Nikolai Gastello - Biography

Biography

Nikolay Gastello was born in Moscow on May 6, 1908. Some sources mistakenly claim that his father was German; however Franz Gastello was a Belarusian. He had recently moved to Moscow and changed his Belarusian last name Gastylo to an exotic-sounding Gastello.

Nikolay Gastello graduated from a Sokolniki high school in Moscow in 1918, and his family then moved to Bashkiria, escaping the horrors of the Russian Civil War. By 1923 Gastello was back in Moscow, where he worked at a factory as a fitter. In 1928 he became a member of the communist party, and in 1932 by special decree he is sent to the Lugansk Pilot's School. Graduating in 1933 as a bomber pilot, Gastello initially flew the Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber. Gastello fought against the Japanese in Battle of Halhin Gol in 1939, where he was awarded the Order of Lenin; he then saw action in the Winter War with Finland.

By the time Germany attacked Soviet Union on June 22 of 1941, Gastello was a squadron leader in a long-range bomber regiment equipped with Ilyushin DB-3 medium bombers. On June 26, five days after the war started, a pair of aircraft led by Gastello bombed German position near the village of Dekshany in Belarus. Gastello's bomber was reportedly hit by flak, with his wing fuel tank being ruptured and the aircraft subsequently becoming engulfed in flames. He then deliberately directed the doomed aircraft into a German Panzer column, performing the first "fire taran" of the German-Soviet War.

Gastello was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union, one of the first Soviet soldiers to receive the title in World War II. Subsequently he became one of the best-known heroes of the war, with his story and that of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya taking up the bulk of Soviet text books on the early years of the German-Soviet War.