Yelena Stempkovskaya

Yelena Konstantinovna Stempkovskaya (Елена Константиновна Стемпковская; c. 1921 – 26 June 1942) was a radio operator in the 216th Rifle Regiment of the 76th Rifle Division, 21st Army, on the Southwestern front during World War II. For her service in the military she was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union on 15 May 1946.

Civilian life
Stempkovskaya was born to a Russian family in the Minsk Region of the Byelorussian SSR in the year 1921, but her exact date of birth is unknown. The family later moved to Uzbekistan to develop the cotton industry; she graduated from the Tashkent Pedagogical Institute and remained in Uzbekistan until the start of the Second World War.

Military career
Stempkovskaya joined the Red Army in June 1941 after the start of the Second World War, having previously been in the Komsomol. She was trained in radio communications and assigned to the 216th Infantry Regiment as a radio operator. After a spotter was killed in the fighting in Kursk, she took over but was closer to the line of fire when the Nazis surrounded and closed in on the trench.

There are two versions of the events leading up to her death; one states that she attempted to fend of the Nazis by throwing two grenades but was eventually captured due to being heavily outnumbered and tortured for information, her captors having stabbed her with bayonets and cut off her hands before they left her to bleed to death after she refused to reveal military secrets. The other version of her death, according to more recent sources, is that after the Nazis approached the trench holding several remaining Soviet soldiers, Stempkovskaya entered the battlefield with a machine gun in her last stand and was killed by gunfire, even though radio operators were at high risk of being captured by the Axis to reveal the information they received and transmitted and weren't supposed to be at the front of the fighting. All remaining members of the battalion that did not flee when the Germans began closing in were killed in the battle.

Awards

 * Hero of the Soviet Union
 * Order of Lenin
 * Order of the Red Banner