Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Do Cool Stuff, a
Speaker 1: podcast about people who put bonus holes into Nazis. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret KILCHOI thanks, thanks, I'm pretty proud of
Speaker 1: that one. My guest today is Carl Hi.
Speaker 2: Carl, Hey, everyone, I'm particularly excited to hear about today.
Speaker 2: We left off on a real cliffhanger, so I want
Speaker 2: to hear about a lot of Nazis being killed by
Speaker 2: really rat women.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's going to be so many more than just
Speaker 1: lud Miller, who's also killing more Nazis than anyone I've
Speaker 1: ever met.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, yeah, a lot more than anyone else
Speaker 2: can really say for the most part.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And our producer is Sophie Hi.
Speaker 3: Sophie Hi, I'm happy. Danil just sent me a really
Speaker 3: cute photo of his dog helping him edit.
Speaker 1: This is the like I didn't really I think that
Speaker 1: like adding to my list of prepper things. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to convince everyone as I'm also now just trying to
Speaker 1: convince everyone to get dogs because the mental health boost
Speaker 1: is just anyway. Our producer is Ian Hi Ian Ian.
Speaker 2: Hey, Ian.
Speaker 1: And on Woman did our theme song.
Speaker 3: And our moral support is by rentro and Anderson.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Nel is usually outside when I recorded these days,
Speaker 1: not because I like houst him, but if the weather
Speaker 1: accepts him being outside, that is where he is all
Speaker 1: day whenever.
Speaker 3: Whenever I think of Ryntron and I say his name,
Speaker 3: I get that woman. I just love him.
Speaker 2: This is obviously a podcast, but on the last one recorded,
Speaker 2: y'all got to see me on video. My kitty Fennel
Speaker 2: was up on my shoulders for a little while.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: She's definitely a good a good companion for sure. It
Speaker 2: makes life a better place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And if you're afraid of the responsibility that
Speaker 1: they bring the new extra Nita pet I don't know
Speaker 1: whatever I mean. Everyone makes her decisons about shit. But
Speaker 1: one person who made a lot of decisions, three hundred
Speaker 1: and nine decisions about wynd to pull trigger was Ludmiller Pavlchenko,
Speaker 1: and also made some decisions about probably sleeping with the
Speaker 1: first Lady of the United States, but maybe not, maybe
Speaker 1: just having a super romantic friendship. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: kind of almost don't care the difference. That's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about today. We are in part two or Part
Speaker 1: four of the Snipers and Part two of the subsection
Speaker 1: of the snipers about the Soviet women who killed Nazis.
Speaker 1: You can tell I didn't script this part out. So
Speaker 1: back to Ludmillim. After we did her aside learning about
Speaker 1: gay President, gay first ladies, she was supposed to show
Speaker 1: up at the White House, have dinner, try to convince
Speaker 1: the US to join the war against Germany. And she
Speaker 1: does that and then will not successfully convince the US.
Speaker 1: That doesn't happen, but Eleanor Roosevelt and her are like,
Speaker 1: what if? Instead we travel around the US for months
Speaker 1: together and it's a drum up support for the Western Front,
Speaker 1: which is what the kids call at the time, and
Speaker 1: you know, like sex and she so she goes touring
Speaker 1: around the US with Eleanor Roosevelt, just gals, being historically
Speaker 1: close pals. You will be shocked to know that the
Speaker 1: US in the nineteen forties is a fairly sexist place.
Speaker 2: What are you sure, because I I've seen stuff from
Speaker 2: the fifties which Lena looks like. Some people today want
Speaker 2: to make that a panacea, but I can't imagine. The
Speaker 2: forties were like worse.
Speaker 1: Even so, she goes on tour and she's like killed
Speaker 1: more people than anyone anyone else is ever going to
Speaker 1: meet and the press is just like talking about how
Speaker 1: long her skirt is that is too long. It's like,
Speaker 1: where's American women wear shorter skirts or whatever? How her
Speaker 1: uniform makes her look fat, like literally fat shaming her
Speaker 1: about like how much she chooses to eat. They ask
Speaker 1: her about makeup and about what makeup she wears at
Speaker 1: the front, and I am really impressed that she didn't
Speaker 1: just look at the audience and say, I've killed three
Speaker 1: times as many people as there are people in this room.
Speaker 1: But what she did say is actually pretty cool. It's
Speaker 1: pretty much that in Chicago when the crowd is like
Speaker 1: asking her this bullshit. Basically like at first she's like,
Speaker 1: why are they asking me these questions? And then like
Speaker 1: Eleanor Roosevelt's like, you can just say whatever you want,
Speaker 1: fuck these people. She's like, oh yeah, I could say
Speaker 1: whatever I want fuck these people. So Chicago, she says,
Speaker 1: I am twenty five years old and I have killed
Speaker 1: three hundred and nine fascist invaders by now. Don't you think, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: that you have that you've been hiding behind my back
Speaker 1: for too long?
Speaker 2: Oh? Brutal, Yeah, brutal. So this is like the this
Speaker 2: is the equivalent of the YouTube comments telling her how
Speaker 2: to shoot better. Come on, little lady, I know how
Speaker 2: to shoot better than you because I'm a guy, Like, oh.
Speaker 1: My god, yeah yeah, And then it is like I
Speaker 1: am one of the most highly decorated military people in history.
Speaker 2: Sick burn as they say.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so it's this thing again though, where it's
Speaker 1: like women fighters are being used as propaganda. It's not like, hey, women,
Speaker 1: we can do it. It's like, men, you're not manly enough.
Speaker 1: A girl is doing your work for you. But the
Speaker 1: same time, playing on men's emotions and utilizing patriarchy to
Speaker 1: fight against patriarchy has been a women's tactic since forever
Speaker 1: and is a fairly effective one. And I can't actually
Speaker 1: hate someone for using that tactic. You know, everywhere she goes,
Speaker 1: it's mostly the unions showing up and offering her gifts
Speaker 1: as thank you, and she hung out with like workers
Speaker 1: at bars and at union halls and shit. The leather
Speaker 1: workers union gave her a fur coat. And it's funny too, right,
Speaker 1: most of the time you read about this fur coat
Speaker 1: she's given, it's like implied that it's given to her
Speaker 1: by like a rich person, because they think of a
Speaker 1: fur coat as a rich person thing, right, And rich
Speaker 1: people are the people who buy the fur coats. They're
Speaker 1: not the people who make the fur coats. It is
Speaker 1: a union labor that made these coats. Say what you
Speaker 1: will about for whatever. And as she's going around, she's
Speaker 1: just like more and more is just like men, fuck
Speaker 1: you all, and she's just like starts talking about how
Speaker 1: in the USSR they don't have a fucking segregated army,
Speaker 1: and like how women are allowed to fight at the
Speaker 1: front line and shit, and she's exaggerating about women allowed
Speaker 1: to fight at the front line, but it sure is
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot more equal. She doesn't manage
Speaker 1: to get the US to join the European Theater. That
Speaker 1: has to wait a while. Americans like being fashionably late.
Speaker 1: That said, all along, they've been sending a fuck ton
Speaker 1: of material aid, which I guess would now be called
Speaker 1: lethal aid. And I actually don't I think that lethole
Speaker 1: aids funny. I don't actually care. I'm not like mad
Speaker 1: that people call it that. I just think it's funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although no, I think that is. I mean the
Speaker 2: reality of the amount of war material that was sent
Speaker 2: to the Soviet Union for this endeavor shouldn't be understated.
Speaker 2: It was immense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and like and you know, the more you
Speaker 1: there's some quote from some general I don't remember, but
Speaker 1: it's like, the more you learn about battle and war
Speaker 1: and strategy and shit, you start off caring about tactics,
Speaker 1: you end up moving to strategy, and then above that
Speaker 1: you realize that the highest thing of all is like
Speaker 1: food supply lines.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like Napoleon with his canned food.
Speaker 1: Woh, Napoleon and canned food.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, did you know this is interesting?
Speaker 1: Prepper here? Oh Poleon?
Speaker 2: Seriously, no, this is a topic for another day. Well,
Speaker 2: one of the things in the Napoleonic Army had going
Speaker 2: for itself was they essentially had essentially a project going
Speaker 2: which was find a way to make us be able
Speaker 2: to be more mobile with food. And that's where canned
Speaker 2: food came from. And they had canned food and the
Speaker 2: Napoleonic Army, and they could move their armies and their
Speaker 2: supply lines in a way that no one else could.
Speaker 2: And it was hugely effective.
Speaker 1: At the end of twenty twenty five, when the Civil
Speaker 1: War has been raging for a year and I opened
Speaker 1: my last can of canned corn, thinking I had enough
Speaker 1: for seven years. But actually it turns out people eat
Speaker 1: an awful lot of food. I'll say to myself, Thanks Napoleon.
Speaker 2: It's pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He offered apparently a twelve thousand franc cash prize to
Speaker 2: whoever could come up with this idea, and that's what
Speaker 2: came out, was canned food.
Speaker 1: Whoa, I've been making hard tackle lately. Oh gosh, that's
Speaker 1: part of my prepper bullshit. Everyone's response is like, what
Speaker 1: the fuck are you doing? I'm like, it's gonna last
Speaker 1: seventy years.
Speaker 2: That's rough stuff. I mean, but I was. I was
Speaker 2: talking about this the other day and it's like, what.
Speaker 1: About consulting that sucks and hurts your teeth?
Speaker 2: Slightly off topic, Well, you got to dip it in
Speaker 2: the coffee long enough that it becomes yea, right, but like,
Speaker 2: but what about like this, the Vic Kong method of
Speaker 2: just stores of rice and spam, Like that stuff lasts
Speaker 2: forever too.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, hell yeah, that's my plan for my This
Speaker 1: is not in my proper podcast. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: the history.
Speaker 2: Part, right, Sorry, that's another day.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I'm the one, okay. So anyway, she
Speaker 1: goes and she goes on this tour for several months,
Speaker 1: and she's hanging out with Eleanor Roosevelt and they're like
Speaker 1: best friends and it might literally be just that, but
Speaker 1: it might not, And God bless them both at least
Speaker 1: in this situation. Either way, I don't care. So she
Speaker 1: makes her way back to the USSR and she spends
Speaker 1: the rest of the war teaching people how to kill Nazis.
Speaker 1: She's actually begging to go back to the front, but
Speaker 1: they don't let her, which is like fucked up in
Speaker 1: some ways, but also it's like she's probably more useful
Speaker 1: passing on her skills at this point, you know, both
Speaker 1: as a propaganda.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, the lessons she learned on the front are
Speaker 2: like how many people did she so save with like
Speaker 2: things that she learned the hard way? Right?
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I feel like actually
Speaker 1: gets left out in terms of like women's contributions to
Speaker 1: the world too, right, is that, like teaching is an
Speaker 1: important part of getting things done, and so like the
Speaker 1: person who doesn't want to do the support work and
Speaker 1: just wants to be the hero is actually often less
Speaker 1: accomplishing less than the person who is teaching, who is
Speaker 1: you know, turning other people into Nazi killers too, you know,
Speaker 1: and saving their lives by teaching them field craft and anyway.
Speaker 1: After the war, she gets her master's degree or maybe
Speaker 1: her PhD. I've read both. She becomes a historian, but
Speaker 1: she struggles for the rest of her life with PTSD
Speaker 1: and alcoholism. And people were like, oh, she's just sad
Speaker 1: that her husband died, but I mean, she'd probably never
Speaker 1: married that guy. She might have married a different husband
Speaker 1: after the war who died right away. I think she
Speaker 1: was said PTSD is shit because she was sad because
Speaker 1: she'd been through the wildest shit that humans have ever
Speaker 1: been through and killed three hundred and nine people and
Speaker 1: solved millions of people slaughtered.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, perhaps she survived the Eastern Front and
Speaker 2: even though they were hitlerrites or fascists, as she said,
Speaker 2: she was still pressing the trigger and sending a bullet
Speaker 2: into what was a human.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally, of two thousand, four hundred eighty four women
Speaker 1: snipers in the Red Army, only about five hundred survived
Speaker 1: the war. Sure that didn't help her PTSD or shell
Speaker 1: shock as was called back then. I'm sure survivor's guilt
Speaker 1: was probably a big part of a lot of this,
Speaker 1: especially being rescued from sevastpool by submarine, as like your
Speaker 1: special everyone else, including your potential husband, is just going
Speaker 1: to die while you're gone. You know, this twenty percent
Speaker 1: survival rate is way lower than the rest of the
Speaker 1: Red Army, which was at around sixty five percent. Like
Speaker 1: the fucked on a Red Army. People died, right or
Speaker 1: casualties of one sort or another. But in this case,
Speaker 1: we're like talking about literally twenty percent survival rate for
Speaker 1: the snipers.
Speaker 2: The human toll that took to destroy the Nazis. I mean,
Speaker 2: the Soviet methods could be discussed, but cannot be cannot
Speaker 2: be overstated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fifteen years later after the war, Eleanor Roosevelt goes
Speaker 1: to Moscow and she insists, She's like, I want to
Speaker 1: see my old friend Ludmilim. But this is Cold War times, right,
Speaker 1: and they're like, nah, you can't see lud Millin. She's like,
Speaker 1: let me see lud Milin. She basically throws a fit.
Speaker 1: She's like, I'm fucking well, she's not the first Lady
Speaker 1: anymore at this point, although she did. I think she
Speaker 1: was first Lady for like sixteen years, but she has
Speaker 1: to fight like hell to get the USSR to agree
Speaker 1: to let her see Ludmilla. And I've seen a couple
Speaker 1: different versions of like where they meet. Maybe it's Ludmilla's house,
Speaker 1: maybe it wasn't, I don't know. When they do see
Speaker 1: each other, they both have these military details following them,
Speaker 1: like bodyguards and handlers and shit. They can't really reconnect.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, hey, how's it going, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And then while they're walking down a hall, they like
Speaker 1: dash into some kind of side room and then like
Speaker 1: a closet or a bathroom or actually maybe a kitchen. Again,
Speaker 1: I've heard this story gets told different every single fucking time,
Speaker 1: but no one tells the important part of it. So
Speaker 1: they barricade themselves off into a different room and they
Speaker 1: can finally reconnect. And you know, the way this story
Speaker 1: usually gets told is that Eleanor throws her arms around
Speaker 1: Ludmilla and says how much you've missed her, and they
Speaker 1: reminisce about their times together until the guards get the
Speaker 1: doors open or whatever. And the story is so funny
Speaker 1: because it just like actually doesn't make sense until you
Speaker 1: realize that they had to at least a romantic friendship,
Speaker 1: you know, regardless of anything that they may or may
Speaker 1: may not have gotten up to, they had a romantic
Speaker 1: friendship that they had a romantic lesbian connection. And that
Speaker 1: is like the only way that this story is important
Speaker 1: part of the story. It's always included, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: why did you include this until I found out that
Speaker 1: Eleanor Roosevelt was a lesbian and then I like started whatever.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it's almost it almost sounds like something you'd see
Speaker 2: in like a fictional movie, but it's but it's actually real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, yeah, And it's like I don't think that
Speaker 1: they like locked themselves in and like boned or something,
Speaker 1: but like they reconnected as these people who had like
Speaker 1: probably loved one another in whatever context, and like they
Speaker 1: finally able to reconnect, you know. So Ludmilla died at
Speaker 1: a stroke at fifty eight years old. I'm sure that
Speaker 1: the series of traumatic brain injuries and the alcohol that
Speaker 1: she used to cope with her trauma had something to
Speaker 1: do with her early death. But she killed three hundred
Speaker 1: and nine Nazis and she probably cooked the president of
Speaker 1: the most powerful capitalist nation on earth. So it's like
Speaker 1: a pretty crammed full life.
Speaker 2: It's hard to not keep in making the joke. But
Speaker 2: she has an incredible body count, like legitimately, yeah, of
Speaker 2: high ranking officials across the board.
Speaker 1: So who fucking knows how many people? How you know
Speaker 1: the real count, but the best we've got the three
Speaker 1: zero nine numbers. She's one of the deadliest snipers in history.
Speaker 1: Almost everyone else on the top of that list is
Speaker 1: Soviet snipers in World War Two. I obviously have no
Speaker 1: pulled particular love for the Soviet government or authoritarianism or at large,
Speaker 1: but the USSRS where Nazism went to die at the
Speaker 1: hands of women and men who fought, sometimes with literally
Speaker 1: nothing to stop them. And I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1: I'm like, why I will never conflate Nazism and Stalinism,
Speaker 1: even though I strongly disagree with Stalinism, right, And that's
Speaker 1: because the average fascist is a nightmare man who wants
Speaker 1: to kill everyone who's different from him, while the average
Speaker 1: state communist, I believe, is a well meaning, hard working
Speaker 1: person who believes in a dream that has been led
Speaker 1: into horrors by their government. That's my like.
Speaker 2: Which governments are so apt to do, regardless of whatever
Speaker 2: ism they're associated with.
Speaker 1: Yep, totally, because you could say the same about American patriots.
Speaker 1: Some of them some are fascists.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the intent of the fascism's entire ideology is based
Speaker 2: on supremacy of a specific group and the destruction of
Speaker 2: others in the process. And while that's not the case,
Speaker 2: even it was not the case in the USSR, the
Speaker 2: higher ups and the hierarchy and the government was definitely horrific,
Speaker 2: but the individual paid the price to save the world
Speaker 2: from fascism.
Speaker 1: Yep. Absolutely. The two five hundred or so women snipers
Speaker 1: killed at best guests eleven thousand Nazis during the war.
Speaker 1: Another one who rose to prominence was named Rosa Shanina,
Speaker 1: and she was named after Rosa Luxembourg. Rosa was raised
Speaker 1: on a collective farm once she was one of seven kids.
Speaker 1: At fourteen, she walked one hundred and twenty miles by
Speaker 1: herself across the Tiger to get to a rail station
Speaker 1: to head off to college. Without her parents' permission. She
Speaker 1: worked as a kindergarten teacher to funder education. She graduated
Speaker 1: nineteen forty two while as war was hitting the country
Speaker 1: and being a kindergarten teacher in the USSR. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties meant that one of her jobs before she
Speaker 1: joined the military was that she and other teachers kept
Speaker 1: guard on rooftops to watch out for bombers. And when
Speaker 1: one of her three brothers to die in the war died,
Speaker 1: she volunteered. She found her way to the school for
Speaker 1: women's snipers that had been set up, the Central Women's
Speaker 1: Sniper Training School. She was really fucking good. They asked
Speaker 1: her to stay and teach, and she was like, no,
Speaker 1: I have fucking Nazis to kill. She wound up the
Speaker 1: commander of a platoon of female snipers in one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty fourth Rifle Division. And it's interesting because her story, well, okay,
Speaker 1: she kills her first man. She's in a trend. She
Speaker 1: kills a guy, and her legs collapse beneath her and
Speaker 1: she slumps into the trenches and she's like, I just
Speaker 1: fucking killed a guy. Well, the actual quote is I've
Speaker 1: killed a man. I don't need to paraphrase it when
Speaker 1: it's fairly direct. And the other women were like, that
Speaker 1: wasn't a man. That was a fascist, and they help
Speaker 1: her back to her feet. And in her war diaries,
Speaker 1: which were illegal for her to keep, a few months later,
Speaker 1: she realized that killing fascists in cold blood gave meaning
Speaker 1: to her life, and that she would do everything the
Speaker 1: same if she could do it all over. And I
Speaker 1: actually trust this information about her a little bit more
Speaker 1: than I trust the Ludmilla information because all of her
Speaker 1: autobiographical stuff was written illegally rather than goes written by propagandists. Right,
Speaker 1: she wasn't allowed to keep this diary, and she did
Speaker 1: it anyway. When the Soviet high command tried to force
Speaker 1: women to withdraw from the front, she refused orders and
Speaker 1: kept fighting, crossing into Germany and killing Germans on their
Speaker 1: own soil basically like just like was like, ignored orders
Speaker 1: and kept fighting, and no one like stopped her.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if you're good at your job and
Speaker 2: it's fascist dying it probably yeah, don't do that. But
Speaker 2: that's pretty.
Speaker 1: Cool, Yeah, exactly Like. And at one point during all
Speaker 1: this she was shot through the shoulder. Another time she
Speaker 1: suffered friendly fire from a rocket launcher. I believe this
Speaker 1: was not a direct hit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so it tends to be pink miss Yeah,
Speaker 2: probably shrapnel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think it was like a fire
Speaker 1: element of it somehow, because she talks about like, now
Speaker 1: I understand why everyone's afraid of this fire or something
Speaker 1: I don't know. And she wrote once in her diary,
Speaker 1: and I really like this quote, the essence of my
Speaker 1: happiness is fighting for the happiness of others. It's strange.
Speaker 1: Why is it that in grammar the word happiness can
Speaker 1: only be singular, that is counter to its meaning. If
Speaker 1: it if it turns necessary to die for the common happiness,
Speaker 1: then I'm embraced to And on January twenty seventh, nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, after being opened by a shelf fragment, she died.
Speaker 2: Wow, and getting close to the end.
Speaker 1: Too, frankly, No, I know, I am. She'd killed at
Speaker 1: least fifty nine Nazis by the time she died, and
Speaker 1: she was only twenty years old. And she died fighting
Speaker 1: for the happiness of others, which she wrote explicitly she
Speaker 1: was braced to do so, you know. Or take Nina Petrova,
Speaker 1: who was a gym teacher and a sniper instructor who
Speaker 1: helped invade Finland. Actually so wasn't doing so good in
Speaker 1: that particular one from my point of view, But she
Speaker 1: was too old to be drafted. When Operation Barbarossa hit.
Speaker 1: She was in her late forties by the time the
Speaker 1: war started, but she volunteered and she died actually on
Speaker 1: May first, nineteen forty five, just days before the end
Speaker 1: of the war. She trained five hundred and twelve snipers
Speaker 1: and she personally killed one hundred and twenty two enemy
Speaker 1: soldiers and she was fifty one years old. There's a
Speaker 1: special place in my heart for the like in one
Speaker 1: of the books I wrote, I call them the Gray Brigade,
Speaker 1: the people who like the veterans who like actually don't
Speaker 1: need to fight. They're like old enough that no one's
Speaker 1: going to give them shit, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like the person in the movie when they
Speaker 2: get to them and they're a veteran from the war
Speaker 2: before and they're like, I know stuff. Yeah, but but no.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating to see again, as we talked about in
Speaker 2: the other episode, how not only the fortitude of these women,
Speaker 2: but also how the skill is transcends that.
Speaker 1: Of age or gender. It's like it's it's the person, right, absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: This fifty one year old woman killed fucking one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty two people and trained five hundred and twelve people,
Speaker 1: which is literally she trained a fifth of the snipers,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Butterfly effect of how many fascists died because of her
Speaker 2: actions is immeasurable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Very few women were involved directly in
Speaker 1: the infantry. Snipers are technically infantry, but the non sniper
Speaker 1: infantry women ran anti aircraft guns and sometimes actually would
Speaker 1: then like that would turn into hand to hand fighting,
Speaker 1: you know, during sieges and stuff. They drove tanks and
Speaker 1: they ran machine guns. There's a Ukrainian woman, Maria Otkabrovskiya,
Speaker 1: and she's one of my favorites. I want the movie
Speaker 1: of her. Her husband died in the fighting, and she
Speaker 1: didn't find out for like two years because she'd retreated
Speaker 1: from the front, right, and she was an army wife,
Speaker 1: and she mostly just wrote about like being an army wife.
Speaker 1: She was like being an army wife rules I actually
Speaker 1: this is like an important part of the military. I
Speaker 1: do all this stuff, you know. And then her husband
Speaker 1: goes to the front during the war, and she like
Speaker 1: retreats off to somewhere safe. She finds out two years
Speaker 1: later that he's died. The war is still going on.
Speaker 1: She sells everything she owns. She's not a rich woman.
Speaker 1: She sells everything she owns to buy a tank and
Speaker 1: then she donates it to the Red Army with one condition.
Speaker 1: I will give you a tank. I am the driver
Speaker 1: of this tank, the original killdozer. This one was named
Speaker 1: the Fighting Girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was thirty eight years old and she just
Speaker 1: she took it into battle after battle, she took out
Speaker 1: machine gun nests, she took out artillery, and then one day,
Speaker 1: you know this was not going to last. She was killed.
Speaker 1: She was killed role repairing her tank in the field.
Speaker 1: And how come it's always movies about a guy on
Speaker 1: a murder rampage after his wife is killed when this story,
Speaker 1: lady's story is right there, That's what I want to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, listen up, Hollywood, this is good. All of these
Speaker 2: are great stories that should be told over and over
Speaker 2: again and have been, yeah, to a large degree, intentionally
Speaker 2: ignored because it doesn't serve the other narratives. Yep.
Speaker 1: And then there's the most famous of the women units,
Speaker 1: the Night Witches. But I'm not going to let you
Speaker 1: hear about them until you hear about I want something good.
Speaker 1: We could advertise this show is sponsored by having three
Speaker 1: days worth of food and water.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say it's sponsored by tea.
Speaker 1: Oh, tea is good.
Speaker 2: And building a community with your neighbor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's sponsored by building a community with your neighbor
Speaker 1: by inviting them to.
Speaker 3: Tea trick tea with your neighbor. That's our sponsor.
Speaker 2: Yep. And share hard tech.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if anything else comes up again, just direct
Speaker 1: that to our complaints department. You know how to find
Speaker 1: it on Twitter. And we're back. So you know, there
Speaker 1: have been all women units in the before Soviet times
Speaker 1: because a woman who had personal connections with the authoritary
Speaker 1: elite head of state got special permission. Welcome to history
Speaker 1: repeating itself. You just reading podcast again.
Speaker 2: That's a good one because you can just just like
Speaker 2: do the next episode the same again, over and over again,
Speaker 2: because these stories are so consistent, aren't they. I know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually just take a mad libs and I
Speaker 1: like swap in like authoritarian leader Margaret dislikes.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: So there's this woman who's not named Maria. Her name's
Speaker 1: Marina Marina Reskova, and she's the first female navigator in
Speaker 1: the Air Force and she's like and this is before
Speaker 1: the war, and she's like called the Russian Amelia Earhart
Speaker 1: and she's all famous, and shit, I don't like her.
Speaker 1: She had a personal connection with Stalin almost certainly. The
Speaker 1: personal connection she had with Stalin is because she was
Speaker 1: an informer for the Secret Police during the Great Terror
Speaker 1: and saw tons of people murdered over bullshit, including actually
Speaker 1: the parents of one of the people that we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about later. This is the period in time
Speaker 1: when just tons and tons of loyal Communist Party folks
Speaker 1: just got fucking murdered by their own side, including gutting
Speaker 1: the military infrastructure. They'd also just killed the guy who
Speaker 1: invented their new tank, the like T thirty four or
Speaker 1: whatever it was called.
Speaker 2: Stalin had a real pension for finding really great, the
Speaker 2: best and brightest, and making sure they didn't live very long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is not like a good thing to do
Speaker 1: right before the Nazis aren't going to invade. In case
Speaker 1: anyone listening is trying to figure out whether you want
Speaker 1: to do something called the Great Purge or the Great
Speaker 1: Terror right before the Nazis invade, you got time it differently,
Speaker 1: Oh my.
Speaker 2: Gosh, for everyone's suffering in a corporate existence. Nowadays, it's
Speaker 2: the equivalent of the boss that won't hire someone better
Speaker 2: than them because they're worried about their job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally just that with tens of millions of lives, but.
Speaker 2: Just put to the worst degree ever. Right, this guy
Speaker 2: is so so concerned about himself and his own narcissism
Speaker 2: that he can't deal with anyone being better than him.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Marina, she's not a cool person doing cool stuff.
Speaker 1: She's a bad person doing cool stuff. She uses her
Speaker 1: connections with Stalin to get three all female flying regiments
Speaker 1: formed on October eighth, nineteen forty one. Stalin's stated reason
Speaker 1: for approving it was that all women units are good propaganda.
Speaker 1: Once again, there's three units. One is a day bomber unit,
Speaker 1: one is a night bomber unit, and one is a
Speaker 1: fighter pilot unit. And this makes the USSR the first
Speaker 1: country in the world that I'm aware of. Anytime I
Speaker 1: say the first, it's like, you know, there's always something
Speaker 1: but whatever, So the first country to let women conduct
Speaker 1: flying combat operations. The most famous of these is the
Speaker 1: night bomber unit, and they have a bunch of different names.
Speaker 1: The most famous official name is because they changed their
Speaker 1: official name a bunch of times over the course of
Speaker 1: the war. Though I think the one they ended with
Speaker 1: and the one that they usually remembered as well, it's
Speaker 1: not what they usually remember it as, usually remember it
Speaker 1: as their nickname, but the forty sixth Tommon Guards Night
Speaker 1: Bomber Aviation Regiment a real catchy name. They flew old
Speaker 1: biplanes that had been used for crop dusting and pilot training,
Speaker 1: and one thing I was reading that kind of blew
Speaker 1: my mind. They were so slow that they were really
Speaker 1: effective in combat because their maximum speed was slower than
Speaker 1: the stalling speed of the German planes. So it was
Speaker 1: like hard for fighters to dogfight them.
Speaker 2: Literally hit the brakes, they fly by you and you're
Speaker 2: still in the air.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's really that's that counterintuitive stuff, right, Everyone's trying
Speaker 2: to go for more speed. Yeah, but in this instance
Speaker 2: it's the exact opposite. Yeah. I did not know that,
Speaker 2: and that's it makes sense, but you would not think
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: No, totally. And I think it's like they invented the
Speaker 1: strategy that they're going to use, because it's I doubt
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, we want biplanes because we're going
Speaker 1: to do the following shit. I think the USSR was like,
Speaker 1: all right, ladies, here's your crop dusters, and they were like,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll still fuck up Nazis.
Speaker 2: And it's a Johnny and Ammonic moment of when when
Speaker 2: they go high tech go low tech. Yeah they did it, yeah,
Speaker 2: but yeah, but because they were probably given the worst crap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, and overall, like the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: started World War Two with like way the fuck more
Speaker 1: planes and tanks than anyone else, but they also started
Speaker 1: off with like oldest fuck tanks and planes compared to
Speaker 1: everyone else. Some of the other people we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about were also in fighters that were wood and fabric,
Speaker 1: you know. So they fly up high and then they
Speaker 1: purposefully stall their engines and glide down to bombing altitude
Speaker 1: with their engines off, so the only sound their planes
Speaker 1: are making is the wind passing through the you know,
Speaker 1: biplane wings, which supposedly sounds like broomsticks in the night.
Speaker 1: Thus the Germans called them the night Witches, or, just
Speaker 1: as likely, the Soviets declared that the Germans called them
Speaker 1: the night witches see the White Death and Lady Death. However,
Speaker 1: it's still cool as fuck.
Speaker 2: Oh it's a badass name. I mean, what could you
Speaker 2: ask for better than that? Yeah. On top of that,
Speaker 2: think about the the sand it takes to use an
Speaker 2: old time term to do that, to like literally kill engines,
Speaker 2: glide under without power, Yeah, into a combat area to
Speaker 2: drop bombs. Is it takes a lot?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely, And so they blow up Nazis and then
Speaker 1: they turn their engines back on and race back up
Speaker 1: out of anti aircraft range and get the fuck out
Speaker 1: of there. That is the glamorized version of night bombing.
Speaker 1: In practice, night bombing is less targeted and is more
Speaker 1: of a weapon of terror and total war. British Prime
Speaker 1: Minister Stanley Baldwin put it that the purpose of night
Speaker 1: bombing was to quote kill the enemies, women and children
Speaker 1: more rapidly than they killed ours.
Speaker 2: The irony of this is and that is that consistently,
Speaker 2: and correct me if I'm wrong or if you know
Speaker 2: something differently? Is that that sort of terror bombing campaigns,
Speaker 2: which night bombing would be because technology of its time
Speaker 2: just didn't lend itself to the accuracy required to hit
Speaker 2: quote strategic resources. It was entirely used to supposedly break
Speaker 2: the morale of the enemy. But the truth was when
Speaker 2: you came out and your home was gone from your
Speaker 2: bunker and your home was gone and your family was dead,
Speaker 2: and more often than not, just turns you into a
Speaker 2: more stalwart enemy of whoever did it.
Speaker 1: I think that that's true. I have a friend who
Speaker 1: I don't know if mentioned this on the show or
Speaker 1: not before. I have a friend who his grandparents were Nazis,
Speaker 1: and they started the war fiercely anti Nazi, and then
Speaker 1: after the Allies killed ninety percent of their family in
Speaker 1: a bombing raid on their city, they joined up for
Speaker 1: the Nazis the next day. And like, that's a.
Speaker 2: Weird situation to be caught in where you're against what's
Speaker 2: going on, but at the same time, the end result
Speaker 2: is you or everyone you care and loving about love
Speaker 2: dying in the process. That's a challenging problem to be in.
Speaker 2: You defend yourself against American air raids that might destroy
Speaker 2: Nazism when it's your life on the line in the process.
Speaker 2: That's a weird problem, I know.
Speaker 1: And it's like I have this like easy out in
Speaker 1: that I hold myself to this ridiculous moral standard, so
Speaker 1: I'd be like, well, i'd be almost the gay, trans
Speaker 1: woman anarchist, so like I wouldn't have any other choice
Speaker 1: in this matter I would be fighting the Nazis and
Speaker 1: a partisan sense, or having escaped the country. But like
Speaker 1: for people who hadn't had to make certain decisions yet, right,
Speaker 1: you know, Like I don't think that grandparents made the
Speaker 1: right decision, but I can't imagine most people making any
Speaker 1: other one.
Speaker 2: You know. The best argument here is that terror bombing
Speaker 2: is a bad idea, Like perhaps that's just maybe that's
Speaker 2: the lesson to be learned here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, totally. And I've read a little bit about
Speaker 1: the Night Witches where they talk about like actually trying
Speaker 1: to hit things accurately. Like there's a one account where
Speaker 1: like a woman goes over her target three times because
Speaker 1: she thinks that she's not over the right target because
Speaker 1: no one's shooting at her, and she's like this is
Speaker 1: too important a target for them to not be shooting
Speaker 1: at me. Therefore I'm not over the target. And so
Speaker 1: like there is a like sense it's like I don't
Speaker 1: have any information about the night which is specifically just
Speaker 1: doing terror bombing, and it's like blurry, you know. And
Speaker 1: I do have the numbers. I don't have numbers of
Speaker 1: how many civilians they killed, but I have the numbers
Speaker 1: on the Nazi infrastructure they destroyed. So the information that's
Speaker 1: available to me, they are cool people doing cool stuff.
Speaker 1: With the information as possible, they are cool people doing
Speaker 1: interesting stuff. I don't know how to you know whatever,
Speaker 1: sitting in moral judgment, that's the other name of this podcast.
Speaker 2: It is also possible that with old antiquated bioplanes that
Speaker 2: they were trying to do targeted bombiting, because that typical
Speaker 2: night bombing campaigns there were terror campaigns were like, you know,
Speaker 2: three hundred b seventeens dropping zillions of tons of munitions
Speaker 2: and they couldn't do that. They didn't have the kind
Speaker 2: of planes total made that possible.
Speaker 1: So all these are fucking crop dusters.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, that's a really good point. The night which is
Speaker 1: were forty two person crews at a time, and not
Speaker 1: at each raid, but you know, at it there's forty
Speaker 1: planes in the night which is set up, and they
Speaker 1: dropped three thousand tons of bombs and twenty six thousand
Speaker 1: incendiary shells. They destroyed seventeen river crossings, nine railways, two
Speaker 1: railway stations, twenty six warehouses, twelve fuel depots, one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy six armored cars, eighty six firing points and
Speaker 1: eleven search lights.
Speaker 2: So to put this into context, one fire bombing campaign
Speaker 2: against Frankfurt was twelve one and ninety seven tons. That's
Speaker 2: one one bombing campaign the US did in.
Speaker 1: A terrible Ah. Yeah, yeah, so this puts this into
Speaker 1: direct contracts contrast. No, No, that that's really useful. That
Speaker 1: is useful information I have because I really like the
Speaker 1: night Witches, you know, like, how can you not They're
Speaker 1: the fucking night Witches.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I'm just rolling through this and we're talking
Speaker 2: like fifteen thousand tons, twenty thousand tons dropped on sebastopool alone,
Speaker 2: Like the numbers here put into contrast. Hell yeah, they
Speaker 2: probably were trying to be targeted in their aiming. Well.
Speaker 1: A total of two hundred and sixty one, which is
Speaker 1: served thirty two of them died during the war from
Speaker 1: a combination of plane crashes, combat deaths, and friend of
Speaker 1: the pod tuberculosis. And I hope that one day some
Speaker 1: kid who grows up listening to this podcast is going
Speaker 1: to grow up thinking about tuberculosis the way I grew
Speaker 1: up thinking about quicksand you know, because it's like fucking
Speaker 1: everywhere in fiction.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's always going to get you I it's still
Speaker 2: probably out there waiting. I guess tuberculosis is coming back
Speaker 2: there so it can be afraid of that again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the developing world or the fucked over world,
Speaker 1: or however you want a phrase. It still suffers a
Speaker 1: lot with tuberculosis. But it's just funny because it is
Speaker 1: in every fucking episode.
Speaker 2: Well, when the antibiotic strains collapsed, then it'll come back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, something that'll look forward to. Some of the night,
Speaker 1: which is did crazy shit like one of them survived
Speaker 1: three different plane crashes and then kept doing it. One
Speaker 1: faked a crash landing to like throw off her attack.
Speaker 1: She just nose dived with the engines off, like oh god,
Speaker 1: you got me, and then like last minute like pulled
Speaker 1: away because you're in a fucking crop duster. It's meant
Speaker 1: to fly close to the ground and shit, you know.
Speaker 1: One of them had all of her legs broken in
Speaker 1: a crash and returned to flying missions despite the doctor
Speaker 1: being like, you can't do that. All of your legs
Speaker 1: are broken, and she's like, got Nazis to kill. Don't
Speaker 1: know what to tell you. They're coolest shit. I don't
Speaker 1: know a ton about the day Bomber unit but I
Speaker 1: know a bit about some of the fighter units. I
Speaker 1: think the other two units didn't stay all women long.
Speaker 1: The Fighter Regiment at least sometimes had to use men
Speaker 1: as tailgunners because not enough of the women recruited were
Speaker 1: tall enough to operate the tailgun of the plane, which
Speaker 1: had obviously been designed by a man putting up by
Speaker 1: Stalin Orsimo. There is one fighter pilot, though, who stands
Speaker 1: out to me, who is probably my favorite person this
Speaker 1: whole week. And she's the one who like whenever I
Speaker 1: have my friends that when I'm doing my research, I
Speaker 1: like messages of being like, oh my god, I found
Speaker 1: the coolest thing, you know, And the coolest thing that
Speaker 1: I found was these screaming deals. Sophie's at work. Sophie
Speaker 1: is giving me an enthusiastic thumbs up and nodding vigorously,
Speaker 1: and I'm totally not deny this. Yeah, okay, Well, here's
Speaker 1: some other podcasts you can listen to and or stuff
Speaker 1: to get. And we'rebecca and I'm really impressed that Sophie
Speaker 1: managed to get all of those different night waking groups
Speaker 1: to sponsor the podcast. At last minute.
Speaker 3: I do not sleep. All I do is think about ads.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's probably true, even though what I said
Speaker 1: was a lie. Don't sleep parts true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, you ever heard of the woman who has
Speaker 4: the most kills as a fighter pilot?
Speaker 2: No, I have not. Sadly, the most famous fighter pilot
Speaker 2: or woman pilot I can think of was a bad
Speaker 2: person that did cool stuff. But we'll talk about her
Speaker 2: another day.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, wait, who is it?
Speaker 2: Hannah Reich who was the test pilot for the Nazis.
Speaker 2: She did some wild stuff flying one of the first helicopters,
Speaker 2: test flying the three rocket jet. She flew into Berlin
Speaker 2: when it was under siege at the end of the
Speaker 2: war to try to get Hitler to leave under gunfire.
Speaker 2: Like crazy stuff. Damn But bad person that did cool things. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: is she did such cool things that she actually has
Speaker 2: to be referenced in air museums regularly because she did
Speaker 2: so many achievements in terms of test piloting.
Speaker 1: That's got to be so awkward every single time, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you go into the museum and it's like there's
Speaker 2: like there's actually a in Tucson, of all places, at
Speaker 2: the museum, there's a list of like famous pilots and
Speaker 2: famous women pilots and they have Hannah Reich there, Like,
Speaker 2: I guess we got to put this black up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about identity politics is
Speaker 1: that it is a useful. It is a useful thing
Speaker 1: to care about, like people at the intersection of different
Speaker 1: oppressions like overcoming barriers and all this shit. It is
Speaker 1: a useful thing. And I am proud of the work
Speaker 1: that women's system trands have done. And like you know
Speaker 1: that said, it doesn't make you a good person if
Speaker 1: you have if you're oppressed along a particular access hey axis.
Speaker 2: In this case, History is difficult and muddy, and human
Speaker 2: culture and relations are not easily put into any form
Speaker 2: of box.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I'm going to put Lydia Litvic into the
Speaker 1: box of my favorite person this week. She is one
Speaker 1: of two women in history to earn the title of
Speaker 1: Flying Ace, which means you've brought down five or more enemies. Right,
Speaker 1: this is no long it's not. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they still a lion ases or not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, they do, and it's still five I believe.
Speaker 1: Okay. The other woman who has this honor is also
Speaker 1: a Soviet World War two pilot. Lydia was the first
Speaker 1: woman in history to kill enemy combatants in the air.
Speaker 1: She fought for two years. She flew sixty six missions
Speaker 1: and she took down and most of these aren't like,
Speaker 1: go kill a guy, right, Most of these missions are like,
Speaker 1: escort these bombers. Right. So it's not like the fact
Speaker 1: that she only quote unquote only has somewhere between seven
Speaker 1: and sixteen victories out of sixty six missions. It's like,
Speaker 1: the best mission is when you don't have to have
Speaker 1: any victories. You just escort the bombers, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the real mission is how many bombers get back home?
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, totally Yeah. So she takes down between seven
Speaker 1: and sixteen victor enemy planes, depending on who's counting. She's
Speaker 1: born to a Jewish family and her father was a
Speaker 1: Party communist, but he was arrested and purged as an
Speaker 1: enemy of the people when when Lydia was a child
Speaker 1: as part of the Great Terror, So the Party commissar
Speaker 1: was always getting Lydia in trouble. During her military career.
Speaker 1: She would show no remorse for slipping out at night
Speaker 1: to go dance with the men. They'd like bring her
Speaker 1: to like trial and be like, are you sorry you
Speaker 1: danced with the men and She's like, no, we're all
Speaker 1: about to die. I danced with some men, you know.
Speaker 1: Her commissar called her as an insult, a swanky, flirtatious
Speaker 1: Avia Trix. Wait, what a name? I know, I know.
Speaker 1: I'm certain she took this as a compliment. She lied
Speaker 1: on her military application. She exaggerated her hours in the
Speaker 1: in the air by like one hundred. In order to
Speaker 1: be you have to have a certain number of hours
Speaker 1: to get into this, like you know, fighting airplane crew
Speaker 1: or whatever. She was like, oh yeah, I have like
Speaker 1: a hundred more, and I actually do. Eventually, they caught her,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't ground her because she was so fucking good.
Speaker 1: She flew on a piece of shitplane, a yak one
Speaker 1: bee made of fabric and wood with one engine. She
Speaker 1: would do shit like when she's coming in for a landing,
Speaker 1: she would like fly bonus acrobatics. That would like piss
Speaker 1: off her commanders because she's endangering herself for no reason,
Speaker 1: you know, and she's a fem hero. They made all
Speaker 1: the women cut their hair short, and she was like, fine,
Speaker 1: if I have to cut my hair short. She threw
Speaker 1: a fit about it. But when she they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna cut my hair short. I'm gonna bleach it.
Speaker 1: And she sent a friend out to get hydrogen peroxide
Speaker 1: so she could bleach her hair. She dyed and sewed
Speaker 1: colorful scarves from parachute materials taken from captured German pilots.
Speaker 1: Right like the fucking POWs. She just like steal their
Speaker 1: fucking parachutes and make fucking victory scarves out of them.
Speaker 1: She kept a picture of red roses in her cockpit,
Speaker 1: and every morning she picked fresh wildflowers and filled her
Speaker 1: cockpit with fresh wild flowers. She also scattered wildflowers on
Speaker 1: the wings of her of the plane as sort of
Speaker 1: a ritual in the mornings before combat. There are these
Speaker 1: probably false go ahead, what.
Speaker 2: An awesome human being, I mean, like all of this together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, yeah, no, I just like, oh my gosh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm she fucking rules.
Speaker 2: I'm looking at I'm looking at a picture of her
Speaker 2: right now with the hair cut like you're described, and
Speaker 2: oh yeah, she cuts an impressive visage. Let's say, yeah,
Speaker 2: that is true. And there are these probably false rumors
Speaker 2: that she had a white lily painted on the side
Speaker 2: of her plane. I'm sure she would have done it,
Speaker 2: but everyone shared planes, and the men might not have
Speaker 2: gone for it. She didn't have like her plane right.
Speaker 2: At one point, she was arrested by her own side
Speaker 2: for sewing fur into the collar of her uniform. Basically
Speaker 2: she's just always getting written up, but for being like
Speaker 2: too cool. A few weeks before her first mission, she
Speaker 2: wrote a letter to her mother, and part of it is, quote,
Speaker 2: what can be in store for me? Either something wonderful
Speaker 2: and magnificent, where everything might collapse in an instant into
Speaker 2: the ordinary routine of the civilian life which ordinary sinners live.
Speaker 2: Of course, I want to live, if only a little,
Speaker 2: but a wild, interesting life. The hour will soon come
Speaker 2: when we shall soar on the wings of hawks, and
Speaker 2: the life we live will be very different. So she's
Speaker 2: just like fucking yolo nihilist anti fascist fem is, just
Speaker 2: just keep liking her more. I want to say something amazing,
Speaker 2: but like, frankly, that left me kind of speechless. It's
Speaker 2: so powerful and stunning and what I what I would
Speaker 2: want to live up to, like on my giving Yeah right,
Speaker 2: I mean that's.
Speaker 1: Amazing, Yeah, totally. The first Nazi she downed was she
Speaker 1: took two down in the first fight, but one of them,
Speaker 1: survived and became a POW. And there's a couple versions
Speaker 1: of this. One is that he like insists to be like,
Speaker 1: I want to see the person who the I want
Speaker 1: to see the man who brought me down, you know,
Speaker 1: and so they like or I think actually the Soviets
Speaker 1: probably just did this to torture him, to be like
Speaker 1: fuck you. But anyway, the Soviets introduce him to Lydia
Speaker 1: just to be like, yeah, you got beat by a
Speaker 1: tiny girl, you Nazi fuck. And she's like twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: During all this fighting, at one point she breaks her
Speaker 1: leg after being shot down after bringing down two enemies
Speaker 1: on her own, and while she's recovering, she becomes internationally famous.
Speaker 1: She's the White Rose of Stalingrad, they called her, and
Speaker 1: they offer an extended leave to recover, and she's like, nah,
Speaker 1: I'm good, I got fucking Nazis to shoot down she apparently.
Speaker 1: And this I just like doubt because it's the same
Speaker 1: story as Ludmilla. She found and married another pilot, but
Speaker 1: soon he died in a plane crash. She might have
Speaker 1: this one, I like more. I mean, she definitely is
Speaker 1: like I mean, she's into boys, you know. She totally
Speaker 1: could have done that. You know, It's also possible people
Speaker 1: just had a lot of short, wild love affairs interrupted
Speaker 1: by violence because it was World War fucking two.
Speaker 2: Well, especially on the Soviet side of this, life was
Speaker 2: so short and cheap, Like, yeah, how could you not
Speaker 2: want to really relish every moment of it you had?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Totally, And so her after his death, her cheerful nihilism,
Speaker 1: as I'm choosing to call it, increased her, like, fuck,
Speaker 1: I just gotta get this shit done.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: On the first of August nineteen forty three, when she
Speaker 1: was twenty one years old, she went down in a
Speaker 1: dog fight against overwhelming odds fighting Nazis while escorting some bombers.
Speaker 1: Because there was no explosion and her body wasn't recovered
Speaker 1: for a long time, she was presumed captured. And therefore,
Speaker 1: do you know that if you're captured by Nazis, you
Speaker 1: were denied like any possible awards.
Speaker 2: I thought it was worse than that. You were not
Speaker 2: just not done, Yeah shoes. If you were to be
Speaker 2: brought back, yeah, you would probably be executed, if not
Speaker 2: at least goologged.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, she doesn't come back, right, she is downed,
Speaker 1: she's dead, but no one knows.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize. It also turned into a meaning that
Speaker 2: you did so post death, you were not that. That's
Speaker 2: Stalin order even meant which provided awards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was denied the award of Hero of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. You had heard of this order? I had
Speaker 1: not heard of this order because Stalin as an evil fuck.
Speaker 1: Soviet prisoners of war were considered by the USSR guilty
Speaker 1: until proven innocent of collaboration. Order Number two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy was a no surrender, no retreat policy written by
Speaker 1: a man who wasn't fighting. This included any pilot who
Speaker 1: fell behind enemy lines and had to like take off
Speaker 1: her uniform before coming back. One of the night Witches
Speaker 1: actually had this happen to her. She had to take
Speaker 1: off her uniform to get back to the fucking lines,
Speaker 1: you know. And since she didn't have her like insignia
Speaker 1: that proves she's a night witch or whatever, they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're a collaborator, and they're going to fucking execute her.
Speaker 1: And she's so loyal according to the version of it,
Speaker 1: that she won't appeal her own case. She's like, if
Speaker 1: Stalin demands it, then I shall die. Supposedly, and then
Speaker 1: she saved the last minute by a commander who's like,
Speaker 1: what are you fucking doing?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah. This is very commonly referred to as not
Speaker 2: a step back order, Yeah, which also became part of
Speaker 2: the Soviet propaganda post order to twenty seven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense, Soviets. Stalin's quote was there are
Speaker 1: no Soviet prisoners of war, only traders. Red army soldiers
Speaker 1: were apparently told that their families would be shot if
Speaker 1: they deserted or you know, let themselves be captured. As
Speaker 1: just an additional you'd better fucking go out fighting. You better,
Speaker 1: I mean, you better fucking shoot yourself, is what they're saying.
Speaker 1: Former prisoners of war were never recognized as veterans, and
Speaker 1: they were denied veterans benefits. This is a one point
Speaker 1: five million soldiers that are I don't know if it
Speaker 1: ever got resolved, but at least at the beginning, I
Speaker 1: fucking hate Stalin. What a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I'm reading this panic makers and cowards
Speaker 2: must be liquidated on the spot, and.
Speaker 1: The panicmakers, yeah, fuck you.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting question to ask, and this is beyond
Speaker 2: the scope. This is a philosophical question almost but the
Speaker 2: amount of people that dedicated, like their lives, both the
Speaker 2: ones that died and survived to the cause of not
Speaker 2: only the feeding fascism, but also being in part of
Speaker 2: what is called in the so USSR and now Russia
Speaker 2: the Great Patriotic War. Yea, what that even with Stalin
Speaker 2: acting that way, they still continued the war, Like how many?
Speaker 2: At what point are you like, this guy's crazy too,
Speaker 2: But I don't think you had a choice, because the
Speaker 2: option was between crazy Stalin and those guys over there
Speaker 2: who are somehow even worse.
Speaker 1: Totally like yeah, the somehow even worse is what's so
Speaker 1: impressive about Hitler, you know, Like I'm like this whole
Speaker 1: thing is like, oh God, I hate Stalin and I'm like,
Speaker 1: but I love the people who fucking stopped the Nazis,
Speaker 1: you know. But so this the White Rose of Stalingrad,
Speaker 1: internationally famous. She's like suddenly persona non grata, someone one
Speaker 1: of her I think, someone that she fought alongside of,
Speaker 1: spent thirty six years searching to find her body. She
Speaker 1: had been buried unidentified, and basically like eventually she finally
Speaker 1: finds us like village and they're like, oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: buried this Lady Pilot. You know, in nineteen ninety she
Speaker 1: was given the award for Hero of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: And somehow she's just my favorite of today's heroes. She's
Speaker 1: twenty one. She decides to fight the Nazis that are
Speaker 1: murdering Jews like her everywhere they go, and she's willing
Speaker 1: to use the war machine that had disappeared her father
Speaker 1: in order to do it. She asked her mother what
Speaker 1: would be in store for her, Something wonderful and magnificent,
Speaker 1: but maybe short or mundanity. She got something wonderful and
Speaker 1: magnificent and short. And we don't get to choose how
Speaker 1: long we live. We only get to choose with what
Speaker 1: time we what we do with the time we have right,
Speaker 1: to paraphrase Gandalf awkwardly, Fuck, I wasn't. I didn't even
Speaker 1: try to put a Lord of the Rings reference into
Speaker 1: this episode. But there you go, Ba, it comes naturally.
Speaker 1: It's just part of it's part of the natural order. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just how it works.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this would have been Gorbachev, and was this award
Speaker 2: to her part of a larger movement of like perastroika
Speaker 2: where he was trying to reform things? Do you know,
Speaker 2: I don't, or was she specifically selected because of her
Speaker 2: amazing achievements. I honestly don't know, and I that's interesting,
Speaker 2: I was a question. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, After the war, Stalin went even more conservative. He
Speaker 1: rebranded the propaganda of like women as warriors towards women
Speaker 1: as patriotic housekeeping. Mothers awards were now given to women
Speaker 1: who bore and raised more than seven children. Divorce laws
Speaker 1: were made stricter. But first, as we've talked about, the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union bled and bled and bled and then stop
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany. There's not really any other honest way to
Speaker 1: look at at it. Everyone helped. Russia lost the most
Speaker 1: in the war to stop Germany, China lost the most
Speaker 1: in the war to stop Imperial Japan. And just to
Speaker 1: get dates correct, it's worth pointing out that the China
Speaker 1: involved in World War Two is not Communist China that
Speaker 1: doesn't kick in until nineteen forty nine. The USSR lost
Speaker 1: roughly ten million soldiers in combat. China lost three to
Speaker 1: four million soldiers in combat. The US lost most of
Speaker 1: lost more than any of the other Western powers at
Speaker 1: roughly four hundred thousand, with the UK close behind at
Speaker 1: like three hundred and eighty four or something off the
Speaker 1: top of my head. The naziason that Japan also lost
Speaker 1: millions each but like fucking Nazi.
Speaker 2: Kind of irrelevant, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it should have been more, yeah yeah, Or should
Speaker 1: have been they should have been three. They should have
Speaker 1: been like, oh, you've killed Hans, we give up, you know, right, no, right,
Speaker 1: interpret that.
Speaker 2: But once it went the way it was, it was like,
Speaker 2: should have been more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. The civilian death toll overall was
Speaker 1: twice as high as the million death toll of World
Speaker 1: War II, but the USSR bled itself to stop fascism.
Speaker 1: The largest battle in World War II was the Battle
Speaker 1: of Moscow. It lasted more than three months. It lasted
Speaker 1: from September nineteen forty one to January nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: The Soviets took more than a million casualties during this
Speaker 1: battle alone, which is more than the rest of the
Speaker 1: Allies took combined for the entire war on the Western Front.
Speaker 1: This battle is the end of Operation Barbarosa, and it
Speaker 1: is the end of the German belief that they'd have Sorry,
Speaker 1: please cut that this battle was the end of Operation
Speaker 1: Barbarosa and the end of the German belief that they'd
Speaker 1: have an easy time conquering in the USSR. And yet
Speaker 1: one interesting thing, the USSR went even more conservative, right,
Speaker 1: But all of these returning POW's, the ones who are
Speaker 1: seen as traders, they go off to Siberian work camps.
Speaker 1: And the thing is is that Siberian work camps are
Speaker 1: full of actual communists, including anarchists and Marxists. And something
Speaker 1: I really want to cover in the few future that
Speaker 1: I came across that I hadn't heard about before. You
Speaker 1: get the Democratic Movement of Northern Russia, which is a
Speaker 1: Marxist and anarchist revolt in nineteen forty seven across the
Speaker 1: Siberian labor camps, and a bunch of the fucking returning
Speaker 1: POW's who've been called collaborators are like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: let's if we're fighting for communism, let's fight for actual
Speaker 1: fucking communism because and this doesn't work, right, But the
Speaker 1: reason I include it is to point out that like
Speaker 1: freedom will pop up everywhere constantly, forever, unrepressibly, even if
Speaker 1: you're fucking Stalin. And that's the story for another time.
Speaker 2: Wow, that sort of does touch on what I mentioned
Speaker 2: A moment ago is how long would they be willing
Speaker 2: to tolerate this? And so the point was that once
Speaker 2: the fascist threat had been removed, this group, which was
Speaker 2: also of course had other reasons to revolt as well
Speaker 2: being put into a prison camp. Yeah for doing their
Speaker 2: service yea, to their country. But like you said, well
Speaker 2: now the time at least for them, they tried at
Speaker 2: least to do what they originally wanted to do in
Speaker 2: the first place. Yeah, And that's noble in its own right.
Speaker 2: And I'd love to hear that topic. That sounds like
Speaker 2: something worth focusing on, because like you said, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's the little weeds in the cracks of the rocks.
Speaker 2: They're irrepressible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, what else is irrepressible is your plugs?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Oh yeah, unstoppable, complete mechanized for so.
Speaker 1: I mean, you did have a pretty major right wing
Speaker 1: attempt to take you down. If anyone like you want, yes,
Speaker 1: another reason to listen to to watch in range. Just
Speaker 1: know that the right wing hates Carl because here was Carl.
Speaker 1: This is my version of your story to Carl is
Speaker 1: cool person, It did cool stuff. Carl is in there
Speaker 1: and he's doing his thing as a you know, gun
Speaker 1: historian and is talking about guns and showing off guns
Speaker 1: and doing like you know, and being very responsible about it.
Speaker 1: And then slowly the right wing starts taking more and
Speaker 1: more control of the you know, certain cultural spheres, and
Speaker 1: then they're like, wait, Carl, Carl's not one of us.
Speaker 1: Carl believes in freedom. And then they all freaked out
Speaker 1: and they were like out with Carl, out with Carl.
Speaker 1: And there's like reddit posts and like subreddits that are
Speaker 1: like committed to outing Carl as a terrible person for
Speaker 1: believing that people should be in charge of themselves and
Speaker 1: be nice to each other. Is that a Is that
Speaker 1: a reasonable?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Like, first of all, it's humbling to hear that,
Speaker 2: and I appreciate you throwing that into the narrative, and
Speaker 2: it is it is true, and thank you for that.
Speaker 2: It turns out, and I mean we've always known that that.
Speaker 2: First of all, the gun community isn't the community. It's
Speaker 2: a group of people that happen to like guns, but
Speaker 2: that doesn't pay a community. That's people that like a thing.
Speaker 2: So that phrase is always erroneous, but it was considered
Speaker 2: as such and putting content to that space before things
Speaker 2: got more visible or more polarized. Yeah, attracted an audience
Speaker 2: that you didn't necessarily always know what they were about.
Speaker 2: But when things got to the nitty gritty, and one
Speaker 2: was willing and I'm not the only one, but one
Speaker 2: of the seems like sadly few visible in that space
Speaker 2: that had at least some share of eyeballs was willing
Speaker 2: to stand up against it and say things like trans
Speaker 2: writes LGBTQ, people have rights to firearms and self defense
Speaker 2: just like you do. Is strangely controversial, take and immediately
Speaker 2: turns you into the enemy of all things good and natural,
Speaker 2: which is of course what fascists do the opposite, Their
Speaker 2: version of what is good and natural is horrible and
Speaker 2: awful and evil. And saying that and drew their ire,
Speaker 2: And you said, Reddit for chanki Wei Farms another site
Speaker 2: I don't even mention that's associated with the air fifteen
Speaker 2: as pages and hundreds and pages of threads of people
Speaker 2: stopping and dosing and all the things. But yet here
Speaker 2: we are, and we still we persevere and hopefully are
Speaker 2: trying to create a more inclusive space for people that
Speaker 2: are interested in this topic or their own self defense
Speaker 2: that otherwise wouldn't have a home and that wasn't that
Speaker 2: was that wasn't an intent or like a strategic goal.
Speaker 2: It was just me being naturally on myself and it
Speaker 2: organically turned into that. But you saying that is a
Speaker 2: real honor and I appreciate that very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so folks should check out Carl's work and check
Speaker 1: out in Range, and folks should check out Cooler Zone
Speaker 1: Media so that you get the strange experience of hearing
Speaker 1: me tossed ads but then having me immediately say and
Speaker 1: we're back. Which here I'll give you an example. This
Speaker 1: is this could be you if you subscribe to Cooler
Speaker 1: Zone Media. But you know what else is fun is
Speaker 1: these products and we're back. See, that's what you could
Speaker 1: have every single time as seeming you have an Apple phone,
Speaker 1: but we're working on Android. That's what I got. That's
Speaker 1: my that's my plug. You can google my name if
Speaker 1: you probably even google my docs. I'd rather you didn't,
Speaker 1: but you know, yeah, I mean whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you google in Range, you find
Speaker 2: all that in an example of how the system works.
Speaker 2: You google in Range and some of the first stuff
Speaker 2: you'll find is what you were just mentioning. So probably
Speaker 2: not that different for you. I'd imagine I haven't. That's
Speaker 2: not as bad interesting it is not.
Speaker 1: Also, I put out so much shit and there's only
Speaker 1: like one group that's been committed to docxing me. And
Speaker 1: it's funny. At one point on Twitter, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: these like neo Nazis are docsing me, and they're like
Speaker 1: they like made a burner account on Twitter to be
Speaker 1: like we're neo Confederates.
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, that's better, all right, okay, yeah, where's
Speaker 2: your white flag? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The funny thing about this is so often I'm
Speaker 2: sure you've encounted this. There's a certain at least I
Speaker 2: have in that space that I work in. These people
Speaker 2: that are like, accuse you of are you saying that
Speaker 2: you support queer rights? And I'm like yeah, and they're
Speaker 2: trying to make it an acquisition decision, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: I think this is a point of pride as a
Speaker 2: human being, as a decent human And it's so funny
Speaker 2: to see them trying to make that a bad thing
Speaker 2: and they're like, hello, yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyways, yeah, Sophia, guys need to plug.
Speaker 3: Uh. My business partner, Robert Evans, has a substack like
Speaker 3: you do. Magpie. Who is this called shatter Zone? Check
Speaker 3: it out.
Speaker 1: It's good. See you all next week when we talk
Speaker 1: about some cool people who did cool stuff. Bye.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 3: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 3: your podcasts.