The (Lost) History of Women at War: Part One - Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Good Morning. Say hello to Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

Who is she, you might ask? Well, if you were one of 36 Nazi snipers in WW2, she was the last thing you ever saw before she put a bullet through your scope from 3000 yards away.

Let's rewind. 1941. World War II. The German invasion of the Soviet Union begins. A young Ukrainian student doing her Master's Degree in History at the University of Kiev volunteers to join the war effort. The recruiters said no.

They did not know who they were messing with.

Miss Pavlichenko simply showed them all the civilian sharpshooting awards she had won since the age of 14. They were still not convinced and tried to steer her toward nursing. But Pavliuchenko insisted. So they tested her by having her shoot from far a couple of Romanians who were working with the Germans. She did so. Oddly enough, ****after*** that according to many accounts, she froze in her first real battle until the soldier next to her was killed. This leads one to suspect that one of the stories was propaganda (either the Romanian story is meant to make her look merciless or the second one was meant to make her look softer and more human)

Either way, what we do know is that after that, Pavliuchenko got to the grim business of killing Nazis -- and business was booming. From Odessa to Sevastopol, she used techniques like tying cloths to trees while hiding somewhere else or rigging up mannequins to draw enemy fire and make them reveal their position. She developed tactics of always shooting the second person in line when she saw groups of German soldiers to cause confusion among them. She would target the dogs because the sense of smell made them more dangerous to her than the soldiers.

Once, an enemy saw her where she was hiding up in a tree, shot at her and missed. She immediately dropped herself twelve feet out of that tree to the ground below and pretended to be dead for many hours until darkness fell. Then she grabbed her gun and snuck away.

According to the records, she engaged in 36 separate duels with enemy snipers all of which she won (obviously.) One of these silent deadly one-on-one battles was against a German whose sniper logbook was recovered after his death and who had recorded 500 kills of his own. In another such combat, she and another German sniper hunted each other for three days before, in her own words: "Finally, he made one move too many."

At a point, she became so famous that the Germans would send out guys with loudspeakers to call for her to switch sides in exchange for gifts and chocolate. One can only assume she shot those guys too. Then they sent artillery shells instead.

By 1942, when she sustained injuries from one such artillery barrage, her experience and skills had become too valuable to risk so the Soviets pulled her off the battlefield and sent her to train others which she did very well. They also sent her to America for propaganda and fund-raising where she became the first Soviet soldier to visit the White House. It seems like she even became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, the American First Lady of that time.

It is interesting how celebrated she was in America at the time (after the usual sexist nonsense about "oh why aren't you wearing makeup" and other stupidity. Her responses were great.)

"I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?"

An American musician called Woody Guthrie even released a song praising her skill and her kill count (309 at final official count.) It looks like Communism was not the enemy yet because Nazism was too big.

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As you can see, I am now producing two series about women in history. That is, women involved in two of the most important engines of history: computing and war. There is a lot of this that people don't know. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for reading.

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