THE AVENGING
Known only as ‘Charcoal’, she is one of the world’s deadliest killers. But, as CHRIS RICKABY reveals, women have been expert snipers since WWII
DRESSED in camouflage fatigues, her identity concealed by a bandana, a powerful rifle slung casually over her shoulder, and a holstered pistol at her waist, the Ukrainian sniper known only by her codename ‘Charcoal’ returned to action last month. Hailed a national hero, the markswoman first joined the marines in 2017 and fought Kremlin-backed separatists in the Donbas region before leaving the military.
Following Russia’s invasion at the end of February, however, she returned to combat operations with Ukraine’s 35th Infantry Brigade in April, a potent weapon both on the battlefield and in the propaganda war, vowing to fight Russia “to the very end”.
On the Russian side, an elite female sniper was recently captured by Ukrainian forces after being left for dead on the battlefield. The sharpshooter, Irina Starikova, codenamed ‘Bagira’ and thought to be from Serbia, has been wanted by the Ukrainians since 2014.
Said to be divorced with two daughters, Starikova is wanted for killing 40 people, including civilians, according to local reports. She has been fighting with separatist forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine since 2014 and, in a strangely literary twist, is married to Alexander Ogrenich, also a sniper who goes by the name ‘Slavic
Dragon’.
Strange as it might seem, the idea of women snipers is nothing new in the history of modern warfare, especially in Ukraine and Russia where there is a tradition of idolising sharpshooters and celebrating their accomplishments.
While it is not known how many kills ‘Charcoal’ has notched up, she is following in the footsteps of fellow Ukrainian Lyudmila
Pavlichenko who killed 309
Nazis during the Second World
War and earned the terrifying nom de guerre ‘Lady Death’.
According to instructors at the
Central Women’s Sniper Training
School at Veshnyaki, near
Moscow, which trained female sharpshooters during the
Second World War, young women made better killers than their male counterparts.
They were thought to have more patience than the men, and could endure stress and cold better while waiting for the perfect shot. Today, such lethal “female traits” are once again in demand.
Pavlichenko was born in
1916 in Bila Tserkva near
Kiev in Ukraine. An athletic tomboy, “unruly in class”, she refused to be outdone by boys “in anything” and practised marksmanship at a shooting club.
When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 she was eager to enlist.
But women were a rarity in the Russian army and officials urged her to become a nurse and it was only when the 24-year-old insisted she was a crack shot that she earned an audition, confronting Romanian troops advancing with the Germans on Odessa.
After being handed a Russian-made Mosinnagant bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight – a firearm that weighed nine pounds and kicked like a mule – she was pointed in the direction of enemy troops dug in 400 yards away.
“I took very careful aim and fired,” she
recalled. “My Romanian dropped. I waited for a fraction of a second, another head appeared over the top. I got that one too. A third Romanian fled. That was my baptism of fire. From that time I regarded myself, and so did my comrades, as a fully fledged sniper.”
By the time she was finally withdrawn from front-line combat, she had 309 confirmed kills – 36 of them enemy snipers, perhaps the most deadly opponents – to her name.
In one instance, Pavlichenko participated in a deadly duel that lasted three whole days before she emerged victorious. One missed shot or mistimed movement might have given away her position and seen her shot dead.
Such deadly skills led to the harried Germans calling female snipers “Bolshevik beasts” and “Amazons devoid of femininity”.wounded four times in battle, she survived to become the first Soviet soldier to be received by a US president when she met with President Franklin D Roosevelt at thewhite House.
Her face appeared on postage stamps, songs were written about her and she became a ferocious advocate for women’s equality.
FIGHTING in Sevastopol in 1942, Pavlichenko was hit by shrapnel. Because of her propaganda value, she was pulled out of the frontline and toured the United States as part of Stalin’s bid to persuade the Americans to start a second front in Western Europe and take pressure off the Red Army. Incredibly, she became good friends with another pioneering woman, Eleanor Roosevelt.
But she was irritated by the constant questions from American journalists about the style of her clothes and lack of make-up. As she pointedly told one of them: “Who had time to think of her shiny nose when there is a battle going on?”
Given the risks, volunteering to be a sniper was a little bit like writing your own suicide note. Between 1941–1945, nearly 2,500 Soviet women served as snipers. Just 500 or so survived the war. Another notable Soviet sniper Roza Shanina – credited with 59 kills – was mortally injured while shielding a wounded officer. She was found by two soldiers with her chest torn open and died aged just 20.
Named after the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, Shanina killed a German ‘cuckoo’ (military slang for a sniper hiding in a tree) on one occasion by waiting until dusk.
Back lit by the setting sun, the cuckoo became momentarily visible. Shanina took her shot, and he was killed instantly.
Born near the city of Archangel, she loved to write. By all accounts a bright, engaging, and talkative personality, she used to sing a particular Russian folk song – “O My Mists” – as she cleaned her rifle. Although diaries were prohibited by the Soviet authorities, the spirited Shanina kept one. In it, she noted that she felt an unknown force drawing her towards danger and the frontline.
The diary’s final entry recorded how Nazi fire had become so intense she’d had to shelter inside the large barrels of an artillery gun.
Shortly afterwards, she was discovered by two Red Army soldiers with her chest torn open by an enemy shell fragment. Poignantly, a nurse who tended her at the end recalled Shanina telling her she regretted having done so little with her short life.
In City Of Ghosts and A Traitor’s Heart, the two Soviet-era thrillers I have co-written with journalist Barney Thompson under the pen name Ben Creed, we tried hard to base key elements of our female characters on the reallife achievements of women like Pavlichenko and Shanina and other historical female combatants.
OUR RECURRING fictional character Vassya Vasiliyeva, whom our militia detective, Rossel – a former virtuoso violinist whose hands have been mangled under torture – encounters in both books is a former pilot in the allfemale 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Known as the “Night Witches”, they earned their chilling sobriquet because of their method of attack – flying during the hours of darkness, they would cut the engines of their antiquated biplanes and glide over their targets to drop bombs.with only the noise of the wind on their aircraft’s wings and struts revealing their positions, the unnerved Germans on the ground likened the sound to that of broomsticks.
In a subtle way, our female leads are an attempt to evoke what academics Roger D Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona in their paper Soviet Women On The Frontline In The Second World War, called “Warrior women”.
The researchers describe them as “a model of Stalinist feminism and steadfastness”. Or, as Pavlichenko, herself, dryly put it: “It occurred to me: why should some boy be able to shoot well and not I?”
What we had not anticipated, when writing the Revol Rossel series is how uncannily history would begin to repeat itself.
Both ‘Charcoal’ and her Russian rival ‘Bagira’ seem to have walked directly out of our pages, right down to their enigmatic nom de guerres. The Ukrainian ‘Charcoal’ even evoked the Great Patriotic War her distinguished predecessors fought in, saying of her Russian foes: “These people are not human beings. Even the fascists were not as vile as these orcs. We must defeat them.”
‘Charcoal’ and ‘Bagira’ do, of course, differ from Pavlichenko and Shanina in one very important way – they are on opposite sides of the same conflict.
If, before ‘Bagira’s’ recent capture, they had found themselves in the same terrain, their sights would be trained on each other.
Recalling what Lyudmila Pavlichenko told The New York Times during her visit to America – “The only feeling I have… is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey” – it seems the most patient woman would be the one who became Death.
A Traitor’s Heart by Ben Creed (Welbeck, £12.99) is out now. For free UK P&P on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com