Biography of Uncle Vasya

We will be frank: not every military leader enjoys absolutely unquestioned authority, and even more so - sincere love among soldiers and officers of the whole kind of troops. Army General Vasily Margelov undoubtedly earned such love and respect from subordinates. And this is not at all an element of pan-Russian, but a tribute to the deepest respect for a person who turned the airborne troops into the elite of our armed forces.

About some facts of the biography of the glorious general - the article of the "army standard". The veteran of the Great Patriotic War Vasily Margelov was born into a family of immigrants from Belarus who moved to Yekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk, now the Dnieper on December 27 according to the new style of the year. His surname at birth sounded like Markelov, and only much later, due to the error of writing in the partybill, he became Margelov.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Little Vasily moved to his father’s homeland with his family - to the Mogilev province. After the October Revolution and the Civil War, the teenager worked on different works as a student and apprentice, and then a full -fledged worker. In the year he was drafted into the army and was enrolled in the United Belarusian Military School in Minsk.

He graduated with honors, and then served as the platoon commander, then commanded the company, the battalion, and headed the intelligence of the 8th Minsk Rifle Division. At the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Margelov accepted under his command one of the regiments of the 1st division of the people's militia. In November, he was transferred to the post of commander of the ski regiment, compiled from the Marines of the Baltic Fleet.

In July, Margelov was transferred to the south, where he first headed the regiment, and then the division, which took part in the battles in the Donbass, in forcing the Dnieper, the assault on Kherson and the liberation of Southeast Europe. In March, Vasily Margelov was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and he ended the war with the rank of major general.

After graduating from the Voroshilov’s Higher Military Academy, he was appointed commander of the Guards Chernigov Red Banner Airborne Division, deployed in Pskov, and was transferred to the Far East with a promotion to the commander of the airborne corps. Margelov in front of the formation of young paratroopers before their parachute jump. True, there was a two-year break, when, due to an extreme incident, in one of the subordinate parts of the sentence, he shot the colleagues of the famous general to the deputy commander of the Airborne Forces, but this episode did not throw a shadow at the Biography of Margelov.

He gave all his forces, intellect and indefatigable energy to the transformation of the airborne troops into the true elite of the Soviet armed forces. Margelov transformed the auxiliary family of troops into shock force, capable of independently solving the most difficult combat tasks. He himself determined the strategy and purpose of their development as follows: “To fulfill its role in modern operations, it is necessary that our compounds and parts are highly maneuverable, covered by armor, have sufficient fire efficiency, well controlled, are able to land at any time of the day and quickly proceed to active fighting after landing.

Here, by and large, is the ideal that we should strive for. " All these theoretically formulated principles were fully embodied by Margelov in practice. He personally delved into each problem and necessarily sought to solve it. The competition upon admission to the Ryazan Higher Airborne School was higher than in the most prestigious civil universities in the country!

Margelov at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. Vasily Filippovich introduced many innovations that put the Soviet Airborne Forces to the highest level around the world. But among other things, I would like to highlight its way of landing equipment with crews inside combat vehicles. The fact is that in the year in the first test of reliability and security of this method, the son of the army general, senior lieutenant Alexander Vasilievich Margelov, personally participated!

And no one saw this surprising in this, because for the legendary Uncle Vasya, every Airborne Soldier was a son!