Within the text of this English edition there are some insertions in square brackets from the original Russian editor, Alla Igorevna Begunova and from the English translator (marked TN). The endnotes are from Alla Begunova, John Walter, Martin Pegler and David Foreman.
1 Pavlichenko gives few details of her relationship with the father of her son, though it was presumably not only short-lived but possibly also scandalous enough to persuade her parents to move away from Belaya Tserkov. She claimed on enlistment in the summer of 1941 to have had no contact with Alexsei Pavlichenko for three years, and is thereafter silent. He seems to have been one of countless Russian soldiers who simply disappeared during the war.
1 Here Pavlichenko repeats the Party line. Although pro-Republican journalists reported thousands of deaths at the time, modern assessments suggest that no more than a few hundred died. Moreover, the German-commanded Nationalists did see the attack on Guernica as part of a broader strategic goal.
2 The milliradian, usually abbreviated to ‘mil’ or ‘milrad’, was created in the nineteenth century to overcome difficulties encountered with the conventional system of degrees, minutes and seconds, which often hindered rapid calculation. The idea was taken up by artillerists and ballisticians, who saw the ease with which adjustments could be made to allow for changes in range and deviations caused by wind or the lateral drift of a spinning projectile. The basis was the radian, half the diameter of a circle, subdivided into a thousand parts (the milliradian). The circumference of the circle was then divided into these mils, the imprecision of pi resulting in a total of approximately 6283. However, beginning with the French and including the NATO forces of today, most armies rounded-off the total to 6400. Though this is mathematically erroneous, the difference is too small to have any practical effect on the shooting of a military rifle. The Russian system, however, was based on the subdivision of the six equilateral triangles contained within a circle, each divided into a 100 and then, after 15 September 1918, 1,000 units. Consequently, the ‘mil’ used by Pavlichenko was 1/6000th part of the circumference though, once again, the differences between this and the 1/6400th system were not significant at combat range. The adjusting drums of Soviet and many other telescope sights emitted an audible click as they turned through each tenth of a mil. A change of ‘three clicks’, therefore, would be 0.3 mils.
1 Here and below the statistical data are cited from N.M. Khlebnikov, P.S. Yevlampiev and Y.A. Volodikhin, The Legendary Chapayevs (Moscow, 1967).
2 Pavlichenko’s reminiscences are misleading. Though the Fw. 189 had been air-tested, and Fw. 189A-0 had been issued to training Staffeln in the autumn of 1940, all of the Aufklärungsstaffeln (H) involved in the aftermath of the invasion of the USSR flew the conventional single-engined Henschel Hs. 126. The first Fw. 189A-1 and 189A-2 aircraft did not arrive on the Eastern Front until the Spring of 1942.
3 I.I. Azarov, Odessa Under Siege (Moscow, 1966), pp. 26–32.
4 This was UR-82.
1 Engineering Forces in the Battle for the Soviet Homeland (Moscow, 1970), p. 114.
2 Pavlichenko’s letter to her elder sister Valentina is dated 27 August 1941. At the present time it is held in the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 4/18,680.
3 I.I. Azarov, Odessa under Siege (Moscow, 1966), p. 81.
4 A reference to the female companion of the original Chapayev.
5 From the collection of war memoirs By the Black-Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), p. 205.
6 By the Black-Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), p. 135.
7 The modern village of Krasnoselovka, Comintern District, Odessa Region.
8 I.I. Azarov, Odessa under Siege (Moscow, 1966), pp. 141, 143.
1 The BM-13 designation of the Katyushas remained classified as a state secret until the end of the war.
2 The modern village of Prilimannoye, Ovidiopolye District, Odessa Region.
3 By the Black Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), p. 137.
1 By the Black-Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), pp. 51–2.
2 This ship was named after the French socialist Jean Jaures. ‘Zh’ is the Russian language’s closest rendering of ‘J’.
3 According to modern research, the master and fifteen crew were lost; twenty passengers and crew were rescued.
1 Pavlichenko qualifies the guns as Ausf. F, but this version of the Stu.G.III did not appear until March 1942.
2 L.N. Tolstoy Sevastopol Sketches (Moscow, 1969), pp. 20, 22.
3 Thus perished sniper Tatiana Baramzina, Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumous).
4 This TT model 1933, 1940 issue, serial no. PA945, as well as other pistols (Mauser, Colt, Luger-Parabellum, Browning) from Pavlichenko’s personal collection are kept at the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 2/3776 .
5 By the Black Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), pp. 182–3.
6 By the Black Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), p. 203.
1 Now the village of Verkhnesadovoye, in the Nakhimov district of Sevastopol.
2 As becomes evident, this took place in November.
3 For the likely identification of von Steingel, see John Walter, The Sniper Encyclopedia (London, 2018).
4 By the Black Sea Fortresses (Moscow, 1967), pp. 219–20.
1 A pipe, a tobacco pouch and two silver cigarette cases belonging to Pavlichenko are kept at the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 2/3776.
2 This is an excerpt from the pamphlet Heroic Annals: The Defence of Sevastopol, which Pavlichenko wrote in 1958, commissioned by the State Political Publishing House, pp. 23–5.
1 This excerpt from the newspaper For the Motherland was reproduced in the collection Kievan Combat Stars (Kiev, 1977), in the piece entitled ‘Chapayev Sniper’, p. 363.
1 Now the village of Verkhneye-Chernorechenskoye, Balaklava district of Sevastopol.
1 Letter from Pavlichenko to her mother, E.T. Belova, dated 15 March 1942. The letter is held in the Central Museum of the Russia Federation Armed Forces, File no. 4/18681.
2 A Stakhanovite was an exceptionally productive and industrious worker.
1 This is among the worst maritime disasters of all time, ranking with Lancastria. The death toll is unknown, possibly well in excess of 5,000, though there were in fact eight survivors.
2 The document is kept in the central archives of the Ministry of Defence, Russian Federation, File no. 33, Op 682524, Item 613.
1 This document was made available by the State Museum for the Heroic Defence and Liberation of Sevastopol.
1 This is actually the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Joseph P. Lash (1909–87), born in the USA to Russian-Jewish parents and now best known for biographies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. A close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lash had been conscripted by the time of the ISS conference. An attempt to join naval intelligence failed owing to his background, which included communist sympathies, so he enlisted in the US Army on 28 April 1942. Married to Nancy Bedford-Jones (1935), Lash became involved romantically with Gertrude ‘Trude’ Pratt (1908–2004). Gertrude divorced her husband in 1943 and a year later married Lash, who had divorced (or been divorced by) Nancy.
1 Although Pavlichenko is careful to give the spelling of the name in English, in the rarely encountered form ‘Jonson’, it is uncertain that this is the correct interpretation. William Johnston III, a research metallurgist listed in the 1935 New York census, is the most plausible candidate, as he would have been not only in the right age-bracket but also of the right profession.
2 The ‘Tin Goose’ was a three-engined transport made only in 1926–33. Pavlichenko is probably referring to the four-engine B-24 Liberator, made in Ford’s Willow Run factory in 1942–5.
3 This award is presently held in the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 2/3776.
4 These guns had an interesting history. They were purchased from Colt during the First World War, but the order was placed by the British, to be offset by credits secured against Russian gold. It has been reliably claimed that 51,100 M1911 pistols were accepted from Colt’s commercial production, in the C23000–C89000 serial-number range, and shipped between 19 February 1916 and 8 January 1917. How many of these guns – which were marked АНГЛ. ЗАКАЗЪ (an abbreviation of ‘English Order’) on the left side of the slide – reached the Russian army before the October Revolution is an open question. It is assumed that many of the Colts were lost in the Civil War, and that this explains their rarity in the Red Army.
5 Gertrude ‘Trude’ Pratt and Joseph P. Lash, officers of the International Student Service.
6 The letter is held in the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 4/3761/15-38.
1 The RAF used three types of B-17, known as Fortress I, II and III. Originally intended for high-altitude daylight bombing, they proved to be a failure and were relegated to long-range anti-submarine patrol work or reconnaissance with Coastal Command and as intercontinental transports with Ferry Command based at RAF Ayr (also known as RAF Heathfield). This is likely to have been one of the transports that Pavlichenko describes.
2 This is possibly Helen Louisa Chivers, born in 1916 and married to Arthur. She appears in London electoral rolls to 1939 and then in Glasgow after 1947.
3 In fact the phrase appears in a letter by Batyushkov written a year after his visit to Britain in 1814.
4 These tanks were supplied to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease from July 1942. They were involved in combat in the Kursk bulge, in the lifting of the blockade on Leningrad, and in the liberation of Kiev.
5 The Churchill IV does not seem to have been introduced until 1943, so it is likely that Pavlichenko is describing the Churchill I, the only one to carry a 3-inch mortar, and a Churchill III, introduced to service late in 1942, which was basically the precursor of the Churchill IV but with a fabricated turret instead of the later one-piece casting. The dimensions are roughly the same as the ones given here but the Churchill III and IV had one 6pr gun and two 7.92mm Besa machine guns, not three, and neither carried the mortar.
6 The 70th Regiment of Foot had been incorporated in the East Surrey Regiment as a result of the British Army reforms of 1881.
7 At the present time these articles are kept in the Central Museum of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, File no. 2/3776.
8 The Settlement was financed by Russian-born tobacco magnate Bernhard Baron (1850–1929), who had invented one of the earliest cigarette-making machines and had extensive shareholdings in Carreras and Gallagher. Baron funded the construction of a huge purpose-built block in Stepney, East London, to house the Jewish children’s clubs – including the Oxford and St George’s Club for Boys – formed during the First World War by Basil and Rose Henriques.
9 Equivalent to about £200 million today. In the city hospital of Volgograd (Stalingrad) there is a bronze bas-relief depicting Baroness Clementine Ogilvy Spencer Churchill wearing the Order of the Red Banner of Labour on her breast. The accompanying text describes the activities of her fund during the Great War for the Fatherland.
1 The complete text of the address is held in the State Museum of the Heroic Defence and Liberation of Sevastopol.