Mikhail Grigoryevich Bondarenko

Mikhail Grigoryevich Bondarenko was born in 1912 in the village of Sinyava in Kyiv province, now Rakytne district of Kyiv region, into a peasant family. He was called into the Workers' and Peasants' Red Fleet in 1933, graduated from a higher naval school, served as a military representative at the Gidropribor works and completed the navy's higher special command course. From the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he took part in the defence of Odessa and of Sevastopol, and in the Novorossiysk and Kerch-Eltigen operations. By November 1943 Captain Lieutenant Bondarenko commanded the 9th division of minesweeper boats in the water district defence of the Black Sea Fleet's main base. On the night of 8 November 1943, during the breakthrough to the bridgehead on the Kerch peninsula near the village of Eltigen, he brought his detachment through to the Crimean shore twice. The naval historian Andrei Kuznetsov's study The Great Landing: the Kerch-Eltigen Operation reconstructs his last hours from signals and shore observation. The boat from which Bondarenko was to direct the landing sprang a leak; he returned to Krotkov and at 03:15 transferred to the small submarine chaser SKA-0122, which was setting out for Eltigen on its second run of the night. A mile and a half from the Crimean shore the boat met a tender that had taken seventy wounded men and prisoners off the bridgehead. Bondarenko took those people aboard his own boat, transferred his landing troops to the tender and turned for base. Five German minesweeper boats caught him soon afterwards. At 03:50 he managed to report that the landing force was ashore. At about four in the morning the shore posts watched a lone chaser fighting several enemy boats: its fire gradually weakened, and then the boat blew up. Of the crew and the seventy people taken from the tender, no one survived. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 22 January 1944, Captain Lieutenant Bondarenko was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, for the forcing of the Kerch strait, the landing of assault troops and the movement of equipment to the Kerch peninsula. He was also awarded the Orders of Lenin, of the Red Banner and of the Red Star, and the Medal for the Defence of Sevastopol.