Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlyuchenko
Posted on 07/21/2020 12:46:30 AM PDT by LibWhacker
With 309 confirmed kills, she became a heroic figure to the Soviets—but the American media didn't know what to make of her.
Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlyuchenko
For Lyudmila Pavlichenko, killing Nazis wasn't complicated. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey,” she once said of her job.
But Pavlichenko wasn’t just any soldier: She was the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the most successful snipers, period. As a member of the Soviet Army during World War II, she killed 309 Nazis, earning the sobriquet “Lady Death.” She also became a public figure who toured North America and Britain, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and spoke candidly about gender equality—especially when she was fed up with American reporters.
Pavlichenko was born in 1916 in Bila Tserkva, a village near Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. As a girl, she was boisterous and competitive. In her early teens, she moved with her parents—a government employee and teacher—to Kiev. After hearing her neighbor’s son brag about his shooting skills, she joined a local shooting club. “I set out to show that a girl could do as well [as him],” she later explained. "So I practiced a lot."
Besides being an amateur sharpshooter, the teenaged Pavlichenko worked in an arms factory. At around 16 years old, she married a doctor and gave birth to a son, Rostislav, but the marriage was short-lived. She then went on to study history at Kiev University starting in 1937, while also enrolling in a sniper school on the side.
When German forces invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Pavlichenko felt called to action. She left school, hoping to volunteer for the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.
The only problem? She was a woman. At the time, women in the Soviet military were largely relegated to support roles—not combat ones.
Army leaders initially wanted Pavlichenko to be a nurse. After some pleading with a registrar, she was able to join as a sniper because of her training. However, a lack of guns meant that she at first helped dig trenches instead. She wrote in her memoirs, “It was very frustrating to have to observe the course of battle with just a single grenade in one’s hand." Eventually, a colleague wounded by a shell splinter passed his rifle over to Pavlichenko when he was too injured to use it. Weeks later, she shot two Romanian soldiers a quarter-mile away, which served as a “baptism of fire,” she later wrote, and led to her being accepted by her comrades as a full-fledged sniper.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko in 1942
Pavlichenko became one of over 2000 female Soviet sharpshooters who eventually fought in World War II (although female soldiers were still just 2 percent of the Red Army's total number). Pavlichenko killed hundreds of enemy combatants in Odessa, Moldavia, and Sevastopol. “We mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she later said. Eventually promoted to sergeant and lieutenant, she spent months in battle killing scouts, officers, and at least 36 enemy snipers from Germany and other Axis countries.
Pavlichenko was so determined that even shell shock and multiple wounds from enemy fire didn’t deter her. Neither did bribes: After German soldiers learned of her shooting prowess, they tried to turn her against her country by offering chocolate and the promise of an officer rank in the German army. When she didn’t fall for it, Germans threatened to tear her into 309 pieces, her number of confirmed kills. The offer reportedly delighted her, since it meant her tally was widely known—yet her resolve didn't waver.
But after shrapnel hit Pavlichenko in the face in the summer of 1942, Red Army leaders withdrew her from combat and assigned her to train novice snipers. She was also given another role: wartime propagandist.
In late 1942, Pavlichenko traveled to the United States to galvanize support for sending more American troops to Europe. One of her first stops was the White House, which she became the first Soviet citizen to visit. She met with President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the sniper and the first lady hit it off: Eleanor Roosevelt invited Pavlichenko on a tour of the country to talk about her experiences in combat.
Speaking through a translator to crowds that sometimes swelled to thousands, Pavlichenko discussed her childhood and triumphs as a sniper. “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now,” she reportedly told one group in Chicago. “Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”
The American press, however, had trouble taking Pavlichenko seriously. They described her as a "Girl Sniper," and focused on her physical appearance, disparaging her bulky green army uniform and minimal makeup. Instead of asking about her skills with a rifle, reporters questioned her about nail polish, hair styles, and whether female Soviet soldiers could wear makeup in battle. “There is no rule against it,” she replied. “But who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
Pavlichenko soon tired of the questions. As she explained to one interviewer:
"I am amazed at the kind of questions put to me by the women press correspondents in Washington. Don't they know there is a war? They asked me silly questions such as do I use powder and rouge and nail polish and do I curl my hair? One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat. This made me angry. I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn."
Comparing gender equality in the U.S. and Soviet Union, she also told crowds: “Now [in the U.S.] I am looked upon a little as a curiosity, a subject for newspaper headlines, for anecdotes. In the Soviet Union I am looked upon as a citizen, as a fighter, as a soldier for my country.”
Pavlichenko eventually returned to the Soviet Union to continue training other snipers, after other publicity stops in Canada and Great Britain. Despite a relatively privileged position as a heroic figure there, she struggled with the lasting effects of her injuries and personal demons: alcoholism, what today we might call post-traumatic stress disorder, and the memories of a romantic partner who had died on the frontlines, in her arms, in early 1942.
When the war ended, Pavlichenko earned her history degree from Kiev University and worked as a historian for the Soviet Navy. In 1957, she reunited with Eleanor Roosevelt when the former first lady visited Moscow and stopped by Pavlichenko’s apartment. While the pair were at first reserved in the presence of a Soviet minder, Pavlichenko soon made an excuse to pull Roosevelt into another room. She reportedly threw her arms around the former first lady while the pair reminisced about their experiences 15 years earlier.
Pavlichenko died in Moscow in 1974, at age 58. The Soviet Union honored her with multiple medals and two postage stamps. A joint Ukrainian-Russian feature film, Battle for Sevastopol, was made about her in 2015, and her memoirs, Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper, was published in English for the first time earlier this year. Pavlichenko also lives on in Woody Guthrie's 1942 song, “Miss Pavlichenko.” It includes the lyrics:
Miss Pavlichenko's well-known to fame
Russia's your country, fighting is your game
The world will always love you for all time to come,
300 Nazis fell by your gun.
The USSR was never an “ally” to the US troops dying in the Pacific, until shortly before the end of the war when they invaded Manchuria. While Americans were dying at Pearl Harbor, Tarawa, Guadalcanal - the USSR observed a truce with Japan.
Maybe the Hildebeast was secretly channeling this woman, and not Eleanor. 🤗
We did the same with some German allies in WW2. We should have invaded Finland by that logic, but we didn’t.
Also worth mentioning that over and above any political concerns, the Soviets basically didn’t have a navy worth the name (for multiple reasons, as the British found out when they got their Lend-Lease battleship back from them after the war) so they *couldn’t* carry the war to the Japanese at sea. The Red Air Force was mostly set up to be a short ranged, tactical support force and couldn’t have contributed to the Pacific island hopping campaign if they’d wanted to. Finally, the Red Army in the East was lacking in equipment, troops and most importantly leaders if they had wanted to go after the Japanese and Manchukuo troops on the mainland. Even the pre-war Soviet victory at Khalkin Gol against vastly outnumbered Japanese troops was only accomplished by a gifted commander (by Soviet standards, anyway) who later could not be spared from the German front and even then was only accomplished at huge cost in men and materiel. Of which neither could be spared post-Operation-Barbarossa until very late in the war when it was obvious that Germany was about to collapse and there wasn’t going to be another Battle Of The Bulge style resurgence.
Post war research has shown that it wasn’t that Stalin didn’t *want* to go expand in Asia, it was that he believed he couldn’t muster the men and equipment to do so.
Part of that is because the 1939 Anglo-Polish treaty specifically excluded Britain from defending Poland against Russian invasion. Another part is that the Polish-Russian border was still sort of fluid and the Poles were squabbling with the Russians about it.
Finland was hardly a German ally; they accepted German help in reclaiming the territory they lost in the Winter War, then would go no further. Hitler desperately wanted them to help at Leningrad, and they wouldn’t. Even Stalin took this into account as the war ended; he re-took what they’d seized in the Winter War, but alone among the countries that fought the USSR along its borders, Finland remained a free country (as opposed to an occupied Warsaw Pact puppet). Finland was no more a German ally than Franco’s Spain; once their countries were secure, they were done fighting.
The USSR wouldn’t have needed to fight in the islands, just on the mainland. Whatever reason you give as to why they didn’t, there was nothing to stop them from rolling into Manchuria afterwards - which they did with gusto. In the end, China, North Korea, and all of former French Indochina ended up in communist hands as a result of that move.
That is a pathetic excuse; for Britain to squander all of those lives, and eventually lose its colonies, due to a war started to “protect Poland”, they ended up with a postwar world with Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) enslaved. Churchill knew they’d won nothing and lost everything; France turned out to be the smarter by sitting it out for the most part.
Churchill also knew Britain was going to lose the empire soon even if they didn’t enter the war.
You should also realize that the Poles and the Russians were still poking at each other over the exact layout of the border and at any time the Poles could go to war against the Russians or vice versa. Britain (correctly, IMHO) didn’t want to get involved in that, especially when it might be a war that Poland had provoked.
France sat it out because they had to. Go look at the status and doctrine of their army in the pre-war period. They were pretty screwed up for a number of reasons to the point where most of their tactics were oriented towards defense with very little offensive capability. If you want to see how screwed up they were (and you hadn’t looked in on recent scholarship on the subject), The Chieftain on YouTube has an excellent video on just how screwed the French tank corps was, despite having the best tanks in the world at the time. It’s a microcosm of how their entire army was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqoPZK6gyao
The only part of the French military that was really even vaguely offensively focused was their navy (with the all-forward-guns battleships and battlecruisers), and even it wasn’t all that clueful.
Ummm, Finnish forces took part at Leningrad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Finnish_participation
Stalin did actually invade Finland. The only reason the Russians stopped was because the Finnish fought the Red Army to a stalemate, negotiated an armistice (the September 1944 Moscow Armistice) and then joined the Allies.
It should be remembered that China was absolutely communist in areas during the war - the Communists and Nationalists were fully engaged in combat in 1927, long before the Japanese invaded.
The USSR didn’t have the resources to spend on mainland Asia until it was clear Germany was prostrated; additionally, it was agreed at the various conferences that the USSR would continue to concentrate in Europe - remember, the policy was Germany first, with Japan as a side show.
You seem to be remembering a lot of things about WW2 that just weren’t so.
Additionally, French Indochina ended up in Communist hands because after the war we let the French take it back as a colony, where they resumed their abuses of the populace, only writ larger. At which point, the Vietnamese, fresh off evicting the Japanese and still armed, strongly objected.
No less a person than Ho Chih Minh went to Washington to ask that the French be removed or at least the aid with which he’d fought the Japanese to be continued. Washington, in their stupid “Hey, let’s appease the French” mindset, told him no. “Uncle Ho” said “screw that” and turned to people that *would* support his people. We all know what happened next.
We should have told the French, “No, you don’t get any of your colonies or territories that we had to liberate or support back” but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......
Did you read the article at your link?
“The Finnish forces crossed the pre-Winter War border on the Karelian Isthmus by eliminating Soviet salients at Beloostrov and Kirjasalo, thus straightening the frontline so that it ran along the old border near the shores of Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, and those positions closest to Leningrad still lying on the pre-Winter War border. According to Soviet claims, the Finnish advance was stopped in September through resistance by the Karelian Fortified Region;[43] however, Finnish troops had already earlier in August 1941 received orders to halt the advance after reaching their goals, some of which lay beyond the pre-Winter War border. After reaching their respective goals, the Finns halted their advance and started moving troops to East Karelia.[44][45] For the next three years, the Finns did little to contribute to the battle for Leningrad, maintaining their lines.[46] Their headquarters rejected German pleas for aerial attacks against Leningrad[47] and did not advance farther south from the Svir River in occupied East Karelia (160 kilometres northeast of Leningrad), which they had reached on 7 September.”
The Finns did NOT fight the Soviets to a stalemate; the Soviets wanted back what they had taken in the Winter War, and they got it. There is no way Finland was going to stop the same army that was taking all of eastern Europe, all the way to Berlin.
The whole point in Asia was that Soviet weapons armed the communist movements, and when China fell, Chinese weapons armed the communists in North Korea and Vietnam.
Read “Hell in a Very Small Place” by Bernard Fall, the author of “Street Without Joy”; it was clear the US wanted the French to suppress the communists in Indochina (as part of “containment”), and we armed them to the teeth to do so. American advisors worked with the French, and we even lent them an aircraft carrier.
France had enough of war; they couldn’t fight another, and told us so. We prodded them into it, and then let them lose when it went south.
To give you an idea as to how excited France was about keeping Indochina, by law they couldn’t even draft French troops to send there - so they ended up with a lot of colonials, locals, and Foreign Legion troops instead. They had no intention of spending French blood to keep it.
France understood as clearly as several other countries that when Stalin fought Hitler, there would be no “winner”; they were absolutely right, and completely vindicated by May 1945. Nazism was traded for Bolshevism, nothing more; at least France (and Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, Sweden) hadn’t squandered their youths’ lives fighting for Stalin. Britain and the US served eastern Europe to him on a silver platter, and eastern Europeans today remember that.
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