It is said that wars are man-made. Whether warfare is a natural pursuit of either gender is debatable, but women were involved in every arena of World War II.
Most nations discouraged women from joining the service until the totality of war dictated otherwise. Eventually one out of fifty Americans in uniform was female. In Poland the ratio was one in twelve, and in Britain one in ten. Unlike their male counterparts, most women served in noncombat roles, a point emphasized by recruiting slogans. American naval auxiliary posters read, “Enlist in the Waves, Release a Man to Fight at Sea.” In nearly every culture, the order was, “Be the woman behind the man behind the gun.” Even in the Soviet Union, where by necessity nearly a half-million women served in combat, the initial battle cry was “men to the front, women to the home front.”109
Guerrilla warfare offered greater opportunity for frontline work. Conservatively, 10 percent of underground combat units in France, Italy, and Yugoslavia were women. Fifteen percent in Russia and Poland were female. Directly involved in the fighting, their losses mounted accordingly. While the U.S. Army lost sixteen female nurses killed in action, Yugoslavia lost nearly ten thousand woman partisans, approximately one out of every four who served.110
Behind the lines, women were the backbone of aid societies, such as the International Red Cross, Women’s Volunteer Service of Britain, and the Greater Japan Women’s Association. Most prevalent was the female presence in the work force. “Rosie the Riveter” symbolized a doubling of American women in factories. By 1945 36 percent of the American labor pool was female, 37 percent in Britain, and 50 percent in Germany and the Soviet Union.111
Regardless of the degree of service, official recognition was not forthcoming. In 1944, France awarded the Compagnon de la Libération medal to 1,057 individuals, only 6 of whom were female. Germany granted tens of thousands of Iron Crosses throughout the war, with a paltry 29 going to women. America’s 100,000 WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) would not receive veterans benefits until 1977.112
Many risked their lives, but few achieved widespread influence and adoration in the service of their country. Listed here are ten exceptions. They are just ten out of some half-billion women who persevered through the largest and bloodiest of wars yet “made by man.”
1. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (U.S., 1884–1962)
The “First Lady of the World,” Eleanor Roosevelt utilized her unique station, sharp intellect, unbendable will, and the modern media to become the most visible woman on the globe and arguably the most influential female in the Western Hemisphere since Catherine the Great.
Venomous to the corrupted, altruistic to the downtrodden, intense, vocal, and uncompromising, Eleanor Roosevelt was an idealist driven to action. She was the first wife of a president to hold press conferences, write syndicated columns, and speak regularly on radio, “fighting for democracy at home” when the pressures of war threatened to reverse social gains. She unsuccessfully protested the internment of Japanese Americans and lobbied for granting visas to European Jews. In the name of equality and the war effort, she successfully lobbied for increases in the number of women in the workplace and African Americans in the military.113
Though she intensely hated to travel, Roosevelt flew to Britain and the South Pacific during the war, often in rickety bombers, to speak with dignitaries, address civilians, and visit the sick and wounded in uniform. In one month she managed to traverse twenty-five thousand miles.
Her brash and relentless character offended many, including white conservative southerners, anti–New Deal Republicans, and a fair number of women. But others grew to revere her, particularly minorities, British civilians, and American servicemen. Accompanying her on a hospital tour in Guadalcanal, the stoic Adm. William “Bull” Halsey marveled at her determination and tenderness and greatly respected the way “she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient.” Winston Churchill said she had “a spirit of steel and a heart of gold.” Joseph Goebbels, angered by her popularity and influence, forbade German papers to write about her.114
Immediately after the war, at the insistence of President Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt became a U.S. delegate to the United Nations.
While visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a young man severely burned while fighting in North Africa. He mentioned he played the piano. To encourage him, Mrs. Roosevelt said he could practice on the Steinway in the White House, which he did for a year, and he recovered.
2. MARINA RASKOVA (USSR, 1912–43)
Soviet Aviation Group 122 consisted of standard-issue bombers, fighters, uniforms, and equipment. Formed in late 1941, there was little to distinguish the group from any other air-combat unit in the war, except that nearly all of its pilots, mechanics, navigators, and support personnel were women, assembled under the leadership of Marina Raskova.115
The first professional female navigator in the Soviet Union, Raskova was a famous endurance pilot before the war and became an air force officer. The young and cheerful Raskova also knew Stalin, which enabled her, in the face of much social and professional opposition, to demand and lead the formation of a female air-combat unit.116
Diligent, inspiring, and practically inexhaustible, for nearly a year she trained what would become three air regiments within the group: the 586th Fighter, 125th Dive Bomber, and 46th Night Bomber. Altogether, the thirty-year-old managed hundreds of officers and enlisted, but she never lived to see combat.
In late 1942 Moscow assigned Raskova’s 125th Dive Bomber Regiment to STALINGRAD at the height of the winter battle. Piloting one of the regiment’s twin-engine Pe-2s, Raskova and three crew members flew to the front when a sudden blizzard engulfed them. Facing thrashing winds and falling darkness, she attempted to land in an open field and crashed, killing everyone on board.117
Testament to her leverage and inspiration, her body was interned in Red Square. Streets, schools, village centers, and newborns were named after her. Not surprisingly, Raskova’s group went on to fight with distinction. From 1942 to the war’s termination, the group logged thirty thousand sorties, two of her fighter pilots attained the status of ace, and her night-bomber regiment fought in the battle of BERLIN.118
During the war, thirty-three women flyers received the highest decoration, “Hero of the Soviet Union.” All but three of them were in Raskova’s Aviation Group 122.
3. YVONNE NÈVEJEAN (BELGIUM, 1900–1987)
Famed Moravian Oskar Schindler rescued more than twelve hundred Jews from the Holocaust. Lesser-known Belgian Yvonne Nèvejean spared more than four thousand, mostly children.
She was head of the Oeuvre Nationale de l’Enfance (National Agency for Children) and directed the state-sponsored children’s homes throughout her country. As the SS began to round up and export Belgium’s sixty-five thousand Jews in 1942, the nation’s underground Jewish Defense Committee turned to Nèvejean for assistance. When asked to help children who had become orphaned or separated from their parents, Nèvejean vowed to save any child and immediately employed her agency to that end.
As the JDC found children for rescue, Nèvejean dispatched social workers and nurses to pick them up. Housing her charges in state facilities, she worked tirelessly to find permanent homes for all, either with foster families or Christian organizations. To pay for the operation, she collected funds from the JDC, banks, private donors, and the exiled Belgian government in London. She and her assistants also gathered food, medicine, clothes, ration books, and forged documents.119
On one occasion, the Gestapo raided a children’s home in Wezembeek, seized a number of Jewish children and adults, and transported them to Mechelen camp, a train embarkation point for Auschwitz. Nèvejean hurriedly contacted Belgium’s Queen Mother Elisabeth and, with the help of the national department of justice, negotiated the release of all the detainees.120
Over the course of two years, Nèvejean and her associates saved approximately a quarter of Belgium’s Jewish population below the age of ten, known thereafter as “Yvonne’s Children.”
Yvonne Nèvejean’s rescue of the children from Mechelen was a miraculous achievement. Of the 26,500 Jews deported from the camp, only some 500 are known to have lived.
4. LUDMILA PAVLICHENKO (USSR, 1916–74)
Tiny, bitter, and blunt, Sgt. Mila Pavlichenko was one of the most prolific sharpshooters in the Red Army and a legend on the eastern front. Her fellow Soviets called her the “Death Sniper.” To the Germans she was the “Bolshevik Valkyrie,” killing with impunity in her native Ukraine and Crimea. During the 1941 siege of Odessa alone, she allegedly tallied more than 180 kills.
Wounded four times and losing her husband in combat, she desired to kill as many Germans as possible. But as news of her exploits reached Moscow, Soviet officials decided to use her in a different capacity. They promoted her to lieutenant, made her the subject of a documentary, and in 1942 sent her on a speaking tour. In Canada, England, Wales, and the United States, she regaled audiences with stories of her assassinations and lectured them on the need for a second front in Europe. She met with students, factory workers, Ukrainian-American groups, and was one of the first Soviets ever to be invited to the White House, a personal guest of ELEANOR ROOSEVELT.121
When telling audiences of her daring occupation, she recalled one incident most often. Near the city of Sevastopol, she became locked in a duel against an opposing sniper that lasted nearly two days. After finally getting in the last and fatal shot, she investigated her prey and found a booklet containing a tally of more than four hundred kills. One version of the story contends the ledger read “Dunkirk.” Whether this was added to stir the emotions of British audiences is unknown.
What could be confirmed was her own incredible total. In her brief but prolific career, Pavlichenko was credited with 309 enemy fatalities.122
According to Soviet records, female snipers of the Red Army scored more than eleven thousand kills during the Second World War.
5. GISI FLEISCHMANN (SLOVAKIA, 1897–1944)
A diehard Zionist working for the Jewish Center of Slovakia before the war, Gisi Fleischmann was in charge of arranging emigrations to Palestine. As Hitler’s power grew, she knew enough to send her two children to the British mandate, but she repeatedly refused to go herself. Instead she spent the rest of her short life saving others.
In the spring of 1942, as the SS began wholesale roundups, extraditions, and executions of the Continent’s Jews, Fleischmann and others formed a clandestine rescue operation code-named “Working Group.” Members of the underground society decided to bribe regional Gestapo chief Dieter Wisliceny to stop the deportations. Fleischmann raised the ransom money through Jewish foundations in Geneva and New York and led the negotiations with Wisliceny. The attempt succeeded. From the fall of 1942 to the fall of 1944 extraditions effectively ceased in Slovakia.
Encouraged by their success, Working Group outlined a “Europa Plan,” whereby the Third Reich would spare all Jews in exchange for money and goods shipped in from outside the Continent. While presenting the arrangement to Nazi authorities, Fleischmann was arrested and jailed for four months. After her release, she again refused to leave the country. In October 1944 the SS swept up nearly every member of the outfit, including Fleischmann. Taken on one of the last trains to reach Auschwitz, she was pulled from the boxcars, sent directly to the chambers, and gassed.123
When she was deported to Auschwitz, Gisi Fleischmann was designated “R.U.” for Rückkehr unerwünscht, meaning “Return undesirable.”
6. YELENA FEDOROVNA KOLESOVA (USSR, 1917–42)
A Moscow grade school teacher, tall, athletic, Yelena Kolesova volunteered for military service immediately after the German invasion. Hastily trained in demolitions, Kolesova led a small group of female fighters behind enemy lines in November 1941. Over the course of nineteen days they set fire to buildings, conducted reconnaissance, and killed several German soldiers. For her initiative and courage, she received the Order of the Red Banner, the third-highest decoration available to Soviet citizens.124
In May 1942, she survived a behind-the-lines airdrop that killed three of her female compatriots. Undeterred, Kolesova proceeded with her diminished group. With the help of local civilians, she derailed trains, abducted enemy soldiers, and destroyed bridges. Germany offered thirty thousand Reichmarks (about seven thousand dollars in 1942) for her capture and estimated her unit to be six hundred strong, where in fact it only numbered a half dozen. She went on to receive the Order of Lenin, the highest decoration in the Soviet Union.125
On September 11, 1942, while leading an attack on a heavily defended German outpost in the town of Vydritsa, Kolesova charged a machine-gun nest and was torn apart by return fire.
Along with several schools and museums, avenues in four Russian cities bear the name Yelena Kolesova.
7. MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (U.S., 1904–71)
She was the first woman editor of Fortune magazine, one of the first photographers from the West allowed into the Soviet Union, a founding member of Life magazine, and the only U.S. photographer in Moscow at the start of the German invasion. Not only did she break new ground and champion higher standards in a male-dominated industry, but she also risked her life to show the war to the United States.
After her return from the eastern front in 1942, she published a book titled Shooting the Russian War and sought assignment in the European theater. The first woman correspondent officially accredited by the U.S. armed forces, she was also the first to accompany a B-17 crew on a bombing run. Bourke-White narrowly escaped death when a torpedo sank her ship off the coast of North Africa, only to follow U.S. troops through the mountains astride Naples and CASSINO. She then went with GEORGE S. PATTON’S Third Army on its march through northern France.
Arguably her most revolutionary contribution to photojournalism occurred in the last days of the war, when she took part in the liberation of Buchenwald, a forced-labor camp in central Germany. Going against governmental censorship and an unwritten agreement among media members to suppress disturbing images, Bourke-White and Life magazine printed her photos of Buchenwald’s emaciated and dying inmates. The images were the first graphic confirmation of Nazi concentration camps ever published for the American public.
Though a woman of many firsts, Margaret Bourke-White took the last known photograph of Mohandas Gandhi, just hours before he was assassinated in 1948.
8. MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE (FRANCE, 1909–89)
She was the only woman to head a major network of the French underground, a spy ring the Gestapo called “Noah’s Ark” for the animal code names given to its operatives. Secretary to the Ark’s founder, Marie Madeleine Fourcade (a.k.a. Hedgehog) took over when her boss was arrested in 1941. Under her direction, the network became the largest and most prolific civilian espionage system in Western Europe.
Positioned across France, at one time numbering more than three thousand operatives, her beasts of burden collected details on troop movements, bunker locations, unit strengths, and supply routes. Information was then fed through a score of radio transmitters to the British Secret Intelligence Service. When maps, images, and volumes of material were collected, Fourcade arranged to have the RAF fly them out.126
Moles infiltrated the Ark on several occasions. Fourcade herself was arrested twice and escaped both times, once by squeezing through the window bars of a Gestapo holding cell. Every time the network collapsed, she rebuilt it. Though she and her network survived the war, more than five hundred of its operatives died along the way.127
In Paris is the Foundation of Memory and Hopes of Resistance at Place Marie-Madeleine Fourcade.
9. ANDRÉE DE JONGH (BELGIUM, 1916–2007)
Twenty-four-year-old Andrée De Jongh became furious when her country capitulated after only eighteen days of fighting. She vowed to work for victory and set upon the idea to rescue Allied soldiers and airmen caught behind the lines. Creating a chain of safe houses in Belgium with her father, she laid the foundation for a network that would rescue some eight hundred military personnel.
In 1941, she and two accomplices smuggled a British airman out of Belgium. Andrée and her entourage proceeded through France, across the Pyrenees, and into Madrid. Meeting with British officials, she convinced them to support an underground railroad from Brussels to Gibraltar. The system was soon to be known affectionately as the “Comet Line.” Fierce and untiring, she was dubbed “La Petit Cyclone” and “the Postman.” De Jongh personally delivered 118 pilots, navigators, gunners, and engineers to safety, many of whom returned to the service.
In the course of their work, several conductors on the Comet Line were arrested and executed, including Andrée’s father, Frederich. The Gestapo caught up with Andrée in January 1943 and sent her to prison in Paris. They later sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She survived the internment and was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945. After the war, she worked as a nurse in impoverished areas of Africa.128
For creating the Comet Line and for her courageous work, Andrée De Jongh received the American Medal of Freedom and the George Cross (Britain’s highest civilian decoration) and was made a Belgian countess.
10. HANNA REITSCH (GERMANY, 1912–79)
A natural-born flyer, Hanna Reitsch earned her pilot’s license by age twenty. Impressing the public at air shows, she also broke distance and altitude records. Before the war she had not particularly cared for the Nazi regime, going so far as to publicly criticize its ethnic policies. But the opportunity to fly the latest and fastest machines had her working as a test pilot for the Reich by 1938.
Weathering a number of crashes, she nearly died in a 1942 incident. She suffered a dislocated jaw, cracked vertebrae, and skull fractures but won much sympathy and attention from Hitler. After ten months of recuperation, Reitsch was again in the air, testing the Messerschmitt 163 rocket plane and a prototype of the V-1 buzz bomb.
She became a national icon, gracing the pages of newspapers and magazines. Far from the Nazi ideal of an obedient homemaker, Reitsch nonetheless served as a symbol of German courage and achievement, a status she did not take lightly. When Allied air raids and Soviet offensives began to tear into the German heartland, Reitsch approached Hitler and offered to lead a suicide mission, piloting modified V-1 rockets to key targets. He halfheartedly consented. Though nothing came of the idea, the gesture ensured her place as one of the last and most trusted members of Hitler’s entourage. She would be one of the last people to see him alive.
In April 1945, as the Red Army stormed into the center of Berlin, Reitsch and Luftwaffe Gen. Robert Ritter von Greim flew through Soviet gunfire to reach the Chancellery bunker. Upon seeing his cherished pilot, Hitler exclaimed: “Brave woman! So there is still some loyalty and courage left in the world!” Yet the Führer refused her offer to fly him out of Berlin. She and von Greim left the bunker two days before Hitler’s suicide.129
Arrested and detained after the war, Reitsch returned to condemning the Third Reich. Released after a year’s incarceration, she toured the world, met Jawaharlal Nehru and John F. Kennedy, and set more flying records.130
Hanna Reitsch is the only woman in German history to receive both a second-and first-class Iron Cross.