ГИТЛЕР ПРИКАЗАЛ ЗАСЕКРЕТИТЬ: Казах БРЁВНАМИ утопил танковую колонну вермахта

HITLER ORDERED CLASSIFICATION: A Kazakh drowned a Wehrmacht tank column with logs June 1942. The bend of the Don River south of Voronezh. 28 degrees Celsius. The Wehrmacht's 23rd Panzer Division—14 vehicles, Panzer III and IV tanks, a motorized infantry company, armored personnel carriers, and ammunition trucks—is approaching the pontoon crossing at Podgornaya. The objective is to cut off the Soviet corps and open the road to Stalingrad. On the western bank is Major Horst Lindner. On the eastern bank is an engineer platoon, a 45-mm battery, and 240 wounded on carts. No air force. No artillery. No reserves. There's a man in a backwater three kilometers upstream—with a bundle of pine logs, three TM-35 mines, and some thin steel wire. Six hours until the convoy arrives. Nothing else. He entered the water. The first bundle went downstream. The current was one meter and three tenths per second. Twenty-three minutes later, a column of water rose under the middle pontoon. Lieutenant Brunner's Panzer IV tilted and sank, crew and all. The second bundle arrived seven minutes later. The third six more minutes later. The pontoon bridge collapsed. The Panzer III slid off the deck. The Opel Blitz, loaded with ammunition, capsized into the river. The convoy stalled. 11 dead, 19 wounded, two tanks and an armored car at the bottom of the Don. The crossing was delayed for 48 hours. The Soviet corps withdrew. 240 wounded were evacuated. Major Lindner kept repeating the same thing in his radiogram: "The shells arrived by water. The source has not been established. There is no Russian artillery in the sector." There was indeed no artillery. There was Zhanibek Sapargaliev—a senior sergeant, a rafter from the Irtysh, 16 years on the river, a barrage foreman, a third-class sapper-demolitionist. He knew how to place a log exactly where he wanted it. With meter-precision. The German command searched for a sabotage group until the end of July. They found none. Because there was no group. There was one man who knew the river better than anyone. #WWII #WorldWarII #WarHistory #Kazakh #Feat #MilitaryHistory #USSR #Kazakhstan #Sabotage #SecretsOfWar #GreatPatriotic #Rafter #Voronezh #Don1942 #BattleOfStalingrad #ZhanibekSapargaliev #Irtysh #Sappers #PanzerIV #23rdTank