There are many legends about the commander of the 394th stationary coastal artillery battery, Andrei Zubkov. But one of them is the most famous in Novorossiysk. One day, the command came to battery 394 with some kind of inspection. In the Novorossiysk naval base, there was already a rumor about the artillery sniper Zubkov, who was nicknamed the "Novorossiysk traffic controller" for his ability to stop any movement of the enemy along the city streets during battery operation. The same rumor endowed him with the gift of covering a single target, be it a car, tank or armored personnel carrier, from a distance of ten kilometers. Tales were intertwined with rumors, myths with legends.
The command, of course, was aware of the abilities with which the soldiers awarded Zubkov. And on occasion, representatives of the high authorities decided personally, either to pry commander Zubkov, or to check the rumors, and invited Andrei Emmanuilovich to demonstrate his talent by standing behind the gun.
Stern and rarely smiling, Zubkov, without any excitement, coldly approached the nearest weapon. And at this time, to his misfortune, some Fritz was calmly driving his Opel Blitz along one of the bombed-out streets of Novorossiysk. In general, the dying carcass on the western side of the Tsemesskaya Bay made an impression on the command.
Often the legend is embellished with the most colorful details, as if Andrei managed to drive a shell directly into the cockpit window. But legends do not grow from scratch, especially when it comes to such a skilled artilleryman as Andrei Zubkov. But who was Comrade Zubkov, whose glory is closely intertwined with the glory of the 394th Battery?
Andrey Zubkov was born on October 27, 1918 in the village of Bogolyubovo, Priishimsky district of the North Kazakhstan region, now it is the Kyzylzhar district in the very north of Kazakhstan, a few kilometers from the border with Russia. Andrei spent his childhood in forest-steppes, unusual for most of Kazakhstan, dotted with rivers and lakes. In 1936 he graduated from high school and was drafted into the Red Army.
The reliable and sensible Andrey, right, was noticed. So in 1940, Zubkov graduated with excellent marks from the Lenin Komsomol Naval Artillery School of Ukraine in Sevastopol. By assignment, Andrei went to serve in the Black Sea Fleet at the Novorossiysk naval base. Just yesterday, a cadet, since June 1940, he becomes assistant commander of the 714th stationary battery of the NVMB, located in the Golubaya Bay near Gelendzhik.
And the war was already on the doorstep. A war that will turn a 22-year-old boy into an artillery legend and will stop him from smiling for a long time.
June 22 was not long in coming. It was decided to strengthen the coastal artillery by installing another battery on the Sukhum highway. The choice of the location of the new battery fell on the height at Cape Penay, which is located between Novorossiysk and Kabardinka, going into the sea waves for a couple of hundred meters. The entire Tsemesskaya bay and the city were perfectly visible from a height above the Penaysky cape.
July 15, 1941 is considered the date of the foundation of the battery, which at first will bear only a number, and later will become "personalized", thanks to its permanent commander. But on that day, in the place of the future battery, through the thickets of juniper and hold-a-tree, only the engineer-fortifier Mikhail Kokin and Lieutenant Polushny walked busily along the rocky Black Sea slope. And on July 19, Andrei Zubkov arrived at the target height with his Red Navy gunners, of course, observing the same picture of a rocky slope overgrown with juniper. It was they who, under the supervision of engineer Kokin, were to build a battery. And for this they were given a little more than 10 days.
The Red Navy men worked day and night. It was necessary to dig pits for the foundations of guns, a rangefinder, cellars, cockpits, shelters and all kinds of outbuildings. In the brilliant film They Fought for the Motherland, combine operator Ivan Zvyagintsev, performed by Sergei Bondarchuk, once said, digging a trench in the steppe near Stalingrad: "This is not land, but a mutilation for the people!" Fortunately, he did not see the land of the Black Sea coast in the foothills of the Caucasus, otherwise the words would have been stronger.
The rocky and stony ground exhausted the builders to exhaustion, weighed down by the scorching July Sun, when the temperature in the shade exceeded 30 degrees. The only thing that brightened up the hellish work was a gramophone playing on the construction site and a short evening swim in the sea. Literally in the very first days of construction, among the Red Navy men of Zubkov there appeared their own "battery" bricklayers, concrete workers and stove-makers.
Despite the fact that from time to time in the already almost dug pit they came across massive rocks, in the last days of July all the pits were completely ready. And by August 1, the concrete poured into the pits froze. As Zubkov himself noted, there were no idlers at the construction site. Apparently, tragic reports from the front spurred the fighters. Some of them have already received news that their city is occupied, while others have learned that their home has been burned down. They were building a new house, the last one for some.
Immediately after the concreting of the sites for the guns, shelters and other things, the guns themselves were brought from Novorossiysk on special metal platforms. And here another problem arose. The bottom line is that the now gently sloping asphalt slope of the height at which the legendary battery was located, during its construction, rose at a very steep angle, and in some places looked completely inaccessible. And the slope, suitable for quiet walks, was not at all due to the post-war arrival of civilization. This was done by 5,000 aerial bombs and 7,000 shells that fell on the battery area throughout the war.
But the extraordinary stubbornness of Zubkov and, in his own words, the advice of Colonel Semyonov, the commander of the installation (in my humble opinion, it was not without scrap and some kind of mother), helped the guns to take their rightful places.
Already on August 8, 1941, four 100-mm B-24 naval guns fired for the first time, thus entering service as a full-blooded coastal battery. The battery will receive its first truly baptism of fire only a year later, but you really need to be completely unfamiliar with the personality of Captain Zubkov (then still a senior lieutenant) in order to assume that the service at 394 was a resort.
Andrei Zubkov demanded compliance with only three rules, which he himself followed. First, a deliberate but strict discipline. Secondly, impeccable knowledge of their business. Third, perfect peace of mind in any setting.
Careful work was carried out to camouflage the battery with camouflage nets, trees, etc. The guns themselves, of course, were painted in naval ball paint (that very special naval "gray" color). Regular day and night exercises were carried out continuously. In parallel with this, the arrangement of the battery continued. Initially, it was designed so that during a massive shelling, the garrison went underground in the literal sense of the word, but practice is used to dictating its own rules. Therefore, already having experience in construction, Zubkov continued to improve the fortress entrusted to him, at the same time memorizing literally every fold of the terrain. This will help them out when the underground concrete cockpits are blown apart by the next shelling (in the open-air museum "Captain Zubkov's Battery" you can still see the remaining ruins of the cockpits), and you have to carve them right in the rock.
The enemy rushed to Novorossiysk furiously. It soon became clear that the tasks of the 394th Coastal Battery should be expanded immediately. Thus, the commander Zubkov, whose main goal was to close the passage to the Tsemes Bay by sea for the enemy, began to study himself and train his garrison to fire at ground targets in the proposed mountain-coastal conditions.
On August 22, 1942, when the Nazis broke through to Novorossiysk, the 394th battery fired its first combat salvo at the enemy. And they had to hit just ground targets.
