During WWII, Lyudmila Pavlichenko Sniped a Confirmed 309 Axis Soldiers, Including 36 German Snipers
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.
I am amazed at the kind of questions put to me by the women press correspondents in Washington. Don’t they know there is a war? They asked me silly questions such as do I use powder and rouge and nail polish and do I curl my hair? One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat…This made me angry. I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.
If you liked this article and the Bonus Facts below, you might also like:
- Simo Häyhä, “White Death”, Sniped Over 542 Soviet Soldiers in WWII
- A Japanese Soldier Who Continued Fighting WWII 29 Years After the Japanese Surrendered, Because He Didn’t Know
- What Started WWI
Bonus Facts:
- Pavlichenko’s rifle of choice during WWII was the M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant 7.62 mm rifle with a PE 4x telescope. The rifle held 5 rounds and could shoot at about 2800 ft per second with an average effective range of about 1800 ft (though as you’ll read below the Soviet snipers were supposedly reasonably accurate as high as 2600 ft away with this rifle).
- You’ll sometimes read that Pavlichenko actually used a SVT40 rifle during her service, but this is incorrect and is likely because this is the rifle she was often pictured holding after she was removed from front line service and made an instructor. This was not necessarily because she preferred the rifle, indeed she probably didn’t because it was a severely flawed weapon for sniper use, but simply because it replaced the Mosin-Nagant for a time while she was an instructor and serving as a public spokesman for the Soviet Union. Because of flaws like bright muzzle flash and poor accuracy at long ranges, the SVT40 was quickly phased out in favor of an upgraded version of the Mosin-Nagant with a PU scope.
- Simo Häyhä, “White Death”, also used a Mosin-Nagant rifle for sniping 542 Soviet soldiers. In his case, though, he didn’t use a scope as he felt this required him to raise his head too high, increasing the chances of getting spotted and killed. He also noted in an interview that the scopes Soviet soldiers put on the Mosin-Nagant were how he managed to spot many of the Soviet snipers specifically sent to kill him.
Out of the 2000 women in the Red Army assigned to sniper duty during WWII, only 500 survived the war, which actually seems like a pretty good ratio considering how dangerous being a sniper was and is.- Soviet snipers dominated WWII based on confirmed total kill score. On the whole they were estimated to average about a 50% hit-rate for a person standing 1/2 a mile away (about 2600 ft), 80% at 1600 ft, 90% at 700 ft and they could supposedly do this at a rate of 1-2 shots per minute, though of course in real battle shooting rapidly from one, often somewhat exposed, location would be a good way to get yourself killed. The Soviet’s high representation on the list of top snipers is likely largely due to having trained many of their snipers from the tender age of 14 in the OSOAVIAKhIM.
- The youngest female sniper in the Red Army was Klavdiya Kalugina who was just 17 when she signed up in 1943.
- The next best female sniper after Pavlichenko during WWII was Yekaterina Zuranova with 155 confirmed kills.
- After WWII, Pavlichenko finished her Master’s degree in History at Kiev University and, among other things, worked as a research assistant at the Soviet Navy headquarters.
- Among other accolades, during the war Pavlichenko was awarded the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, rose in rank from Private to Major, earned the Order of Lenin, was presented with an engraved Colt 1911 pistol while visiting the U.S., and was presented with an engraved Winchester model 70 rifle while in Canada, the latter of which can be seen in Moscow at the Central Museum of Armed Forces. After the war she was also featured on two commemorative postage stamps in the Soviet Union.
- At the age of 14, Pavlichenko worked as a metal grinder at the Kiev Arsenal.
- Women didn’t just serve on the front line in the Red Army during WWII, but also served as soldiers in the Tsarist Army during WWI.
- Woody Guthrie wrote a song honoring Pavlichenko, “Miss Pavlichenko“.
- It should be noted that unlike what is stated in the song, not all German soldiers were members of the Nazi party in WWII (in fact, most weren’t), so it’s not technically correct to say “three hundred Nazis fell by your gun.” Also, the “Russia’s your country” line is inaccurate. As noted, she was Ukrainian, which is a particularly important distinction today.
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wow, super post, Thank You, David
FYI, Ukrainians refer to their homeland
as the ‘Fatherland’ :’ Batkivshchyna ‘
A search,’motherland vs fatherland’ makes for some interesting reading.
cheers
So did the Nazis…and hey, Ukraine is now run by Nazis! What a coincidence!
What other forms of dogmatic expression do you practice? Here’s a quick bit of reqding to get you CAught up on present day Ukraine & their refusal to be loansharked by the IMF, World Bank, US, EU (who are acting soley out of subservience to the wishes of CORPORATE overloards in the AgriBusiness Chemical sector.). https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/01/hidden-hands-behind-east-west-tug-war-ukraine
Remember kids, if you don’t “sin” then Jesus died for nothin’!
good read.Wish will somebody will do a movie about her
“Bitva za Sevastopol – Battle for Sevastopol .2015” movie is about her.
I liked the movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4084744/
I enjoyed the article and found it interesting. However I am concerned about some of the authenticity in parts of the article about MajorPaulicenko. I am currently researching, and have been for a while, Lyudmila’s life, and will soon be I hope, to Russia where I will be reviewing her complete military records. I am not quesitioning the author’s zeal, but would like to have seen use of references as there are some things that do not appear anywhere else I have seen.
If this female sniper has been a soldier in any other army, I would believe her accomplishments as cited in the article.
But the Soviets were/are absolute masters of propaganda, lies, deceit and misinformation. Frankly, you cannot believe one thing they “allowed” the world – or their own people” to see or hear.
Yea, she probably was a sniper for the Soviet Army and probably did in fact achieve a dozen kills or so, and then caught the eye of her units dreaded “political officer,” and he figured he could initiate a real good propaganda scam/film for the benefit of the soviets and the rest of the world.
Most likely, “her story” is another work of fiction brought to you by the world’s greatest propagandists.
Funny you’d say that, seeing as you’re basically just spouting Western propaganda that you’ve been spoon-fed.
There’s this pervasive myth that the Soviets lied about everything, but even when they are proven right, the people who claim they always lied never admit it. They revealed the truth about the German extermination camps years before Western forces found them, yet they were not believed.
Really, the US are the best propagandists. They invented crap like the Holodomor and the obscenely bloated claims of lives lost in various revolutions (which, if true, would literally mean that the Russian and Chinese people would have gone extinct). I guess they’re all paid actors, though? Merely PRETENDING to exist! Those sneaky Russkies!
Meanwhile no one talks about the 15 million people who our economic model murders around the world by denying them basic needs (that tend to exist there, but have been commodified to feed our impossibly wasteful lifestyles). Even if we were to take the absurd claims that communism killed 100 million people (sometimes people even say just the Soviets did that, lol), well – we top that after just seven years.
Fortunately, the reality of anti-fascist heroes like Pavlichenko is not tarnished by the ravings of an online conspiracy theorist.
Look to the man who saved a billion lives.
Now, here we have a really good example of Communist slogans. The Soviet Union might be dead, but its followers, like ringwraiths, are still under its control.
True, the Soviets did not lie about everything. They told the truth when it suited their purposes. But John Tyler is right in one respect: if you wish to discover the truth of anything in the Soviet era, you have to research the documents which the leaders used to keep themselves informed. Anything official statement broadcast to the masses and the outside world must be considered suspect.
I don’t know which of these documents our author used, so I can’t comment on his article.
Sounds to me like American propaganda has caused you to turn off your brain. Cool shit. Go watch another Rambo movie, clown.
so do americans , but 1000 times more…
Soviet statistics are notoriously inaccurate thereby rendering stories like this more fantasy than reality. One example is the Soviet perpetuated MYTH OF KURSK.
The Popular Myth:
Soviet historians continue to propagate one of the great myths of WW II by erroneously claiming that Kursk was a great Soviet victory and a monumental German loss. According to this version of events, the nimble T-34 tank was able to defeat the German Tigers via ramming or maneuvering to their flanks. We are told Prokhorovka was the grave of German armor.
What is the accuracy of these statements? Western authors and now Russian sources agree that the popular version was a complete fabrication.
The Truth Finally Emerges:
A number of exhaustively researched and thoroughly documented books by Russian, British, and American authors have been published that completely destroy the Kursk myth. The first publication to receive widespread acclaim for debunking the Kursk myth is titled, “Kursk 1943: A Statistical Analysis” by Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson.
This book looks at all the important aspects of the battle such as the assembly of forces, strength and loss statistics, performance of tanks, operational plans, what if scenarios. The greatest strength of the book lies in the use of official German records for all the statistics concerning the German forces. German sources are used for German strength and loss statistics and Soviet sources for the Soviet numbers. This is the only way to ensure reliability since using Soviet numbers for German losses (and vice versa) leads to exaggerations.
Although Kursk was not a German victory losses between German and Soviet units were roughly 3-1 in favor of the Germans. German tank losses were not heavy nor was Prokhorovka a Soviet victory.
Some important aspects of the battle are dealt with in detail since they have been misrepresented in postwar accounts:
1). German strength: Soviet sources, repeated by Western authors, gave inflated accounts of the German strength at about 900.000 men, 2.700-3.200 tanks and assault guns and 2.800 planes.
The real numbers were roughly 780.000 men, 2.500 tanks/SPG’s and 1.800 planes. The manpower statistic refers to iststarke (actual strength) which includes all men that are part of the unit’s composition. Men on leave or temporarily detached to other units are included. Also men sick or wounded are included if they are assumed to return to service within eight weeks. Thus, despite its name, this strength category does not give the actual number of men available for service with the unit at the given time.
So obviously the true strength at the front was less than that. In comparison the Soviets had in the Central, Voronezh and Steppe fronts 1.900.000 men , 5.128 tanks/SPG’s and 3,549 planes (17th Air Army and Long Range Bomber Command included).
2). Overall losses: A Soviet General Staff study of the Kursk operation says that ‘in the defensive battles of Kursk from 5 through 15 July 1943 enormous losses in personnel and equipment were inflicted upon the Germans. During the period of their offensive, the German Kursk-Orel and Belgorod-Kharkov groupings lost a total of 70.000 men killed and wounded, and 2.952 tanks, 195 self-propelled guns, 844 field guns, 1,392 aircraft, with more than 5.000 motor vehicles damaged or destroyed’. Similar figures have been given in various books published postwar.
The correct figures were 55.000 men (killed, missing, wounded) and 300 tanks/SPG’s which can be compared with 177.000 men and 1.600 tanks/SPG’s for the Soviet side.
3). Prokhorovka: According to the ‘official version’ the forces that clashed in Prokhorovka on 12 July 1943 had about 1.200-1.500 tanks (most accounts give 800 Soviet vs. 400 German or 800 Soviet vs. 700 German). This supposedly was the ‘largest tank battle of the war’ and resulted in heavy losses for the Soviet side but also the crippling of the German tank units (400 Soviet vs. 320 German).
The reality was very different. Depending on how one defines the battle of Prokhorovka there were about 294 German and 616 Soviet vehicles or a maximum of 429 German and 870 Soviet vehicles. Losses were overwhelmingly in favor of the Germans with 334 Soviet vehicles destroyed versus at most 54 German tanks and assault guns. In fact the ratio should be higher since the authors state that ‘more German units are included in this calculation than actually took part in the Prokhorovka battle, while not all Soviet units are included’. [A recent article by Zamulin in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies:’Prokhorovka: The Origins and Evolution of a Myth’ gives the following numbers: in the Prokhorovka area 516 Soviet vs. 206 vehicles of II SS Panzer Corps plus in the South 150 Soviet vs. 100 German of III Panzer Corps].
Prokhorovka was not the death ride of the Panzers but rather the death ride of the 5thGuards Tank Army!
You have a lot of numbers, cite no sources at all.
The Soviets achieved their goals with the battle, while the Nazis didn’t. The Nazis expended their last major offensive that had any chance of working (the Battle of the Bulge in the West being, of course, a suicide mission), and the Soviets gained the strategic initiative for the rest of the war.
In other words, it was a loss for the Axis and a victory for the Red Army.
Fuck off, Nazi.
Is this the female “Russian” sniper that Stephen hunter wrote ” Sniper’s Honor ” about?
There wasn’t any “Russia” back in the days, and she fought for Soviet Union, which is a particularly important distinction today. But westerners with their anti-soviet propaganda washed brains will never get it.
Well she was born in pre-Soviet Russia. Assuming DOB @1916.
A good 5 years passed before the europeans recognized the Bolshevik’s as legitimately head of Soviet State.
Some corrections, she was born in 1916 in Ukraine, but this was considered part of the Russian Empire at the time, which would make her Russian. Her family name is Russian and according to her own autobiography, she felt herself to be Russian.
She did use a SVETA (SVT40), she again talked about it in her autobiography.