Sharp-shooting women best Soviet snipers

Soviet military records from World War II contain evidence that women can be as effective front-line soldiers as men, reports Anna Krylova, assistant professor of history at Duke University, Durham, N.C. Krylova has studied the mass volunteering of young Soviet women for combat in 1941, their integration into the armed forces, and the implications that their performance had on gender roles in the military and Soviet society at large.

Krylova, who grew up in Moscow, declares that 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during WWII, 350,000 of them in combat. According to USSR records and memoirs written by men and women, females between the ages of 17-27 turned out to be quick learners in the martial arts and became effective as bomber and fighter pilots, snipers, machine-gunners, anti-aircraft fighters, and combat engineers, as well as platoon and company commanders.

"Women snipers, because they were extremely well trained, were often much more effective than male snipers," Krylova maintains. "The snipers who graduated from the Central Women's Sniper School in Moscow proudly reported over 11,000 German soldiers killed."

The female sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko who, in a year and a half, killed 309 Germans, was as well-known as the famous male sniper Vladimir Pchelintsev, Krylova points out. Moreover, "if we look at comparable male and female night bomber regiments, the women's regiment proved superior to the male regiment in terms of their statistics of accuracy of target-hitting. In the Fourth Air Force Division, for example, the female night bombers were known for the extreme accuracy of their hits and they were assigned to the most-demanding missions.

"The conclusion that one could come to is that, as far as combat performance and combat endurance are concerned, the variations within sexes are very wide and, if we actually wanted to pick the best soldiers, then it would make sense to take the best out of those who are willing and best suited to fight. In that case, we would inevitably end up with a mixed group of men and women," states Krylova.

"The Soviets derived those conclusions but they did not let women stay in the army. They demobilized women after World War II because they lost a lot of men and it seemed more urgent to have women out of the military giving birth than in the military as career officers."

Krylova concludes that, in contemporary debates, the argument against women's presence in the military is based on evidence that men "freak out and cannot fight together with women because, while in combat, they get disoriented and want to protect women instead of being combatants.

"The Soviet case is interesting because such reactions were indeed present during the first encounters between male and female combatants," she says. "But what the Soviet case also illustrates is how, over the four years of combat, male and female combatants managed to learn how to fight together. Even female platoon and company commanders were, in the end, accepted by male soldiers and other officers."

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning