Patriotic War II,0704829,Artillerist,416th Rifle Division,Küstrin

[ade stevenson]

Thanks for brining this old thread back up with the added info.

I visited Küstrin in May this year with the British Army whilst on a Battlefield Tour. We we met by the Polish 5th Engineers and went down the Oder to the old Fortress in assualt boats. So I was interested to read this old thread.

Cheers, Ade.

[CtahhR]

It is really astonishing what great stories are out there and what pictures we can paint collectively with information from the Podvignaroda, Memorial, personal experiences and good old google. The amount of information available is truly vast and only growing by the day.

The selection of researched awards, fully, partially or barely on the forum is a tiny fraction of those out there but it is a great foundation to grow upon using both the original Soviet text and English translations.

Hopefully the days of "I think x got it for something in '43" are gone and a more factual and balanced representation of Soviet awards can be enjoyed by all. The actions for which awards were granted for have a huge range from being deep behind enemy lines killing dozens of enemies to sitting hundreds of miles in the rear shuffling paper faster than anyone else. This is just to mention military awards as headways are now being slowly made into labour awards, with decrees starting to be available and often good luck coming to the rescue.

Going through the available citations of awards presented here I know there are hundreds of tales of service, some are very blurred but still intriguing, others are vivid and stirring.

All of these jigsaw puzzle pieces thrown together by all the forum members certainly makes for an ever more detailed picture even though sometimes we don't have the picture on the box or we're just trying to put together a blank puzzle.

Even if our collections can't grow in size at worst they can grow in depth.