All Hell Let Loose (60 page)

3
A WOMAN’S PLACE

The mobilisation of women was a critical social phenomenon of the war, most comprehensive in the Soviet Union and Britain, though Adam Tooze has shown that Germany also used female workers more widely than formerly supposed. The Japanese social ethos precluded the elevation of women to positions of responsibility, but they played a critical role in factories, and by 1944 provided half of Japan’s agricultural labour force. Pre-war Britain used women workers much less than the Soviet Union, but quickly conscripted them under the pressures of siege. Some thus found a fulfilment they had not known in peacetime: Peter Baxter’s fifty-five-year-old mother worked as a clerk in the British Ministry of Supply, ‘and is, I suspect, enjoying herself more than she has done for years’, her son wrote. ‘She has a quick brain, and it is stimulating for her to be using her wits instead of toiling through a load of housework … I can’t help thinking that, much as my mother has loved her children, she might perhaps have been happier all these years if she could have kept on with a business career as women do in Russia.’

Many girls suffered, however, when thrust into a male-dominated, shamelessly chauvinistic factory world, as was Rosemary Moonen: ‘My initiation into factory life was shattering. Being a hairdresser in a high-class salon situated in a select area of the town, I was a somewhat genteel, reserved type of girl. To be plunged abruptly into a world of coarse, ill-bred men and women, where language was foul and bluer than the bluest sky, was an experience … harsh and unreal.’ The foreman to whom Moonen was first introduced tossed her a broom contemptuously, saying: ‘Here! Take this! And sod around!’

Sarah Baring was a peer’s daughter whose sole pre-war occupation had been that of a dancing debutante. Now she found herself drilling alloy sheets in an aircraft parts factory, which she hated: ‘The airless workplace, the indescribable food, the damp floors which even soaked through the wooden clogs we wore on our feet, the twit of a shop steward who hadn’t the courage of a flea … the bullying and oppressive attitude of the manager … I had to take the odd day off and lie in bed fighting constant fatigue.’ Baring was fortunate enough to be able to exploit her fluency in German eventually to gain a transfer to Bletchley Park.

Every nation sought to elevate and glamorise the role of women war workers, as a stimulus to recruitment. In America in 1942, Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb composed a popular ditty:

The original of Rosie the Riveter, who became an American feminist icon, was twenty-two-year-old Rose Will Monroe from Pulaski County, Kentucky. Like millions of Americans, she relocated to war work – in her case on the Willow Run B-24 and B-29 assembly lines at Ypsilanti, Michigan. She was made the star of a propaganda movie, and in May 1943 Norman Rockwell produced a famous painting of Rosie the Riveter, published as a
Saturday Evening Post
cover, though his physical model was an Arlington, Virginia, telephonist. By 1944, twenty million American women were working, a 57 per cent increase on the 1940 figure. The progress of black civil rights in the US, though extremely sluggish, was importantly enhanced by the recruitment into factories of African-American women, often working alongside whites. All female workers, however, remained severely disadvantaged by lower pay, earning an average $31.50 a week against the male average of $54.65. Many were employed in shipyards, which briefly spawned a ‘Wendy the Welder’ propaganda character, based on Janet Doyle of the Kaiser Richmond Liberty yard in California. Another much-publicised ‘Rosie’ was Shirley Karp Dick, who was paid $6 to model for photos, of which the most famous showed her treading on Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. Canada followed suit by promoting ‘Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl’.

It would be mistaken to romanticise the role of Rosie: the US industrial workforce remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the lifestyle of that early generation of working women was often wretched. A vast, squalid trailer park grew up beside Ford’s Willow Run plant. Some workers commuted as much as sixty miles daily rather than endure life there. Wages were high, but there was social concern about ‘eight-hour orphans’ – the children of working wives simply abandoned at home through the day. A few such hapless offspring, it was discovered, were left in cars at factory parking lots. Moreover, many of the new workers took time to acquire appropriate skills. Some ‘Rosies’, like their male counterparts, were less than competent, a reality reflected in the structural limitations of some of the ships they built. Likewise, the intense agricultural effort on both sides of the Atlantic was sometimes blighted by ill-judged production decisions and inadequate skills. In April 1942 Muriel Green, working in a market garden in southern England, reflected glumly on the waste of much of her effort growing vegetables: ‘I suppose in everything there is waste: that is what is the matter with this country. There seems so little full effort and so little result – so far.’

In Russia, the plight of both women military conscripts and civilians was vastly worse.
Pravda
correspondent Lazar Brontman recorded in his diary the desperate efforts of Moscow housewives to escape factory service. Those with children under eight were exempted until the summer of 1942, but thereafter this age limit was lowered to four. Women begged office jobs of any kind, to avoid labour in the ZIS vehicle works. Brontman recorded the droll assignment of some privileged women who became ‘hooves’ – avoiding more demanding duties by working in a Moscow theatre imitating the sound of galloping horses during a play about Soviet cavalry. More than 800,000 Russian women served with Stalin’s armies. For some, including ninety-two who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, the experience may have been uplifting. The female ‘rabbit units’ of the Red Air Force, named in self-mockery for an incident early in the war when desperately hungry girl flight trainees ate ‘like rabbits’ raw cabbages which they found on a station, became famous. A handful of women served as snipers at Sevastopol and Leningrad, and in 1943 large numbers of female graduates began to emerge from sniping schools. Their superior breathing control was found to promote marksmanship, and they played a useful role in the latter war years – though not, contrary to myth, at Stalingrad.

Some women, however, recoiled from the experience of battle. Nikolai Nikulin witnessed an incident on the Leningrad front, during shelling which left a sentry writhing in agony on the ground. A girl nurse sat sobbing beside him, ‘tears running down her filthy face that has not seen water for many days, her hands shaking in panic’. The wounded man himself eventually pulled down his trousers and bandaged a shocking thigh wound, while seeking to calm the girl. ‘Daughter, please don’t be scared! Don’t cry.’ Nikulin observed dryly, ‘War is not a place for girls.’

Many women in uniform were ruthlessly sexually exploited. Captain Pavel Kovalenko wrote one day: ‘I went to visit the tank regiment. The unit commander had got drunk celebrating his new rank of lieutenant-colonel and was snoring away. I was struck by the spectacle of the prostrate figure curled up beside him – his “campaign wife”, as it turned out.’ ‘Campaign wives’ became a phenomenon of Russia’s war, and only a fortunate minority gained wedding rings from the experience. ‘The PPZh is our great sin,’ sighed Vasily Grossman, using the Red Army’s slang phase for commanders’ sexual abuse of its women. Thousands were evacuated when they became pregnant, deliberately or otherwise. Almost the only concession to their sex was that they were eventually granted a tiny extra ration of soap.

Meanwhile, women labouring in fields and factories in the absence of their menfolk suffered chronic hunger, and were often required to perform tasks beyond their physical strength. Hernias became commonplace among those who struggled daily with heavy loads, or were harnessed to the plough in lieu of dead oxen. Grossman reflected in the dark days of August 1942: ‘Villages have become the kingdoms of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses, queue for vodka. Tipsy girls are out singing – they are seeing a girlfriend off to the army. Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden of work. Women dominate. They feed and arm us now. We do the fighting. And we don’t fight well. Women look and say nothing. There’s no reproach [in their eyes], not a bitter word. Are they nursing a grievance? Or do they understand what a terrible burden a war is, even an unsuccessful one?’

Housewife Valentina Bekbulatov wrote to her son at the front, describing the family’s desperate circumstances: ‘Dear Vova! I received the money that you sent, but you didn’t need to bother, it’s not enough anyway to help us in our poverty, and you deprive yourself even of this meagre support. I earned only twenty-six roubles this month, so you can imagine what our situation is like – there is no chance to buy anything at the market. We are waiting for milk. Uncle Pazyuk came over recently, he brought some household stuff to exchange for flour. Aunt saw her three sons off to the army – Aleksei, Egor and Aleksandr. Aleksei has already been in a battle, Egor is in the Far East, and from Aleksandr there aren’t any letters …’

Evdokiya Kalinichenko was wounded in the leg as an army nurse, discharged and sent back to the university she had previously attended, which was evacuated to Kazakhstan. From there, she wrote to her family, painting a picture which captures a fragment of the vast collective tragedy of her people:

One of Evdokiya’s fellow students was a young man named Vitya, once very handsome, now deeply embittered by the loss of a leg. She wrote that he had become hardened, ‘turned to stone’. He refused to see his family, even his mother, though he wrote to them. In one such letter, Vitya described the life of their town, where he had learned to ride a bicycle: ‘I push the pedals with one foot, and manage fine. The streets are empty, there are wrecked houses everywhere, empty shells. Evenings in the town park are unimaginably peaceful, there is even music. There are lots of girls, all blonde, and our officers are having a good time with them … as if there was no war now. These young ladies are nicknamed “German shepherds” because they are indifferent to whether their men are Russian or German. I said as much to one, and she replied: “You are jealous? Someone’ll turn up for you too, my poor cripple, but not as good.” I threw my crutch at her.’