On the Road to Stalingrad: Memoirs of a Woman Machine Gunner

This is a book about a young girl who volunteered to serve in the famous 25th Chapayev Division and became a machine gunner. She was inspired by her role model, mentor and friend Nina Onilova (1921–1942), a legendary machine gunner, to keep a diary and tell the story of her comrades-in-arms. Zoya Medvedeva (married name Smirnova) has provided an authentic, eyewitness account of the desperate fighting in the trenches for Odessa and Sevastopol, as promised to her role model, mentor and friend Nina Onilova (1921–1942), a legendary machine gunner. Though half-blinded, eventually Medvedeva became a machine-gun company commander. Too modest to dwell on her own exploits, instead she writes about her former comrades-in-arms, many of whom were killed or hospitalized and some, like Medvedeva herself, had to wander across the enemy-occupied Stavropol Territory, after their release from various military hospitals, in order to break through to Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kizlyar to the southeast of Stalingrad.