20 Of The Most Courageously Badass Female War Heroes The World Has Ever Seen

Women are the fairer sex, right? Maybe, but the truth is that plenty of females have proved they can equal and exceed males when it comes to battling for what they believe in. Think of a British queen defying Roman invaders or women pretending to be men to fight in America’s Revolutionary War. Such women have defied danger and stereotypes since time immemorial. Read on for the extraordinary stories of 20 intrepid women in wartime...

20. Queen Boudicca

Roman invaders arrived in the south of England in 43 A.D. One of the tribes they conquered were the Iceni. The leader of these people, who lived in what today is called East Anglia, was Prasutagus. The Romans decided to allow him to continue as king. But everything changed when Prasutagus died in 60 A.D. The Romans now opted to attempt to take over the Iceni fiefdom lock, stock and barrel. But the dead king’s queen, Boudicca, had other ideas.

Leading the people in rebellion

Enraged by ill-treatment of herself and her daughters at the hands of the Romans, Boudicca led her people in rebellion. Under the queen’s command the Iceni warriors routed the Roman 9th Legion. The Iceni and other tribes then put Colchester, the Roman capital of England, to the torch and marched on London, destroying the city. Eventually, though, the Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus crushed the revolt at what was later called the Battle of Watling Street in 61 A.D. Boudicca is said to have taken her own life with poison rather than be captured by her Roman enemies.

19. Major Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a sniper with the Soviet Union’s 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, a Red Army unit, fighting the Germans who had invaded her country in 1941. At first the Soviet army had tried to steer her towards nursing. But she insisted that she was a crack shot and proved it by killing two enemy soldiers in an impromptu test of her skills.

Lethal lady

When Pavlichenko first went into combat, by her own admission she was rigid with fear. But a young comrade was shot and killed beside her, and from then on she operated with a steely determination. She killed an extraordinary 309 of the enemy, making her the most prolific female sniper in history. A 2013 article in the Smithsonian Magazine quoted her attitude towards her cruel profession. Pavlichenko explained, “Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”