting down a German Ju 52 transport, and on 4 April he shot down two more.
Eighteen days in the forest
On 5 April 1942, while covering Soviet bombers over the Demyansk pocket in the Novgorod region, Maresyev’s Yak-1 was shot down and crashed in the forest behind the German lines. Both his feet were badly injured. He could not stay where he was without being captured, so he set off east towards the front. For eighteen days, in snow and freezing cold, he walked and then crawled through forest and marsh, finding his way east by the sun. Exhausted and close to death, he was spotted by boys from the village of Plav in the Valday district. They fetched an old man, “Grandfather Sasha”, who took him home on a cart, and from there he was flown to hospital in Moscow.
The doctors saved his life, but they had to amputate both his legs. Most people would have been discharged from the forces. Maresyev decided that he would fly again.
Learning to fly again
He learned to walk on artificial legs, then to run and even to dance, to convince the doctors that he could control an aircraft. After months of training and repeated medical boards, he was allowed back into a fighter. In June 1943 he joined the 63rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment and went into action over the Kursk salient, where the biggest air battles on the Eastern Front were being fought.
In one air battle over the Kursk salient he shot down three Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters. On 24 August 1943 he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. In all he flew more than 80 combat sorties and shot down German aircraft both before and after he lost his legs.
The Story of a Real Man
The war correspondent Boris Polevoy met Maresyev in 1943 and heard his story. His novel The Story of a Real Man, published in 1946, made the pilot – called Meresyev in the book – known to every Soviet schoolchild. It was filmed in 1948, and Sergei Prokofiev wrote his last opera on the same story.
After the war
Maresyev left the air force in 1946, graduated from the Higher Party School in 1952 and in 1956 earned a doctorate in history. For many years he worked with the Soviet War Veterans Committee and helped disabled veterans. A variety of lilac and an asteroid were named after him. He died in Moscow on 18 May 2001, an hour before a celebration of his 85th birthday.
More: the Battle of Kursk · Ivan Kozhedub · all heroes of the war
Sources and further reading
- Alexey Maresyev – Wikipedia
- Маресьев, Алексей Петрович – Wikipedia (Russian)
- Boris Polevoy, The Story of a Real Man (1946).