Super skeptical. Even Carlos Hathcock only had 93 confirmed kills, and the oppo lacked on-call artillery, of which German divisions had no shortage, not to mention mortars, panzerfausts, pack artillery, etc. And the Germans weren’t exactly worried about civilian casualties when it came to raining bombs on suspected enemy infantry or sniper positions.
Different wars. Hathcock fought in a jungle war that was mostly ambush and stealth in triple canopy jungle, whereas Pavlichenko and other European WW2 snipers were often firing across open fields or in urban landscapes.
Simo Häyhä, the highest scoring sniper of all time, was a Finn who fought in the Winter War. His final total at the end of that war was 542 sniper kills, of which at least 259 were confirmed by his unit commander. He also had at least 259 confirmed submachinegun kills aside from his sniper work. He was... very busy, at one point killing a confirmed 25 people in one day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4
Hathcock simply had fewer targets than were present in most WW2 battlefields. Hathcock was also not even the top scoring US sniper when he was active - Adelbert F. “Bert” Waldron III, US Army, had 109 confirmed kills in just 8 months in 1968. More references here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelbert_Waldron
In later fights in more open territories, sniper totals for US forces went back up. Chris Kyle had 160 confirmed (”stepped on”) kills, for example.
If you look at other countries, Canada had Francis Pegahmagabow, who in WW1 had 378 confirmed kills and so many unconfirmed that everyone lost count. There’s was a guy in Sri Lanka’s army, Ranjith Premasiri Madalana, who had 217 confirmed sniper kills before he himself was shot in the fourth Eelam War (2006-2009).
Also keep in mind that most of those early kills were against us allies... as Russia switched sides late in the war. The article dances around that.
You should NOT be skeptical, imVho, as WWII on the Eastern Front was a FAR different sort of combat than RVN was.- For one thing there were MANY times more soldiers in many of the major battles than were ever present in any action during RVN.
At the Battle of Stalingrad ONE German sniper killed 22 Russian soldiers & a Russian sniper from Siberia was credited with 19 kills on the SAME day.
(That coincidence of time/place was discovered after WWII.)
Yours, TMN78247