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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

31. Buying a Tank

A Iosef Stalin IS-2 heavy tank. History Net

Aleksandra and Ivan Boiko sought to join the Red Army, but the draft officials refused, because both had essential jobs – Ivan was a superb heavy truck driver, while Aleksandra performed essential clerical work for her department. They nonetheless figured out a way to get into the fight. During the war, Soviet citizens could directly pay for specific new tanks and planes for the military. So, in 1943, the couple donated 50,000 rubles from their savings to pay for a new IS-2 heavy tank, and wrote a letter to Stalin, asking for the right to drive that tank into battle.

Stalin agreed, and the Boikos were trained as tankers in Chelyabinsk Tank School. Ivan became a tank driver, while Aleksandra became a tank commander – the only woman to have ever commanded a heavy tank during WWII. Their technically “private” tank was officially named “Kolyma”, after the Kolyma River near the couple’s Siberian town of Magadan.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.