Hello and thank you for listening to the history of World War II podcast Episode 206

and interview with Dr. Luba Vino Gradova about her latest book,

Avenging Angels, Young Women of the Soviet Union World War II sniper corps.

With a PhD in microbiology and a second degree in foreign languages, in 1995 the author was introduced to Anthony Beaver and helped him research Stalingrad.

Since then she has worked on many other research projects and is the co-author again with Mr. Beaver of a writer at war,

Vasili Grossman with the Red Army.

And Dr. Vino Gradova thank you very much for being with us today.

It's my pleasure thank you very much for inviting me and thank you very much for your interest in my book.

Yes I'm I was lucky to get you because I know that you're only in the country for a couple of days.

I'm glad we could have this chance to talk to start out.

I was very impressed with your book because I really got a sense of what these very young women went through.

The good and the bad you know they were obviously defending their country and that kind of thing.

But it was just an incredible experience that they went through in a relatively short amount of time for the second half of the war.

I entirely agree most of them and indeed most of the Soviet female snipers only took part in the war in the second half.

And it's true that very few of them were older than 25.

A lot of them were still in their teens.

That is absolutely amazing.

And so I just want to if it's okay with you we're just kind of kind of jumping to this because I was pretty excited to get to some of the details of just what these very young women were doing.

And so I think that was really what these very young women had to go through and you have to think that they really had no idea what to expect.

So you start off in your book by saying that you were talking about the number of Russian females that participated in the war.

And for comparative sake you mentioned that the British had about 56,000 act girls but they saw very little action.

The United States trained and this is so strange to me 395 female anti aircraft gunners but this was abandoned after a couple of months.

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