Hell Hath No Fury (15 page)

While in the act of reaching for a cartridge, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.

Her bravery was rewarded by George Washington himself, who issued a warrant making her a noncommissioned officer on the spot, resulting in another set of nicknames, “Sergeant” or “Major” Molly. This part of the story has seemingly endless variations, in which Washington's cameo appearance also involves his presenting her with either a gold coin or, as befitting a magnanimous leader, a hatful of gold.

After the war, Mary and John Hays returned to Carlisle, where he died in 1789. Mary remarried one of her late husband's comrades-in-arms, a John or George McCauley, but the marriage was not a happy one. McCauley is said to have treated her like a servant, a fate Mary, now known as Molly, had escaped years before. Perhaps it may have come as a relief to her that McCauley also died before too long.

But without a male provider, Mary/Molly may well have struggled financially, and she seems to have petitioned the government for relief. One undisputed fact is that later in life, in 1822, her war service was officially recognized when the state legislators of Pennsylvania awarded her a veteran's annuity of forty dollars, which she claimed for the next ten years.

“Molly McKolly,” as some sources call her, died in Carlisle on January 22, 1832. Her son by her first husband, John Ludwig Hays, became a soldier and was buried with full military honors when he died in about 1853. At the age of eighty-one, John's daughter, Polly McCleester of Papertown, Mount Holly Springs, unveiled a monument to her grandmother, which boldly asserts Mary/Molly's claim to fame:

MOLLY McCauley, Renowned in history as MOLLY PITCHER, The Heroine of Monmouth, died Jan 1833, aged 79 years. Erected by the Citizens of Cumberland County, July 4, 1876.

A wonderful story—but is it true? In Carlisle, the town Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley was born in, left, and returned to after the war, the place where she died among her descendants and where she is buried, there is no doubt. But however proud the local people were of their heroine, they mistook the date of her death. Molly died at least a year earlier than recorded on her monument, as shown by the fact that no application for her pension was made after January 1832.

There are other questions and inconsistencies. For many years it was believed that the real Molly Pitcher was born Mary Ludwig and that she had married John Hays in Carlisle. This identification with Mary Ludwig was later challenged in favor of another Mary, who married another Hays with another extremely common first name, William. Another woman known as Molly Pitcher, described as “the heroine of Fort Washington” and buried along the Hudson, is a different individual, frequently confused with the heroine of the Battle of Monmouth.

The confusion arose because Molly Pitcher was not unique. Mary Ludwig Hays was neither the first nor the only woman to take a gunner's place on an American battlefield and man a field gun. She was preceded by Margaret Corbin during the defense of Fort Washington in 1776—possibly the heroine of Fort Washington described earlier. Corbin was recorded as staying resolutely at her post in the face of heavy enemy fire, ably acting as a matross (gunner). Other women fought in numerous engagements in the Revolutionary War and Civil War (see
Sampson, Deborah,
Chapter 3, and
Tubman, Harriet,
Chapter 4). Historical sources confirm that at least two women fought in the Battle of Monmouth, one at an artillery position and the other in the infantry line. There is no evidence linking either of them to Mary Ludwig Hays. And when she died, there was no mention of a cannon or the Battle of Monmouth in her obituary.

“Molly Pitcher” may therefore be not one woman but a composite. But the legend refuses to die. She remains a cherished character of the American Revolution and since 1876 has been firmly identified with Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley. An unmarked grave believed to be hers was opened during the centenary events of that year, and the remains were reburied with honors under a plaque declaring her the real embodiment of the famous Molly Pitcher.

One fact remains. Whether or not Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley was the real Molly Pitcher, the forty-dollar-a-year payment she was awarded by the state of Pennsylvania was more than the usual war widow's pension granted to all soldiers' wives. The citation published in
The American Volunteer,
February 21, 1822, under the heading “Legislature of Pennsylvania,” makes this plain:

A bill has passed both Houses of the Assembly granting an annuity to Molly McCauley (of Carlisle) for services she rendered during the Revolutionary War. It appeared satisfactorily that this heroine had braved the hardships of the camp and dangers of the field with her husband, who was a soldier of the revolution, and the bill in her favor passed without a dissenting voice.

Note the date. In 1822, veterans of the Battle of Monmouth were still alive to dispute the facts, yet her award was unanimously passed. The “services rendered” by Mary/Molly Ludwig Hays McCauley undoubtedly amounted to something above and beyond the ordinary conditions of war. If only we knew what they were.

Reference: Rachel A. Koestler-Grack,
Molly Pitcher: Heroine of the War for Independence,
2005.

PARTISANS

Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Soviet Union, in World War II

The term “partisans” historically denotes irregular troops who employed hit-and-run tactics. In World War II in the West, partisans attacked German rear areas, particularly in the Balkans and in the Soviet Union, which necessitated the diversion of large numbers of troops to secure lines of communications. Women have generally proved effective operators in this type of warfare, and their usefulness was widely exploited.

Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia, women played a vital part in the effective and highly organized partisan movement led by Marshal Tito, the nom de guerre adopted by the Communist leader Josip Broz, who had seen active service in the Russian and Spanish civil wars..

Yugoslavia was invaded by the German army on April 6, 1941. Within two weeks it had been overrun and occupied, and thereafter the country was partitioned. The central portion, consisting of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, became the state of Croatia, under the leadership of a German-appointed puppet, Ante Pavelic. The remaining elements of Yugoslavia were absorbed by Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy.

Two resistance movements emerged from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, one led by the Communist Party under Tito and the other, the nationalist, right-wing “Chetniks” commanded by Draza Mihailovic. In Tito's partisan army, the Yugoslav antifascist Front of Women was a significant force. Some 2 million Yugoslav women, approximately 12 percent of the prewar population, played a part in resistance to the Axis occupiers; 100,000 of them fought as combatants, and the others worked as couriers and auxiliaries in handling supplies, communications, education, and hospital care.

More than 250,000 female Yugoslav partisans died in the war, at least 25,000 of them front-line fighters. Some 70 percent of the female partisans were under the age of twenty, and the majority of these women came from peasant backgrounds. Of great importance in the women's partisan movement was the tradition prized in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia of the “cult of motherhood,” which gave women a large amount of autonomy in the home and, in Montenegro, allowed them to don male attire and go to war.

In the field, relations between the male and female partisans were carefully policed. Sexual encounters were banned, and a man who ignored this prohibition was instantly transferred to another unit. Persistent offenders were reportedly shot. However, this stern discipline did not apply to Tito and several of his senior male aides, all of whom took partisan mistresses. Tito's mistress, the fiery Zdenka, apparently chafed at maintaining the fiction that she was his secretary. When she threw a spectacular tantrum, one of Tito's bodyguards, a grizzled veteran of the Spanish Civil War, offered the laconic advice to his unnerved chief that he should have her shot.

The partitioning of Yugoslavia and the number of Axis troops (forces allied to Germany) of different ethnic groups, including a high proportion of Balkan Muslims from Bosnia and Albania, ensured that the fighting assumed the character of a civil war rather than a conventional international conflict. In Yugoslavia, civil and guerrilla war accounted for the deaths of a million Yugoslavs. During this traumatic time, women's participation enabled them to achieve important legal and economic gains, but in the immediate postwar years they were not effectively consolidated.

Reference: Velimir Vuksic,
Tito's Partisans 1941–45,
2003.

Italy

In Italy, the arrest on July 24, 1943, of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was swiftly followed by the opening of negotiations with the Allies by his successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. When the British Eighth Army established itself on the Italian mainland on September 3, the partisan war in Italy was about to begin. It was a struggle in which women were to play a central role.

Women had played a part in the series of strikes that preceded the overthrow of Mussolini. They came from all walks of life, and clothed and fed demobilized Italian troops, escaping Allied prisoners, and Jews seeking refuge. In war factories, women sabotaged materials destined for the Germans and turned the “go slow” into an art form. In providing practical help to the active partisan groups, they enjoyed considerable freedom of movement as, unlike men, they were not forbidden to ride bicycles and aroused less suspicion in the fascist security forces than Italian men (see also
SOE,
Chapter 11). Thus was born the
staffettas,
the army of messengers who became lynchpins of the Italian Resistance.

Staffettas
were more than messengers. Some operated radios; others carried ammunition concealed in shopping bags and baby carriages. Posing as Red Cross nurses, they provided the partisans with medical supplies and the clandestine newspapers that kept civilians informed about the movement of Axis troops and Resistance operations.

In the latter years of the war, some 75,000 women joined defense groups that helped the partisan movement by organizing strikes and sabotage in Italian war industry. Approximately 35,000 fought with the partisans; of these, 5,000 were imprisoned, 3,000 deported to Germany, and 650 were executed.

Reference: Eric Newby,
Love and War in the Apennines,
1998.

Greece

Greece was invaded by Axis forces on April 6, 1941. The British Expeditionary Force, which had arrived in Greece in March, was withdrawn from the mainland to the island of Crete at the end of April. The Greek government and royal family went into exile in the Middle East on April 27, and Greece was occupied by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria in a tripartite arrangement in which the Germans held the whip hand.

In Greece the vacuum left behind by the flight of the royal family and political elite was eventually filled by two principal resistance organizations, the EAM-ELAS (National Liberation Front–National Popular Liberation Army) and the EDES (Greek Democratic National Army).

Women had already played a celebrated role in Albania, which had been annexed by Italy in April 1939 and used by the Italians as the springboard for an abortive invasion of Greece in October 1940. The women of the Pindus Mountains, in northeast Greece, carried supplies on their backs to the Greek forces in Albania. Women also served as auxiliaries during the heavy fighting in Crete that followed the German airborne invasion on May 20, 1941, and sheltered many British and Commonwealth troops as they retreated to the points on Crete's rocky southern coast from which they were evacuated.

The women of mainland Greece came to the fore in the terrible winter of 1941–42, when an estimated three hundred thousand Greeks starved to death as the result of the ruthless requisitioning of food supplies to feed their occupiers. To limit the suffering, women organized soup kitchens. Initially they had performed these roles in the absence of their men, but with the growth of organized resistance from the autumn of 1941, women and young girls undertook more radical activities.

In the towns this was particularly true of the youth organizations EPON and PEAN, whose participation in acts of sabotage was punishable by death. In the countryside, where the Communist-led EAM recruited entire populations of villages, married, widowed, and elderly women engaged in a wide range of activities, at risk of lengthy imprisonment or death. These included owning or using a radio, participating in a neighborhood soup kitchen, breaking the curfew, and knitting socks or providing any kind of food or shelter to victims of the occupation. It has been estimated that out of a wartime population of 7.5 million the final strength of EAM-ELAS was approximately 1.75 million, but it is difficult to state with certainty the proportion of women in the movement at any one time, as members drifted in and out of its formal structure according to the pressures of the moment.

Nevertheless, ELAS raised female fighting formations whose members took their responsibilities very seriously, and for whom their engagement with ELAS exposed them for the first time to the workings of political life. One woman who fought in the Peloponnese remembered, “Without the Resistance, I would have been a nobody…. The Resistance gave us wings.”

The women of ELAS observed strict codes of conduct. One of them recalled:

We had a very beautiful girl in our platoon. And a lot of officers, the male officers, were attracted to her. In the end we were forced to vote her out of the group once it became clear that she couldn't control herself, because we were not allowed to have any kind of contact with each other beyond that which was platonic and comradely. We couldn't form any other kind of relationship…. We were all supposed to wait until after liberation to have our romances.