Lyudmila Pavlichenko was born on May 30, 1916. She was tomboy who was fiercely competitive. Pavlichenko was attending the Kyiv University when Germany invaded the USSR. She was in the fourth year of her major in history. She had proved herself to be an excellent sharpshooter, but when she enlisted she was put in the nursing program. She begged and pleaded to become a sniper and got her wish at age 24. She became one of hundreds of female snipers. Her first kills were two Rumanian soldiers which she referred to as her “baptism of fire”. She used a Mosin-Nagant model 1891 bolt-action rifle. This occurred before her unit was posted to Odessa. She is credited with killing 187 during the siege. It was at Odessa that she married a sniper who was subsequently killed by a mortar shell. (She had an earlier failed marriage pre-war which had resulted in a child.) When Odessa fell, she and her unit went to Sevastopol where she was mainly a trainer. She was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar at Sevastopol and was ordered to evacuate by submarine. She was a valuable propaganda asset. Soviet propagandists called her “Lady Death”. She was awarded the highest military decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union. And after recovering from her wound, she was sent off to America, Canada, and Great Britain. She was the first Soviet citizen to go to the White House. She became friends with Eleanor. The press referred to her as “the Girl Sniper”. She and Eleanor went on a tour of the country. Woody Guthriewrote a song about her. When she returned to her homeland, she was strictly a trainer. Her record of 309 kills make her the deadliest female sniper in history. Her kills included 36 German snipers. After the war, she became a historian but suffered from PTSD and alcoholism. She was visited by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1957. She died from a stroke in 1974 at age 58.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko
https://explorethearchive.com/lyudmila-pavlichenko
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