#snipers

(This is about Lyudmila Pavlichenko)

In June 1942, she was seriously wounded again. She wrote about her second operation: "A shell fragment made a deep cut on my right cheekbone, tore off the lobe of my right ear, and the shock wave also damaged my eardrum and caused a general contusion. I was taken to our divisional medical battalion No. 47. The wonderful Dr. Pischel-Gaek once again stitched up my front-line wound. The next day, an order arrived at the medical battalion to prepare a convoy of wounded for evacuation to Novorossiysk, and the surgeon found my condition suitable for such a journey . " [ 5 ]

From besieged Sevastopol, she was evacuated by sea to the Caucasus, then recalled from active duty and sent with a delegation of Soviet youth to Canada and the United States . During her overseas visit, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, along with the secretary of the Moscow City Komsomol Committee, Nikolai Krasavchenko , and sniper Vladimir Pchelintsev , attended a reception with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt . At the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt , members of the Soviet delegation lived for a time in the White House . Later, Eleanor Roosevelt organized a tour of the country for the Soviet representatives.

In America, she was given a Colt pistol [ 6 ] , and in Canada, a Winchester rifle (the pistol is on display at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Moscow). American country singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her, "Miss Pavlichenko" [ 7 ] . In Canada, the Soviet military delegation was greeted by several thousand Canadians gathered at Union Station Toronto .

At one of her meetings with journalists, after yet another round of questioning about the details of a female soldier's life, she uttered the legendary phrase:

***I'm 25 years old, and I managed to kill 309 fascist invaders at the front. Don't you think, gentlemen, that you've been hiding behind my back for too long?***

This phrase brought applause and brought the American public closer to understanding what was happening on the Eastern Front and the need to open a second front.