Pyotr Nikolayevich Bukhonka

Pyotr Nikolayevich Bukhonka, also spelt Bukhonko, was born on 29 June (12 July, New Style) 1906 in the settlement of Dobrush in Gomel uyezd of Mogilev governorate, a town since 1935, now in Gomel region of Belarus, into a peasant family. He finished four classes of school and from 1928 worked at the Dobrush pulp and paper mill «Geroy Truda». He was called up in 1941 by the Dobrush military commissariat and was in the field army from the start of the Great Patriotic War. In September 1943 he was a sapper of the 350th Separate Engineer Battalion, 6th Army, South-Western Front, in the battle for the Dnieper. On 26 September 1943, near the village of Dibrova in Synelnykove district of Dnipropetrovsk region, he crossed the river twice under heavy fire as one of the crew of a rubber boat ferrying troops to the right bank. On the second crossing the boat, holed by bullets and fragments, began to sink. Although wounded in the arm and the leg, Bukhonka plugged the holes; three wounded soldiers were saved and the landing party was put ashore on the right bank. In a later action he was severely wounded. According to warheroes.ru he was by then a Guards private serving as a rifleman of the 240th Guards Rifle Regiment, 74th Guards Rifle Division, 8th Guards Army, 3rd Ukrainian Front. He died on 5 February 1944 in the 5250th field hospital of the 8th Guards Army; ru.wikipedia gives the cause as pulmonary haemorrhage. He was buried in a mass grave at Zelbakhovka, renamed Buzuluky in 1946, in Krynychky district of Dnipropetrovsk region; warheroes.ru records his reburial in the mass grave at Huliaipole in the same district. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 19 March 1944 he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously. He was also awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star. A street in Dobrush bears his name, a memorial plaque is on the paper mill where he worked, and his name is on the stelae of Heroes at the Pamyat memorial complex in Dobrush.