Part Four: A Tale of Two Snipers: Simo Häyhä, Lyudmila Pavlichenko & the Eastern Front

In the conclusion of this special 4-part episode, Margaret continues her conversation with firearms historian Karl Kasarda about two WWII snipers on the Eastern Front defending their homeland, a Finnish man and a Ukrainian woman who couldn't have been more different.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, a lot more than anyone else
can really say for the most part.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah. And our producer is Sophie Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Sophie Hi, I'm happy. Danil just sent me a really
cute photo of his dog helping him edit.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Hey, Ian.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
And on Woman did our theme song.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
And our moral support is by rentro and Anderson.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Whenever I think of Ryntron and I say his name,
I get that woman. I just love him.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
She's definitely a good a good companion for sure. It
makes life a better place.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
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

(02:12):
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

(02:36):
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,

(02:58):
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

(03:21):
US in the nineteen forties is a fairly sexist place.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
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

(03:57):
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

(04:18):
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?

Speaker 2 (04:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
My god, yeah yeah, And then it is like I
am one of the most highly decorated military people in history.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Sick burn as they say.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
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

(05:25):
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,

(05:47):
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

(06:08):
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.

(06:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
You know, it's like Napoleon with his canned food.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
Woh, Napoleon and canned food.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Oh wait, did you know this is interesting?

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Prepper here? Oh Poleon?

Speaker 2 (07:18):
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

(07:41):
supply lines in a way that no one else could.
And it was hugely effective.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
It's pretty fascinating.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
That's rough stuff. I mean, but I was. I was
talking about this the other day and it's like, what.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
About consulting that sucks and hurts your teeth?

Speaker 2 (08:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah yeah, hell yeah, that's my plan for my This
is not in my proper podcast. Let's go back to
the history.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Part, right, Sorry, that's another day.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
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

(09:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
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?

Speaker 1 (09:35):
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,

(10:00):
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

(10:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
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

(11:09):
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,

(11:30):
we're like talking about literally twenty percent survival rate for
the snipers.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
The human toll that took to destroy the Nazis. I mean,
the Soviet methods could be discussed, but cannot be cannot
be overstated.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
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

(12:03):
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

(12:26):
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

(12:46):
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

(13:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
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

(13:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Which governments are so apt to do, regardless of whatever
ism they're associated with.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Yep, totally, because you could say the same about American patriots.
Some of them some are fascists.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
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

(15:46):
from fascism.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
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.

(16:09):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:50):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:34):
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

(17:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Oh yeah, so it tends to be pink miss Yeah,
probably shrapnel.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
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

(18:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Wow, and getting close to the end.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
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,

(19:28):
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

(19:49):
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

(20:10):
need to fight. They're like old enough that no one's
going to give them shit, you know.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Butterfly effect of how many fascists died because of her
actions is immeasurable.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
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,

(21:13):
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

(21:34):
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.

(21:55):
I will give you a tank. I am the driver
of this tank, the original killdozer. This one was named
the Fighting Girlfriend.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
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

(22:30):
a murder rampage after his wife is killed when this story,
lady's story is right there, That's what I want to know.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
I was gonna say it's sponsored by tea.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Oh, tea is good.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
And building a community with your neighbor.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Yeah, it's sponsored by building a community with your neighbor
by inviting them to.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
Tea trick tea with your neighbor. That's our sponsor.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yep. And share hard tech.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
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

(23:48):
repeating itself. You just reading podcast again.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
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?

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, I actually just take a mad libs and I
like swap in like authoritarian leader Margaret dislikes.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
You know.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
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

(24:37):
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

(25:00):
invented their new tank, the like T thirty four or
whatever it was called.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
Stalin had a real pension for finding really great, the
best and brightest, and making sure they didn't live very long.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, totally just that with tens of millions of lives, but.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
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.

(26:12):
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

(26:35):
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

(27:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Literally hit the brakes, they fly by you and you're
still in the air.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
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

(28:22):
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

(28:45):
the night witches see the White Death and Lady Death. However,
it's still cool as fuck.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
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?

Speaker 1 (29:08):
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

(29:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:38):
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

(29:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
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

(30:28):
the Nazis the next day. And like, that's a.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
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,

(31:16):
you know, Like I don't think that grandparents made the
right decision, but I can't imagine most people making any
other one.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
So all these are fucking crop dusters.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
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

(33:12):
and seventy six armored cars, eighty six firing points and
eleven search lights.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
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

(34:19):
up thinking about quicksand you know, because it's like fucking
everywhere in fiction.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Well, when the antibiotic strains collapsed, then it'll come back.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:28):
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

(35:48):
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

(36:10):
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

(36:31):
managed to get all of those different night waking groups
to sponsor the podcast. At last minute.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
I do not sleep. All I do is think about ads.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
I mean, that's probably true, even though what I said
was a lie. Don't sleep parts true.

Speaker 4 (36:47):
Yeah, well, you ever heard of the woman who has
the most kills as a fighter pilot?

Speaker 2 (37:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
Oh okay, wait, who is it?

Speaker 2 (37:13):
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,

(37:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
That's got to be so awkward every single time, you know.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
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

(38:23):
that said, it doesn't make you a good person if
you have if you're oppressed along a particular access hey axis.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
In this case, History is difficult and muddy, and human
culture and relations are not easily put into any form
of box.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, no, they do, and it's still five I believe.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
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

(39:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, the real mission is how many bombers get back home?

Speaker 1 (39:39):
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

(40:02):
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

(40:24):
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

(40:44):
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

(41:04):
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

(41:27):
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

(41:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
An awesome human being, I mean, like all of this together.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, no, yeah, no, I just like, oh my gosh, yeah, yeah,
I'm she fucking rules.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
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.

(42:29):
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

(42:53):
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

(43:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
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

(43:50):
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.

(44:13):
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

(44:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
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?

Speaker 1 (45:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
You know.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
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

(45:35):
were denied like any possible awards.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Yeah, well, she doesn't come back, right, she is downed,
she's dead, but no one knows.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
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

(46:26):
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,

(46:47):
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?

Speaker 2 (47:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
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.

(47:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Yeah, I mean I'm reading this panic makers and cowards
must be liquidated on the spot, and.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
The panicmakers, yeah, fuck you.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
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

(48:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
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

(49:10):
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,

(49:31):
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

(49:54):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
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

(50:56):
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

(51:17):
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

(51:38):
millions each but like fucking Nazi.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Kind of irrelevant, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
But once it went the way it was, it was like,
should have been more.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
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

(52:17):
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

(52:40):
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

(53:00):
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

(53:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
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

(54:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:15):
Yeah, well, what else is irrepressible is your plugs?

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Yeah? Oh yeah, unstoppable, complete mechanized for so.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
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

(54:49):
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

(55:11):
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?

Speaker 2 (55:31):
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

(55:52):
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

(56:15):
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,

(56:39):
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

(57:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
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

(57:34):
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

(57:57):
you probably even google my docs. I'd rather you didn't,
but you know, yeah, I mean whatever.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
I'm like, oh, that's better, all right, okay, yeah, where's
your white flag? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (58:39):
I know.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
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

(59:01):
and they're like, hello, yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Anyways, yeah, Sophia, guys need to plug.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Uh. My business partner, Robert Evans, has a substack like
you do. Magpie. Who is this called shatter Zone? Check
it out.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
It's good. See you all next week when we talk
about some cool people who did cool stuff. Bye.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
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.