A bit more about Lyudmila Pavlichenko and how fucking badass she was.

She got 309 kills, making her one of the deadliest snipers ever, and she got them in only 2 years. That’s almost one Nazi every 2 days. Once her skills were made obvious, she was given more dangerous and high-stakes missions, such as being sent to find and countersnipe Nazi snipers. This is basically a duel between 2 snipers. She engaged in 36 duels like this, and she won every time. One of these duels lasted 3 straight days. When asked how she finally beat her counterpart, she just said “He moved too much.”

It took a mortar round to stop her, but even that didn’t kill her, just put her in the hospital. After she recovered she wanted to go back to the frontlines but Soviet command stopped her. Instead she trained snipers until the end of the war. Her nickname was “Lady Death.”

After she left combat, she was briefly sent to the USA and Canada, where she met the First Lady Elanor Roosevelt (as seen above.) While in the US she was, of course, belittled and dismissed by western journalists. They referred to her as the “Girl Sniper.” They asked her things like if she wore makeup while on the front lines, and did she curl her hair, and “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.” The reporters said that she was “very blunt and unemotional” in her responses, which I have to imagine was a result of her trying not to murder the stupid motherfuckers.

I think she is best summed up by a line from a speech she gave in Chicago, trying to convince American men to join the war and fight the Nazis. “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”

Not the first time I’ve heard of her, won’t be the last, and I still get a little teary eyed thinking about what a bad ass she was. Flat out disgraceful how she was treated in the US. It was a smart move making her a trainer instead of sending her back. I would love to know the count of Nazi’s killed by her trainees; force multiplier in full effect!

-AF Vet

What’s the film called?