Semyon Ivanovich Butenin

Semyon Ivanovich Butenin was born on 25 March (7 April New Style) 1914 in the village of Novorozhdestveno in Ramenskoye volost of Bronnitsy uyezd, Moscow governorate; the village no longer exists and its site lies in the Narkomvod district of the town of Zhukovsky. Older documents give 25 April 1914; the March date comes from the parish register. He was Russian, finished five classes of school, did his military service in tank units and then worked in Moscow as a loader at the Krasnoye Znamya textile factory, where he became a driver. He was called up by the Ramenskoye district military commissariat in July 1941 and was in action from August 1941. In 1942 he joined the newly formed 5th Separate Tank Battalion, equipped with British Lend-Lease Matilda and Valentine tanks and Soviet T-60s; the award sheet names his tank as a T-26, which the warheroes researchers consider an error. On 20 August 1942 the battalion supported an attack by the 125th Rifle Brigade on the fortified village of Gorki in Gzhatsk district, now Tyomkino district of Smolensk region. According to the award sheet, Senior Sergeant Butenin, a tank driver-mechanic, crushed two machine-gun nests with their crews. When an anti-tank rifle set the tank on fire and its commander was mortally wounded, he put out the fire and took the tank back into the fight. At Gorki the tank was set alight a second time; attacked by German infantry trying to take him prisoner, he killed them with a grenade, drove the burning tank onto an anti-tank gun and destroyed it with its crew, and, wounded in the arm and shoulder, crawled back to his unit. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 31 March 1943, published in the Vedomosti of the Supreme Soviet, Senior Sergeant Semyon Ivanovich Butenin was made a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and Gold Star medal no. 828. After hospital he returned to the front in summer 1943 and was wounded for the fifth time in December 1943. In 1944 he served in the 43rd Guards Tank Brigade, and in 1945, as a guards sergeant-major, commanded a Churchill tank crew in the 139th Tank Regiment of the 63rd Mechanised Brigade in Pomerania and on the approaches to Berlin. He also held the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd class, the Order of the Red Star and the medal For Courage. Demobilised in 1946, he lived in Ryazan and worked as a toolmaker at a motor depot. He died on 10 August 1973 and is buried at the Skorbyashchenskoye cemetery in Ryazan.