Lily Craven@TheAttagirls
Woman of the Day sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko born OTD in 1916 in Ukraine, one of 2,000 women snipers in the Red Army during WW2 and one of the top five snipers of all time. The scourge of the German Army - they called her "the Russian bitch from hell” - she was the first Soviet soldier invited to the White House.
American reporters who bombarded her with sexist questions during a subsequent publicity tour didn’t come off too well either. This is when I warmed to her. She gave them rock-all.
An opinionated tomboy who was "unruly in the classroom”, Lyudmila and her family moved from their small hometown to Kiev when she was 14. She worked as a metal grinder in a munitions factory and in her spare time, learned weapons skills and etiquette with a youth sporting organisation. “When a neighbour’s boy boasted of his exploits at a shooting range, I set out to show that a girl could do as well. So I practised a lot.”
In early 1941, Lyudmila was studying history at Kiev University but when Hitler fell out with Stalin on 22 June 1941, German troops invaded Soviet Russia. She tried to join the Red Army but they thought she looked too feminine and turned her down. Lyudmila persisted, showing them her marksman certificate and a sharpshooter badge, but they would only recruit her as a nurse. “They wouldn’t take girls in the army, so I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get in.” Eventually, the Red Army gave her a rifle and a practical test: kill two men working with the Nazis quite some distance away. She passed.
Lyudmila was assigned to the 25th Rifle Division digging trenches and communication routes, but when a badly-injured comrade handed her his rifle, she killed two Nazi officers at 400 metres. In her first 75 days at war, she killed 187 Germans and within a year, 309 confirmed kills, 36 of which were German snipers. There may have been more. Only confirmed kills, witnessed by a third party, count.
She had to sit perfectly still for hours on end to avoid detection from enemy snipers, difficult and dangerous work. Lyudmila was wounded several times but remained on duty and operational until she was bombed by the Germans and was hit in the face by shrapnel. They were so desperate to stop her, they’d tried addressing her through loudspeakers, offering her sweets and promotion if only she would defect to them. “Lyudmila Pavlichenko, come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer.”
She became a sniper instructor and in 1942, she visited Canada and the USA as part of Soviet Russia’s charm offensive to convince the Allies to open up a second front against the Nazis and was invited to the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to conduct a publicity tour of the US to talk about her experiences as a woman soldier on the frontline and it was in Washington DC that Lyudmila experienced the unreconstructed sexism of the American press. She wasn’t used to it, and she wasn’t exactly a natural diplomat either.
They nicknamed her the “Girl Sniper”, refused to take her seriously, and only wanted to ask questions about her appearance or make personal comments. “One reporter even criticised the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides, my uniform made me look fat." Asked if she wore make-up on the frontline, she tartly replied, “There is no rule against it, but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
One reporter actually asked about her underwear. Lyudmila responded, "I am proud to wear the uniform of the legendary Red Army. It has been sanctified by the blood of my comrades who've fallen in combat with the fascists.” She challenged one especially sexist male reporter (what, even more sexist than asking about her underwear?) to a fistfight.
Lyudmila kept to her brief, trying to convince Americans to open up a second front. She told a male audience in Chicago: “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?”
Of the 2,000 women snipers in the Red Army during WW2, only 500 survived, such was the casualty rate. Lyudmila was one. She went back to finish her master's degree at Kiev University and became a historian. She died in 1974 at the age of 58.
