Hell Hath No Fury (17 page)

In July 1954, Vietnam was partitioned into the Communist North and US-backed South, as the United States sought to stem Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Approximately one million women had participated in the anti-French resistance, an experience that foreshadowed the twenty-year war for a reunited Vietnam. From its formation in 1961, women were active in the Communist National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (NLF).

In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson decided to commit combat troops to the war. For the North Vietnamese leadership, the struggle against the South and the Americans was seen as both military and political, including recruitment, the maintenance of morale, and the simultaneous undermining of the morale of the South Vietnamese forces and government. For these tasks, women were considered ideal, not least because by 1965 the NLF suffered a severe manpower shortage.

The Women's Liberation Organization, an arm of the NLF, also had a vital auxiliary military role to play, liaising between villages in the South and NLF units in the jungle, performing intelligence work, providing food and clothing for NLF fighters, concealing them from the enemy, and nursing the sick and wounded. They were also tasked with staging “face-to-face” confrontations with US and South Vietnamese troops, the aim being to harass them at every turn.

Women were also responsible for placing propaganda leaflets for the enemy to find, and Nguyen Thi Dinh, who eventually became deputy commander of the armed forces of the NLF, launched her career in this way. These activities enabled some women to play a significant part in the NLF's political and administrative cadres. Ho Chi Minh honored them with the name “long-haired warriors.”

Women mainly worked in support formations, carrying huge quantities of rice into the jungle to supply NLF units and returning with wounded fighters, often traversing the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, the infiltration route running through Laos to South Vietnam. The young women often had to negotiate the trail carrying burdens greater than their body weight, while suffering from malaria.

By the end of 1967, the numbers of women involved in NLF support and combat operations had risen steeply and they were a constant presence in the resistance to the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, a factor that was badly underestimated by the US commander, General William Westmoreland, and his staff. While many of them did not bear weapons and few fought full-time, this did not prevent women from being imprisoned, tortured, and killed in Operation Phoenix, the CIA-sponsored attempt to eliminate the NLF.

Women also played a part in the 1968 Tet offensive, which, although a military catastrophe for the NLF, fatally undermined the claims made by the United States that it was making progress in the war. One of the combatant women in Saigon was Hoang Thi Khanh, who had been part of a sapper unit that liaised with NLF guerrillas in the surrounding countryside and smuggled arms into the city. In the buildup to the offensive, she had guided guerrillas—many of them women—into Saigon and coordinated them once the fighting started. After her unit had been roughly handled by South Vietnamese troops (ARVN), she organized a counterattack. She survived until November 1969, when she was captured by the ARVN.

Other women who took up arms during the Tet offensive included two sisters, Thieu Thi Tam and Thieu Thi Tao, who unsuccessfully tried to blow up the police headquarters in Saigon. They were captured, interrogated, tortured, and sent to the prison at Con Dao, notorious for its cramped “tiger cages,” whose open ceilings enabled the jailers to drench the inmates with lime.

Fifteen miles west of Saigon lay the area of Cu Chi, which boasted a vast network of tunnels providing shelter for NLF fighters and containing underground hospitals and assembly points for major operations. The women of Cu Chi had helped to excavate the tunnels, claustrophobic work undertaken in the most dangerous and unhealthy conditions. Cu Chi also boasted a female fighting formation, C3 Company, which had been formed in 1965. All its members were trained in the use of small arms and grenades, the wiring and detonation of mines, and assassination. However, they were discouraged from taking on Americans in close-quarter combat because of their small stature.

The war also subjected the people of North Vietnam to a long strategic bombing campaign, undertaken from 1964 by fighter-bombers of the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. From the outset, female militias were raised for the defense of North Vietnam, guarding roads and bridges, engaging South Vietnamese Rangers around the 17th Parallel dividing the North and South, and serving in antiaircraft batteries, both artillery and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). By the time US B-52s launched their own strategic bombing campaign, Linebacker II, in December 1972, Hanoi was the most heavily defended target in the world.

By then all young women in North Vietnam had long been required to join the local militias and self-defense units, making up some 40 percent of the total personnel. They also moved into roles that very few women had filled before 1965. Approximately 32 percent of North Vietnam's skilled and scientific workers were women. Women replaced men in the health sector and provided some 70 percent of the North's workforce, toiling in factories, fields, and offices. They taught in universities and worked for the government.

In the rural areas, women cared for and educated the children evacuated from urban centers to save them from the bombing. They worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, wielding picks and shovels, heaving baskets of soil, and filling bomb craters by day so that trucks could roll by night. Rural women were already inured to hard work. Now they had to learn new skills to operate heavy machinery and raise rice yields and a range of new crops.

The women defending North Vietnam provided ideal subjects for war photographers. Perhaps the most famous image of the home front in the North was that of a minute young peasant girl, Nguyen Thi Kim Lai, the seventeen-year-old commander of a female militia unit, escorting a US airman who had been shot down in December 1972 during Linebacker II. The sight of the hulking American, his head bowed and hands tied, dwarfing the tiny, alert woman wielding an elderly rifle, provides a metaphor for the humbling of the United States in Vietnam. In 1985 the airman in the photograph, William Robinson, returned to Vietnam to meet Nguyen Thi Kim Lai and to ask for her forgiveness, which she readily gave.

Reference: Sandra C. Taylor,
Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution,
1999.

5

CREATURE COMFORTS

Courtesans, Consorts, and Camp Followers: Women Drawn into War to Minister to Men

We were just poor people fighting for our stomachs.

—
Soldadera
Manuela Quinn, mother of US movie star Anthony Quinn, on her war service following the Mexican flag

T
HE RUNAWAYS
,
ROARING GIRLS
, and revolutionaries all made their own choices, striking out in search of war and adventure, wherever that led. Countless more women through the ages have been drawn into war by their men, either through the accidents of love or marriage or as war followers, accepting both the risks and rewards of the military life.

Like the women involved in other areas of warfare, they have often been absent from the annals, strangely invisible when the importance of their contribution is taken into account. But whoever contemplates any war, from the Roman invasion of Britain (43
CE
), to the battles of Hastings (1066), Waterloo (1815), or Kursk (1943), invariably conjures up images of fighting men and has no picture of the women who were also there in force, just outside the frame.

And like the men they were following, the women who took this route to war met different fates. Those who were tied to one man, like Eva Braun or Clara Petacci, the mistresses of World War II leaders Hitler and Mussolini, had little or no control over their own destiny but stood or fell with the men they loved. Those who had a professional rather than an individual interest in military men tended to prosper, since men at war always demand more of women's traditional physical and sexual services, not less. During the Crusades, the laundry women were always the first to be ransomed by the victors, since in a pox-and-plague-ridden age, their skills could mean the difference between life and death, and the desert heat was intolerable without them.

The laundry women were only part of a larger whole. Before modern transport could move troops swiftly from place to place, armies of men on the march have been attended by armies of women performing a wide variety of functions, and the differences between them are often obscured by the general term
camp followers
(see Chapter 5). Throughout the history of warfare, these have come in all shapes and sizes, from the traders and prostitutes trailing in the wake of the Roman legions to the colorful
Vivandières
of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 5).

They were a sturdy breed. Military commanders striving to preserve troop cohesion or struggling to lash a rabble of untrained volunteers into a body of fighting men were often hostile to these female hangers-on. Without any understanding of the law of supply and demand, they made regular attempts to disperse or control the women, but no thought was given to the needs of the men. Camp followers performed vital functions. They provided food and other necessities when the military authorities often failed, and their sexual services also chimed with the age-old belief that a fighting force needs regular sexual relief if it is to fight at its best, a view still held today. What this sometimes means for women is shown in the sufferings of the
comfort women
(see Chapter 5).

Nevertheless, in keeping with the hallowed rule that women are required to supply sex and then are punished for it, camp followers of all kinds were subject to the rough discipline of the military. This could include stripping and flogging, a penalty inflicted by the Duke of Wellington, who had a particularly low opinion of the women who followed his army at every battle during the Napoleonic Wars, commenting, “It is well known that, in all armies, the women are at least as bad, if not worse, than the men.” Other sanctions for women included having their heads shaved, being paraded naked, and worst of all, a savage punishment reserved for women alone, the “whirligig” (see
Leaguer Ladies,
Chapter 5).

Camp followers were prisoners of their place and time. However, some women saw a way to make their fortunes through war. The women
conquistadoras
(see Chapter 5) who accompanied the sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer Cortés on his conquest of Mexico were as hungry for gold and land as any of their men and were ready to fight to the death for rewards they could achieve no other way.

As late as World War II, some women following their men were able to strike out for adventure and parlay their given role into something more. The elegant and heroic
Susan Travers
(see Chapter 5) achieved the singular distinction in World War II of becoming the only female member of the French Foreign Legion at the time.

Manuela Quinn,
the mother of movie star Anthony Quinn, had a very different war. As a
soldadera
who fought in the Mexican revolutionary wars of the early twentieth century (see Chapter 5), she grimly recalled, “We were just poor people fighting for our stomachs.” But all these women were united by a bond that remained unchanged for centuries, following their men to war. And whatever survival for their families or small personal triumphs for themselves they may have carved out, their fate remained unchanged, a life dominated by men and by war.

Few women whose lives are bound up with men of war succeed in beating these odds. One exception was the Irish adventuress
Elisa Lynch
(see Chapter 5), who in the 1860s saw the chance to enrich herself at the expense of the impoverished Paraguayan people when her lover, Francisco Solano López, drove the country to collapse in an insane war.

Lynch escaped retribution by leaving Paraguay when both the victors and the losers had reason to take her life. In the closing days of World War II, the lovers of the twentieth-century dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met a far grimmer fate, Petacci fighting like a wildcat to protect Mussolini before she was gunned down by Italian partisans, and Braun, dubbed “the Angel of Death” by Hitler's entourage, acting as the mistress of the sinister revels in Hitler's bunker as the Third Reich spiraled down to destruction. Whatever the cost to their women, Il Duce and the Führer had their creature comforts to the last.

CAMP FOLLOWERS

Women Who Sustained the Soldiery with Food and Sexual Services,
BCE
–Modern Times

From the earliest times, armies have been followed by women who sustained the soldiery with food and sexual services, in the process attracting the hostility of commanders who often regarded their presence as a threat both to discipline and to mobility. Women caught up in the movements of men at war could also be from the highest social caste. The wives and concubines of the kings of Persia often accompanied them on campaigns and were, from time to time, exposed to capture by the enemy. In 333
BCE
, the wife and daughters of King Darius III were captured by Alexander the Great's Macedonian army after the Battle of Issus, fought on the border of Asia Minor and Syria in what is now modern Turkey.

The Greeks made much of the effete Persians' inability to leave their womenfolk behind when they went on campaign, but they were happy to take slave women to war, as the Greek poet Homer records in the
Iliad,
his epic account of the siege of Troy. The Romans sometimes took a sterner line on camp followers. The military leader Scipio Aemilianus, who had commanded the Roman forces in the siege of Carthage in 146
BCE
, was a martinet of the old school. While campaigning in Spain in 134
BCE
, he threw all the prostitutes and traders out of the Roman camp and introduced a regimen the legendarily tough and warlike Spartans would have approved of, including four-mile training runs in full armor.

In his account of the Jewish revolt against the Romans (66–70
CE
), the Jewish historian Josephus gives an interesting account of the Roman army on the march, from the forward scouting patrols to the rearguard of light and heavy infantry and auxiliary cavalry. The military column was closely trailed by camp followers seeking the protection of the army, a motley crew including prostitutes, common-law wives, slave dealers on the lookout to purchase prisoners of war, and a gaggle of merchants.

From the days of Scipio Aemilianus to the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus at the end of the second century
CE
, both legionary and auxiliary troops in the Roman imperial army were not allowed to marry. Nevertheless, they often formed lasting partnerships that were treated as marriages by all concerned, and which the emperor recognized by granting citizenship to the children they brought into the world and to the auxiliaries themselves. Their sons were thus entitled to enlist in any of the legions, though they might prefer to join their fathers' regiment.

By the fourth century, the Roman army had become progressively less mobile, obliging the emperor Constantine (306–37
CE
) to divide his army into mobile forces (
comitatenses
) and relatively static
limitanei,
who garrisoned forts and fortified towns along Rome's frontier. The enemies that the army faced, notably Celtic and German tribes, were themselves hampered in their mobility by their womenfolk, the warriors merely forming the cutting edge of the colossal tribal migrations that lapped against the increasingly leaky walls of the vast but now collapsing Roman Empire (see also
Boudicca,
Chapter 1).

But no army could do without women. Camp followers were also a feature of medieval warfare, providing many of the foraging, cooking, and washing services essential to the maintenance of European armies in the field (see also
Vivandières,
Chapter 5). Islamic observers of the Crusades were alternately fascinated and horrified by the women who accompanied Crusader armies.

One of them, Imad al-Din (1303–73), castigated some three hundred Frankish women who arrived at Acre as “licentious harlots, proud and scornful, who took and gave, foul-fleshed and sinful singers and coquettes, appearing proudly in public, ardent and inflamed, tinted and painted, desirable and appetising.” The over-heated and excitedly prurient tone of his address anticipates by seven centuries the outrage caused by the physical appearance of female US aircrew in the Persian Gulf after the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the initially pusillanimous efforts made by the United States Air Force to placate their Islamic hosts (see
US Army,
Chapter 6).

Thousands of women straggled after the European armies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some in lumbering baggage trains, others working as unofficial sappers. Some commanders attempted to make the best of a sometimes chaotic situation by appointing officials to provide them with basic rations, transport, and shelter while on the march. From the latter part of the seventeenth century, a limited number of soldiers were allowed to marry camp followers and live with them in peacetime barracks; Prussian troops were fortunate in that the ratio for them was fixed at one man in three, while Bavarian troops were limited to one in twenty.

A similar arrangement was adopted in the British army of the eighteenth century (see
Leaguer Ladies,
Chapter 5). In the early nineteenth century, the small number of British women who were allowed to marry soldiers did not live in married quarters but shared with the men, living in a screened-off corner of the barracks room, where they dressed, made love, and gave birth. Not surprisingly, rape and sexual abuse were commonplace, and middle-aged soldiers lined up to marry the teenage daughters of their comrades.

In the American War of Independence (1775–82), George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army, bridled at the “pernicious” effect of female camp followers, while grudgingly conceding that much of the work they did was entirely beneficial. He attempted to bring the problem, as he saw it, under control by ordering that there be no more than one woman for every fifteen men, a measure that in practice he found impossible to enforce (see also
Molly Pitcher,
Chapter 4). On the British side, Lady Harriet Acland, the wife of a grenadier officer, sought out her husband after he had been badly wounded and captured in 1777. Although heavily pregnant, she commandeered a small boat, sailed down the Hudson under cover of darkness, and slipped though the American lines to recover her husband from the enemy. She kept him alive on the hazardous return journey and nursed him back to health.

Some thirty years earlier, the Duke of Cumberland, the hammer of the Scottish rebels at the Battle of Culloden (1746), adopted a similar approach of weary resignation when he ordered the women accompanying the British army to “remain with the horses, between the general officers' luggage and the wheel baggage of the rest of the army.” The Duke of Wellington, victor of the battle of Waterloo (1815), had a characteristically forthright approach to disciplining female camp followers, ordering some of them to be flogged. Wellington considered the rank and file of his army the “scum of the earth” and had an equally low opinion of their womenfolk, observing that it was “well known that, in all armies, the women are at least as bad, if not worse, than the men as plunderers.” For Wellington, the exemption of such women from punishment would only have “encouraged plunder” (see also
Royal Navy,
Chapter 5).