A Sniper to love and admire

[FamousAJ]

Pretty neat story, many of you old timers may already be aware. The gun she used was a Mosin-Nagant 1891/30 7.62mm rifle with a 4x optical scope.

Today I found out Lyudmila Pavlichenko sniped a confirmed 309 Axis soldiers, including 36 German snipers, during WWII.

While most of the world shied away from putting women on the front line, the Soviet Union did not, including recruiting about 2000 women as snipers during WWII, one of which turned out to be one of the most successful snipers in history, Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She still holds the record for the highest confirmed kill total of any female sniper in history and is not that far off Simo Häyhä’s all-time mark of 542 confirmed kills (more on “White Death” Simo Häyhä, here).

In June of 1941, 24 year old Ukrainian Lyudmila Pavlichenko was attending Kiev University, studying history, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. When this happened, she went down to the local recruiting office to sign up for the infantry. The recruiter she spoke with suggested she was better suited for a role as a nurse or in a clerical position. Not to be dissuaded, she pulled out her Voroshilov Sharpshooter badge and a marksman certificate, both of which she’d earned while a teenager as a member of the OSOAVIAKhIM, which was a society that trained non-military people as young as 14 years old in military tactics and other such things in case they would someday be called into service to “defend the Motherland”.

After seeing this, the recruiter allowed her to sign up for combat duty and she was subsequently given the rank of private and assigned to a subsection of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, the 54th “Stephan Razin” Rifles Regiment, in the Red Army. With her regiment, thanks to her prodigious skill as a marksman, she was immediately assigned to the 2nd company sniper platoon.

Over the course of the next year, she recorded 309 confirmed kills, including 187 in her first 75 days on the job during the fierce fighting at Odessa, before the Soviets were forced to withdraw. Among her total confirmed kills, she knocked off 100 officers and 36 German snipers, including supposedly one who himself was one of the more decorated snipers in history, recording over 500 confirmed kills according to a log found on his person. (I was not able to ascertain the name of that German sniper though and only a few reputable sources that cite him, so take that latter fact with a grain of salt.)

It should also be noted that Pavlichenko’s actual total number of kills was probably significantly more than 309 because in order for a kill to count towards her total, an independent party had to witness it. Her real total is thought to be closer to around 500.

Sniping being an extremely hazardous job, often with the sniper positioned in no-man’s land between the lines of friendly troops and the enemy (Pavlichenko often camped around 600-1000 ft. in front of her unit), Pavlichenko didn’t always come away unscathed. In June of 1942 during the siege of Sevastopol, she was seriously injured for the fourth time, this time by a mortar shell that had exploded near where she was hiding. Because at this point she’d become something of a celebrity and a public symbol, officials within the Red Army were unwilling to risk her being killed, so they put her on a submarine and got her out of Sevastopol and assigned her a new job as a sniping instructor and a public spokesman, with the rank of Major.

This probably saved her life as most of the rest of her division were killed within a month at Sevastopol, including her husband. (Again, I’ll just interject for a minute to point out that despite my sincerest efforts in researching this one, I couldn’t find anything about her husband, not even his name, and only a few reputable sources mention him dying at Sevastopol, so… you know, grain of salt). The few members of her division that survived Sevastopol were re-assigned in July of 1942 to other Red Army units and the 25th Rifle Division was officially disbanded.

While functioning as a public spokesman, Pavlichenko traveled to the United States and Canada, becoming the first citizen of the Soviet Union to be received at the White House by a U.S. President, in this case Franklin Roosevelt. She was not impressed by the U.S. media who were more concerned with her outfit than the war and her experiences in it.

SOURCE

 

[Fyrtwuck]

The Russians do like their medals.

 

[3inSlugger]

She didn't look too bad...good thing the Germans never captured her...

 

[henschman]

How accurate do you think the kill numbers for those Communist snipers really are? We are talking about Stalin era Soviet propaganda here.

 

[LightningCrash]

How accurate do you think the kill numbers for those Communist snipers really are? We are talking about Stalin era Soviet propaganda here.

I think our propaganda lies were more accurate propaganda lies.

 

[FamousAJ]

Not too concerned about the numbers as I am with the rifle she used. A mosin? dayum!

 

[cjjtulsa]

How accurate do you think the kill numbers for those Communist snipers really are? We are talking about Stalin era Soviet propaganda here.

But....but....they were confirmed! Looks like she was a great shot, anyway.

She didn't look too bad...good thing the Germans never captured her...

Maybe, but it was the Red Army soldiers who were notorious for rape; she probably should have been more concerned about her comrades.

 

[TedKennedy]

How accurate do you think the kill numbers for those Communist snipers really are? We are talking about Stalin era Soviet propaganda here.

But, but Soviets were the BEST, man!

 

[TedKennedy]

Oh, except for this comme-killing machine.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_Häyhä

 

[FamousAJ]

I've been looking at diff scopes lately and this got me thinking.... she was only using a 4x scope. Imagine if she had a bigger modern scope! I'm sure no one else was around for windage calculations and such...she probably licked her finger and stuck it in the air. Yep!