Piousbox

This man died just seconds after the photo was taken. This photo is titled "Combat." It is not staged and is not a still from a film.

On July 12, 1942, near the village of Khoroshye, photographer Max Alpert managed to capture a photo of a man leading a company of soldiers into an attack, when a shell fragment shattered his camera. The photographer assumed the image was ruined and did not record the name of the man he had photographed. Later, while developing the film, he realized the shot had turned out perfectly.

The identity of the man in the photo was later determined – his name was Alexey Gordeevich Eremenko. Here's what an eyewitness, Alexander Matveevich Makarov, had to say about those events:
"The Nazis launched attack after attack. There were many killed and wounded. Our greatly depleted regiment was already repelling its tenth or eleventh attack. The Nazis were pushing straight toward Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk), which was about thirty kilometers away. By the end of the day, the company commander was wounded. After a fierce bombardment, supported by tanks and artillery, the Nazis launched another attack. And then, rising to his full height, with the words: "Follow me! For the Motherland! Forward!", Eremenko led the company toward the Nazi lines. The political officer was killed, but the attack was repelled."

Despite the fact that Alexei Eremenko held the rank of junior political officer, the world remembers him as an anonymous battalion commander. The thing is, while fiddling with his broken camera in the trench, the photographer wasn't paying attention for a while, but he heard a call on the line: "The battalion commander has been killed." The author didn't know the commander's name or rank, but what he heard later inspired him to title the photo that way.

There are no nameless heroes—there are heroes whose names have been forgotten by posterity. Share this story with your friends.