Hell Hath No Fury (23 page)

Israel is a small country that since its formation has often been obliged simultaneously to confront a range of more populous enemies on its borders. In time of war it relies on the rapid mobilization of its reserve to meet any major threat. In 1973, for example, just before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the active IDF numbered some 75,000, of whom one-third were regulars in the army, navy, and air force, with the balance supplied by on-duty reservists and conscripts undergoing training. On mobilization in October, Israel's armed forces grew to 350,000. Women, however, rarely serve in the IDF reserve.

Nevertheless, since the 1990s women in the IDF have been making some, albeit limited, progress. This is a phenomenon that some military historians who are skeptical about the role of women in modern armies have linked to several interrelated factors. One of the most significant of these is the growing reluctance, since Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, of a small but statistically significant number of Israeli men to undertake military service. Some of the gaps this has opened up have been filled by the introduction of women into a number of military occupational specialties (MOS) that had previously been the preserve of men.

Following a 1995 ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court, which upheld an appeal by Alice Miller, a Jewish immigrant from South Africa, women became eligible for training as aircrew in the Israeli air force. Miller did not make it through pilot training, but in 2001 Lieutenant Roni Zuckerman became the fourth Israeli woman to complete the air force's flight course and the first to reach the status of F-16 fighter pilot, ranking sixth in a class of seventy. Previously, several women had qualified as navigators. From 1997, women in the IDF have joined antiaircraft units, and in 1998 the navy removed its barriers to the recruitment of female shipboard personnel, although women do not serve in submarines. By 2005, women were able to serve in 83 percent of the MOS in the IDF. Combat, however, remains voluntary. Those women who volunteer for combat duty are among the small number of female personnel required to undertake active reserve duty, and this for only a period of two years after their active service. Currently some five hundred women serve in combat units of Israel's security forces, principally the border police. These volunteers may be required to serve for three years because they must undergo lengthy training.

However, women still have a long way to go in the IDF. In 2002 some 33 percent of the IDF's junior officers were female, a percentage that fell to 21 percent in the case of middle-ranking officers (majors and captains) and plummeted to only 3 percent in the senior ranks. Significantly, as women have become integrated more fully into the structures and operations of the IDF the number of exemptions from service for women—principally for religious reasons—has risen. It remains to be seen if the aftermath of Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon in July 2006 effects long-term changes in IDF morale and composition.

See also
Meir, Golda,
Chapter 2.

Reference: Chaim Herzog,
The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East,
1982.

LOTTA SVÄRD

Finnish Female Auxiliaries, World War II

Women had played an active voluntary but noncombat role in the Finnish independence movement and civil war (1918). In 1921 the Lotta Svärd emerged as an auxiliary to the Finnish Civil Guard, providing moral and medical support and assisting with provisioning and fund-raising. The organization was named after the heroine of a patriotic poem of the early nineteenth century, Lotta Vraede. The model was imitated in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, and Denmark and encouraged the foundation of a number of associations in the United States. It also influenced Heinrich Himmler in his organization of female SS auxiliaries (see
Helferinnen,
Chapter 6).

The Lotta Svärd had a center-right political bias and until the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union (1939–40) it was not open to those with socialist or Communist beliefs. Its principal thrust was religious and moral, and its membership was divided into two categories—an “acting” Lotta, which had received training in specific tasks like nursing, provisioning, air surveillance, signaling, or anti-chemical-warfare measures, and a reserve. By 1939 the Lotta deployed eight field hospitals, staffed by nurses dressed soberly in gray and sporting white sheepskin hats in winter. Lotta members wore a distinctive pin in the shape of a Finnish swastika.

In the Winter War, the Lotta Svärd became an auxiliary of the Finnish armed services. Its members assisted with the evacuation of civilians, worked in air-defense posts, staffed hospital trains and field hospitals, and supplied the Finnish army with clothing. Many Lottas worked in “centers for the fallen,” washing and preparing the bodies of dead soldiers before their dispatch to their hometowns for burial. The Lottas were initially unpaid, receiving only food and lodging, but later the Finnish Defense Ministry introduced a system of daily allowances for those members of the Lotta who served outside their locality.

After the Winter War, the Finns had to yield territory to the Soviets. In the 1941–44 War of Continuation, as the ongoing struggle against the Soviet Union was known, Lottas were once again mobilized. Typically, each Finnish division of twelve to fifteen thousand men had an auxiliary of one hundred to two hundred Lottas. They remained noncombatants and received no weapons training, although some Lottas serving near the front line were unofficially issued with weapons and given basic training in their use. Adolf Hitler was sufficiently impressed by them to summon the Lotta leader, Fanni Luukkonen, to Berlin, where he presented her with a medal for her “outstanding fight against Bolshevism.” By 1944 the Lotta Svärd included 240,000 volunteers from a Finnish population of four million.

This did not impress the Soviets, and at the conclusion of the War of Continuation, they demanded that the Finns disband a number of organizations they deemed to be “fascist,” including the Lotta Svärd, which was wound up in November 1944. During World War II, 113 members of the Lotta Svärd died as the result of enemy action. Today the Lotta Svärds work has devolved to a successor organization, the Lotta Svärd Foundation.

Reference: A 2005 movie,
Lupaus
(Promise), describes the work of the Finnish Lottas in World War II.

NATO ARMED FORCES

1949–Present

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in the spring of 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War, when military groupings coalesced around the United States on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other. It was the start of a standoff that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 1976, NATO's highest authority, the Military Committee, recognized the Committee on Women in the NATO Forces. Since then, the status of women in NATO forces has changed beyond recognition. Between 1976 and 2001 the number of females in NATO uniforms rose from 30,000 to nearly 300,000. The pace and scale of integration, however, differs from country to country within NATO.

In April 1949, acting in response to the Soviet land blockade of West Berlin, the United States and Canada had combined with Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom to form NATO to provide for the collective defense of the major Western European states and the North American states against the perceived military threat from the Soviet Union.

Since 1949, NATO has undergone successive enlargements, and following the disintegration of the Soviet Empire has been joined by a number of Eastern European states that in the Cold War were members of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet counterweight to NATO formed in 1955 and dissolved in 1991. In 2006, full members of NATO were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, Turkey, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

In some respects, Norway and Denmark have made the most striking progress toward the integration of women into the military. Norway was the first NATO country to allow women to serve on submarines, and since 1985 women have been allowed into all other combat functions. In 1988, Denmark opened all functions and formations in its armed services to women following a series of combat-arms trials conducted between 1985 and 1987. Women in Norway and Denmark have only been held back from entry into the para-rangers and marine commandos, both functions in which they have not met the entry requirements. Otherwise, female soldiers train, work, and are deployed on equal terms with men.

Nevertheless, representation of women in the armed forces of Norway and Denmark remains relatively low, at, respectively, 3.2 percent and 5 percent. Norway appointed its first female defense minister in 1999, but few female soldiers have progressed to senior ranks, and it was not until November 1999 that Norway appointed its first female colonel. One reason for this is that many female officers change from operational to administrative duties after maternity leave, reducing their chances of being selected to study at military academies.

The NATO nation with the highest representation of women in the armed forces is the United States, with 14 percent. The breakthrough for US servicewomen came with the creation of the all-volunteer force in 1973. At the time, disillusionment with the military in the aftermath of the Vietnam War meant that men were reluctant to serve, and as a result female recruits were welcome. By 2001, 8.6 percent of US troops deployed worldwide were women and nearly 11,500 had supported NATO peacekeeping operations. (For US Army, US Navy, and US Air Force, see
United States Armed Forces,
Chapter 6.)

In Canada, women have been able to serve in almost all military functions and environments, including submarines, since 1989. However, most women in the Canadian armed forces—at 7,900, some 15 percent of regular personnel—are to be found in traditional fields and there has been only patchy progress toward integrating them into the combat arms—infantry, artillery, field engineering, and armor—where representation hovers around 2 percent. In May 2006, Canada suffered its first loss of an active-combat female soldier when Captain Nichola Goddard, one of 230 female Canadian forces personnel serving in Afghanistan, died in an engagement with Taliban forces.

France, which withdrew from NATO's military-command structure in 1966, granted female soldiers equal status in the early 1970s but retained quotas until 1998. Currently some 23,500 women make up just under 10 percent of the 260,400 active personnel in France's front-line armed forces. Of France's 6,800 naval aviators, 480 are women. Of the 64,000 air force personnel, some 7,000 are women. The French army comprises 137,700 personnel, of whom 12,500 are female.

In the United Kingdom, women in the armed forces were segregated into women's corps until the early 1990s, at which point the role of women underwent considerable changes. Women were able to serve at sea in surface ships and in all aircrew roles. In the Royal Air Force over 95 percent of posts are open to women, and approximately 70 percent in the army and navy.

British women in the military now serve alongside men in nearly all specialties, with an exception being units whose primary duty is “to close with and kill the enemy,” where it is still felt that their presence would impair combat effectiveness. This restriction is consistent with a ruling of the European Court of Justice that allows women to be excluded from certain posts on grounds of combat effectiveness and leaves the final decision on the precise definition of the term to national authorities.

At present British servicewomen are not allowed to drive tanks, serve in the front-line infantry, or work as mine-clearance divers. They cannot be part of the Infantry, Royal Armored Corps, Royal Marines, or the RAF Regiment, and are also barred from submarine posts. In 2006 the British army's 7,432 women comprised 6.7 percent of the force; there were some 5,000 women (8.9 percent) in the Royal Air Force; and 2,890 (7.8 percent) in the Royal Navy, with 745 at sea aboard fifty ships.

The role of women in the modern navy was thrown into sharp relief by an international incident in March 2007. A fifteen-strong boarding party from the frigate
Cornwall,
which was patrolling an area south of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway in Iraqi waters in the Persian Gulf, was taken prisoner by two Iranian fast boats. One of
Cornwall
's boarding party was a woman, Acting Leading Seaman Faye Turney, the mother of a three-year-old child. The captured Britons were taken to Tehran and subjected to a sustained campaign of psychological harassment. Initially, Turney was separated from her colleagues, who were told that she had been sent home. She later appeared on Iranian television, wearing a hijab and making a confession that the boarding party had crossed into Iranian waters. After two weeks the boarding party was released and returned to the United Kingdom, having incurred considerable criticism for appearing to cooperate with their Iranian captors during their incarceration. Later Turney and another member of the boarding party, Arthur Batchelor, and their navy handlers, incurred even more criticism for selling their stories to British newspapers and television.

There were five fatalities among British women serving in Iraq between the invasion in March 2003 and April 2007. The overall figure for fatalities during the same period was 140. In a war with no front line in the traditional sense, British servicewomen increasingly found themselves in the fighting as medics, signalers, and in logistics crews. Private Michelle Norris, a teenage medic with the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment, was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing her wounded patrol leader during a fierce firefight in al-'Amarah, Iraq, in the summer of 2006.

In the spring of 2007 there were some 1,600 female troops on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for much of the time they were exposed to the lethal hazards of roadside bombs and mortar fire. There are no restrictions on women deploying on operations unless they are pregnant. Although they cannot join a unit whose primary duty is “to close with and kill the enemy”—for example, the infantry and cavalry—women undertake a number of postings fraught with risk, and their deployment has its critics.