Posted on by bugsy122019

The Lady was a Sniper

In honor of Woman’s History Month, I thought we could take a look at an amazing Ukrainian woman, Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She was born on July 12, 1916, in Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv Oblast of what was then Russia. Her family moved to Kyiv in 1930 where she worked as a grinder at the Kyiv Arsenal Factory. She admitted that she was extremely competitive and a bit of a tomboy, and was delighted to join a shooting club in Kyiv, where she became an excellent sharpshooter. In 1937 Lyudmila entered the Kyiv University (studying history🥰). But life changed on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavicenko, Hero of the Soviet Union

Like so many others, she immediately volunteered, and ended up in Odessa, where she was ordered to Nurses Training. She refused, insisting that she would be more useful as a marksman. She was assigned to the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division. Weapons were in short supply, but when a sniper in her unit was wounded, she took his Mosin-Nagant 189 bolt-action rifle and immediately shot two Germans. With that, she officially became a sniper. Pavlichenko spent the next ten weeks at the siege of Odessa, during which she accrue 187 kills and quickly was nicknamed “Lady Death.”

As the Romanians wrested Odessa from the Soviets in October 1941, the Russians withdrew toward Sevastopol, in Crimea, which also came under siege. By May 1942, the new Lieutenant was cited by the Southern Army Council for having another 257 kills. In June, she was hit with shrapnel from a mortar. She was evacuated via submarine and spent a month in a hospital in Moscow.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko c.1942

With a total of 309 kills, Pavlichenko was more important to the Soviets as a spokesman than sending her back to the front. Instead, she went on a propaganda tour throughout the country. She then was out a tour to both Canada and the US where she met both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House, and spoke in both Chicago and New York City. On returning to the Soviet Union, she trained new sharpshooters and snipers until the end of the war.

Justice Robert Jackson, Lt. Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Eleanor Roosevelt

After the war, she went back to Kyiv and graduated from the University with her history degree. Ultimately she became the Senior Researcher for the USSR’s Navy Headquarters. After dealing with what we now understand to be PTSD for years, she died of a stroke at the age of 58 in 1974.

Posted on by bugsy122019

Black History Month–we remember Ralph J. Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche, 1904-1971

I was very surprised to learn that some student’s didn’t know who Ralph Bunche was, so Black History Month is the perfect time to learn about an extremely influential American—and international—leader.

Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit on August 7, 1904. His father, Fred, was not an involved parent, so when Ralph’s mother, Olive, developed serious medical issues in 1915, she moved to Albuquerque, NM, with her children, Ralph and Grace, was born in 1909, along with her mother Lucy Johnson, and the children’s uncle. However, Olive Bunche died in 1917 and three months later, her brother committed suicide. Looking for a better life for all of them, Ralph and Grace’s grandmother took both children to Los Angeles in 1918. There, Ralph was an excellent athlete, and an outstanding student, graduating as the valedictorian from Jefferson High School in 1923. He then attended UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian in 1927.

Bunche received a scholarship to Harvard University where he earned a Master’s degree in 1928 and Ph.D. in political science in 1934. In 1936 he published his first book, A World View of Race. He went on to do post-graduate work at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. While working on his dissertation at Harvard, he began teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he revamped the Political Science department. In addition, in 1940 he worked as the lead investigative research and writer for An American Dilemma with Swedish sociologist Gunner Myrdal. Also while working a Howard, Bunche became one of the new generation of Black American intellectuals who believed that integration was necessary and overdue in the US. He worked with men such as A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and served on the board of the NAACP.

When World War II arrived at America’s shores, Bunche moved from Howard University to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he served as the senior social analyst. He then moved over to the State Department where he was an adviser for the US delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. He also provided much preliminary work for the United Nations conference in San Francisco, particularly Chapter XI and XII of the UN Charter, and working closely with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Count Folke Bernadotte and Ralph Bunche

In 1947, the first Secretary General of the UN, Trygve Lie asked Bunche to act as Director of the Trusteeship Committee. He accepted, and in 1948 joined the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine. On September 17, 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, the chief UN mediator of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was assassinated in Jerusalem. The Secretary General requested that Bunche take up Bernadotte’s work, and in 1949 he got both sides to agree to the Armistice Agreement between Israel and Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon and Syria. In 1950, Bunche became the first African American to received the Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of the most important, and famous, men in the US at that point. President Truman asked that he become Assistant Secretary of State, and later, President Kennedy asked Bunche to serve as Secretary of State. He preferred to continue his work in the United Nations.

Over the years, Bunche became the Director of Peacekeeping in the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Congo in 1960, and Cyprus in 1964. By the late 1960’s he was the Undersecretary-General for Special Political Affairs. He had received 69 honorary doctorates, and numerous awards, most importantly, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s very possible that he could have gone on to be the Secretary General of the UN. Unfortunately, Bunche had diabetes, and other medical issues, and decided to retired in 1971. He died on December 9, 1971 and is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City.

Hopefully, you’ll look a little deeper into a quiet man who did so much to make both the United States and the world a better place. If you’re looking for a good book about him, take a look at Brian Urquart’s Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.