Hell Hath No Fury (16 page)

During the Axis occupation, the different organizations within the Greek Resistance fought as much with one another as they did with their occupiers. In the subsequent Greek Civil War, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, Communist guerrillas opposed to the restoration of the monarchy, the Democratic Army of Greece, fought US-backed Greek government forces. Many of the women who had fought with ELAS joined the Democratic Army. Many of those who were captured were either executed or sent to prison camps on the Greek islands. The mothers among them were often accompanied by their children. Female relatives of former ELAS fighters often suffered the same fate. Not until 1952, when a more liberal Greek government took office, were the women of Greece granted the vote.

Reference: Janet Hart,
New Voices in the Nation: Women in the Greek Resistance,
1996.

Soviet Union

On July 3, 1941, barely two weeks after the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made a radio broadcast in which he called for a vast partisan movement to spring up in the enemy's rear. However, it was not until after the defeat of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943 that the partisans—now supplied by air with food and medical supplies, and centrally directed from Moscow—became a broad movement. Postwar Soviet sources estimated that in the winter of 1942–43 some 60 percent of Belorussia was under the effective control of partisans. The “partisan regions” had their own airstrips into which supplies could be flown and from which the wounded could be evacuated. V. G. Grizodubova, a female pilot who commanded 101st Long Range Air Regiment, flew nearly two thousand missions into enemy-occupied territory, taking in ammunition and evacuating the wounded.

The partisan bands—or
otriads
—drew heavily on young men and women who fled from the threat of forced labor or escaped from German captivity. For the partisans, capture by the enemy had the most dire consequences, legendarily illustrated by the fate of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an eighteen-year-old member of the Young Communist League who was taken prisoner by units of the German 197th Infantry Division in the village of Petrischevo, west of Moscow, in the winter of 1941, while attempting to set fire to some buildings. Kosmodemyanskaya was tortured and then hanged. Several of the German soldiers at the scene took photographs of her mutilated body, which remained on the scaffold for a month before being buried in a pit outside the village. When, shortly afterward, the village was recaptured by the Red Army, Kosmodemyanskaya's corpse was exhumed and, with the rope still around her neck, became one of the most powerful images of the war on the Eastern Front. When the 197th Division was overrun by the Red Army near Smolensk in October 1943, the body of one of its officers yielded up five photographs of Kosmodemyanskaya's execution, including one of her being marched to the gallows. A placard hung from her neck bears the legend “Incendiary.”

In January 1944 there were some 288,000 active partisans in the Soviet Union, of whom approximately 27,000 were women. As the Red Army rumbled westward, the partisan war was wound up. Many partisans were incorporated in the Red Army. Others were rejected as physically unfit, and a substantial minority fell under suspicion by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police, forerunner of the KGB), which was responsible for restoring the loyalty of those regions that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. Their fate, after they had survived Nazi occupation, was transportation to the gulags.

Reference: Ben Shepherd,
War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans,
2004.

PITCHER, MOLLY,
SEE
MOLLY PITCHER, Chapter 4.

SANTAMARÍA, HAYDÉE

Cuban Revolutionary, b. 1922, d. 1980

Haydée Santamaría's career described an extraordinary arc from guerrilla freedom fighter to director of a world-famous literary institution and home for exiled Latin American artists and intellectuals.

She was born on a sugar plantation in central Cuba to parents who owned a small parcel of land. In Havana in 1952, Santamaría and her brother Abel joined Fidel Castro's insurgent movement against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

On the evening of July 26, 1956, Santamaría and Melba Hernández became the only two women in the 120-strong force assembled by Castro to seize the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba as the first step toward overthrowing the American-backed Batista regime. Among the male insurgents were Santamaría's boyfriend and her brother. The attack on the Moncada was a chaotic failure, and some three-quarters of those involved were either killed or taken prisoner. Santamaría, her boyfriend, her brother, and Hernández were among those captured.

In her cell Santamaría was confronted with terrible evidence in an effort to make her talk—an eye, or in some accounts both eyes and testicles—of her brother. Famously, she told her captors, “If you tore out his eye and he did not speak, neither will I.” Her brother succumbed to torture, as did her boyfriend, but Santamaría did not crack, even when she and Hernández were burned with cigarettes.

Following an amnesty announced by Batista, Santamaría was released from prison and returned to the struggle. She worked as a gunrunner, international fund-raiser, coordinator of the urban underground, and combatant in the Cuban revolutionary movement. Later she fought alongside Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, the mountainous region in southern Cuba that became the redoubt for Castro's forces and the battleground on which they defeated the numerically superior forces of Batista, who fled the country in January 1959.

After the revolution, Santamaría transformed herself from guerrilla to Cuban cultural emissary. Perhaps her greatest achievement was her work as founder and director of the Casa de las Américas, one of the foremost cultural institutions in Latin America, which over the years has hosted and published a pantheon of literary giants, including Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda. The Casa was responsible for bringing some of the world's greatest dancers, musicians, painters, and theater groups to Cuba, doing much to break down the isolation in which the Castro government found itself from the mid-1960s. Santamaría also fiercely defended young Cuban writers, artists, and performers from the dogmatism that muffled free speech in Cuba under Castro.

In the last year of her life Santamaría was badly injured in a car accident and left in constant pain. She was also deeply affected by the death of a close friend, Celia Sánchez, one of Castro's most trusted aides. Some have speculated that her decline was triggered by these events, combined with depression about Cuba's increasing material and ideological dependence on the Soviet Union. But it is more likely that she had reached the end of a long road that began during the horrifying aftermath of the attack on the Moncada Barracks. Perhaps Santamaría foresaw her own end in 1967 when she wrote after the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, “Today I feel tired of living; I think I have lived too much already.”

Reference: Betsy Maclean, ed.,
Haydée Santamaría,
2003.

TAMIL TIGERS

Sri Lankan Separatists, 1970–Present

From the early 1970s, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) developed into a formidable fighting force dedicated to the establishment of a separate Tamil homeland on the island of Sri Lanka. By January 2004, the Sri Lankan president, Chandrike Kumaratunga, estimated the strength of the LTTE guerrillas at approximately eighteen thousand, many of them women and small children.

The policy of recruiting women and children was initiated after the 1987 signing of the Indo–Sri Lankan peace agreement, when an Indian peacekeeping force was introduced to restore order in the Tamil-dominated regions of Sri Lanka's north and east. The LTTE soon faced a growing manpower shortage caused by the escalation in fighting, and within ten years almost one third of its strength consisted of women, who were assigned duties on the battlefield, in the medical corps, and in other support services.

All LTTE combatants undergo a physically rigorous four-month training program, during which they receive weapons training and are instructed in battle and field craft, intelligence gathering, and explosives. The Women's Front of the Liberation Tigers (Viduthalai Pulikal Makalir Munani) formed in 1983 and began combat training in 1985. October 1987 saw the establishment in Jaffna of the first training camp exclusively for women. The high recruitment of women during this period was matched by the figures for women killed while serving in LTTE formations, which between 1985 and 2002 were estimated at four thousand. More than one hundred belonged to the Black Tiger suicide squad (see
Suicide Bombers,
Chapter 10). In 1999, President Kumaratunga was blinded in the right eye in a suicide bombing.

The LTTE has been designated or banned as a terrorist organization by a number of countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, and Malaysia—where it disseminates propaganda and raises funds and supplies for its campaign in Sri Lanka. But the writer Adele Ann, Australian-born wife of an LTTE theoretician, justified the decision by Tamil women to join the Tigers as one that sent a clear message to society at large: “They are not satisfied with the social status quo; it means they are young women capable of defying authority; it means they are women with independent thoughts; young women prepared to lift up their heads.” (See
Eritrea,
Chapter 4).

In 1996 the leader of the LTTE, Velupillai Prabhakaran, described the liberation of Tamil women as “the fervent child” that had been born out of the Tamil nationalist movement. There is a price attached. Women in the LTTE are allegedly forced to suppress their femininity and sexuality. They are not allowed sexual relationships, as this is considered a crime that can sap their strength (see
Partisans,
Chapter 4). Marriage is not allowed for LTTE women up to the age of twenty-five and for men up to the age of twenty-eight.

Reference: Adele Ann,
Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers,
1989.

TUBMAN, HARRIET “ARAMINTA”

“General,” American Civil War Commander, and Leader of the Underground Railroad, b. 1820, d. 1913

Born into slavery in Maryland, Tubman worked as a field hand until 1849, when the death of her master and the threat of being sold into the Deep South prompted her to escape to Philadelphia. In December 1850 she slipped back to Baltimore to help her sister and two children to get away, returning in 1851 to fetch her brother's family. She also rescued her parents from the South. These qualities of leadership became evident in the years to come, when the former slave became the only woman to command a military mission in the American Civil War.

For the rest of the 1850s, Tubman took an active part in the Underground Railway, helping up to three hundred fugitive slaves to reach the northern states and Canada, and acting as an adviser to the abolitionist John Brown. In 1863 the Union army asked Tubman to organize a network of scouts—and spies—from the black population of South Carolina, where she had been working with slaves abandoned by owners who had fled the advancing Union army. Tubman established a sophisticated system to gather information and recruit men for the Union's black regiments, a task for which her work on the Underground Railway had provided an ideal training.

In July 1863, Tubman led troops commanded by Colonel James Montgomery in a mission to disrupt the South's interior lines by blowing bridges and cutting rail links. The mission also freed some eight hundred slaves, who benefited from Tubman's calm and reassuring presence while under Confederate fire. Her commanding general reported to the US secretary of war, “This is the only military command in American history wherein a woman, black or white, led the raid and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.” Tubman's nickname, “General,” arose from this.

In three years of service with the Union army, Tubman received only intermittent pay amounting to two hundred dollars and supported herself by selling beer and food, which she prepared in such spare time as she had. After the war she applied unsuccessfully for a pension in her own right but received one only as the widow of her soldier husband. Deeply religious, she devoted her later years to founding schools for freed slaves, teaching, and preaching. She also founded a home for elderly black people in Auburn, New York, where she had settled her parents, and financed it from the sale of her autobiography.

Reference: Sarah Bradford,
Harriet Tubman, The Moses of her People,
1986.

VIETNAM WOMEN FIGHTERS

1945–75

“When war comes, even women have to fight.” This ancient saying of the Vietnamese took on a new relevance in the thirty years that followed the end of World War II, during which the Vietnamese rid themselves of two more foreign interlopers, first the French and then the Americans.

By the summer of 1941, the French colony of Indochina had fallen under the effective control of the Japanese. In December 1944, the Vietnamese guerrilla commander Vo Nguyen Giap organized a group of thirty-five Viet Minh (Communist) guerrillas, of whom five were women. The women were particularly useful in explaining the party line to Vietnamese villagers, who were impressed by their skill in handling firearms.

In 1945, as the war came to a close, Vietnamese women seized Japanese food depots to stave off starvation, and in August and September they joined Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, in the seizure of power in Hanoi, in northern Vietnam. However, the French returned after the Japanese surrender and in 1946 reoccupied Hanoi, the prelude to an eight-year war.

At the outset, Ho Chi Minh's military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, suffered a string of defeats before a vital victory at Dien Bien Phu, which led to the surrender of ten thousand French troops in May 1954. During the fifty-five-day siege, short and slight minority tribeswomen played a vital role, hauling heavy equipment, bicycles, artillery components, food, weapons, and ammunition on their backs to supply Giap's forces, and evacuating the Viet Minh wounded to the rear (see also
Long March,
Chapter 4 and
Greek Partisans
, Chapter 4).