Leonid Georgiyevich Belousov

Leonid Georgiyevich Belousov was born on 3 (16) March 1909 in Odessa, the son of a blacksmith. He lost his father at seven, killed at the front in the First World War. In 1923 he became a ward of the 151st Rifle Regiment of the 51st Perekop Rifle Division, where he spent two years; in 1925 he returned to Odessa and from 1926 worked as a fitter and welder in the locomotive repair shop of the January Uprising works, completing the factory apprentice school at the same time. He was called into the Red Army in October 1930 and graduated from the Odessa infantry school in 1933 — and was then sent not to an infantry unit but, with a small group of infantry commanders, to the 2nd Red Banner military pilots' school at Borisoglebsk. On completing it in November 1935 he was allowed to choose his posting and chose the 31st aviation brigade of the Baltic Fleet air force near Leningrad, where he was made a flight commander on arrival. In February 1938 his I-16 crashed while landing in bad weather; fire broke out on impact and his face and legs were burned. During his treatment he underwent thirty-five plastic operations on his face without anaesthetic, with skin grafted from his back. He returned to the regiment, became assistant squadron commander of the 13th Fighter Aviation Regiment in April 1938 and fought with it in the Soviet-Finnish war, flying about thirty sorties. His face had not fully healed, and before flying in hard frost he bandaged it with a dressing soaked in goose fat, leaving slits for his eyes and his breathing. From November 1940 he commanded the 4th squadron of the 13th Fighter Regiment on the airfield of the Hanko peninsula, where the war found him; he fought in the defence of Hanko until September 1941. From September the squadron covered Leningrad from the Bychye Pole airfield, and on 7 November 1941 moved to the village of Vystav on Lake Ladoga with the task of covering the "Road of Life". In December 1941 Belousov became deputy commander of the regiment, and on 18 January 1942 the 13th Fighter Aviation Regiment was given Guards status and became the 4th Guards. In February 1942 the legs burned in 1938 failed him for good. He wrote of it in his memoirs: "On one of the hard days of fighting I felt my legs stop obeying me, as though iron weights had been tied to them. Burned in the accident on the frontier, they had now begun to torment me again with sharper and sharper pain." Gas gangrene developed in the right leg and he was sent to the rear. In hospital at Alma-Ata the right leg was amputated above the knee, and then the left. In September 1943 he was discharged as disabled. He went back to Leningrad and to his own regiment. With his comrades' help he regained his flying on the Po-2 and then the UTI-4, and in April 1944 got himself returned to the navy's establishment. At a training regiment he mastered the modern Yak-7 and La-5 fighters, and in December 1944 was appointed senior pilot of the 4th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment — with both legs gone. In that post he flew ten more operational sorties, covering ships and on reconnaissance. By February 1945 he had flown 300 combat sorties and shot down three enemy aircraft. In February 1945 his health worsened again and he was retired as disabled. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 10 April 1957, twelve years after the war, as a retired major, for the courage and military valour he had shown in the Great Patriotic War. From July 1945 he headed the Leningrad flying club, worked in river transport and ran the city's first taxi depot, and from the late 1950s spent more than thirty years as a lecturer for the Knowledge society. He died on 7 May 1998 and is buried on the Avenue of Heroes at Serafimovskoye cemetery in St Petersburg.