Hell Hath No Fury (24 page)

Colonel Bob Stewart, the first commander of British forces under UN command in Bosnia, opposes women being close to combat, arguing that their deaths or injuries have a debilitating effect on male comrades. One female soldier died in his arms in Northern Ireland, and the trauma rendered him inconsolable and effectively unable to operate. Stewart reflected, “If you put women in the front line because they are equal, then you have to expect that there will be operational casualties.”

Belgium's armed forces, which were opened to women in 1975, now contain just over 7 percent female personnel, a number that continues to rise. All functions are open to women, but the majority occupy administrative and logistic posts. In Luxembourg, which has no air force or navy, women were allowed to enter the army in 1987, and today they make up 0.6 percent of personnel.

Most Mediterranean countries began opening their armed forces to women in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1979, Greece admitted women noncommissioned officers to support functions, but military academies remained closed to them until 1990, and full access to military education has still not been achieved. Women are excluded from combat roles but can go to sea, and, since 2001, have served as aircrew in the Greek air force. Spain began to recruit women in 1988, followed by Portugal in 1992, and in both countries female servicewomen make up some 6 percent of total strength. In Spain, combat positions are open to women, but over half serve in administrative posts. Portuguese women can in theory apply for all posts, but in practice posts in the marines and combat specialties remain closed to them.

In Turkey, women were accepted into military academies in the late 1950s, but this policy was reversed in the 1960s, and it was not until 1982 that they were readmitted to military education, a process that only got under way in the early 1990s. As a result, women in the Turkish armed forces make up a mere 0.1 percent of personnel. They can serve as officers but are restricted from serving in the armored and infantry fields and in submarines.

Italy was the last NATO member to admit women to the military. In September 1999, after a long and vociferous campaign mounted by La Associazione Nazionale Aspiranti Donne Soldato (Association of Aspiring Women Soldiers), the Italian Parliament passed legislation enabling women to serve in the armed forces. The first female recruits reported for duty in 2000, and in June 2001, to mark this success, the Committee on Women in the NATO Forces met in Rome. The Italian armed forces are taking a gradualist approach to the integration of women, bringing them into general support rather than operational positions and maintaining restrictions on their admission into military academies.

In the countries that have become members of NATO in recent years, simultaneous preparations for accession to the European Union stimulated the introduction of equal opportunities for women in the military. In the Czech Republic, servicewomen represent nearly 4 percent of service personnel. The figure in Hungary is higher, around 9 percent, but women are largely restricted to traditional roles. In Poland the figure is very low, at about 0.1 percent, and most servicewomen fill medical posts.

In Germany, until 2000 approximately 3,800 women made up 24 percent of the military's medical service. Another 37 women served in military bands. These were the only two branches in which women were allowed to serve, as they were prohibited by law from rendering service that involved the use of arms.

In February 2000 the European Court of Justice ruled, after a challenge by a German woman, Tanja Kreil, who wanted to enter the army as a maintenance technician, that it is contrary to European law that women are not allowed into nearly all branches of the military. The policy of recruiting women to the German armed forces was reconsidered, and from 2001 women were able to enter all branches and careers in the military. In 2005, there were some 7,200 women in the German army; 2,350 in the air force; 1,600 in the navy; and 5,600 in the medical corps.

Reference: Rebecca R. Moore,
NATO's New Mission: Projecting Stability in a Post–Cold War World,
2007.

RED ARMY WOMEN SOLDIERS

Soviet Union, World War II

On September 1, 1939, Article 13 of the universal military law was ratified by the Fourth Session of the Supreme Soviet, enabling the Red Army to accept women trained in critical medical and technical areas. During the Great Patriotic War, some 40 percent of the front-line medical personnel would be women, fighting against Hitler's invasion.

In May 1941, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Red Army's strength stood at some five million men. By the end of December, when Barbarossa had blown itself out, the Soviets had lost more than three million men taken prisoner in a series of massive “cauldron battles” (battles of encirclement). The exact figure for casualties has never been determined. Continuing losses in 1942 nearly bled the Red Army white and significantly changed the reluctance of the Soviet high command (Stavka) to recruit women into a fighting role.

In the summer of 1942, a recruiting drive aimed at women began; in part its aim was to shame the men of the Red Army into greater efforts, and also to accelerate the integration of Soviet women into war industry. During the war some 800,000 Soviet women served in combat formations, 8 percent of the Red Army's personnel.

Due to Stavka inefficiency and lack of foresight, women faced formidable problems of integration. They struggled with male uniforms and boots that were often several sizes too big. There was no female underwear and no segregated latrines. In a surreal move, considering the savagery that characterized the fighting on the Eastern Front, Stavka introduced forty-three mobile tearooms for female troops, which also fielded cosmetic counters and hair-dressers. Women who did not smoke were given chocolate rations. However, they had to wait until the end of the war for uniforms specially designed for the female physique.

Some 70 percent of the women serving in the Red Army were posted to the front, but they were often kept away from the sharp end of the fighting and assigned to antiaircraft (AA) batteries or engineer battalions, where they performed their duties on an equal footing with men (see
Mixed Antiaircraft Batteries,
Chapter 7). Approximately 300,000 served in AA units and, in contrast to their British counterparts, performed every function, including the firing of the guns. Klavdia Konovaluva from the Georgian Republic, who served with 784th AA regiment, had been a blacksmith in civilian life and joined her unit as a gunlayer. This Red Army Amazon quickly became a gun loader, which involved shifting thirty-six-pound shells at high speed, often under heavy fire.

There were some all-woman AA units in which a female military subculture flourished, encouraging a warmer approach to the generally ferocious military discipline of the Red Army. However, throughout the war male officers were reluctant to commit women to action, partly out of male shame and also from an apprehension that women “were not up to the job.” “Why are you bringing these girls here?” the response of one disgruntled Red Army officer, was a common reaction.

Many were clearly up to the job. Some women trained tank crews (a practice that continues today in the
Israeli Defense Forces,
Chapter 6) and others drove tanks in the field. Mariya Oktyabrskaya bought a tank from her personal savings and fought as its commander, with the rank of guards sergeant, until she was mortally wounded in action in January 1944. Marina Lagunova graduated from a tank-training brigade as a driver-mechanic and later fought in the Battle of Kursk (1943) and the advance to the Dnieper River. In September 1943 her tank “brewed up” (received a direct hit) and she was so badly burned that both her legs were amputated. Once released from the hospital, she learned to drive again and returned to duty as a tank instructor.

One tank family went to a shared wartime grave. On the death of Colonel Koponets, his daughter Yelizaveta volunteered for the armored corps, serving as gunner/wireless operator, only to be killed in 1945 in the Battle of Berlin. With one exception, all the women who fought in tanks rode in the medium T-34.

The exception was Alexandra Boiko, who, with her husband, pulled a great many strings to gain a place at the Tank Technical School at Chelyabinsk. They eventually rode into battle in the heavy IS-2, which weighed forty-five tons. Alexandra commanded the behemoth, and her husband served as the driver/mechanic. The couple fought together in the great battles of 1944–45, in the Baltic States, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and in the drive to Berlin.

Other Red Army women excelled in specialized duties, notably in the air war (see
Litvak, Lily,
Chapter 7, and
Night Witches,
Chapter 7). They also proved to be adept snipers, a deadly skill highly prized on the Eastern Front. Sergeant Ludmila Pavlichenko, who began the war as a history student in Kiev, accounted for more than three hundred Germans, seventy-eight of whom were snipers like herself, while serving with Twenty-fifth “Chapayev” Rifle Division.

Such was Pavlichenko's fame that in 1943 she toured the United Kingdom and the United States, where she was dubbed “Sniper Number One.” Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her. In the wartime British movie
The Tawny Pipit
(1944), the strapping actress Lucie Mannheim played a visiting Soviet sniper, possibly based on Pavlichenko, who in real life was slight and attractive. Another female sniper, Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya, fought her way from the steppes to Berlin, bringing down some eighty-nine of the enemy. The women in her company killed more than three thousand Germans.

In the Red Army, medical-support tasks were wholly integrated with combat units, and doctors and nurses served in the front line under heavy fire. All the nurses and some 40 percent of the doctors in the Soviet military were women. There were many instances of the heroism of Red Army medical personnel under fire, although some of them were in all likelihood embellished for reasons of propaganda.

In one example, Vera Krylova enlisted as a student nurse in 1941 and in front-line service dragged hundreds of wounded comrades to safety. In August 1941 at the height of Operation Barbarossa, when German armies were racing across the Soviet Union, the wounded Krylova is said to have taken command of an ambushed company whose officers had been killed and, riding a horse in a two-week running battle, led the survivors back to Soviet lines. A year later, in another improbable tale, she was reported to have single-handedly charged a German tank formation, hurling grenades as she went and enabling her comrades to evacuate their position.

Whatever the precise truth of these exploits, they nevertheless reflect the courage of Red Army women in the front line. Perhaps a more typical memory of a woman's war is that of one veteran who remembered her service more prosaically:

We didn't shoot. I cooked porridge for the soldiers…. I was given a medal for that…. I dragged cauldrons and mess tins about. Heaven knows, they were heavy. I remember our commander saying, “I'll shoot holes through those mess tins…. How are you going to give birth after the war?”

More than 100,000 Red Army women were decorated during the war, including 86 who received the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, the USSR's highest award for valor. Three women—sniper Petrova, machine-gunner Stanilizhene, and air gunner Zhurkina—were awarded all three classes (bronze, silver, and gold) of the Order of Glory, the most highly respected soldiers' decoration (see also
Partisans,
Chapter 4).

Reference: Catherine Merridail,
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army,
2006. For a more skeptical view of the role played by women of the Red Army in World War II see Martin van Creveld,
Men, Women and War,
2001.

ROSIE THE RIVETER

US War Industry Women Workers, 1942–45

The collective nickname for the women who worked in the American ordnance and aircraft plants and shipyards of World War II was Rosie the Riveter. She was also the muscular and deter mined heroine immortalized by the artist Norman Rockwell on a
Saturday Evening Post
cover in May 1943.

In 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Britain on a fact-finding tour of war industry. She found many women at work on the production lines, filling jobs that in the prewar years had been reserved for men, although she noted that they were not paid the same as men. In the United States in 1941–42, although the quickening pace of the draft had absorbed much of the male unemployment that persisted from the Depression years, employers were still reluctant to hire women in areas other than retailing or light industry. Over 80 percent of production work was closed to females.

The timing of Roosevelt's mission to Britain coincided with the low point in the United States' fortunes in the war. The Japanese had run amok in the Far East and the Pacific, seizing the islands of Guam and Wake, bundling the Americans out of the Philippines, and threatening the Aleutian chain and the approaches to Alaska. However, President Roosevelt and the War Manpower Commission shrank from adopting measures similar to those that had been introduced in Britain to conscript women into the labor force.

Rather, the administration encouraged state and city authorities to launch enrollment drives. The first of these, in Oregon, produced a little more than 300,000 volunteers for war work. In the city of Detroit, whose automotive industries were rapidly converting to the manufacture of tanks and artillery, 180,000 women registered for war work. Initially, however, these women were channeled into services that were still related to civilian occupations, in hotels, department stores, and office buildings. Significantly, when Gallup polled a cross-section of women on this development, over 50 percent stated that they would be willing to work in the war industry, while only one in five of the husbands questioned approved of their wives' decisions to seek war work.