Soviet tankers were extremely reluctant to transfer from their "iron" horses to new vehicles. It was all the more crazy to abandon the tank in an open field because of a trifling breakdown, because KV and T-34s were repaired with a hammer and "some kind of mother". About one breakdown, dozens of destroyed vehicles and a magnificent hijacking of a tank - in the material of the RG.
The Voronezh-Voroshilovograd operation, which took place in the summer of 1942, was not the most successful for the Red Army. German tank divisions gradually covered more and more concentrations of Soviet troops. Fighting raged everywhere, and it was almost impossible to find a whole tank. The same problem faced the KV crew under the command of Semyon Konovalov. Just yesterday, his car was shaking from the hits of enemy shells, and today the tankers received the command to retreat, but Konovalov's tank was out of order. It was decided that the immobilized car would catch up with its own as soon as the repair was over, for this they even allocated the most experienced technician of the brigade - Serebryakov. As a precaution, the fifty-ton "block" was thrown with branches, grass, and field repairs began.
A few hours later, the attention of the tankers, exhausted by the hot Rostov sun, was attracted by the noise of equipment. Not further than half a kilometer from them, two German armored vehicles appeared on the road. The KV could not move, but it turned out great to shoot, which was demonstrated immediately - an accurate shot and one armored personnel carrier was engulfed in flames, and the second was already backing away.
A few minutes later, a long column of German tanks PzKpfw III or simply T-3 appeared on the same road. Ignoring the already burning out armored car, all 75 vehicles confidently moved forward. This oversight cost them four tanks, since the 76-mm KV cannon did not know misses from such a distance and hit very powerfully. Panic in the German ranks gave way to retreat - they could not find a camouflaged tank and apparently assumed that there was a whole accumulation of enemy equipment. An hour to regroup, and here again the German T-3s are creeping into the attack on the "invisible" enemy. And again they retreat, because the KV shells destroy six more tanks. The third wave and again everything is the same: six tanks, eight vehicles with infantry and another armored personnel carrier turned into a heap of scrap metal.
True, such a hurricane of shooting could not fail to give out the location of the Konovalov tank, according to the recollections of tankers, the tank's armor was rippled by hundreds of dents that were left by shells from the T-3 cannons.
The crew decided in advance that as soon as the last round was fired from the KV cannon, the comrades would leave the tank. But at the very moment when they were about to leave, a shell hit the KV side from a 105-mm gun and four of the seven tankers were killed. The tank commander Konovalov, the technician Serebryakov and the gunner of the gun Dementyev survived. Fearing a second hit, the survivors escaped through a hatch in the bottom of the tank. Amid the noise of explosions and shots at the ready with a tank machine gun, which had been previously twisted from the heroic KV, they managed to crawl to a safe distance.
At night, the remnants of the heroic crew moved towards their own. For several days, the tankers had to eat only grass and moss - they were afraid to enter villages and farms, fearing betrayal. For such hardships, fate thanked them in full. One morning the crew came across a T-3, which was parked on the outskirts of the village. The hatches of the tank were open, and a cheerful German speech was heard. Apparently, somewhere nearby, a whole tank platoon made a halt, but the crew of the lone tank had not yet had time to join the others.
The plan was invented and implemented instantly. The sentry falls silently into the grass, and three Soviet tankmen attack the crew of the T-3. The owners of the German tank, Konovalov and his comrades, who did not have time to recover, were hammered in with rifle butts, the commander of the T-3 grabbed a pistol, but they shot at him. So, the tank is captured, food is available, which means that you can safely go towards the Soviet troops, which the heroes are doing. One can only imagine the surprise of the fascist soldiers when they realized that a tank had been stolen from under their noses.
The appearance of the surviving KV crew on a German tank at the location of the Soviet troops was extremely effective. After the situation cleared up, the heroes were told that the KV crew was considered completely destroyed and, moreover, the tankers had already been awarded with the phrase "posthumously." The papers were not rewritten, and therefore it turned out that the surviving crew members literally rose from the dead. The captured T-3 was given to Konovalov, and over the next month he destroyed three more enemy tanks on it.
