The Bizarre History of Women in WWII: Soviet Edition - A Day In History
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Just under half a million women served in the Soviet Red Army in WWII, or as it is known in the former Soviet countries, The Great Patriotic War. The most famous of them were snipers, but as far as we can tell from what Soviet records were made public after the fall of the USSR, only about 2, 000 of them served as snipers on the front line, or at least, those were the women who received formal training. But consider this. Even if we limit ourselves to 2, 000, the arguably five most well-known were responsible for the deaths of close to 700 Axis troops!
The most famous Soviet woman sniper was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a. k. a Lady Death, her nickname during the war. Lyudmila's tally of Nazis was 309 an entire company's worth of Nazi invaders, all killed by one person! Lyudmila was born near Kyiv in today's Ukraine, in 1916. She became interested in shooting while she was involved in a sports club as a teenager. One of the boys in the club lorded his skill with a rifle over all the other students, and Lyudmila, who had done some shooting with her father, was determined to shut the young man's mouth. She continued to practice in private and when she realized she was much better than that boy would ever be, she challenged him to a round of target shooting. We remember Lyudmila's name who the boy was is lost to history
Paul: And the German military had a policy that no Soviet female soldier was to be taken prisoner. All were to summarily executed. That this mostly happened, after they were invariably raped by the soldiers. A few ended up in POW camps. Date: 2022-09-18
