Klavdiya Kalugina

Klavdiya Kalugina was one of the youngest Soviet snipers who fought during World War 2.

Born in 1926, Kalugina was aged 15 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, at which time she was working in a munitions factory. Shortly after the invasion she joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and in 1943 she was accepted into a Komsomol sniper school. Although she initially struggled with the training, Kalugina credited her graduation from the school to the patience of her squad commander. 

Kalugina was sent to the front lines in March 1944 where she joined the 3rd Belorussian Front. Aged 17, she operated in a sniper/spotter team with a girl who she had trained with, Marusia Chikhvintseva. Her usual weapon was a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a PU scope, with which she engaged enemies at distances from as close as 200 metres to as far as 1200. She described her objective as eliminating key targets such as enemy commanders and machine gun emplacements, making one shot per day from a heavily camouflaged position and then returning to base at night. 

Kalugina survived the war, although her partner, Chikhvintseva, did not. There is no account of her life following the end of the war.

An interview with Kalugina describing her experiences of her wartime experiences in detail can be read here.

Defenders of Warsaw

Polish women march through the streets of Warsaw as part of the city's defense forces during the German Invasion of Poland, 16th September 1939.

Photo from The Atlantic.

Minnie Spotted Wolf

Minnie Spotted Wolf (1923–1988) was the first Native American woman to serve in the United States Marine Corps.

A member of the Blackfoot tribe, Spotted Wolf spent her childhood working on her father's ranch in Heart Butte, Montana, where she cut fence posts, drove trucks and broke horses. She first expressed an interest in joining the army when she was aged 18, shortly after the US entered into World War 2 at the end of 1941. However she was initially discouraged by a recruitment officer who told her that the war was 'not for women'. 

Spotted Wolf was eventually accepted into the Marine Corps Women's Reserve in July 1943, making her the first Native American female Marine. She almost did not accept the post as her father was dying from a horse riding accident, however her mother and sister strongly encouraged her to pursue her ambitions. She underwent rigorous boot camp training at Camp Lejeune, during which she gained 15 pounds of weight from the diet and rigorous exercise. She later described the training as "hard, but not too hard" given her background on the ranch. 

On completion of her training Spotted Wolf went on to serve 4 years in the Marines in California and Hawaii. She drove trucks loaded with heavy equipment, a job normally reserved for men, and also sometimes worked as a jeep driver for visiting generals. Spotted Wolf's career quickly gathered media attention and she was featured in numerous news stories, and even her own comic book, to promote the war effort. 

Following her discharge in 1947, Spotted Wolf returned to Montana where she married a farmer named Robert England with whom she had four children. She attended college to qualify as a teacher and spent the next 29 years teaching in reservation schools. She died in 1988 aged 65 and was buried in her military uniform. 

British Women in World War 2

From a guide for US troops stationed in Britain in World War 2:

'A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can and often does give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this war. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at the gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing in her duty under fire.

Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect.'

Ack Ack Girls

'Ack Ack Girls' were members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) that helped operate Anti-Aircraft Guns in the defense of Britain from German bombing raids during World War 2. 

From 1941 onward all unmarried British women aged 20 to 30 were required to join one of the Auxiliary services, which included the ATS. One of the most dangerous and exciting ATS roles was to be selected for 'Ack Ack' duty, manning the Anti-Aircraft guns known for their distinctive ack-ack sound as they fired. The idea to use women in gun crews was first proposed by British engineer Caroline Haslett and was eagerly approved by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill's own daughter, Mary Soames, was one of the first Ack Ack volunteers and served at a gun site in London's Hyde Park.

As a royal proclamation forbade women from operating deadly weapons, Ack Ack Girls worked as part of mixed-gender squads where men would load and fire the weapons with the women's support. The three main roles of the women were Spotters who used binoculars to find enemy planes, Range-Finding teams who calculated the distance a gun shell would have to travel to hit the target, and Predictor teams who worked out the length of the fuse necessary to make sure the shell exploded at the right height.

Women were subject to the same intensive training as men and  had to undergo rigorous testing in terms of fitness, hearing, eyesight and nerves in order to be accepted. This was essential for enduring the hard conditions at the gun emplacements and to keep on task while bombs fell all around them. When the Germans deployed V1 flying bombs against Britain, 369 Ack Ack Girls were killed in just 3 months. Their sacrifice and dedication proved invaluable to the war effort, as well as providing a boost to civilian morale, the sound of the Ack Ack guns becoming a well-recognised symbol of British resistance.

Read a personal account of Ack Ack Girl, Vee Robinson, here.

Marina Raskova

Marina Raskova (1912-1943) was a Soviet pilot, navigator, and commander who founded 3 famous female air regiments during the Second World War. 

Born to a middle-class Russian family, Raskova initially had aspirations of becoming a musician, but eventually abandoned the idea to study chemistry. While working in a dye factory as a chemist she met Sergei Raskov, an engineer, who she married and had a daughter with. She changed careers in 1931 when she joined the Aerodynamic Navigation Lab of the Soviet Air Force as a draftswoman. Aged 19 in 1933 she became the first female navigator in the Air Force and the following year became the first woman to teach at the Zhukovskii Air Academy.

In 1935 she divorced from her husband and focused on her flying career. She become a famous pilot as well as a navigator, setting a number of long distance records. This included the famous 'Flight of the Rodina' covering 6000km from Moscow to Komsomolsk, which she conducted with two other female pilots, Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. However the flight ran into difficulties at the end of its 26 and a half hour journey when poor visibility hampered the landing. As the navigator's pit was vulnerable in crash landings, Raskova bailed out with a parachute while the two pilots completed the landing.  She survived with no water and almost no food for 10 days before she found her way to landing site and reunited with her team. All 3 women were decorated with the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ award, the first women ever to receive it. 

With the outbreak of World War 2 the Soviet Union was in need of pilots and many women volunteered. However while there were no formal restrictions on Soviet women in the military, many found their applications were denied or mysteriously delayed. Raskova proposed the creation of women's aviation units and used her celebrity status to propose the idea directly to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Following a speech by Raskova in September 1941 calling for women pilots to be welcomed into the war, Stalin ordered the creation of 3 new air regiments, the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment, and the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, dubbed The Night Witches. These regiments were entirely formed of women, from the pilots to the engineers to the support staff. Each regiment contained around 400 women, most of them in their early twenties, who completed 4 years' worth of training in a matter of months. 

Raskova personally took command of the 125th Bomber Regiment, for which she obtained the very best equipment available, including the state-of-the-art Petlyakov Pe-2 bombers, which caused some resentment from male units. The 125th regiment went on to fly 134 missions over the course of the war, dropping over 980 tons of bombs.

Raskova herself was killed on January 4th 1943, while attempting to lead two other Pe-2's to a safe airfield. She was forced into making a forced landing on the Volga Bank, which resulted in the deaths of the entire bomber crew. Raskova received the first state funeral of the war and her ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall beside those of fellow pilot, Polina Osipenko. She was posthumously awarded the Order of Patriotic War 1st Class and the regiments she created continued to serve for the duration of the war.

Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes (1921-1944) was a Jewish Hungarian resistance fighter who was parachuted behind German lines in World War 2.

The child of a Jewish family in Hungary, Szenes showed a talent for writing from a young age. She was accepted into a Protestant private school, however in spite of a 'gifted student' discount she still had to pay double the regular fees because she was Jewish. Combined with her awareness of the worsening situation for Jews in Hungary, this led her to join Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist youth movement.

In 1939 Szenes traveled to the British Mandate of Palestine where she studied agriculture and wrote poetry and plays about Kibbutz life. In 1941 she joined the Jewish paramilitary force Haganah and in 1943 volunteered to join the British Special Operations Executive to train as a paratrooper. After training in Egypt she was selected to take part in an operation to infiltrate German-occupied Europe and establish links with beleaguered Jewish communities.

On March 14th 1944 Szenes was parachuted into Yugoslavia along with two men, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein. Their mission was to enter Hungary and help save Hungarian Jews from being deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The team spent 3 months working with Yugoslavian partisans, during which they discovered that Hungary had been forcibly occupied by German forces in retaliation for attempting to surrender to the Allies. Faced with this new information Palgi and Goldstein decided to call off the mission. Szenes disagreed and pressed on to the Hungarian border alone, however not long after crossing she was arrested by Hungarian police. 

Szenes was imprisoned and suffered a brutal interrogation by police who wanted to know the code for the radio transmitter she used to communicate with the partisans and the British. She was stripped, tied to a chair, and whipped and clubbed for 3 days. She lost several of her teeth. Yet she refused to surrender the code and so she was transferred to a Budapest prison where she continued to be tortured. Frustrated that she wouldn't break, the guards brought in her mother, who she had not seen for 5 years, and threatened her life. Despite this Szenes still refused to give up the code and eventually her mother was released.

Szenes spent the next three months in prison but was not idle. She communicated with other prisoners using a mirror to flash signals and used large cut-out letters to spell out messages in Hebrew. She often sang to keep up the spirits of the other prisoners. However in late October she was tried for treason and on November 7th 1944 she was executed by a German firing squad. 

Following the end of the war, Szenes became widely known when her diary, poetry and plays were published. She was recognised as a national heroine of Israel and in 1950 her remains were reburied in the military cemetery on Mt Herzl in Jersualem.

One of the final entries in her diary contained a poem reading:

In the month of July I shall be twenty-three,

 I played a number in a game,

The dice have rolled. I have lost.

Italian Maquis Fighter

An Italian Maquis freedom fighter braves the hazardous conditions of the Alps at Little St Bernard Pass, 4th January 1945. The Italian Maquis were a resistance movement which fought against German Nazis and Italian fascists before and during World War 2. Formerly a school teacher, this woman chose to fight alongside her husband as part of the Maquis 'White Patrol'.

Yevdokiya Zavaliy

Yevdokiya Zavaliy was a Soviet nurse, soldier and marine commander who fought in World War 2.

Born in 1924, Zavaliy was raised in a small village in the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine, where she worked on a farm. She was brutally exposed to the outbreak of World War 2 when enemy planes bombed her village and in the aftermath she treated injured soldiers by ripping up bed sheets from her home to make improvised bandages. The event left such an impression on her that she persuaded the commander of a cavalry regiment to take her with them to the front line, claiming to be 18 years old when she was in fact 16. 

Zavaliy started serving with the regiment as a nurse, but during this time she learned to shoot rifles, pistols and machine guns. She also became directly involved in conflicts, taking a wound to the abdomen during the retreat at Khortytsia island and saved the life of a wounded officer by dragging him to safety. She was awarded the Order of the Red Star for her bravery, but this was only to be the first decoration she would receive.

One day an officer mistook Zavaliy for a man as she wore soldier's clothes and her head had been shaved to remove lice. The officer ordered her to join a group of soldiers headed to the front line. Zavaliy decided to go along with the mistake and two hours later she took part in a battle near Goryachy Kluch with the 6th Airborne Brigade. She continued to serve in numerous battles under her new male identity and following her capturing of a German officer in combat she was appointed to commander of a reconnaissance squad. When Soviet troops were starving near Mozdok in late 1942, Zavaliy mounted a daring night raid across a river to a German camp, where she stole ammunition and provisions before sailing away on a raft.

The following year Zavaliy was a sergeant serving in the Kuban region when her company was surrounded during a heavy firefight and the company commander was killed. Seeing her fellow soldiers faltering Zavaliy took command, shouting for the men to follow her and leading them in a furious counter-attack which broke the enemy and sent them into retreat. The battle left her seriously injured and during her treatment the doctors discovered that she was a woman. Zavaliy expected to be dismissed and return to nursing, however in light of her many achievements she was allowed to stay in the army and in October 1943 she was promoted to commander of a submachine gunner platoon. 

While the men of her platoon were initially reluctant to follow the orders of a teenage girl, Zavaliy quickly won their respect. The platoon was repeatedly deployed to the forefront of the most intense fighting, where Zavaliy led her men in daring attacks on German lines, taking part in the defense of the Caucasus, the battle for Crimea and ultimately the Soviet expansion across Eastern Europe. She became so feared by German soldiers that they nicknamed her 'Frau Black Death'. Twice she was believed to have been killed in combat but both times she returned unscathed. In her military career she was wounded a total of 4 times and received approximately 40 medals of honour.

Zavaliy was eventually discharged from the army in 1947 and traveled to Kiev where she married and had 2 children. She spent much of her life working as the manager of a grocery store but also toured many cities and army bases where she was celebrated as a military hero. She died in Kiev in 2010.

Soviet Guerrillas

Soviet guerrillas operating in Russia during World War 2. 

Janina Forbertówna

Janina Forbertówna was a Polish resistance fighter who took part in the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation in 1944. Using the codename 'Jasia' she worked as a liaison officer in the communist partisan Armia Ludowa, or 'People's Army'. What became of her after the failed uprising is unknown.

Violette Morris

Violette Morris (1893-1944) was a decorated French athlete, race car driver, military nurse and Nazi intelligence operative.

A wild child from a French noble family, Morris spent her teenage years in a convent where she displayed an incredible aptitude for sports. At the age of 15 she was competing at the highest levels of boxing, swimming, weightlifting, javelin, shot put and discus. She was fond of describing herself with her cheeky motto "Anything a man can do, Violette can do".

Morris married Cyprien Gouraud in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War. During the war she served as military nurse driving an ambulance on the front lines during the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. She also served as a warzone motorcycle courier, wrecking her bike on the crater-filled terrain at least three times, but always completing her mission.

After the war Morris returned to sports, playing for various French Women's Football teams and winning Olympic gold medals for discus, javelin and shot put. Her life driving on the front lines had given her a passion for speed and she competed twice in the Bol d'Or driving a 750cc Benjamin Ruby cyclecar. In 1923 she became the the French national boxing champion. Morris also defied society's expectations of women in her personal life, dressing in men's clothes, smoking heavily and swearing frequently. She was publicly known to be bisexual and was photographed attending the Parisian lesbian nightclub, Le Monocle. In 1929 she had a double mastectomy, stating that her large breasts interfered with her race car driving.

Public opinion eventually turned against Morris. She was banned from entering the 1928 Olympics and was subsequently smeared in the French press. Repeatedly forbidden from entering sporting competitions, Morris became bitter toward French society and in 1935 she agreed to become a spy for Nazi Germany. She was rewarded with a personal invitation from Adolf Hitler to be an honoured guest at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Morris provided Germany with French tank schematics and plans of France's defenses along the the Maginot Line, information which proved integral to the German invasion of France in World War 2.

Following the German occupation of France, Morris became a member of the Carlingue, the French wing of the Gestapo secret police. She operated in counter-intelligence working against British SOE forces that were supporting the French Resistance. She was so effective in infiltrating resistance networks and extracting information through torture that she became known as the 'Gestapo's Hyena'. Her notorious success eventually led to resistance forces plotting to assassinate her. On April 26th 1944 Morris was driving her sports car when she was fatally ambushed by Resistance commandos armed with machine guns. Nobody claimed her body and she was buried in a communal grave.

Women's Army Corps Members

Members of the US Women's Army Corps at Camp Shanks, New York, on February 2nd 1945. This photo was taken before the women shipped out to Europe as part of an 800-strong Black American WAC battalion serving in World War 2.

Sara Ginaite

Sara Ginaite was a Jewish Lithuanian partisan who fought against Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

Ginaite was born in 1924 in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. She was educated in a Lithuanian-speaking school, which she was about to graduate from when Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941. Three of Ginaite's uncles were killed in the Kaunas Pogrom, a massacre of Jewish people that the Nazi's encouraged the Lithuanian population to perform. The pogrom resulted in the deaths of 9200 people, almost half of them children. The surviving members of Ginaite's family were incarcerated in the Kovno Ghetto, along with 40,000 Jewish people.

While living in the ghetto Ginaite joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization (AFO) to take part in the resistance against the Nazis. She began a relationship with their charismatic youth leader, Misha Rubinson, and the two married in 1943. The pair broke out of the Kovno Ghetto that winter, escaping to the Rudninkai Forest where they established a partisan military unit named 'Death to the Occupiers'.

Ginaite returned to the Kovno Ghetto twice to help others to escape, once disguised as a nurse claiming she was there to escort four sick workers. In 1944 Ginaite and Rubinson took part in the liberation of the Vilna and Kovno ghettos, although by this time 90% of the Jewish populations inside had been killed. Ginaite's own family were all dead, save for her sister and a young niece.

After the war, Ginaite fought against rampant anti-semitism to become a professor of Political Economics at Vilnius University, where she published award-winning books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. Following her husband's death in 1983, she moved to Canada to live with her two daughters and continue her academic career.

Aleksandra Samusenko

Aleksandra Samusenko (1922-1945) was a Soviet Ukrainian tank commander during World War 2.

Samusenko began her military service as a member of an infantry platoon fighting in the Winter War in Finland. Some rumours say she had previously fought in the Spanish Civil War, but these are unsubstantiated.

As World War 2 continued she graduated from tank academy and became commander of a crew operating a T-34 tank. She was the only female tanker in the 1st Guards Tank Army. In 1943 she received the the Order of the Red Star for bravery in the Battle of Kursk, where her crew destroyed three German Tiger I tanks. 

Samusenko was befriended by US Army Sergeant Joseph Beyrle, who had escaped from a prison camp and persuaded Samusenko to let him join her unit en route to Berlin. She was also known to have a boyfriend named Mindlin, who she stopped smoking and drinking for. 

Samusenko died 70 km from Berlin during the East Pomeranian Offensive, when she was accidentally run over by another Soviet tank in the dark. After her death Beyrle described her as a symbol of Soviet fortitude and courage.

Women Members of the Maquis

Women members of the Maquis display the rifles and pistols they used to fight the Nazi garrison in Marseille before the entry of Allied troops, 1944.

Elena Haas

Elena Haas (1912-1945) was a Czech resistance fighter during World War 2.

A young woman beginning a career in civil engineering, Haas was 25 years old when Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. She joined the Czech Resistance movement to fight against Nazi occupation, where her engineering skills made her an excellent saboteur, identifying where to plant explosive charges for maximum damage to structures.

In September 1944 she led a strategic raid, aided by a French agent and British special operatives. During this mission she successfully destroyed a key bridge and stocks of Nazi ammunition and supplies. 35 enemy soldiers were killed in the process.

Haas died in early 1945 leading a force of Czech partisans against a Nazi airfield near Prague. During the mission she was shot down, still firing her own weapon as she fell to the ground.

Italian Resistance Fighters

Italian resistance fighters who helped South African troops in Pistoia locate German snipers during the Second World War.

Emilia Gierczak

Emilia Gierczak (1925-1945) was a Polish commander who fought for the Soviet-aligned Polish army during World War 2.

Raised by a family of patriotic farmers, Gierczak graduated school in 1938 and became a teacher and scout leader. When World War 2 broke out in the following year, Gierczak’s family was one of the first to be deported to work on Russian farms following the Soviet Invasion of Eastern Poland. 

In 1943 both Gierczak and her father were called up for military service and initially served in the Tadeusz Kosciuszko 1st Division. She then served as a platoon commander in the newly created all-female military unit in the Polish army, known as the Emilia Plater Independent Women’s Battalion (named after Emilia Plater, the leader of a Polish uprising, who Gierczak may herself have been named after). Gierczak later went on to provide her expertise as an officer commanding male platoons.

Gierczak fought with distinction on the Pomeranian Rampart near Kolobrzeg (formerly known as Kolberg). She was killed there on March 17th 1945, on a mission to assault a heavily defended enemy building. According to one witness Gierczak could have waited until night to gain an advantage, but chose not to as she didn’t want to be seen as cowardly by doing so. During the assault she was shot in the head. On seeing this her men reportedly flew into a vengeful rage, pushing forward and completing the mission in her name.

A street in Kolobrzeg is named after Gierczak, as well as a number of schools and scouting organisations.

Russian Snipers

“Female snipers of 3rd army, 1st Belorussian front.

From left to right :

1st row down is a senior non-commission officer V.N. Stepanova (20 kills), a senior non-commission officer Y.P. Belousova (80 kills , a senior non-commission officer А.Е. Vinogradova (83 kills);

2nd row is the second lieutenant Е.К. Zibovskaya (24 enemies), a senior non-commission officer К.F. Мarinkina (79 enemies), a senior non-commission officer О.S. Маrjenkina (70 enemies);

3rd row is the second lieutenant N.P. Belobrova (70 kills) , a lieutenant N.А. Lobkovskaya (89 kills) , the second lieutenant V.I. Аrtamonova, a senior non-commission officer М.G. Zubchenkо (24 kills);

4th row is non-commission officer N.P. Оbuchovskaya (64 kills), a non-commission officer А.R. Belyakova (24 kills)”

Source: Tales of War