Hell Hath No Fury (22 page)

DACOWITS has survived these storms and retained its overall aims, which have changed little in more than fifty years: to improve the nation's defense by enabling military women to serve as full partners to military men; to give women opportunities that are commensurate with their abilities, which are not to be calibrated by popular notions of a “woman's role” to provide the support systems that encourage this outcome; and to foster respect for women in uniform, which underlies unit cohesion, morale, and good order and discipline.

Reference: Francine D'Amico and Laurie Weinstein,
Gender Camouflage: Women and the US Military,
1999.

FIRST AID NURSING YEOMANRY (WOMEN'S TRANSPORT SERVICE)

FANY, United Kingdom, World Wars I and II

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) was conceived in 1907 as a nursing corps recruited from well-to-do women operating on horseback to tend the wounded in the aftermath of battles. In 1914 the FANY, now motorized and equipped with its own ambulances, crossed the English Channel to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in the process supplying the British army with its first female drivers.

After 1918 the FANY continued to operate in national emergencies, providing the army with extra drivers in the general strike of 1926. A year later the War Office officially recognized the FANY, and when the ATS came into being, many FANYs joined that branch of the service as drivers and were called up in 1939 to serve in the ATS's transport arm. Nevertheless, the FANY remained an independent entity.

In World War II the FANY, redesignated the Women's Transport Service (WTS), performed a bewilderingly wide range of tasks. Its ranks were initially filled with fashionable young women from wealthy backgrounds who often occupied confidential positions as “personal assistants,” perhaps the most celebrated being the former fashion model Kay Summersby, who became General Dwight D. Eisenhower's driver and mistress.

Members of the FANY were often mocked as “society girls playing at war,” but they played an important back-room role in the field of intelligence, particularly with the
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11). Some two thousand FANYs served with the agency in Britain, Europe, and the Middle and Far East, many as wireless operators and decoders, others as housekeepers in the SOE's many holding stations.

One FANY, a Mrs. Barclay, was responsible for delivering directly to Winston Churchill the raw decrypts of intercepted Enigma traffic assembled at Bletchley Park, home of the Ultra secret. Seventy-three members of the FANY went behind enemy lines in occupied Europe, where some were captured, brutally interrogated, and executed. Self-assured young FANYs were relied on to move comfortably in this secret world, which was for the most part run by men from a similar social background. They all “spoke the same language.” The motto of the FANY was “I cope.”

Reference: Eric Taylor,
Women Who Went to War 1938–1946,
1988.

HELFERINNEN

Women Auxiliaries, Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler was implacably opposed to women playing an active role in the waging of war, a paradox in such a highly militarized state as Nazi Germany. For the Führer, women were defined by “the three Ks”—
Kinder, Kirche,
and
Küche
—children, church, and kitchen, which encompassed the National Socialist ideal of womanhood. The war work of good German women was to breed, in large numbers, the child of the future, the Aryan dream.

True to these views, one of the earliest Nazi Party ordinances in January 1921 had excluded women in perpetuity from holding any office in the party. The kernel of Nazi thinking on the woman question was a doctrine of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the Aryan and non-Aryan races. This was in line with developments throughout Europe where the rise of fascism, with its unbridled stress on masculinity and exaggerated virility, undermined almost all the gains made by women in the previous century of struggle for civic freedom and the vote. But even before the outbreak of war, the role of female auxiliaries, the Helferinnen, had become a key component in the administration of Germany's armed forces.

In World War II, there were a number of German women's auxiliary formations servicing the signal corps, the air force and its antiaircraft batteries, the army, the navy, and the Waffen-SS. The Helferinnen wore uniforms, were placed under military discipline, and received free rations, quarters, and clothing. However, they were not treated as members of the armed forces, and their senior officers were not ranked in a hierarchy that paralleled the male officers in the Third Reich's armed forces. A directive of 1942 limited the role of the Helferinnen to the provision of clerical and switchboard assistance.

Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, had a marginally more flexible approach to the role of women within his empire of concentration and extermination camps. In World War II there were some thirty-five hundred female camp guards, although even at Ravensbrück, the camp designated for the training of female SS personnel, they constituted less than 10 percent of its SS establishment.

In devising the overall role of the female SS auxiliaries, Himmler had drawn on a Finnish model, the
Lotta Svärd
(see Chapter 6), an organization whose aim was to discharge militia and soldiers from all tasks not directly concerned with combat. He also insisted that they would have to meet the same racial criteria as SS men. Although the SS women did not have their blood type tattooed on their arm or chest like the men, they could rise to a position of command as senior overseers in which they were the equal of their male counterparts.

The Helferinnen in the Luftwaffe played an increasingly significant role from 1943 as the Allied bombing offensive against Germany gathered pace. Many were recruited into the RAD (Reich Labor Service) to deal with bomb damage. Others served in radar stations, the fighter control network, and antiaircraft batteries. By the end of 1944, Allied raids had become so severe that Hitler was persuaded to turn over the operating of searchlight batteries to women. By 1945 some women were firing antiaircraft guns. At its peak the Luftwaffe Helferrinen numbered some 130,000.

It was not until March 1945, when the Red Army had advanced to within sixty miles of Berlin, that Hitler withdrew his order banning women from carrying arms. The aim was to form an all-female battalion as a propaganda tool to bolster the last-ditch defense of the Third Reich (see
Bochkareva, Maria,
Chapter 4, for a similar idea in World War I Russia, the women's Battalion of Death). But the Führer flinched from this final step, rescinding the order within a week. Only the women serving on antiaircraft batteries or guarding communications hubs were armed.

But as the Fatherland crumbled, some German women acted on their own initiative. There is photographic evidence of women being trained to fire the
Panzerfaust,
a handheld, recoilless antitank weapon issued in large numbers at the end of the war to the Volkssturm, the German equivalent of the British Home Guard. There is also credible documentary evidence of some German tank crews containing at least one female member at this stage in the war. In her autobiography,
The Gift Horse,
the German actress Hildegard Knef tells of joining her boyfriend in a Volkssturm column marching to defend Berlin against the Red Army. She fell into Russian hands and spent three weeks in a prisoner-of-war cage before being released.

Reference: Gordon Williamson,
World War II German Women's Auxiliary Services,
2003.

ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES

1941–Present

In the independence struggle in Palestine, which culminated in November 1947 with the founding of the State of Israel, a number of Jewish organizations played important military roles, although they did not always act in concert. The largest of these was the thirty-thousand-strong Haganah, conceived not as a guerrilla force but as a broadly based self-protection umbrella for Jews in Palestine, which followed a policy of self-restraint and nonviolence. It acted as the parent body for the Palmach (from
Plugot Mahatz
or “shock troops”), which had been formed in May 1941, with the knowledge of the British who administered the Palestine mandate.

The Palmach fielded approximately four thousand members, of whom 15 to 20 percent were women. The Haganah ensured that the women in the Palmach received weapons and combat training alongside the men. Female members of the Palmach played a relatively minor role in the organization's so-called actions against the British in Palestine—the sabotaging of communications and attacks on British army bases—and in 1946 the organization renounced terrorism and turned its attention to nonviolent activities, for example, encouraging and aiding the arrival in Palestine of illegal Jewish immigrants.

There were two more militant armed Jewish organizations: Etzel, with a membership of some seven thousand; and a smaller, splinter faction, Lehi, a self-proclaimed terror group dedicated to the violent ending of the British mandate in Palestine. Lehi fielded about eight hundred fighters and often clashed bitterly with the Haganah. Along with Etzel, it used women as medics and messengers and, in common with World War II Resistance networks, employed women to smuggle ammunition and explosives. A celebrated member of Lehi was Geula Cohen, an announcer on its underground radio station, the Voice of Fighting Zion, who was famous for her lugubrious tones as she issued chilling threats to the British forces occupying Palestine. Cohen was later to pursue a political career and in the early 1990s became a junior minister in the government headed by Yitzhak Shamir, who had been a driving force behind Lehi in the 1940s.

On the day the United Nations voted in favor of the establishment of a Jewish state, November 29, 1947, a mixed-gender Haganah patrol in the Negev was ambushed by Bedouins and wiped out. Their dead bodies were then mutilated, which prompted an order from Haganah headquarters withdrawing women from combat units. However, in the Israeli War of Independence, which broke out in early 1948 as the British relinquished their mandate in Palestine, women played an active part in the fighting that flared as the fledgling state was assailed by its Arab neighbors. Some women served as escorts to convoys making their way to a besieged Jerusalem. The women were also responsible for concealed arms and ammunition, confident that British troops would not search them. A number of women also took part in Operation Nachshon, Israel's brigade-sized operations in the hill country to the west of Jerusalem. Among them was twenty-year-old Netiva Ben-Yehuda, who had joined the Palmach in 1946 and served in an engineer unit. More than thirty years later, she recounted her experiences in the War of Independence in three autobiographical novels.

In June 1948 the United Nations brokered a truce between Israel and its Arab enemies. This enabled the newly formed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rest and regroup while they were reorganized and underwent intensive training as war matériel arrived from Europe. The IDF then decided to remove women from the front line. Some 10,600 women continued to serve throughout the war, which ended in July 1949, but they were tasked with medical and administrative duties in a Women's Corps whose members served in female battalions attached to but independent of male formations. In 1949 the Women's Corps was restructured and women soldiers were dispersed among male units. Thereafter one of its roles was to act as a support system for the women in the IDF's ranks.

The Women's Corps was known as Chel Nashim, which was contracted into the acronym CHEN (grace). It was closely modeled on the British
Auxiliary Territorial Service,
or ATS, of World War II (see Chapter 6), an organization in which CHEN's first head, Stella Levy, had served. The emergence of CHEN coincided with the passing, in 1949, of Israel's Defense Service Law, the first piece of legislation to introduce conscription of women in peacetime. At first the bare terms on which Israeli women were conscripted were the same as those applying to men—they were drafted to serve for two years when they reached the age of eighteen. However, when the men's period of service was extended to three years, the women did not follow suit. (In August 2001 the Women's Corps lost its independence when it was incorporated into the Israeli General Staff and its commander, Brigadier General Suzy Yogev, was appointed to serve as adviser on women's issues.)

The Defense Service Law had required all citizens and permanent residents of Israel to perform military service. All women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six who were physically fit, unmarried, and had not borne children, and had not objected on grounds of religion or conscience, were obliged to fulfill their military obligation. But in 2003, during the hearing that imprisoned five young men for refusing to serve on the “political” grounds of opposing the Israeli occupation of territory annexed after the Six Day War of 1967, the court reinterpreted the exemption law for women. Thereafter women were obliged to go through the same channels as men to gain exemption, which remains at the discretion of the minister of defense.

In 2005 this change of procedure led to the imprisonment of a young Israeli woman, Idan Halili, after an initial refusal by a conscience committee to hear her argument for an exemption on the grounds of her feminist rejection of militarism. When her case was heard, the conscience committee handled the hot potato thrust into their hands by Halili with some circumspection. She gained exemption on the grounds that her feminism made her “unfit to serve.”

Until recent years, conscript women in the IDF were largely confined to administrative duties. If they possessed the right qualifications and had the endorsement of their commander, they could attend officer school. However, after graduation they could only command other women. Those who chose to remain in the IDF faced a limited range of promotion prospects and could not command men.