Isaak KobylyanskiyIsaak Kobylyanskiy, an Ukranian Jew, was an 18 year old freshman attending the Kiev Industrial Insitute when the Axis suddenly invaded his country on June 22, 1941. He volunteered for the Soviet Red Army the next morning and left his home of Kiev on uly 9, 1941.
In August 1942, Kobylyanskiy was assigned to the 300th Rifle Infantry Division's 1049th Rifle Regiment (later renamed the 87th Guards Rifle Division). He served as a guncrew commander in a 76mm field-gun battery, later the battery's fire platoon commander, and finally served as a battery commander from Janruary 1945 until the end of the war.
He saw combat at Stalingrad, the Don steppes, the Donbass, the North Tavria, at Perekop, at Sevastopol, in Lithuania, and East Prussia (Konigsberg and Pillau). Kobylyanskiy returned home on New Year's Eve 1946 with four military orders and three medals. In 1994, he immigrated to the United States at the age of 71.
Stuart Britton is a freelance translator and editor residing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has been responsible for making a growing number of Russian titles available to readers of the English language, consisting primarily of memoirs by Red Army veterans and recent historical research concerning the Eastern Front of the Second World War and Soviet air operations in the Korean War. Notable recent titles include Valeriy Zamulin's award-winning 'Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative ' (Helion, 2011), Boris Gorbachevsky's 'Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front 1942-45' (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Yuri Sutiagin's and Igor Seidov's 'MiG Menace Over Korea: The Story of Soviet Fighter Ace Nikolai Sutiagin' (Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009). Future books will include Svetlana Gerasimova's analysis of the prolonged and savage fighting against Army Group Center in 1942-43 to liberate the city of Rzhev, and more of Igor Seidov's studies of the Soviet side of the air war in Korea, 1951-1953. Read More Read Less