{"id":4473,"date":"2020-05-06T21:26:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T20:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sigbi.org\/solent-east\/?p=4473"},"modified":"2020-05-06T21:26:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T20:26:18","slug":"night-witches-and-soviet-snipers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sigbi.org\/solent-east\/2020\/05\/06\/night-witches-and-soviet-snipers\/","title":{"rendered":"Night Witches and Soviet snipers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In lieu of presenting at our speaker meeting in May, Paul Strong<\/strong> has shared with us the chapter he wrote for a book on Women in War.\u00a0 It describes the ‘Night Witches’ and Soviet snipers he would have mentioned in his talk to the club.\u00a0 Here are some extracts from his chapter, and a picture of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful female sniper in history.<\/p>\n

The \u2018night witches\u2019 was the German nickname for a Russian female flying unit, formed in June 1942 by Colonel Marina Raskova as the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, and re-designated in February 1943 as the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Regiment.\u00a0 The ‘night witches’ flew night harassment missions, often making their final approach with the engines in idle to ensure surprise.\u00a0 Their main task was to damage or disrupt key German installations.\u00a0 The Germans soon learned to respect these women and acknowledged that they degraded the army and the Luftwaffe\u2019s capability to operate by striking at bases and airfields.<\/p>\n

One of the roles where women excelled was as snipers; 2,000 are recorded as being trained in this capacity during the war of which 500 survived.\u00a0 The Germans found the use of women in this role bewildering, calling them musket-women (flintenweiber<\/em>), and occasionally using pictures of the corpses of the snipers they killed, and identified as women, as proof of both the desperation and barbarism of the Soviet regime.\u00a0 Amongst the most notable practitioners of the sniper\u2019s art was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who killed over 300 Germans (including 36 enemy snipers) in one year from June 1941, placing her in the elite of her chosen profession.\u00a0 Pavlichenko was made a Heroine of the Soviet Union and promoted to major.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In lieu of presenting at our speaker meeting in May, Paul Strong has shared with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-club-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNight Witches and Soviet snipers | News | Blog | Events | SI Solent East<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"SI Solent East : Blog & News : Night Witches and Soviet snipers : Keep up to date with the latest news, articles and events from the Soroptimists of SI Solent East . 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