Smart as well as deadly

War History Online has an article about a Russian sniper, Roza Shanina:

In the deep silence of the endless Russian pine forest, a small, lonesome figure was walking, just a few years before the outbreak of the Second World War. She had set out alone, without the permission of her parents, carrying only enough food to keep her on her feet for the long march. She was used to walking; every day, for years, she had walked eight miles to and from her school in the little village closest to her home; she knew she could do it. Her self-belief and determined spirit drove her steadily on. She was fourteen years old.
This was Roza Shanina (photo). She walked one hundred and twenty miles all alone, at last reaching a train station. From the station, she took the train to the city of Arkhangelsk, where she enrolled in the city’s college. She loved the city. The cinemas, the lights, the people and the bustle were worlds away from the isolation of her early years. She was friendly, quick, talkative and highly intelligent, and so she made many friends. Often, she would return to her college dormitory after the doors had been locked, entering with the help of a rope of tied bedsheets let down by her friends inside.
When tuition fees were introduced, she had to find a job to support her studies. The job was at a kindergarten in the city, where she was well liked by the children, the parents, and the other staff. The job came with a little apartment, and for the first time she had a place of her own. She worked during the day and studied at night, and the days were full and happy.
In 1943, she enlisted in the military. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, launching Operation Barbarossa. By 1943, Roza had lost two brothers to the war, and would lose a third before the war was over. The city where she lived had suffered air raids. She joined the Central Female Sniper Academy, where she excelled. In April of 1944, she was given command of an all-female sniper platoon, and was deployed to the front.
In the aftermath of the hard-won Soviet victory at the battle of Stalingrad, the Russians launched a series of counter-attacks against the German army. It was during these actions, in early April of 1944, that Roza took a human life for the first time. She was shaken, but her comrades congratulated her. As the months passed, she became battle-hardened and cold. Seven months after that first kill, her wartime diary recalls her feeling that she had found the true purpose of her life in her actions in battle. She writes that, given the chance to go back, she would not change a thing.
It takes a steady hand and a resolute will to kill at range, and these elite soldiers were indeed resolute. Roza Shanina’s unit screened the advancing infantry. They hunted enemy snipers and picked off enemy officers.
The Soviet commanders were of a mind to keep the sniper units, including the women of Roza’s command, back from the perils of the front in a pitched battle. Despite this policy, the women went where they were needed, and more than once this meant going into action against direct orders. Roza Shanina was sanctioned for disobeying orders, but her actions in combat and the actions of her unit made the commanders relent from pursuing harsh punishment.
The women fought in battle after battle. In one action, their position was stormed by the enemy, and they fought hand-to-hand with bayonets and even shovels, killing many of the enemy and capturing the survivors. In another action, Roza hunted an enemy sniper who was camouflaged in a tree canopy. When dusk fell, the sky behind his tree was lit by the last light of the setting sun, and she was watching. His sniper’s nest showed up clearly in silhouette against the wide sky. She fired her trademark, two shots in very quick succession, and a body slid silently from the tree and thudded to the ground.
By September of 1944, the Soviet army had crossed into German-controlled East Prussia. The German army, embattled though it was, resisted strongly, and the fighting intensified as winter deepened. The Soviets began their full-scale East Prussian Offensive in January of 1945, and the women’s sniper platoon was engaged in heavy fighting. The German army positions held out fiercely against the Russian advance, which involved more than two million soldiers. The Russians advanced steadily toward the city of Königsberg and, in the freezing winter of 1945, the Germans fought hard for every kilometer of ground. Casualties on both sides were terrible, but always the Germans were pushed back under the pressure from the Soviet army.
Everywhere along the front, heavy shelling preceded assaults by tanks, field artillery, and infantry. One by one, the fortified positions still held by the Wehrmacht fell. In villages and towns, ridges, valleys, forests and open plains, vicious fighting took place, yet always the Russians crept forward.
The snipers had been committed to the front of the offensive, and it was at the end of January, after ten months of active service, that the war finally claimed the life of Roza Shanina. Under heavy shelling and machine-gun fire, two Russian officers found her broken body slumped over that of a wounded artillery officer. She had been standing over him with her rifle in her hand and she still clutched it with one hand when they found her. A shell had burst right next to her, and she was mortally wounded. Though they tried to save her life, there was little that could be done, and she died the next day, on 28 January 1945. She was twenty years old.
Roza Shanina was a prolific writer, and her diaries, kept against army regulations, were published many years after the war. They give a profound insight into the determined mentality of this young woman. Before she died, she told a nurse that her only regret was that she had not done more in the war effort. Talented and utterly committed, she gave up everything she had to resist the advance of Fascism against her people. Her story, just one among the stories of the millions who died in the Second World War, resonates to this day.

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