They called her Lady Death.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko killed 309 Nazi invaders of her homeland in the space of a year. Wounded by mortar fire during the Siege of Sevastapol, she was pulled out of the line and sent to the U.S. to build goodwill and to agitate for a second front in Europe.
Pavlichenko was a student at Kiev University in the Ukraine when the Germans invaded. At the beginning of the war, women were generally relegated to support services and nursing, but Lyudmila wasn’t having any of that. She had been a member of a Soviet youth paramilitary organization and had won a boxful of marksmanship medals. She wanted a rifle and she wanted to join the infantry and she wanted to kill fascists.
She got her chance. She proved herself by clipping two Romanian soldiers with a Tokarev semi-automatic rifle and her career was underway. Within 75 days she had racked up 187 confirmed kills and had become a legend. The Germans knew who she was, too, and assigned counter-snipers to take her out. With superior fieldcraft and marksmanship, she killed 36 of those German snipers.
Soviet sniper during World War II. Credited with 309 kills, she is regarded as the most successful female sniper in history
During the Siege of Sevastapol she pushed her total to 309 confirmed kills before being lashed with shrapnel from a mortar round. The Soviet commissars decided she was too valuable to risk further and sent her to the U.S. in 1942 for a propaganda swing, where she was subjected to inane questions about makeup and whether she worried that her Soviet uniform made her look fat. Seriously.
Nothing was more important to Stalin than seeing the Western Allies open a second front in Europe to take the pressure off the Soviet forces that had taken an ungodly pounding at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Lyudmila Pavlichenko did her part. She told one American audience:
“Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”
Rapturous applause.
Lyudmila returned to the Soviet Union, survived the war and quietly raised a family and worked as a historian.
Ran across this delightful graphic account of her career at rejectedprincesses.com. Yeah, no princess here. Just an all-time badass.
The Russians and the Ukrainians collaborated on a movie about her, before that whole scene went to shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C9yCpxAIcg
Paul McNamee says
I believe all Ukrainian women are descended from Princess Olga.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_of_Kiev
(She used to have a Badass of the Week page, but I can’t find it.)
Matthew says
The Soviet sniper woman has been a minor meme in popular culture for awhile. The James Bond story The Living Daylights had one. A while back I mentioned the manga Black Lagoon, one of the characters, the head of the Russian Mafia, had been a female sniper in Afghanistan.
It also seems to me to reinforce the notion that some of the best soldiers come from hunting cultures.
JimC says
Certainly makes a difference to have early marksmanship training.
Matthew says
I think it goes beyond that. Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron, was an avid hunter and he was a fighter pilot. I think hunting also develops certain mental qualities.
JimC says
Oh, absolutely. I was just thinking of Pavlichenko. She was a youth shooter but I haven’t seen anything about hunting. Overall, no question — from Zaitsev to Hathcock. Virtually all of my Frontier Partisans were hunters, some professionally.
Matthew says
I think I misread about the youth shooter thing and thought she was a hunter.
Still, she grew up with a familiarity with guns.
Steve says
Bang.