• UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    What about the “Lady Death” a.k.a. the “Russian Bitch from Hell”?

    She was initially assigned to digging trenches and communication routes, armed with a single RGD-33 grenade due to weapons shortages. In the second half of July 1941, a comrade was severely injured by shrapnel and handed her his Mosin–Nagant model 1891 bolt-action rifle. On 8 August 1941 Lyudmila experienced her debut as a wartime sniper when she killed two Nazi officers in Biliaivka at a distance of 400 metres.

    When the Nazis and their Romanian allies overran Odessa on 15 October 1941, her unit was withdrawn by sea to Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula, to fight in the siege of Sevastopol. There, she trained other snipers, who were credited with killing over 100 Axis soldiers during the battle. In May 1942, newly promoted Lieutenant Pavlichenko was cited by the Southern Army Council for killing 257 Axis soldiers. The number of soldiers Pavlichenko is credited with killing during World War II was 309, including 36 Axis snipers.

    In June 1942, Pavlichenko was hit in the face with shrapnel from a mortar shell. When she was injured, the Soviet High Command ordered for her to be evacuated from Sevastopol via submarine.

    She spent around a month in the hospital. Once she had recovered from her injuries, instead of being sent back to the front, she became a propagandist for the Red Army, where she was nicknamed “Lady Death.” (The Germans called her “the Russian bitch from hell.”) She also trained snipers for combat duty until the end of the war in 1945.

  • gift_of_gab@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I want to include how she died, as it showed just how courageous she really was:

    Two months later, on 17 January 1944, Oktyabrskaya fought in another night attack. The battle would prove to be her last. The attack took place at the village of Krynki near Vitebsk. During the battle, she drove her T-34 about the German defenses, and destroyed resistance in trenches and machine-gun nests. The tank crew also destroyed a German self-propelled gun. Subsequently, the tank was hit by a German anti-tank shell, again in the tracks, and was immobilized. Oktyabrskaya immediately got out of the tank and began to repair the track, amid fierce small arms and artillery fire. She managed to repair the track, but she was hit in the head by shell fragments and lost consciousness. After the battle, she was transported to a Soviet military field hospital at Fastiv, near Kiev, and then to a military hospital in Smolensk, Russia. She remained in a coma for two months before finally dying on 15 March. She was buried with military honors at the Heroes Remembrance Gardens in Smolensk.

    As well as this gem:

    In 2014 US National Public Radio featured a cartoon of Oktyabrskaya to headline a story about “rejected princesses” that Disney and other storytellers had hitherto ignored.