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