Introduction: “I Believe in My Maximchik…”

In late August 1941 near Odessa, Lieutenant Ivan Grintsov ran down the trenches to the left wing of his company. There was a new machine-gun crew there that he had not yet had a chance to meet. Now, as the enemy was launching another infantry assault, this crew was silent. The new machine gunner must have lost his nerve. Grintsov raced to find out what was wrong; if necessary, he was prepared to machine-gun the enemy himself. When he reached the trench with the new crew, he saw that the machine gunner was crouching, ready, observing the approaching enemy. Grintsov remembered that he wanted to thrust the machine gunner aside when, finally, the gunfire started.

“The machine gun began to speak,” remembered another witness, Political Officer Iakov Vaskovskii. “The enemy soldiers got crowded at a narrow passage. The very first sweep of the machine-gun fire cut down nearly half of their first line. The soldiers were so close that they had no place to hide. The last ones fell down about thirty meters from the machine gun. Our trenches were screaming ‘Hurray!’ I believe no one in my company had seen such performance by the machine gun before.”

The audacious and deadly precision of this fire executed at a close distance denoted a machine gunner of enviable mental stamina, superb technical know-how, and excellent tactical calculation – one capable of knowing and waiting for that precise degree of proximity at which the most dead from the enemy may be cropped without endangering one's own position.