Hell Hath No Fury (32 page)

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Raskova used her personal influence with Joseph Stalin, and her position on the People's Defense Committee, to secure the establishment of Aviation Group 122, a training formation in which both the air and ground crews would be female.

Raskova oversaw the recruitment and training of the intake and their eventual assignment to three air regiments—the 586th IAP (Fighter), the 587th BAP (Bomber), and the 588th NBAP (Night Bomber). She assumed command of the 587th BAP, which was equipped with the rugged Petlyakov Pe-2 attack bomber, an outstanding combat aircraft that had entered service in 1940 and was frequently upgraded throughout the war. On January 4, 1943, while leading a flight of Pe-2s to reinforce the Stalingrad front, Raskova crashed in a heavy snowstorm and was killed. She received the first state funeral of the war and was buried in Red Square. In September 1943 the formation she had commanded was redesignated the 125th M. M. Raskova Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment.

Reference: Reina Pennington,
Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat,
2002.

REITSCH, HANNA

Hitler's Test Pilot, 1912–1979

Diminutive, dynamic, and burning with an almost mystical belief in the magic of flight, Reitsch became an ambassadress for Nazi aviation in the 1930s, gaining a reputation from which she struggled to distance herself in the postwar years. When she died, one of the kinder obituaries referred to her as a “politically naïve patriot who had believed that she had only served her Fatherland.”

Reitsch was raised in an intensely patriotic family in the eastern German province of Silesia. Bitten by the flying bug, she abandoned her medical studies for gliding, which had been developed in Germany in the 1920s as a means to circumvent the ban on powered flight imposed on Germany in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles.

International success as a gliding champion took Reitsch around the globe as a woman in an almost exclusively male world. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics she was a member of an elite German team tasked with giving aerobatic displays. On the insistence of Ernst Udet, the World War I flying ace who in 1936 became the technical director at the German Air Ministry, Reitsch was appointed
Flugkapitan,
a rank normally reserved for the most senior pilots of Lufthansa, the German national airline.

In September 1937, Udet invited Reitsch to join a team of test pilots at Rechlin, an air base at which new aircraft designs were flown and evaluated. Here she tested the dive breaks on the Junkers Ju 87 bomber and flew an early helicopter, the Fa61, in the presence of Charles Lindbergh. Photographs of the period show a small, intensely feminine figure dwarfed by Luftwaffe officers in bulky leather overcoats.

In the early war years, Reitsch remained at Rechlin as a test pilot, helping to develop and fly the Messerschmitt Me321 Gigant, a massive transport glider capable of carrying one hundred fully equipped troops plus a crew of seven or 21,500 pounds of cargo. A powered version was later used extensively as a heavy transport machine.

Reitsch also tested the Me163 Komet, a unique ultra-short-range defensive jet fighter, which had an alarming tendency to explode like a bomb as it landed on its ski undercarriage. Reitsch later likened flying the Komet to “thundering through the skies on a cannonball.” On October 30, 1942, while flying an unpowered Me163, she crashed and sustained severe injuries.

This setback did not deter Reitsch, and after the award of an Iron Cross she embarked on another hazardous assignment, test flying a manned version of the V-1 missile, which was launched from the underside of a modified He111 bomber. Reitsch advocated the employment of this weapon on suicide missions against Allied shipping, but it never went into service.

On April 26, 1945, as the Third Reich entered its death throes, Hitler summoned the Luftwaffe general Robert Ritter von Greim, then commander of Luftflotte 6 and an old friend of Reitsch, to the
Führerbunker
in Berlin. They flew into the besieged city in a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch light aircraft, piloted by Reitsch after Greim had been badly wounded in the foot by ground fire. Trapped in Hitler's bunker in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery, Greim was promoted to the rank of field marshal and appointed commander of what remained of the Luftwaffe. On April 29, he was ordered to fly out of Berlin with Reitsch to arrest Heinrich Himmler. The historian Hugh Trevor Roper dryly commented that Reitsch's fervent character was “well suited to the atmosphere in that last subterranean madhouse in Berlin.” She and Greim took off from Berlin's east-west axis in a small Arado aircraft, shells bursting around them, a sea of flame below, and flew on to Grand Admiral Dönitz's headquarters at Plon, on the Baltic. Greim committed suicide on May 24, 1945 and Reitsch was taken into US custody.

Reitsch's postwar career was marked by more international gliding triumphs, a rapprochement with aviation enthusiasts in the United States—she was invited to the White House in 1961—and a protracted battle to clear her name of the taint of Nazism. In the 1930s she had regarded Nazism as “the most natural way of life” and had, perhaps naïvely, allowed the German propaganda machine to exploit her femininity. The attention she had received in the 1930s and early 1940s was unsought but not unwelcome, and in the 1960s and 1970s she paid the price in the form of a number of libel actions. She continued to set gliding records up to her death, on August 24, 1979, from a heart attack.

Reference:
Fliegen mein Leben, Hanna Reitsch,
1968; and Judy Lomax,
Flying for the Fatherland,
1988.

ROSSI, MARIE T.

US Helicopter Pilot, b. 1959, d. 1991

Major Rossi was the first US woman soldier to fly operationally into Iraqi-held territory in the Persian Gulf War. She was killed in an air accident the day after the cease-fire had been declared in Operation Desert Storm.

A graduate of River Dell Regional High School, New Jersey, she studied psychology at Dickinson University, where she was an outstanding cadet in the ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps). In the Gulf War, Rossi commanded Company “B” of the 159th Aviation Battalion, 24th Infantry Division, which played an important role in Desert Storm, ferrying fuel and ammunition to the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. Three days before she lost her life, Major Rossi made these comments to a CNN interviewer:

Sometimes you have to disassociate how you feel personally about going into war and, you know, possibly see the death that's going to be there. But personally, as an aviator and a soldier, this is the moment that everyone trains for—that I've trained for—so I feel ready to meet the challenge. I don't necessarily personally like it; if I had the opportunity and they called a ceasefire tomorrow that would be great.

Major Rossi died on March 1, 1991, when the CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter she was piloting flew into an unlighted microwave tower at night and in bad weather near her base in Saudi Arabia. Three other crew members died in the crash. Major Rossi is buried in Arlington National Cemetery; her epitaph reads, “First Female Combat Commander to Fly into Battle Operation Desert Storm.”

Reference: Marie T. Rossi-Cayton, www.ctie.monash.edu/.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

World War II

One of the rare engagements of World War II in which women fought side by side with men, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising proved beyond doubt what women were capable of when given weapons and allowed to take part in combat. The heroism of the Jewish women involved in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was such that it commanded the attention of the German commander of the forces against whom they made their courageous but doomed last stand.

At the outbreak of World War II, there were some 3 million Jews in Poland, of whom about 300,000 lived in the capital, Warsaw, where they formed about one-third of the city's population. The Warsaw Ghetto was established by Poland's German occupiers in the autumn of 1940. In a matter of days, an eleven-mile wall, ten to twenty feet high and topped with broken glass and barbed wire, was built to isolate an area of 2.5 square miles east of the Vistula River.

The original population of the area had been moved out and replaced by some 138,000 Jews. No Jews were allowed to leave the area, with the exception of a few employed in war-related industries. Thousands more Jews were transported to Warsaw from cities and towns across Poland, and eventually some 433,000 Jews were incarcerated in the ghetto. Thousands of its inhabitants died every month from starvation and disease. Communication with the outside world was both illegal and fraught with danger (see
Sendlerowa, Irena,
Chapter 11).

July 1942 saw the first shipments from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of Treblinka, a death camp only fifty miles away. The Jewish Council, a body established by the Germans, was ordered to supply six thousand people a day for “resettlement.” Few believed that this was a death sentence. A German poster offered three kilos of bread and a kilo of jam to those who reported for resettlement between July 29 and 31.

However, the truth about Treblinka was discovered by a member of the Bund, the underground Jewish socialist party in Poland. The news was published in the Bund newspaper but had made little or no impact on the situation. By September 1942, the population of the ghetto had fallen to sixty thousand. The decision to resist the liquidation of the ghetto was led by the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), a group of some five hundred young male and female Zionists opposed to the Bund, who up to that point had remained isolated and powerless. From December 1942, the ZOB began to acquire arms with the help of the Polish Home Army (the clandestine force formed after the fall of Poland in 1939), although on a pathetically small scale.

On January 18, 1943, the Germans launched a renewed roundup in the ghetto. This time they met armed resistance, and the roundup was abandoned after four days of fighting. The mood of fatalism that had previously pervaded the ghetto was lifted. Taxes were imposed on wealthy inhabitants of the ghetto to obtain fuel and arms from outside its walls, and the ZOB received additional weapons from the Polish Home Army. Training and weapons drills were stepped up. Bunkers were prepared with supplies of food and water.

On April 19, three thousand SS troops, supported by tanks and flamethrowers and commanded by SS general Jürgen Stroop, were sent into the ghetto with orders to clear it out and destroy the buildings. They were met with small-arms fire and grenade attacks. Small detachments of armed Jews totaling some 750 male and female fighters armed with grenades, Molotov cocktails, seventeen rifles, and a handful of pistols engaged the SS in a running battle.

The Jews were meant to go like lambs to the slaughter, but they fought like tigers, using hidden bunkers and secret escape routes. Stroop himself reported on the battle in the ghetto: “Jews and Jewesses shot from two pistols at the same time…. Jewesses carried loaded [weapons] in their clothing…. At the last moment they would pull out hand grenades…and throw them at the soldiers.”

The battle lasted twenty-seven days. On May 8 the headquarters bunker of the ZOB was overrun and its leader, Mordecai Anielewicz, killed. Eight days later Stroop announced that the fighting was over. He had proceeded methodically, using fire rather than the sword. Water, gas, and electricity were cut off and buildings set aflame block by block. Cellars were cleared with “smoke candles.” When their occupants emerged, they were mown down.

At the final count, more than twenty thousand inhabitants of the ghetto were killed and some sixteen thousand remained for transport to Treblinka. Around three hundred Germans had died in the fighting. The Polish Jews had provided their fellow Poles with a heroic example. Their cause had been hopeless, but their courage was superb. In the process they had demonstrated the effectiveness of urban guerrilla warfare waged with unflinching determination against a better-armed and more numerous enemy.

Reference: Norman Davies,
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw,
2004.

8

HEALING HANDS

Doctors, Nurses, Medics, and Health Workers

The picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the “emergency” of March 22nd 1918, gazing half-hypnotised at the dishevelled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy clothing, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy bloodstained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me, and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirit.

—Vera Brittain, working as a VAD sister in a field hospital in Étaples, France, recalled in
Testament of Youth
(1936)

M
Y GOOD LADY
, go home and sit still!” The British War Office bully who gave this insulting advice to
Dr. Elsie Inglis
in World War I (see Chapter 8) was clearly ignorant that women of all kinds had been vital attendants at battlefields for thousands of years. All wars everywhere have needed doctors and nurses, a reality recognized by
Isabella I,
the fifteenth-century warrior queen of Spain, when she set up one of the earliest known military field hospitals in the Western world (see Chapter 2).

Despite some notable exceptions, for thousands of years doctors were male, and women were restricted to nursing roles until the turn of the twentieth century, when medical schools finally opened their doors to female students. As with the entire story of women at war, women's struggle to gain entry to medical training and also to be admitted to front-line service mirrors their fight for freedom and equality in the wider world.

Inglis herself had benefited from these greater freedoms to qualify as a doctor in Scotland, and eager to put her healing skills to good use, she had offered to provide the British army with fully staffed female medical units for the battlefronts of World War I. Whether she knew it or not, Inglis was working within an ancient tradition. Early myths and legends place goddesses and women on every battlefield, both as combatants and hostile scavengers and as their polar opposite, healers in time of need. The Roman historian Tacitus records that Celtic warriors fighting the Roman armies from the first invasion of Britain in 43
CE
always brought their women to the battlefield because “it is to their mothers that they go to have their wounds treated, and the women are not afraid to count and compare the gashes.”

In Arabia before Islam, women similarly went to war with their men to help the wounded, when they were not fighting themselves (see
Al-Kind'yya, Khawlah bint al-Azwar,
Chapter 1). Records show that during the early period of Islam in the seventh century, there are many women who appeared on the battlefield, including some of Muhammad's wives. Women known as “the companions of the Prophet” accompanied the men to battle to nurse the wounded and to supply food and drink: Umm Ayman, Muhammad's nurse and freedwoman, was present at the Battle of Uhud in 625
CE
, at Khayber in 628
CE
, and at Hunayn in 630
CE
. Several other women companions, such as Umm Sinan al-Aslamiyya and Ku'ayba bint Sa'd al-Aslamiyya, were active in a number of battles, tending the sick and the wounded. Al-Aslamiyya is said to have set up a tent in the mosque at Medina to serve as a makeshift hospital for the wounded, which would make it one of the very first field hospitals in the world.

The history of military medicine can be traced to the origins of organized warfare in the Sumerian city-states of southern Mesopotamia around 3000
BCE
, when the so-called Vulture Stele of the city-state of Lagash around 2500
BCE
shows the gory fate of the defeated enemy, whose abandoned corpses are being picked over by vultures: men whom their battlefield nurses had been unable to save.

The Romans, masters of order and organization, understood the link between their troops' health and fighting strength, but patriarchs to a man, they had no room for women in their first medical corps, formed in the reign of its first emperor Augustus between 27
BCE
and 4
CE
. Centuries ahead of their time, the Roman army's
medici
(physicians) cleaned wounds with
acetum
(vinegar, a simple fatty acid more efficient than the carbolic acid used by Joseph Lister, the founder of nineteenth-century antiseptic surgery), and boiled their surgical instruments before every use. With an equally advanced organization of military hospitals and wards staffed with medical orderlies and designated bandagers
(capsarii),
they provided the troops with a standard of medical care in times of war and peace that was not to be equaled until the work of
Florence Nightingale
and others in the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 8).

Medical care of this standard was one of the rewards a grateful empire bestowed on the soldiers who sustained it, and the exclusion of women from the knowledge and experience of the army doctors meant that vital information never spread into the civilian world beyond the military. Incalculable death and loss would have been avoided if midwives attending women had known about sterilization and antisepsis, for example. Nevertheless, a parallel tradition persisted of local wise women who were expert in treating war wounds, like the crone reputed to have saved a feverish Alexander the Great from a particularly vicious sword gash. She packed the gaping hole with spiderwebs, a remedy dismissed by later physicians as filthy old wives' nonsense until modern science showed them to be full of penicillin.

Nevertheless, in succeeding centuries, women continued to be banned from both the armed services and from enrolling as doctors. Throughout Europe from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century, nurses were treated as no better than domestic servants and given only rudimentary training at best. Surgery was performed without any anesthetic except the occasional use of alcohol and never with sterilized instruments, antiseptics were not in general use, and hygiene was primitive or nonexistent. With no clear idea of good practice until
Florence Nightingale
(see Chapter 8) began her program of reform, the administration and design of wards were matters of chance, and treatment was haphazard at best. The women who tended the sick were also notorious for their addiction to the bottle, and were often drunk (see
Seacole, Mary,
Chapter 8).

British journalists investigating the campaign in the Crimea between 1853 and 1856 exposed these and other chronic levels of mismanagement by the military authorities in Britain that ensured that malnutrition and disease took a deadly toll. The resulting national scandal brought down the British government and stimulated reforms aimed at improving the welfare of British troops.

One determined woman grappled with this tangle of problems. At the request of Britain's secretary for war, Florence Nightingale led a team of nurses to reorganize the care of the wounded at the British army's base hospital at Scutari. A small band of equally determined women in the American Civil War (1861-65) followed the standards set by Florence Nightingale,
Dorothea Dix
(see Chapter 8) among them. Like Nightingale, Dix battled against entrenched male hostility to establish the Union's Army Nursing Corps, as did
Clara Barton,
the founder of the American Red Cross (see Chapter 8). The Civil War boasted another remarkable medical and military cross-dresser like
James Barry
(see Chapter 3),
Mary Edwards Walker,
who became the first female doctor in the Union army's medical corps (see Chapter 8).

In spite of these significant advances, the American and British armies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained strongly male institutions, with little tolerance for women except as nurses. A small number of British nurses saw service in the Zulu War of 1879 and between 1882 and 1885 in Egypt and the Sudan. The British Army Nursing Reserve was established in 1897, and in the United States the American Nurse Corps followed in 1901.

In the twentieth century, the scale of both world wars drew tens of thousands of American and British women into work as nurses, and increasingly near the front line (see
Army Nurse Corps,
Chapter 8). In World War I, there was still room for remarkable and often crazily heroic freelances who provided medical care (see
Chisholm, Mairi,
and
Knocker, Elsie,
both Chapter 8). But the industrial scale on which that conflict was waged—more than 90,000 women served in
Voluntary Aid Detachments
(see Chapter 6) alone—left little room for quirky individualism.

America's entry into World War II brought some 59,000 women into the Army Nurse Corps over time, and the sophisticated “chain of evacuation” they developed in North Africa, Italy, and northwestern Europe became standard practice until the end of the war. Twenty years later, the experience the corps gained in air evacuation proved invaluable in the Vietnam War, when nurses formed the majority of female service personnel in the war zone. Later, the work of the corps laid the foundation for medical care during the Persian Gulf War and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Modern warfare is frequently described as more “technologized” and more “professional” than the wars of the past. But war wounds remain as horrific as ever, if not worse, and nurses continue to serve armies worldwide, often at the risk of their own lives.

ANG, SWEE CHAI

“Small Miss,” Singaporean Orthopedic Surgeon and Refugee Camp Doctor, Beirut 1982, b.ca. 1952

An orthopedic surgeon by training, the less-than-four-foot-nine-inch Swee Chai Ang volunteered to join a humanitarian mission to Lebanon after hearing an international SOS for a surgeon to treat war victims in Beirut. She found the hospitals bombed and without electricity or water. She was working in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabrah and Shatila when, only weeks after her arrival, Israel invaded West Beirut and the people of the camps fell victim to the notorious massacre of 1982. The killing of an estimated 800 to 3,500 Palestinians was carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, and controversy continues to surround Israel's role in the outrage.

“Frightened people were pouring into the hospital,” Ang recalled. “The first woman…had her entire elbow joint missing…she had been shot as soon as she stepped out of her front door. After her came a stream of women, shot in the jaw, the head, the chest, the abdomen…shot in the streets while going out for food or water for their families.” These were the lucky ones. Many more were raped, tortured, and horribly killed.

Ang and her colleagues worked throughout the crisis, treating all comers. Later that year she gave evidence to the Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the massacre, then returned to Beirut, where she worked for six more years. Subsequently she devoted much of her time to work with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

Reference: Dr. Swee Chai Ang,
From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon with the Palestinians,
1989.

ARMY NURSE CORPS

United States, World War II

American nurses served in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and were officially established as the Nurse Corps in 1901. Although the American military continued to see itself as an all-male preserve, extending only a grudging tolerance to nurses, the value of the nursing service was effectively demonstrated in World War I.

In World War II, more than 59,000 nurses served in the US Army Nurse Corps. They came under fire in field hospitals and hospital ships and as flight nurses on medical transport aircraft. Their dedication, combined with advances in medical science, contributed to the low mortality rate among US troops who received medical care in the field or underwent casualty evacuation.

On December 7, 1941, the day that the carrier-borne aircraft of the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the US Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, there were fewer than a thousand nurses in the US Army, of whom eighty-two were stationed on the island of Oahu. First Lieutenant Annie G. Fox, the chief nurse at Hickam Field, on Oahu, was the first nurse of World War II to be awarded the Purple Heart for her “calmness, courage and leadership” during the Japanese attack.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was only one element in Japan's preemptive strike in the Pacific. On December 8, Japanese forces landed in the Philippines, where more than one hundred members of the Nurse Corps were stationed, most of them in Manila. With the fall of Manila on January 2, 1942, the nurses were evacuated to the island fortress of Corregidor and then, after leaving some of their number behind, transferred to the Bataan peninsula, where they were ordered to prepare two emergency hospitals for the US and Filipino forces fighting there.

By the end of March, the hospitals were massively overcrowded, short of medicine, food, and clothing, and under Japanese air attack. A month later the twenty nurses left on the peninsula were evacuated on two US Navy aircraft. One aircraft made a forced landing, and all those aboard were taken prisoner by the Japanese. On May 7, the defenders of Corregidor surrendered, along with the fifty-five nurses who had remained there. The nurses who had fallen into Japanese hands in the opening campaign of the Pacific war were interned in Manila and remained prisoners of war until their liberation by US forces in February 1945.