LYUDMILA PAVLICHENKO
Most Dangerous Woman on Earth
The last train west chugged across the River Bug to the German-occupied side of the Russo-German border at 0200 on 22 June 1941. An hour later, as the short summer night lifted from the central Ukraine, Hitler violated his non-aggression pact with Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa. German artillery shells screamed across a 3,200-kilometre frontier from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Three million Axis soldiers (182 divisions), 6,000 big guns, 2,000 Luftwaffe warplanes, and thousands of tanks flooded into the Ukraine in what was to be the last German Blitzkrieg.
‘The sooner Russia is crushed, the better,’ Hitler cheered.
Kiev, capital of Ukraine and its largest city, was one of Hitler’s first objectives, along with Moscow and Leningrad. Luftwaffe Me-109 fighters and Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers began pounding and strafing the city only weeks after the invasion began. Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko, 24, a history student at Kiev University, was walking to college when a swarm of fighters buzzed in low and fast to chew up the block. She dashed for cover. That night, she made up her mind. ‘I am going to fight,’ she informed her parents. Her father was a veteran of the Russian Revolution, on the side of the winning Reds. ‘I’ll be at the recruiting office tomorrow.’ Within a year, this petite, dark-eyed beauty would become the most dangerous woman of the twentieth century, the deadliest female sniper in any army, in any war.
Pavlichenko arrived at the recruiting office the next morning wearing high heels and a crêpe de Chine dress with her nails manicured and her dark, wavy hair groomed short. She was slim, fit and beautiful, with delicate features and dark brown eyes that seemed to burn into a man’s soul. Volunteers were lined up around the block.
The recruiter was an older soldier pulled off the line because of age or ill health. He looked up in surprise when she stood before him and announced her intentions. ‘I’ve come to enlist as a sniper.’ This smart-looking woman looked more like a fashion model than a German-killer. He laughed at her.
‘Why don’t you work in the factories like other women?’ he demanded. ‘You’re needed there what with our men marching off to the front lines.’
Although in the spirit of Soviet equality Russia was arguably less sexist than its Western allies, the Soviet military nonetheless harboured a deep prejudice against recruiting women for combat. The high command maintained women were meant to nurture, not to kill. Females served mainly in administrative, medical and support roles. However, the exceptional circum stances of war on the Eastern Front, with Russia’s survival at stake, attenuated objections to women serving on the front lines. By the time the Second World War ended, over 800,000 Russian women had served as pilots, machine gunners, tank crew members, partisans and snipers. Nearly 200,000 would be decorated; ninety-two eventually received the Hero of the Soviet Union accolade, the nation’s highest award.
The rapid industrial development of the Soviet Union and the worldwide depression of the late 1920s and 1930s combined to move large numbers of Russians from their farms to the cities. In the spirit of egalitarianism, young women were encouraged to work, go to college and participate in paramilitary training. Women learned to shoot weapons, pilot aircraft, drive trucks and survive in battle. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was one of them.
She was born on 12 July 1916, during the dark years of the First World War in the market city of Bila Tserkva (‘White Church’). The family moved to nearby Kiev when she was fourteen, where she completed high school while working as a grinder at the Kiev Arsenal Factory. A gifted but wilful student, a tomboy who would rather hunt small game with a catapult than play with dolls, she was an avid reader of travel and adventure stories.
Like many boys and girls of the times, she was fond of military-related sports and activities. Her taste for adventure included skydiving and flying small planes. She excelled as a remarkable natural rifle shot and won the coveted Voroshilov Sharp shooter Badge while competing in regional rifle matches. As Hitler’s spreading war threatened to engulf the U.S.S.R., she prepared by enrolling in a volunteer sniper school arranged by her local Komsomol (Party youth section). She put her diploma in a box and forgot about it until 22 June 1941, when the Nazis swarmed across the River Bug to attack the Ukraine.
By then she was in her fourth year as a history student working on an advanced degree. At the recruiting office, she took out her sniper’s diploma, Voroshilov Badge and other shooting and paramilitary honours and dumped them on the table in front of the recruiter who had laughed at her. The expression on his face changed. He looked at the documents and his eyes slowly lifted to regard with grudging respect the impudent young fashion plate across the table from him.
‘You’re going to get your fingernails dirty,’ he said as he stamped her application. Accepted.
With that, Pavlichenko was on her way to becoming one of 2,000 female snipers to serve in the Red Army, only 500 of whom would survive the war.
*
Through bitter experience against Finnish sharpshooters like Simo Häyhä, who picked off more than 500 Russian soldiers during the Winter War of 1939–40, the Soviet Union learned the value of snipers and began to place more emphasis on its sniper training programme. Special sniper units were embedded in nearly all major unit commands. Young Lyudmila Pavlichenko found herself assigned to the Red Army’s V. I. Chapayev 25th Rifle Division of the Independent Maritime Army.
She received truncated training in basic military and sniper tactics, such as observation techniques, camouflage and concealment, shot placement and target selection. There was no time for anything else. Although the Red Army’s five million soldiers made it the world’s largest, it was ill-equipped and inefficient and found itself in chaos as the Germans advanced as much as 450 kilometres within the first week of the attack. By 8 July, the enemy were almost at the gates of Kiev, fighting in the forests less than 150 kilometres away.
Tales of horror and raw courage filtered back to Kiev as Pavlichenko and her fellow replacements prepared to move to the front to join the 25th Rifles – of a Soviet tank ablaze from antitank shells charging German positions until its crew burned to death; of a pilot who plunged his damaged warplane into a convoy of German fuel trucks; of rear guards who fought to the death rather than surrender or withdraw . . .
Russian women and children were conscripted to fight. Pretty teenage girls were found dead on the battlefield, still clutching automatic weapons. Soviet soldiers who panicked and fled the fighting were shot by their own officers. Those unfortunates taken prisoner were declared traitors and their families’ rations taken away, which often meant starvation.
Before being sent to the front, Pavlichenko was issued the standard infantry weapon, derived from one that had been in Russian and then Soviet service since 1891 – a five-shot, bolt-action 7.62-mm calibre Mosin-Nagant 91/30 rifle that fired a 9.59-gram bullet at 854 m/sec and was effective out to 550 metres. Adopted as the standard sniper’s rifle in 1932, it could be fired with authority up to 1,250 metres with the addition of a telescopic sight.
Pavlichenko’s 4-power fixed PE scope, a copy of scopes manufactured by Carl Zeiss, had a 4° field of view, was nearly a foot long and added about half a kilogram to the rifle’s weight. Thumb screws allowed adjustments for windage, drift, lead and angle of elevation.
Armed with her new rifle and a combat load of 120 cartridges, no longer a fashion plate but garbed out in her baggy olive drab male’s uniform, with camouflage overalls, sniper’s hood and net face mask in her pack, the young history student turned prospective German-killer massed with thousands of other recruits and replacements at the Kiev rail yards for trans port to the front. Her unit was already engaged in desperate combat with Romanian and German forces in Moldavia as it attempted to block the southern approach to the Black Sea city of Odessa, the most important port of trade in the Soviet Union and the site of a Soviet naval base.
The rail yards were in turmoil as soldiers with their packs and weapons piled into boxcars, open wagons, and anything else that could be moved by rail. Trains arrived and departed day and night, their steel wheels and shrill whistles signalling an urgency that Russia had not experienced since Napoleon’s invasion.
Apprehensive, her nerves drawn tight, Pavlichenko rooted into a boxcar between a grizzled sergeant with bad oral hygiene and a kid of about seventeen who cried a lot. For two days, the train rumbled across Bessarabia towards Moldavia and the Dniester River, where the 25th was making its stand, stopping only long enough to refuel and allow troops to stretch and boil up a few pots of potatoes and cabbage.
Moldavia, formerly part of Romania, was an ancient land known for its castles and wine. Stalin had recently absorbed it as part of his non-aggression pact with Hitler. The Dniester River formed the boundary between Moldavia and the Ukraine. The river entered the Black Sea about 150 kilometres west of Odessa.
Summer dust in clouds obscured the horizons as the troop train neared its destination. Russian forces were on the move by any means available, not only by train but also by trucks, touring cars, horses and wagons, carts, bicycles and on foot. Late in the afternoon of the second day, Pavlichenko and her comrades heard the distant thunder of duelling artillery.
‘I knew my task was to shoot human beings,’ Pavlichenko later reflected. ‘In theory, that was fine, but I knew that the real thing would be completely different.’ She was to discover, as others had, that there was a big difference between shooting at a target and shooting at a pair of eyes that jumped out at you through the telescopic sight. She wondered if she possessed that kind of courage, the answer to which she would find within days after her arrival in the wooded, hilly country between the Dniester and Odessa. Her No. 2 Company, 54th Razinsky Regiment, 25th Division, was retreating from the vicinity of the Prut River to dig in on the distant approaches to Odessa.
*
The Romanian General Staff had issued its Directive 31 when Barbarossa began, in it stipulating that its Fourth Army and elements of the German Eleventh Army would defeat the Russians between the Dniester and the Tiligulskiy Banks to occupy Odessa. Odessa was heavily defended by the Soviet 25th, 95th, and 421st Rifle Divisions, supported by the 2nd Cavalry Division, an NKVD (Internal Security) regiment, three squadrons of bombers and fighters and contingents of artillery. Fortunately, the city could not be completely surrounded due to the superiority of the Soviet Black Sea fleet.
Three separate lines formed the Russian defence, the first a thin line of trenches, pillboxes and anti-tank ditches some 50 kilometres outside the city. If it fell, the Russians would withdraw to an alternative defensive line 8 kilometres from Odessa. The final protective line meant house-to-house fighting inside the ancient city originally founded by the Empress Catherine the Great in 1794.
Stalin issued strict orders that cowards would be shot by NKVD troops. It was forbidden in Pavlichenko’s company even to think about death, much less talk about it.
No. 2 Company was in the centre of the first defensive line when the German offensive against Odessa began on 8 August 1941, preceded by thunder barrages of enemy artillery that pounded hills and left stands of timber splintered into smoking kindling. Pavlichenko and other soldiers from her company hugged the ground overlooking a narrow open field. Visible through her rifle scope in the pale morning sun were a number of enemy soldiers moving about on the near side of a hill. Easy targets. However, to her dismay, she discovered she could not squeeze the trigger on them. Her finger seemed frozen stiff. Perhaps she hadn’t the courage to be a sniper after all.
Nearby lay a young soldier with whom she had become acquainted on the train ride from Kiev. A nice boy with a sunny disposition. The sudden crackle of rifle and machine-gun fire from the opposing tree line signalled a probe. Pavlichenko heard a sound like a hammer striking a melon, followed by a cry of pain and surprise. To her horror, she saw that her friend had taken a round through the head, exploding it in a pink mist of blood and brains. ‘After that,’ she later recalled, ‘nothing could stop me.’
She killed her first Germans a day or so later during the four-day fight for Hill 54.2 near Belyayevka, which her regiment was defending. She and a spotter crawled through thick under growth outside the defensive perimeter and set up a hide over looking the enemy’s most likely avenue of approach. Russia’s was the first military to employ snipers in two-person teams consisting of a shooter and an observer.
Through his Model 40 trench periscope, Pavlichenko’s spotter picked up movement in a wooded area about 300 metres away. Pavlichenko shifted into a better position, the outline of her form broken up by her one-piece overall into which she had woven natural foliage.
Her 4-power scope picked out three Germans stealthily moving in and out of shadow, unaware that they were being watched. She had zeroed in her weapon at 300 metres for point of aim and point of impact. Taking into account variables such as wind speed (light), bullet weight, breath control and trigger squeeze, she cross-haired slightly off centre of mass on the lead enemy soldier. Military snipers usually aimed for the chest area and depended on tissue damage, organ trauma and blood loss to make the kill.
The barrel of her gun danced in front of her eyes from the excitement. She took a deep, calming breath and waited for the right moment. This time she did not hesitate. As soon as her target paused to look around, she squeezed her trigger. The impact of the bullet slapped the German around and dropped him to his knees. Even before he plunged face down in the forest, dead, she acquired and killed a second German. The third soldier panicked and fled before she could finish him. ‘There was no change of expression on her pretty face,’ her spotter reported, then predicted, ‘Russia is going to be talking about Lyudmila Pavlichenko.’
Anger at the Germans for having invaded her homeland turned to hate as Axis soldiers broke through Soviet defences and closed in on the city. The enemy reached the main line of Russian resistance within two weeks after the offensive launched and began shelling Odessa with a reinforcement of ten heavy artillery batteries.
The pretty sharpshooter from Kiev University hardened and quickly adapted to the harsh and dangerous climate of battle. She and other Soviet snipers were granted virtual free rein in carrying out their missions of scouting and slowing down, harassing and demoralizing the advance by long-distance suppressive fire against key targets of opportunity. The roar of artillery, the scream of dive bombers and the clatter of machine-gun fire continued unabated for days, broken only by the occasional lull. Smoke and dust smudged the sky in thick clouds and columns.
A sniper had to possess patience, perseverance, nerves of steel and a steady trigger finger. Pavlichenko proved to be as relentless as she was strikingly attractive. The perfect killing machine. Day after day, she and an observer crept into no-man’s land to ply her bloody trade. Fortified by hatred and her sense of mission, she often crawled into a hide and remained for up to eighteen hours at a time, living on dry bread and water, conducting bodily functions in place, all just to get the one shot, one kill of the sniper’s trade. Her body count grew almost daily.
Her preferred targets were enemy officers, followed by communications specialists, NCOs, dog handlers that were often used to track snipers, and, of course, enemy snipers, a deadly cat-and-mouse game played out in the wreckage and rubble of war. Losers received no second chance.
Crafty and deceptive, with a strong sense of survival, she employed various ploys and tricks to keep going when the life-span of the average sniper was about three weeks. Captured snipers from either side were summarily executed on the spot.
Thunderstorms or artillery barrages that masked the report of her rifle were her favourite times to hunt since her targets were less alert to her presence and her location more difficult to pinpoint. She rarely fired more than once from the same position and never returned twice to the same hide. She tied strips of cloth to bushes in danger areas to flutter in errant breezes and distract enemy observers. Grenades, mines and smoke booby traps provided further protection against intrusion. Sometimes a clothing store mannequin disguised as a tempting target lured enemy snipers into exposing themselves.
She proved unequalled in the cold-blooded act of sniper psychological warfare. Consistently taking out the second man in a patrol or column struck panic in advancing squads or platoons to the point that no one wanted to be placed in that position. Occasionally, she deliberately shot a man in the legs so that his pleas for help would entice other targets into her sights.
The single crack of Pavlichenko’s 7.62-mm Mosin-Nagant in no-man’s land was enough to strike terror into the hearts of German and Romanian soldiers. Whenever she went to the rear, infantrymen gawked in disbelief that this slip of a girl could be the ruthless killer whose reputation was beginning to spread throughout the Ukraine. By 29 August, twenty-eight days into the Odessa offensive, her body count stood at 100, or an average kill rate of nearly four per day. Few snipers in any war had been so successful in such a short period of time. In effect, she was already becoming the world’s most accomplished bringer of death.
*
A small cemetery held by the Russians near Il’lchevka State Farm was strategically important because of the Voznesensk– Odessa highway that ran across the farm. Snipers were deployed ahead of the defensive perimeter. Working alone for the day, Pavlichenko climbed a tree inside the graveyard to obtain a better view of the terrain, thinking the foliage would conceal her.
Barely had she settled in than the sharp crack of a rifle sent a bullet scything through the leaves inches above her head. A second shot followed in the echo of the first. Realizing she was in dire straits, with at least two enemy snipers zeroing in on her, she let go and fell twelve feet to the ground, landing on grass between two graves. Pain shot up her spine. She gritted her teeth against it and lay perfectly still, pretending to be dead, knowing that to move even a finger would draw more fire to finish her off.
Hours passed. The midday sun baked her body. Stinging, biting insects crawled on her face.
Finally the sun went down. She crept from the cemetery under cover of darkness and back to her own lines, where she spent two days in bed and more than a week afterwards hobbling around with the aid of a makeshift crutch.
*
The enemy continued to pound Odessa. No quarter asked, none given. Russia suffered an unrecoverable blow when the northwestern heights fell and Germans occupied the area south of the Sakhoy Bank, which allowed their artillery to reach any sector of Odessa and the Soviet defences.
Choking summer dust stirred up by boots, horses and tank tracks hung in clouds as high as city buildings, turning to mud when the cold rains of late September began. Downpours lasted for days and turned tracks and roads into impassable bogs. Horses sank up to their collars, men to their knees, and vehicles to their axles.
Scarcely a building in Odessa remained intact. Fighting raged in Mikhailovsky Square, on the Potemkin Stairs and around the imposing dome of the First Orthodox Church. Fires burned almost constantly. It was a target-rich environment for snipers like Pavlichenko, now promoted to senior sergeant. She chalked up another eighty-seven kills.
On 9 October 1941, a shell splinter gashed her scalp during fighting in the Dainitskiy sector. Her company commander, Junior Lieutenant Petrenko fell dead. Sergeant-Major Leonid Kitsenko, a sniper and senior NCO of Pavlichenko’s sniper element, was wounded. Pavlichenko assumed command, a valiant figure wearing a dirty bandage around her head, cap pulled low to hold the dressing in place, face masked by blood, struggling to maintain consciousness.
‘Cowards!’ a political officer railed against her frightened comrades. ‘Look at the woman. Pavlichenko has the balls of a man.’
She was eventually moved to a medical battalion, from which she was released only days before Odessa fell on 15 October. In accordance with Stalin’s scorched-earth policy, Russian sabotage groups destroyed as much of the city as they could and land-mined the rest while the Black Sea Fleet evacuated more than 350,000 soldiers and civilians under cover of darkness. The Soviets lost 16,578 dead and 24,690 wounded during the siege. German and Romanian casualties numbered 17,729 dead and 63,345 wounded, among whom were 187 killed one shot at a time by Sergeant Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
More savage fighting lay ahead for her at Sevastopol, which by this time was also soon to come under siege.
*
Lyudmila Pavlichenko the sniper cannot be considered apart from the times and circumstances that created her. Without the war, she would likely have lived out her life as an obscure history teacher somewhere in the Ukraine. As it was, however, with 187 confirmed kills, she was becoming celebrated throughout the Crimean region by the time her 25th Rifles escaped Odessa to reinforce Sevastopol. The entire world would soon hear about ‘the most dangerous woman of the century’.
Sevastopol, lying at the tip of the Crimean Peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, was one of the most defensible locations on the Eastern Front – ringed by mountainous terrain whose rugged lines of ridges provided the city and harbour with natural protection. German forces would have to push through the narrow and desolate Isthmus of Perekop and then drive across the Crimea, often being compelled by the terrain to attack frontally along narrow strips of land. The battle for the isthmus, and the advance to the city and the Soviet fleet harboured there, began on 24 September 1941, and raged fiercely for the next nine months. It would require six German divisions and two Romanian brigades with air support and some of the heaviest artillery ever built to defeat the Russian enclave.
Pavlichenko landed by ship with the 25th Division during a lull in the fighting. The battle-worn and under-strength reinforcements from Odessa were immediately hurled into the struggle.
In the fighting around Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the previous century (1853–6), Russians developed the art of sniping from ‘rifle pits’ in no-man’s land. As then, and as at Odessa, Russian snipers at Sevastopol in 1941–2 were cast forward of the main defensive line in a thin screen of modified ‘rifle pits’. Sometimes alone, at other times working with a spotter or fellow sniper, Pavlichenko continued the practices that had made her so successful at Odessa. She generally crept into her hide at around 0300 and sometimes waited for as long as two days for a single shot.
Winter was coming. Morning ice appeared on brown grass and the bare limbs of trees. Miserable conditions exacerbated her previous injuries. One day at the front was like a month or even a year in peacetime. She lost weight, grew thin and gaunt and developed the haunted ‘thousand-yard stare’ that marked a combat veteran. Streaks of white appeared in her raven-black hair.
Nonetheless, she persevered. Clad in trousers and baggy camouflage known as a mochalniy suit with its large hood and loops to permit the use of foliage, she knocked off one or two enemy soldiers every few days. She was constantly on the move, transferred from sector to sector so her true eye and steady hand could be used to their best advantage. No one from the old days in Kiev would have recognized in her the young college student in heels and crêpe de Chine.
The new Pavlichenko, sniper, became familiar to the entire country as word of her exploits spread. The Communist Party used her to inspire ordinary people, who were suffering horribly from cruel wartime conditions. ‘If this beautiful young woman can endure,’ went their spiel, ‘then how can we who are not at the front complain about food rationing and other hardships.’
Even the Germans were aware of her and her unerring eye. One afternoon, she killed a radioman in a squad rushing from a shell-gutted farmhouse towards a barn filled with mouldy hay. It was a long shot in cold rain that impaired proper visibility. A shot like that could only have been made by ‘the Russian bitch from hell’. A German officer stood up long enough to shout, ‘Lyudmila, leave your Bolshevik friends and come and join us.’ She killed him.
*
The Soviet outer defences collapsed on 28 October, leaving the entire Crimea with the exception of Sevastopol itself in German hands. Through autumn and into early winter snowfalls, fighting see-sawed as counter-attack followed attack and the Russians clung stubbornly to their spit of land on the Black Sea. German artillery and mortars pounded the city relentlessly until it was little more than a pile of rubble with scarcely a building left standing. Day by day, Soviet forces that originally numbered some 235,000 soldiers dwindled in the attrition of lead and steel.
Snipers were, as usual, an integral part of the city’s defence. During the siege of Sevastopol, which eventually lasted until July 1942, a Russian sniper contingent estimated at fewer than 300 shooters wiped out about 10,000 German soldiers, almost an entire division. Pavlichenko, who won a battlefield promotion to junior lieutenant, was the siege’s top scorer, followed by Sergeant-Major Leonid Kitsenko, now recovered from his wound at Odessa.
After the Russian withdrawal into the city, Pavlichenko and Kitsenko became a team so effective that commanders described them as worth an entire division of infantry. They often returned from a hunt claiming three or four kills between them for the day. On at least one occasion, they were seen embracing with more than comradely enthusiasm.
Continuing horror stories of German atrocities helped fuel Pavlichenko’s rage. Special Einsatzgruppen units made a fulltime job of killing Russian prisoners of war, as well as civilians and Jews. At Kiev and elsewhere, Jews were shot and thrown into mass graves; hundreds of thousands were murdered in this way. In Minsk, SS pulled 280 Russian civilians from jail, lined them up in front of a ditch and mowed them down. Following the fall of Kiev on 26 September 1941, cattle trucks hauled off 38,000 Russians to slave labour camps; most of them never returned. In an attempt to depopulate the Ukraine to make room for German settlers, occupiers encouraged starvation and the spread of diseases by neglecting sanitation measures and prohibiting food being sent to needy areas. ‘This enemy consists not of soldiers but to a large extent only of beasts,’ Hitler declared. ‘This is a war of extermination.’
German snipers were encouraged in their deadly trade by rewards for kills and by bounties on the heads of successful Russian snipers like Pavlichenko, whose fame had spread as far as to Berlin. Twenty kills earned an expensive wristwatch, forty a hunting rifle, and sixty a personal hunting trip with Hermann Göring. Few German snipers involved in the siege of Odessa and Sevastopol lived long enough to earn a hunting trip. Pavlichenko alone was to slay thirty-six enemy snipers.
Not only was she deadly, but, even more humiliating, she was a woman. As the Wehrmacht closed its steel bands on Sevastopol, German snipers made a pact to put an end to the Russian bitch with the long-reaching rifle.
On 11 November, 60,000 Axis soldiers launched a four-day attack against a sector of the city’s defences where mountainous terrain was prohibitively difficult. It was one of Pavlichenko’s favourite hunting grounds precisely because it offered good cover and concealment. As was her custom, she crawled into her hide before dawn on a clear, frosty morning with the smell of snow in the air and settled down to wait for a target of opportunity. Her usual partner, Kitsenko, was assigned else where.
In the early morning light something moved in a copse of new-growth trees that rimmed the military crest of a ridge about 400 metres to her front. She glimpsed a helmet through her binoculars. Snipers were often unable to resist the temptation of an easy kill. Pavlichenko held off and waited. The movement of the helmet seemed unnatural. Then she detected the flutter of branches to the left of where the helmet had disappeared, just enough movement to attract her attention. She herself had sometimes used the old trick of tieing a line to a bush and shaking it from a distance in order to draw fire and pinpoint an enemy sniper’s location.
She waited, tense and edged for action. The sun climbed higher, its rays sparking jewels from the frost in the lowlands. Several times over the next few hours she detected movement – but never a clean target. She knew these were simply distractions to encourage her to compensate by shifting the barrel of her rifle or the tilt of her camouflaged head, small adjustments only a trained eye would notice. The guy out there knew what he was doing. The prudent sniper under such circum stances might withdraw to fight another day. Pavlichenko, however, held her ground, not only because of pride, although that certainly figured in the equation, but also because her worthy adversary had undoubtedly killed many of her comrades and would kill others unless she stopped him.
Her peripheral vision caught the suspicious shifting of a shadow, just in time to see the blink of a muzzle flash. The crack of the enemy’s high-powered rifle reverberated from the distant ridge line. A rock within touching distance of her head disintegrated into a stinging shower of particles.
A second shot snapped at her head, again only centimetres away. She wriggled backwards out of her hide and, crouching low and using the reverse slope of her knoll for cover, scrambled towards a nearby rocky upcropping where she burrowed into a thicket of briars interwoven with old growth timber. The site provided a view of the lowlands between her and the ridgeline occupied by her deadly foe.
She dared not move. Her eyes snapped from side to side, scanning. Cold, stress, hunger and thirst plagued her as she lay in wait for the German – and he lay in wait for her. A high stakes poker game in which each challenged the other to blink.
The strange stand-off continued all through the afternoon. Clouds rolled in and snow began to fall. Pavlichenko determined she would not miss her shot if the opportunity presented itself. The name of the game was patience coupled with accuracy.
Artillery thundered like a storm on the horizon. Small birds and animals scurried about.
Ultimately, the German proved the less patient of the two. Succumbing to curiosity, he made the mistake of lifting his head to take a better look across the clearing. Pavlichenko’s cross hairs locked onto his forehead. He seemed to be looking directly at her when she massaged her trigger. It was her first shot in the duel. No other was required.
Later, a Russian patrol confirmed that the dead man was an expert sniper whose ‘kill log’ supposedly recorded the deaths of more than 400 Allied soldiers by his hand at Dunkirk.
*
Pavlichenko and partner Kitsenko continued to create mayhem with their rifles all through what the Germans referred to as the ‘Winter Crisis’. Although starving, cold, and suffering from injuries both old and recent, the two fought on in the snow. By spring 1942, Lyudmila was an ‘old timer’ serving as a front-line sniper leader near the embattled Imgarmansky Lighthouse and taking novices under her wing to teach them how to become sharpshooters.
At some point, probably in early May 1942, Sergeant-Major Leonid Kitsenko was killed, either by an enemy sniper or by the ubiquitous shelling. Although little has been recorded about the relationship between Lyudmila and Leonid, it is assumed that they were at some point married. It has been noted, almost in passing and without providing a name, that Pavlichenko’s ‘husband, also serving with the Red Army, was killed in the [Sevastopol] siege’.
Fellow snipers noticed Lyudmila’s increased bitterness following Kitsenko’s death. Anger burned deeper into her being. In late May, the Southern Army Council cited her for killing 257 Germans. During a meeting of her sniper unit, she vowed to raise her score to 300 within the next few days – and kept her word.
During 2–6 June 1942, the Luftwaffe dropped 570 tons of bombs on the beleaguered ruins of Sevastopol and its harbour. As preparation for the final assault, heavy artillery that included some of the largest guns ever built, such as the 600-mm Karl mortar and the 800-mm Gustav railway gun, fired 42,595 rounds, the equivalent of 2,449 tons of munitions. On 7 June, the Germans attacked and breached the outer defensive rings round the city to seize most of the bay’s northern shore. While strong pockets of Soviet resistance held firm in the rear and on the flanks, no one harboured any illusion about how much longer the Russians could last. The fight was down to its last days.
Shrapnel riddled Pavlichenko’s worn young body during the hell of raining bombs and shells. Unable to continue her vendetta, she was moved to a Severnaya Bay champagne factory converted as both an ammo dump and a field hospital. She was not to see personal combat again. Because of her growing status, she was evacuated by submarine at night before Germans entered the city on 1 July. Her final tally stood officially at 309 kills, including more than 200 officers and 36 enemy snipers. Since she often worked alone, however, and every kill had to be verified independently, the actual number may have been nearer 500. In comparison, Russia’s other famous Second World War sniper, Vassili Zaitsev, killed 225 German soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad.
While the Germans declared victory over Sevastopol on 4 July 1942, it took them twenty-seven more days to mop up. Russia suffered 18,000 killed or wounded and 95,000 captured. Only 25,157 were successfully evacuated. German casualties numbered 24,000 dead or wounded; the Romanians listed another 1,597 killed and 6,571 wounded. Pavlichenko’s 25th Rifle Division was declared combat ineffective and disbanded, its banners sunk in the Black Sea and its remaining soldiers reassigned to other units.
*
Due to her fame, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was sent to the United States and Canada at the end of 1942 to drum up war support. She delivered speeches in forty-three American cities and was the first Soviet citizen to be received at the White House, where she had dinner with President Franklin Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor. Celebrities all over the continent lined up to be photographed with her. Folk musician Woody Guthrie recorded a song dedicated to her, ‘Miss Pavlichenko’. She was featured in a 1943 comic book, War Heroes. She played with Laurence Olivier in the documentary film Chernomortsy. Actor Charlie Chaplin gallantly kissed her fingers one by one, saying, ‘It’s quite remarkable that this small, delicate hand killed Nazis by the hundreds.’
Interviewed by Time (28 September 1942), she gently derided American women and the American media:
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 makes me look fat.
‘The most dangerous woman in the world’ saw out the war as a sniper instructor at the Central Women’s Sniper School near Moscow. Her military awards included: Order of Lenin with Gold Star; the Bravery Medal, awarded to snipers with forty or more kills; and the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest distinction any Soviet citizen could receive. Of 11,635 HSU recipients, only 92 were women, 50 of whom received the award posthumously.
She was discharged with the rank of major in 1945 and returned to Kiev University to finish her postgraduate degree. Russia issued two postage stamps in her honour and named a Ministry of Fisheries vessel after her. She served out her life as a historian working for the Navy Central Staff and was active in veterans’ affairs.
She married a second time, in 1943, and gave birth to a son. Husband and son remained out of the spotlight to the point that almost no records exist about them. Lyudmila rarely spoke publicly of her sniper career. She published several magazine articles and a book about her division’s role in the defence of Sevastopol, but, other than one small section in a Russian book published posthumously, wrote little about her own exploits. One of her only recorded comments resulted from a 1968 visit to London where a reporter asked about her feelings at Sevastopol.
She killed without hesitation, she responded, and with not a twinge of regret afterwards. ‘If you are going along a road with your child and you see a snake, what do you do?’
She died of natural causes on 27 October 1974, at the age of 58 and was buried in the Novodevicheye Cemetery in Moscow. Sevastopol named a street after her, not far from where Sergeant-Major Leonid Kitsenko died.
References
Due to the guarded nature of Soviet society during the Second World War, I have had to resort to numerous sources to fill in the gaps of detail left by the official histories of Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Relying upon my own knowledge and experience with war and people at war, as well as my extensive research into the Second World War era, I have on a few occasions in this narrative resorted to re-creating scenes and dialogue in an effort to depict Pavlichenko as a well-rounded individual. Where re-creation occurs, I have striven to match personalities with the situation and the action while maintaining factual content. None of the facts has been altered.
Ian Baxter, Hitler’s Defeat on The Eastern Front (Pen & Sword, 2009)
Kazimiera J. Cottam, Women in War and Resistance (Focus Publishing, 1998)
N. Krylov, Glory Eternal: Defence of Odessa, 1942. (Moscow, 1972)
L. Ozerov, ‘The Girl with the Rifle’, in Soviet Women in the War Against Hitlerism (Moscow, 1942)
L. M. Pavlichenko, ‘I was a Sniper’, in I. M. Danishevskiy, The Road of Battle and Glory (Moscow, 1977)
The World at War 1939–45 (Reader’s Digest Books, 1998)
Russia Besieged, The Soviet Juggernaut (Time/Life Books, The Second World War series, 1980)
Time magazine (28 September 1942)
Wapedia. ‘Wikki: Snipers of The Soviet Union.’ (Wapedia. Mobi/en/Soviet_sniper – accessed 13 August 2010)
Wikipedia article, ‘Lyudmila Pavlichenko’ (www.wikipedia.org. – accessed 27 July 2010)