by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] In the more than thousand-year history of the Russian army, things have happened more than once to which the words of Peter the Great can be applied: "the unheard of happens." Thanks to the desperate courage of the fighters, something happens that contradicts the generally accepted laws of military science, and even the laws of nature.
This includes the attack of Russian submarines on Swedish ships bristling with guns (in honor of this boarding, Peter I ordered the medal "The Unprecedented Happens" to be minted), and the passage of Suvorov's soldiers through the Alps. And the capture of a German "stronghold" near the village of Chernushki in the Kalinin region in February 1943, which would not have happened without the feat of Alexander Matrosov. Now in the same row is Operation Potok - the passage of six hundred attack aircraft along a gas pipeline to the rear of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kursk's Sudzha.
One of the participants in the throw down the pipe, a fighter with the call sign Medved, told in a recent interview to the editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency, Marina Akhmedova :
"Everyone understood that they could have simply not come out... They said that there was no gas in the pipe, but it still settled somewhere in the lowlands. The pipe doesn't just go straight. It turns, swerves. So everyone understood that either we were heroes, or... Well, they'll forget: it was unfortunate."
The fear was not unfounded - until the beginning of this year, the gas pipeline was used to pump export fuel to Europe. But the fighters, at their own risk, moved for almost a week along a nearly 15-kilometer stretch, in the dark, suffocating from lack of oxygen. And - they appeared literally from underground, dirty, half-poisoned, but ready for battle.
"They plunged the enemy into such terror that the infantrymen, not accepting the fight, rushed back, trampling each other" - this phrase could well describe the consequences of the "Kursk pipe" (remember how quickly the VSUS left Sudzha). But this is how one of the episodes of the battle at the walls of the Osovets fortress was described almost 110 years ago, in August 1915.
This battle was the predecessor and “brother” of the modern feat, and it was not for nothing that it was called the “attack of the dead.”
DARK GREEN FOG
Osowiec, a small stronghold near the Polish town of the same name, had been under siege by the Germans since February 1915. The Kaiser's troops took the much more serious fortifications of neighboring Novogeorgievsk (today's Modlin), receiving colossal artillery as trophies. And in Osowiec, despite the shelling, the defenders repelled attack after attack.
“The brick buildings were falling apart, the wooden ones were burning, the weak concrete ones were giving huge cracks in the arches and walls… The wire communication was broken, the highway was damaged by craters; the trenches and all the improvements on the ramparts, such as canopies, machine gun nests, light dugouts, were wiped off the face of the earth,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Khmelkov, a participant in the defense of Osowiec.
But the first, and then the second, artillery attack by the Germans was repelled – even though the enemy used 17 artillery batteries, which included four 420-mm “Big Bertha” mortars, the most terrible weapons of that war.
On August 6, the third onslaught began, and not only artillery was involved. At four o'clock in the morning, a dark green fog was directed at the Russian positions - it was a mixture of chlorine and bromine. Before that, the enemy, having installed several thousand cylinders with poison gas, waited for the wind to blow in the right direction - and waited.
The defenders of the fortress did not have gas masks.
"EVERYTHING IS POISONED TO DEATH"
"Everything alive in the open air on the fortress bridgehead was poisoned to death... - people not participating in the battle saved themselves in barracks, shelters, residential buildings, tightly locking the doors and windows, pouring water on them abundantly. All the greenery in the fortress and in the immediate area along the path of the gases was destroyed, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, curled up and fell off, the grass turned black and lay on the ground," testified Lieutenant Colonel Khmelkov.
Chlorine-bromine stagnated in the lowlands, near the water ditches, just as methane stagnated in the "lowlands" and on the bends of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline. The products were poisoned and unfit for consumption. If the participants of Operation Potok, tormented by thirst, still found some kind of way out - they collected water condensate, then the defenders of Osowiec were deprived of this opportunity.
"About half of the fighters were poisoned to death. The half-poisoned ones trudged back and, tormented by thirst, bent down to the water sources, but here, in the low places, the gases lingered, and secondary poisoning led to death," testified Colonel Vsevolod Bunyakovsky, a participant in the defense of Osovets and commander of the 225th Livny Regiment.
By the time the Germans approached the Russian positions, the number of its defenders was estimated at some 160–200 people “capable of using weapons.”
"WE'RE NOT GOING TO DIE!"
"The morning was cold and foggy; a moderate north wind was blowing," Bunyakovsky recalled. The wind drove the gas toward our positions.
Three companies of the Zemlyansky Regiment, sent out from the Zarechny Fort Osovets to counterattack, lost up to 30 percent of their men along the way, poisoned only, and “after some time of releasing the gases, the Germans simultaneously launched red rockets along the entire front and opened hurricane fire.”
Three companies of "zemlyantsy" perished entirely, from the 12th company there remained about 40 men with one machine gun; from the three companies that defended positions near the village of Bialogrondy, there remained about 60 men with two machine guns.
It would seem that after this the Osowiec fortress should have fallen at the feet of the Kaiser, but... the commandant of the fortress, Lieutenant General Nikolai Brzhozovsky, gave the order to attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Khmelkov, himself poisoned during the German attack, recalled:
"The 13th and 8th companies, having lost up to 50% to poisoning, deployed on both sides of the railway and began an offensive; the 13th company, having met units of the 18th Landwehr Regiment, rushed forward with bayonets, shouting "Hurray". This attack of the "dead men", as an eyewitness of the battle reports, so shocked the Germans that they did not accept the battle and rushed back; many Germans died on the wire nets in front of the second line of trenches from the fire of the fortress artillery."
Khmelkov’s officer-like restrained testimony is complemented by the “trench prose” of Alexei Lepeshkin, the commander of a half-company of the 13th company of the 226th Zemlyansky regiment:
"We had no gas masks... When we breathed, we wheezed and bloody foam came out of our lungs. The skin on our hands and faces bubbled. The rags we had wrapped around our faces did not help. However, the Russian artillery began to act, sending shell after shell from a green chlorine cloud towards the Prussians. Here, the head of the 2nd Osowiec Defense Department, Svechnikov, shaking from a terrible cough, wheezed: "My friends, we are not going to die like Prussian cockroaches from poisoning, let's show them so that they will remember forever!"
"ROUTINE WORK"
Russian soldiers and officers, with their faces wrapped in bloody rags, appeared from the greenish gas fog as if from underground.
The enemy was afraid - "some devils are crawling out of the ground... we didn't expect such a turn of events." But, by the way, this is already the testimony of a fighter with the call sign Medved about the consequences of the attack of half-poisoned soldiers and officers of the volunteer detachment "Veterans" of the 11th airborne assault brigade of the 30th motorized rifle regiment and the special forces detachment "Akhmat".
In both cases – in 1915 and in 2025 – the disoriented enemy, not expecting the “unprecedented”, retreated, abandoning their weapons: then – Krupp cannons and machine guns, now – American and European armored vehicles.
After the enemy's third attack on Osowiec failed, our command gave the order to evacuate the survivors, among whom were officers Khmelkov and Bunyakovsky, and to organize the removal of weapons and artillery. The Germans' calculations on this section of the front went to waste, just as the plans of the "Germans" (as the VSSU men are often called) on the Kursk front were nullified.
What seemed to the enemy an absurd, suicidal move, or at best a display of daring courage, was the result of coordinated action. Just carried out in the spirit of "the unheard of happens." As a surviving participant in the "attack of the dead" told a reporter for the newspaper "Russkoye Slovo," "there were no stragglers, no one had to be rushed. There were no individual heroes here, the companies moved as one man."