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Liski-naselennyy punkt voinskoy doblesti

Immediately with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, transit military trains went through the Liski station to the west, and trains with evacuated population, equipment and agricultural products went to the east. At the same time, the Liskinsky railway junction, as the most important infrastructure and supply facility for Soviet troops, was subjected to regular bombing by Nazi aircraft.

The first ten bombs were dropped on the Liski station in September 1941, when the front was 400-500 kilometers from the railway junction. And then, as the front approached, an average of about 400 aerial bombs were dropped on the station and the city every month.

Since July 1942 to January 1943 the front came close to Liski. The right bank of the Don, opposite the city, was occupied by the Nazis. For six months the city was the front line of defense, subjected to bombing and shelling. The city survived and helped the country survive, manufacturing weapons, armored trains, supplying the army with food and equipment.

On June 28, 1942, the Nazis’ strategic offensive operation “Blau” began, with the primary goal of capturing Voronezh as a city on the way to Stalingrad. And already on July 6, the advanced Nazi units of the Nazis entered the right bank zone of the Liskinsky district.

On July 7, attaching great importance to the Voronezh direction, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command decides to create the Voronezh Front, the main tasks of which were defined in order No. 0027 of July 18, 1942: “The enemy is making frantic efforts to break through the Don into the depths of our country. The fight for the Don is now our task. The Don must become inaccessible to the enemy. On its shores we must break its backbone and force the enemy to bleed to death.”

By that time, having occupied the right bank of the Don, units of the Wehrmacht and the Royal Hungarian Army fought fiercely in the area of ​​the city of Svoboda, trying to capture the railway bridge across the Don, the ferry crossing and the Liski station. The Chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht Ground Forces, Franz Halder, noted in his daily notes that the 6th Army “the main forces of the mobile formations ... should have been concentrated in the direction of Freedom.”

During the month of fighting, both sides suffered significant losses. The Siberian-Krasnoyarsk soldiers of the 309th Infantry Division fighting in this section of the Voronezh Front showed all their courage and courage in defending Liski. And first of all, the All-Union Radio addressed them on the morning of August 8, 1942, announcing to the whole country the victory of Soviet troops in the Middle Don.

The history of the Liskinsky region, which in the summer of 1942 stood as an insurmountable obstacle to the path of Hitler’s troops, is forever inscribed with two famous defense sectors of the Voronezh Front - Storozhevskaya and Shchuchensky and the bridgeheads that were captured in August 1942 by units of the 25th Guards Rifle Division and units of the 18th a separate rifle corps, and then for almost six months they reliably covered the Liski railway station from different sides, which was transporting military cargo to Stalingrad.

In the battle for the Storozhevskaya bridgehead, the Red Army soldier of the 636th Infantry Regiment of the 160th Infantry Division, Cholponbai Tuleberdiev, covered himself with eternal glory. Anticipating a feat that was later popularly called “Matrosov’s”, in the area of the village of Selyavnoye-Vtoroye, Liskinsky District, on August 6, 1942, he covered the embrasure of an enemy bunker with his body and thereby silenced the enemy’s machine gun for a few seconds. This short period of time was enough for the hero’s comrades to destroy the machine gun crew and subsequently capture the bridgehead.

Posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, Cholponbai Tuleberdiev was buried with military honors at the site of his death on the top of Lysaya Mountain near the village of Selyavnoye-Vtoroye, Liskinsky district, where in the post-war period a monument was erected in honor of one of the five “sailor” heroes who accomplished their feat in Voronezh land.

Having not surrendered the city of Svoboda with the Liski junction station to the enemy in the summer of 1942, Soviet troops continued to defend themselves on the Don line, pinning down the forces of the Nazis rushing to Stalingrad and Caucasian oil. And the Nazis, having broken their teeth on the Liskinsky railway junction, in the fall of 1942 began to hastily build a railway road from Ostrogozhsk to Evdakovo, paving the way to Stalingrad bypassing Liski.

Called by the Nazis “Berlin-Rostov” and popularly shortened to the name “Berlinka”, this road went down in the history of the Voronezh region under the name “Road on Blood”, because thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians became victims of its construction. According to preliminary data, more than 10 thousand dead were buried near the Berlin railway track.

Meanwhile, there - to Stalingrad - through the Liski station, one after another, Soviet trains with troops and equipment were walking, which, under the incessant bombing of the Nazis, were led by locomotive brigades of a special locomotive column with the symbolic name “For Stalingrad!”, formed at the Liski railway junction from a special NKPS reserve.