Iwan Petrovich Dawidow

My grandfather, Iwan Petrovich Dawidow, was born in 1919 and was drafted into the Red Army in February 1940, before the war. My mother was born in May 1940. Dawidow was born in the Orenburg region. We have a picture of him in the army, he was an aviator. We know because he had wings on his buttonholes; we think he was a pilot. I have not found data in what part he served, but there is a record of him being in Chernigov in 1941. He went missing in action in December 1941.

After the war a letter arrived to my grandmother from a woman in Ukraine. She was interested in Dawidow’s fate. Granddad had been shot down; she found him wounded and helped him back to health. He wrote his address for the woman in Ukraine before he left her house. And then he went back to the front line.

The burial notice was sent to his sister and my Mother didn’t know what happened to him. Mother wrote to the War Department. In 1947 we received notification in writing with a covering letter from General Basilov. Grandad was beaten to death and buried on the Island of Alderney. It was confirmed by a document from the War Department. He died in February 1943, he was 23 years old.

We received lists with the official report from the British War Office about German atrocities. Maybe someday I can visit my grandfather’s grave. My mother didn’t live to see that moment. We understand he is in the OPD Memorial, buried in the Russian cemetery, France.

[Editor’s note: the bodies exhumed from Alderney were reburied in the Mont des Huisnes German war cemetery in France, close to Mont St Michel].

Source

Anna Vyvodtseva, grand-daughter of Iwan Petrovich Dawidow