WW2 Soviet Sniper Aces - Story Time [Range Talk]

Josh, you said we wanted to do precision rifle shooting today. You did not specify the era. Now I'm punished with the Mosin. I'm doing the shooting. What do you mean you're being punished? You're enjoying the glory of the Red Army. Ready? 300? Yeah. All right. So you hear a lot about Soviet snipers. Which ones do you know? I know Vasili. Okay. Thank you, American pop culture. Everyone knows Vasili thanks to Enemy at the Gates and he does not look like Jude Law. I know Tiger Shaman because you were Tiger Shaman in the Mosin video. Now it's not Tiger Shaman, it's Tiger. No, Tiger. Like Tulam and his tiger. Okay. So I wanted to set things up to talk a little bit about Russian snipers or Soviet snipers in the Second World War and some of their contributions and backgrounds to it. Because I feel like a lot of people in America, when you talk to them about Soviet snipers, it's like maybe one Vasili Zaitsev and fictional snipers like Rachel Weisz come to their mind. Yes, American pop culture has done its best work. Indeed. So female snipers were a thing. Absolutely. That was a thing in the Soviet Union. Partially because they were trying to maximize the resources that they had. Because if you open a population up to the female population as well to serve, all of a sudden you double the population that you could draw from. That's some good math you just did there. Indeed. Is that that Asian math? Yeah. But I think a lot of times, it's kind of crazy for us nowadays. You talk about women in combat arms. When I was in the military, women were not in combat arms. Yeah, it's a big controversy, right? Yeah. Even still, I'd say it's still somewhat controversial, right? There's a lot of at least shade thrown around at the PT standards and stuff like that. But when push comes to shove, when your country is getting taken over, I guess it doesn't matter what PT standards are, right? There's a bit of a luxury in that, isn't there? So I wanted to start and talk about Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Have you ever heard of that name? No. Partially, I'm guessing. Hold on. Get on. The major has been found. I'm wondering because in Enemy at the Gates, there's that one scene, you remember the department store? It's a trap. How unfulfilling is it in Enemy at the Gates that the final kill shot on the major is at point blank range? Oh, I know, I know. All right, sorry. Lyudmila, the department store. Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She was a 24-year-old college student when the war came to her. She was Ukrainian. A lot of times when people talk about female snipers in the Soviet Union, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, her name comes up, but the image of Rosa Shanina comes up. We'll talk about her in a bit. But when you're looking at some of these guys who were snipers, they all came from a civilian background. Obviously, you're not born... Even in the Soviet Union, you're not born in a sign that you shall be a sniper later on. And one thing that I've learned is that they all have backgrounds that put them in a position to where they learn how to shoot. They don't learn how to shoot when they're in the military. They bring it to the military. And Lyudmila Pavlichenko, so she was a 24-year-old college student. She kind of grew up like a little bit of a tomboy. So the story goes that at one point, when she was playing sports and doing all the activities with all the other local boys, one of them challenged her and said that he could out-shoot anyone. So she ended up joining the shooting club and getting really, really good at shooting and just out-shot everyone and basically told them to shove off. But then later on, she ended up... When her school was bombed and she ceased to become a college student because of her school ceasing to exist, she started working in a state arsenal, making small arms. And she was a lathe turner. And so she ended up being very familiar with firearms, not only from shooting, but also working in the industry in Russia, right? During her time in the industry, the factories also had courses, military courses for people. So you could learn aviation. You can learn all sorts of stuff. And sniper and shooting courses were a part of that. And so in the early days of the war, when they started opening up for females to join the Red Army, she volunteered to be a sniper. So early that they still didn't have female sniper courses. She went in as a single female soldier into a sea of male snipers going through the course. And so she's kind of singled out. One thing I learned in the military, when you're going through basic, you don't want to be that one guy who's special. But in this case, this is like as special as you can get it, right? Yep. So she went through, and of course she had been shooting competition her whole life. And her shooting skills were impeccable. And she was able to show that off even as a rookie. And she ended up in the Battle of Odessa. And then later on in Sevastopol and racking up 309 kills. 309? 309 kills. A lot of that came down to her field craft and improvising and trying new tactics to lure snipers in. Like she has interviews where she talks about like the rookies, they would have them go out on hunter teams. So a shooter-sniper combo. And they would watch a sector and just take high value targets from the Germans. And then she was also pioneering some counter sniper operations with teams of five to seven snipers. And they would go out and hunt German snipers in these engagements. But the cool thing about what she did wasn't just about sniping. Because later on, she ended up with enough shrapnel that she could not serve anymore. And when she was in hospital, the Soviet VA had determined that, of course, her injuries were not service-related and sent her on her way into doing other things. And one of those things that was kind of interesting, because at this point, she was nicknamed Lady Death in the front. And she had a little bit of a celebrity status going on in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets, they were fighting the Germans. And they were having a hard time. Well, obviously, they were having a hard time because it was just... The Soviets out there fighting the Germans alone on the Eastern Front. Stalin and Roosevelt had been wanting to get the American side to open up a second front. But of course, when it comes to opening up a second front, America isn't like Russia, where the person in charge could just say, let's send all the troops over here and open up a second front. It takes an act of Congress. Or it used to. Well, yeah, I know, right? But Roosevelt needed public support in order to get American troops to get into the European front to fight. And so she was actually sent over to America. Ah, a good bit of propaganda. Yeah, a little bit of politicking. A little bit of advertisement. Yeah, so she ended up going on a public tour with Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. Ah, interesting. And learning about how to talk to the American public. And then, of course, you're talking about like a tomboy college girl who gave no craps about how to do public speaking, trying to engage the public, the American press. And like nowadays... After having been retired from combat. Yeah, I know. Injury sustained with hundreds of kills. Yeah, 309 kills. And she's trying to talk to Americans, in Russian, about how the front was and how it was going. Sure. And so instead of being interested in her exploits, though, they were more interested in how she looked. They're like, look, Mila, why is your dress so long? And why does it look so ugly? Meanwhile, that was her uniform that she freaking wore. And they were asking, would you wear makeup in the front lines? Like absolute things that were... You could tell that they were so detached from reality. You know, the realities that they lived in were so different. And so Eleanor Roosevelt taught her how to essentially tell them to go eat during the interviews while elegantly telling them to go eat and inspiring people to listen to her story. And you could say that her contributions or her politicking actually brought America over onto the European front. Because then that gradually built up some of the support for Congress. One of the initial catalysts. Yeah. Interesting. But then there was another sniper that I think my appearance is perhaps... Well, you mentioned... Who is it? Rosa Shanina, whose photo comes up? That's not your likeness. Have you heard of Rosa Shanina? Well, you mentioned her earlier. I could talk about Rosa Shanina. Then you said your likeness. You look like one. I don't look like Rosa Shanina. Rosa Shanina is a pretty girl. And quite frankly, she also got propagandized quite a bit because of that. Yeah, Rosa Shanina, she was a 20-year-old sniper out of the northern part of Russia. Her family, they were poor, but she had three adopted siblings who were orphans outside of the six biological siblings that she had. So she was from a blended family and she had a heart for orphans and young children. She was a kindergarten teacher, but during her time becoming a kindergarten teacher, she actually grew up very poor and had to walk all over the place, like 20 clicks to school and 20 clicks back. So that old adage where you're like, oh, back in my day, I had to walk 20 clicks uphill and 20 clicks uphill the other side. That was her. She actually had to do that. Okay. But then when the war came to her in Russia... Let's do a little closer. The cleaner target one. Impact, dead sack. The kindergarten she was working at got firebombed. And so she was trying to protect the kids. And then at the same time, two of her brothers, two of her brothers got killed. One of them in Leningrad and then the other one near her, Fyodor, who she was living with back then. So she had a burning desire to become someone on the front, frontline troops. She was already a bit of a rebel because she disobeyed her parents. Okay. So military life, I mean, if this is foreshadowing, military life is all about following orders. Right. She wanted to become a sniper, which typically has a lot of latitude in the front lines to operate alone or in small units. So she did become a sniper. After pushing, pushing, pushing, she did become a sniper. And on her way of becoming a sniper, she actually joined a... She learned how to shoot at a local shooting club before she went into sniper school. And she ended up commanding a sniper platoon once she got in. Impact, right hand. Right side. A female sniper platoon when she got in because this was 43. And she actually used a PU sniper like this one rather than a PEM. Once she was in, though, the war, it wasn't winding down per se. So late G-Watch guys will understand this. You join the war thinking, I want to do my part. I want to fight. I want to go and deploy. And then you realize, well, all the glory stories and all that deployment stuff is like the surge 2007 era type of stories. I mean, if you really wanted to experience Fallujah, which I don't think anyone joined saying, I want to be in Fallujah. That style of fighting was already just not there by the time I joined the military. There still was fighting. It just wasn't there. And so this was post-Stalingrad when she joined. And the Red Army was already advancing towards the Prussian territory. And her unit ended up in East Prussia. But the snipers were told to be held back because the Russians didn't want to bleed any more of their sniper experts in the field. Okay. Understandably. So they were just pushing a lot of the foot soldiers into the point. Well, is this like the point where they're making like a strong re-assault towards? Yeah, this was pushing into Poland and East Prussia into Lithuania specifically, Vilnius, where she was. She ended up with a 59 kill count, 59 kills. It's also ridiculous. In a short couple months in the front. Unfortunately, she did get killed by indirect fire. The enemy of the sniper. Yeah, yeah. But the interesting thing is like whenever she got her kill counts, she was like AWOL. She went AWOL to go to the front to fight with the guys in the front. And through that, she racked up her 59 kills. Wow. And those are confirmed kills. Those are not including unconfirmed kills. But also the interesting thing is she kept a diary. So kind of like for the audience out there, diaries are actual books that you write in, kind of like social media, but other people don't see it until you die. So her diary became published. It was published and it became a thing that people were able to learn about this one female sniper in the front because she was also pretty. So they took photos of her for propaganda purposes. And the Canadians also wrote about her. She became famous when she was in. But her diary, when they published it, they realized that a lot of the things that she was talking about in the back end and a lot of the aspirations that she had, she wanted to open an orphanage after the war. She wanted to take in kids who were separated from. So she wrote all this in the diary. She wrote all of this in her diary. It's like a propagandist's perfect situation. Yeah, I mean, it is. But she's also a 20 year old who kept on going AWOL to fight in the front. Some interesting, interesting breed of person for sure. Yeah. So I wanted to add just a little bit right here, because I think that diaries and first person accounts like this are very important for us to learn as human beings, even years down the road, because especially in Rosa Shanina's case, she writes about her life aspirations. She writes about friends that she's made and friends that she grieves because she lost them during the war. She talks about falling in love and losing her love interests as a casualty of war. She talks about very real wartime emotions like fear, while some of these diaries and autobiographies have a tendency of being altered by propaganda. In Rosa's particular case, she even talks about Red Army senior officers making unwanted sexual advances towards her. Now, this may not be a definitive indication, but I don't think Red Army propaganda would be releasing this type of information out there willingly. At the end, though, I think literature like this could be important for us as human beings to grow. And quite frankly, it's something that our channel, being very heavy on the technical shooting side and historical side, we don't get to talk about these human interactions very frequently. So I thought that was pretty cool. Back to the show. So then, I think, let's see, are we on the 500 yard? You can go 450. 450. To the base of the flagpole. Dial in a little bit. We've got some wind today. The 450 is a decently long distance shot for snipers back then. I'll hold base. On glass. Impact, dead center. Nice. Do another one. Impact. These rounds are two inches from each other. Sick. So the 450 for back then, that was a pretty long shot. A lot of them, especially if you're talking about Stalingrad, they were working in really short distances, like 200 and in. The reason the Russians, and Rosa also talks about this in her diary, and so did Lyudmila Pavlichenko, they valued the expert snipers more. They valued not giving up their positions more and patience more than anything. And so when they were doing counter-sniper operations, they would lay there for three days sometimes, letting the Germans do all their bait and everything and think they're not there. And then finally shoot them at a long distance whenever they finally broke cover. And so field craft was a premium for these guys. But I am going to close my optics right now because the next guy I want to talk about is the Tiger Shaman. Not the Tiger Shaman, Josh. It's interesting because when you look at pictures of this guy, he's like this short Mongolian descent, indigenous Russian. He's from the Trans-Baikal region, so he looks more like me than he does you. He is not white at all. So when he showed up at his unit, and he showed up in the funeral detail unit, 41 years old, old dude, short little Asian uncle. And he didn't speak Russian. Like, he only knew things like lunchtime. So he thought, oh, this is like some from the, you know. You can't say that anymore, Henry. That's not politically correct. It's like this not very smart person out there in the Far East who doesn't even understand the language. And they just gave him what you would give a funeral detail soldier. Menial work. So until one day, they came under fire, and he picked up like a Mosin-Nagant rifle. Target? 300. Impact. With iron sights, he started shooting at all these Germans at distance like that. And they were like, hold up, hold on. This Asian uncle knows how to shoot. Of course, the dude was a hunter. And I'm specifically in honor of Semyon Namokonov. I'm using soft points for these because he was a hunter. So he's a hunter. He was a hunter from the Trans-Baikal region who started shooting since he was seven years old. Wow. And so you translate that seven to 41. Like, that's a lot of years for someone to have behind a rifle. Sure. And they would give him scoped rifles, and he would be like, no, I don't want that. I want iron sights. Kind of like a certain fin that we know of. I mean, or you. So Namokonov ended up with 367 confirmed kills. I mean, it's just so wild by today's standards. Like, can you imagine that type of a kill count? 367? Yeah, I mean. With iron sights, by the way. Iron sight kills. Yes, it's crazy. Like, what are modern snipers? Like, what did Chris Kyle record? 50 is a pretty high number. Yeah. Like, it's just completely different. It's a different world. But I would also say, let's put it this way. Simul Hawa had a lot more kills. He also had a lot more targets to shoot at. Whereas nowadays, snipers don't have that many targets to shoot at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot more rules. Talking about ours, there's a lot more rules that go into it. Sure, right. You want to do another iron sight one? Sure. These three again. All right, on glass. Impact. Nice. Left hand. So, they realized that, oh, this guy can shoot. And they gave him a sniper rifle. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want these iron sights. No, I only want these iron sights. I only want iron sights. And of his 367 kills, Josh, eight of them were Japanese. How does that even happen? Because he fought on both sides. Wow. Because remember, Russia was also in war with Japan on the border. Like Korea, China. Mongolia, China. Yeah, okay. So, the dude was born in 1900. Like, not the 1900s. On the button. 1900. Wow. So, he ended up getting wounded like eight or nine times. Old uncle from Siberia would not die. Just continue to live. Just keeps going. Continue to shoot. He was a quiet dude. So, he used to smoke a pipe. And every kill he would get, he would put a notch on his pipe. And not on his rifle. I would imagine, get like, maybe like 20. That kind of fills up one side of the stem. My goodness. Maybe 20 on the other side. But like 357, he probably ceased to do that on his pipe at some point. Yeah, it's crazy. So, I was able to find a picture of the Taiga shaman's actual pipe. And you'll see that he didn't do hashes. He did dots. And I also learned that he specifically made marks on his pipe. Because he didn't want to deface his rifle. Because he didn't want to deface. One, he didn't want to be punished for destroying government property. But two, he didn't want his officers to take his rifle away from him. So, he would lose his scoreboard. This guy is metal. But back to the show. The dude lived. After getting wounded eight or nine times. And fathered nine children. Of which he has had 49 grandchildren by the time he died. Wow. He went back to his village. And became a village elder. And continued on to lead his local community in that area. Wow. So... Impact. The spirit of the Taiga shaman lives. Crazy. So, what's the overarching theme here? That in the time where, you know, it wasn't about who was quote-unquote like signing up, right? Like everybody was involved. It was a required effort. All of these, there's not a lot that's written about Semyon. Because he was a pretty quiet dude. Yeah. And he also didn't speak a lot of Russian. Yeah. I believe he was drafted. Okay. Into... He was doing funeral details. That sounds like a draftee. But what is the unifying theme here? Is that... You'll see a lot of these guys. And we didn't talk about Vasily. Vasily also was a hunter. Yeah. From young. These guys don't become snipers from sniper schools. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a sports shooter and a gunsmith at the State Arsenal. Rosa Shanina was... She wasn't a big-time sports shooter. But she learned to shoot at a sports shooting club locally. Vasily was a hunter. Namokonov was also a hunter. Yeah. All of these guys learned to shoot on their own. And the hunting and sports shooting communities, and they bring that into the military. It's not guys who go in the military and go through sniper school and magically have this skill. And on top of that, they're successful because these hunters, they understand camouflage. They understand field craft. They learn these things. Lyudmila Pavlichenko learned that from a hunter. When she was working in the front with a local hunter, she learned field craft. Interesting. So all of these things, a lot of what snipers do nowadays, yes, a lot of it was learned from the baptism of fire during World War II by the Russian snipers. But a lot of it predating that came from the civilian sportsman mentality. And honestly, those are the best shots that I saw in the military too. When you served. Yeah. Country boys who like to shoot on their own. Those are the people I learned to shoot from. Yeah. Country boys who shot CMP, competitions, iron sights. You remember back then in college, I used to hang out with that crowd. And so when it comes to it, I think a lot of times people in the military kind of poo-poo on sports shooting and hunting. But those guys out there, those are the guys who carried the torch back in the day and still continue to do so. Interesting. All right, what do you say? It's cold. Guys, until next time. See you on the Eastern Front. Wait.