Nina Onilova

Nina Andreyevna Onilova (, ; 10 April 1921 – 8 March 1942) was a Soviet machine gunner in the Red Army's 25th Rifle Division who fought the Germans near Odessa and Sevastopol from 1941 to 1942.

Awarded the Order of the Red Banner after destroying a German tank, Onilova was mortally wounded in a German attack during the Battle of Sevastopol. She was posthumously awarded the honorary title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin in 1965.

Early life Nina Onilova was born in 1921 near Odessa, a daughter of Ukrainian peasants and was brought up at an Odessa orphanage after her parents' death. She was a member of the Komsomol and joined the workforce as a textile factory worker before World War II.

Onilova developed an interest in gunnery after attending a screening of Chapayev, a popular 1930s film based on the life of Russian Civil War commander Vasily Chapayev that starred Varvara Myasnikova as Anka, a courageous woman machine gunner, and took gunnery training lessons from her factory's paramilitary training club.

Taken to a Soviet hospital in the aftermath, she spent her time drafting an unfinished letter to Myasnikova about herself on the spare pages of a school notebook she had brought with her. She died on 8 March 1942 at age twenty, and was interred at Sevastopol's Communards Cemetery.

Though commemorated during and after the war, Senior Sergeant Onilova was only recognized as a Hero of the Soviet Union at the twentieth anniversary of the war's end when she was posthumously awarded the title by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 14 May 1965.