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“One shot, one kill”, Ivan Sidorenko's motto

Louis

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Ivan Mikhaylovich Sidorenko was a former art student who traded his sketching pencils and paintbrushes for a rifle and bullets. Born into a peasant family in Smolensk Oblast, near Belarus, in Sept 1919. He only completed ten grades of school, after which he enrolled in the Penza Art College, near Moscow, hoping to carve out a career for himself in art. However, it was not for his artistic abilities that he would be remembered... On 1939 he was conscripted into the Red Army.

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His unit was sent into battle in the Battle of Moscow in 1941, but he quickly decided that he needed to do more to the German soldiers than simply fire mortars at them. He started to use his unit’s time off to hunt down German troops in the city and take them out from a distance.

Sidorenko used the Mosin-Nagant rifle with a telescopic sight, increasing the range at which he could accurately hit a target up to around 875 yards. In the war-torn streets of Moscow, he soon began to make a name for himself as he racked up kill after kill, taking out unsuspecting German soldiers from positions of cover and then disappearing like a phantom before they could retaliate. Not content to simply kill individual German soldiers, Sidorenko also targeted German tankers and supply vehicles, which he would take out with explosive rounds.

So the potential snipers were selected for training with Sidorenko. To teach his trainees the art of sniping, Sidorenko, who lived by the motto “one shot, one kill,” would often train them the same way he had learned: on the job. He would take one trainee at a time with him on his sniping missions, so that they could see the principles of the activity being put into live – and lethal – practice.

He was wounded on numerous occasions throughout his time on the front, but a particularly serious wound he received in Estonia in 1944 put an end to his career as an active sniper. As a result of this injury he spent the rest of the war in a hospital.

At the time he received this career-ending injury, he had racked up a kill count of five hundred, and had trained two hundred and fifty new snipers, all of whom wreaked havoc on their German enemies throughout the war. On June 4, 1944, he was awarded the prestigious honor of Hero of the Soviet Union.

After the war he left the army and moved to Chelyabinsk Oblast, where he took a job as the foreman of a coal mine. He died on 19 Feb 1994 in Republic of Dagestan, Russia.​
 
Thanks for posting this interesting story. I am little sceptical of the high scoring numbers. I would have thought that training 250 snipers one at a time would have been a monumental effort too.
 
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