10 Heroic Women of War
As of November 2016, 205,000 women were enlisted in the United States Armed Services. Over the
course of America’s involvement in World War II, 350,000 American women took part
in active duty service in non-combat capacities. As it turns out, America is
not leading the world in that area. 800,000 women were part of the Red Army during the what was called in the
Soviet Union the Great Patriotic War, with 300,000 serving in active combat roles
in repelling the Nazi invasion. With such vast ranks of dedicated sisters in
arms around the world to choose from through the ages, it’s not easy narrowing
it down to ten who most heroically faced the horrors of war.
10. Leigh Ann Hester
A former shoe salesperson in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2004 Leigh
Ann Hester was sent to Iraq to perform weekly convoy escort missions in
the 617th Military Police Company. It was written policy by the Pentagon
that she and other female soldiers were not to engage in combat with enemy
units. Yet such doctrine meant nothing when, on March 20, 2005, her unit was
ambushed near Salman Pak by fifty insurgents. The insurgents outnumbered them five to
one armed and were armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers.
Instead of trying to get in an offensive formation, Hester led her
unit on an attack that got them out of the line of fire and around the enemy’s
flank. In the process, she had three confirmed kills of the twenty-seven
inflicted on the insurgents. The attack was defeated utterly and all members of
the 617th survived. Hester was awarded the Silver Star in 2007, the first time
a woman had won any such award since World War II, and finished her enlistment
in 2009. In a move she found rather crass, an action figure modeled on her was released on 2011.
9. Katya Budanova
In 1937, Katya Budanova (middle in the above picture) had moved
from being an airplane factory worker in Moscow to a flight
instructor despite being only 21-years-old. When the Third Reich invaded in
June 1941, she answered a call on state radio by Marina Raskova and enlisted in
the 586th Fighter Regiment, an all-female unit. It wasn’t until April 1942 that
she began to fly combat missions in a Yak 1 fighter, a notoriously
unsafe plane so prone to overheating that it had almost failed government
quality checks.
It was in September 1942 that she performed the actions that would
make her name famous. She was transferred to the 437th fighter regiment,
meaning that she was sent to the vitally important air combat happening over Stalingrad. The
German 6th Army was in Stalingrad and the Soviet Army was preparing the pincer
attacks that would trap them and inflict the defeat that would swing the war in
the Allies’ favor, so Soviet control of the air was tantamount. For her part
Budanova so distinguished herself that on October 6 she attacked a group of
thirteen German planes by herself and shot down her first enemy plane. The next
month she shot down three enemy planes, two fighters, and one bomber. As the
German army tried to supply the trapped 6th Army with airdrops, she shot down
five more planes, greatly assisting in strangling the supply route. On July 19,
1943 she was killed in action during a solo fight with three enemy fighters,
taking one down with her.
8. Ursula Graham Bower, Naga
Queen
There are few figures who would seem less likely to distinguish
themselves in war than an archaeologist born to a wealthy family in Wiltshire,
UK in the early 20th Century. Yet even as early as 1937, when the 23-year-old
traveled to the Naga Hills in Eastern India as part of an anthropology project,
it was clear that the former debutante was no average student. She gained the
loyalty of the isolated Naga tribe by providing them with dearly needed medical
treatment and food during a famine, convincing more than a few she was the
reincarnation of a rebel priestess. When 1942 rolled around and India was
threatened by invasion from the Japanese Army that had swept with startling
success through Southeast Asia, 150 of them joined a desperate military unit
called V Force that Bower took command of simply because there were no male
officers in the area that could command their loyalty.
The guerrilla unit’s main purpose was to scout 800 miles of Indian
border for any signs of advancing Japanese soldiers. Not only were their
weapons hopelessly outdated rifles and elephant guns, but rations were so short
that during the first month of traversing mountainous jungle terrain Bower lost
35 pounds before adjusting to the conditions. For two years they waited before
the Japanese Army put in an appearance. On March 28, 1944, a column of 50
Japanese soldiers was seen approaching a vital rail depot which supplied the
Allied forces in the region. One captured member of V Force’s eyes had been
gouged out by the Japanese already, underlying the personal dangers they faced.
Bower led the unit to intercept them and, as Time Magazine reported, wiped them out.
On April 4, V Force learned of the approach of 80,000 Japanese
soldiers into India in time to get word to a British division stationed in Kohima,
allowing the desperately outnumbered 1,500 men to prepare defenses against an
assault by 15,000 of the enemy and eventually escape. By June the British army
would regroup and drive the Japanese Army back out, but in the meantime Bower
continued operations of defending Naga villages from deserters (one time
capturing a gang of 30 deserters at once) and rescuing Allied pilots from
planes shot down in the jungle. Her unit was disbanded in November 1944,
leaving Bower to outlive her astonishing achievement by 45 years. After the war
she returned to Britain, but felt that after India, “Home was no longer Home.”
7. Nancy Wake
Unlike Usula Bower, Nancy Wake was born into poverty. Originally
from New Zealand, she used up her inheritance money to move to the UK when she
was 16. After studying journalism, she moved to Paris, and in 1938 she married
Henri Fiocca, a wealthy industrialist. In 1940, after Paris fell, she joined
the French Resistance, and almost immediately became a thorn in the Gestapo’s
side. By 1943 she had rescued hundreds of downed Allied pilots to safety in Spain and earned the
nickname “Die Weisse Maus”(“The White Mouse”).
But she was no saint. At one
point she killed a German soldier with her bare hands to escape capture and
ordered a member of the resistance she suspected of being a German double agent to be
executed without, as she said, it “putting (her) off breakfast.” In April 1944
she was dropped in Auvergne and coordinated attacks by 7,000 soldiers on German strongholds. At one point she had to cycle over
200 miles in about three days to contact Allied command to coordinate a weapons
drop after their wireless communications network was destroyed. After the war
she would express that she regretted that her efforts did not kill more
Germans. “I’m not a very nice person,” was her summation of it. It was a more
understandable sentiment when, after the war, she learned that the Gestapo had
tortured her husband to death in their hunt for her.
6. Florence Nightingale
Unquestionably the most famous nurse in world history,
during the Crimean War she was dispatched to Turkey at the head of a group of
38 female nurses in 1853 to the British-French Allied Army. This was after it
had been reported that medical treatment was insufficient, and done as a means
of quelling public outcry. After initially being rejected by the rest of the
army hospital, the 33-year-old earned their trust by using finds from the
London Times to buy needed medical supplies.
Her most significant contribution was to raise sanitation
standards and improve food service. She also basically encouraged psychological
care, such as writing letters to relatives for the wounded and providing them
educational services. She would walk through the hospital at night with a
lantern, leading to her being dubbed the “Lady with the Lamp.” Although the official
claim that she lowered the mortality rate at her hospital to two percent turned
out to be propaganda, there’s little denying that she saved many lives by
greatly raising field hospital standards.
After the war ended in 1856 and she returned home, she
published Notes on Nursing in 1859, which became used as
standard text. She founded the first scientific nursing school in 1860 at St.
Thomas’s Hospital in London. She also founded a school for midwives at King’s
College Hospital in 1862, revolutionizing access to medical care for the
working class and poor.
5. Ruby Bradley
While Florence Nightingale saved many lives, Ruby Bradley did so
under much more difficult circumstances. She had the misfortune of serving as a
hospital administrator on Luzon Island on December 23, 1941 when she was 37,
placing her squarely in the Japanese Army’s way during America’s most disastrous defeat of World War II. After five days of hiding, she was captured
by an army that would soon become notorious for their abuses of prisoners of
war. Instead of submitting in captivity, she resisted in an amazingly bold
manner.
Smuggling invaluable medical equipment and medicine from the camp
hospital, Bradley began an improvised hospital of her own. Within three days
she was performing major surgeries and delivering babies while having to resort
to a tea strainer to deliver anesthetic. She had to continue stealing food and
medicine to keep the hospital running for the next three years, during which
time she performed more than 230 surgeries and delivered thirteen
babies. Supplies were so short that she had to share some of her rations of
less than half a cup of rice with local children. The toll of the medical work
and the privations of the camp were so severe that by the time she was
liberated she’d gone from 110 pounds to a skeletal 86.
In 1950 she faced the horror of war again, when a month into the
Korean War she arrived at an evacuation hospital. Early in the war the North
Korean army routed the Americans, leaving Bradley in a position where she had
to remain behind as planes desperately evacuated her patients while under fire.
She was said to be one of the last ones to board a plane, just in time to see a
shell destroy her ambulance behind her. For all that, she lived to be
94-years-old.
4. Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Probably the only Soviet sniper the average American could name
today would be Vasily Zaitsev of Enemy at the Gates-fame. During
the war itself, it was likely to be Lyudmila Pavlichenko – also known as “Lady
Death.” In 1942 she was sent to Washington DC as part of an effort by Joseph
Stalin to increase American commitment to open a second front in Europe and
ease pressure on the Red Army. Being the first Soviet citizen allowed
into the White House, she so
impressed Eleanor Roosevelt that the First Lady accompanied her on a tour of
America. Although initial questions were of an almost comically sexist nature (
e.g., “Do Russian women go into battle wearing makeup?”) over time she won over
the American public so that thousands would gather to hear her speak. Woody Guthrie even wrote a song about her.
It was all well-deserved. In the first year of the invasion, the
24-year-old Pavlinchenko had refused to be assigned work as a nurse, since
she’d been training with a rifle for years. She grimly first tasted death when
she had to kill two Romanian non-combatants to demonstrate her abilities to the
25th Rifle Division. Her first major battle was near Odessa, and while she was
initially gripped with fear, the death of a friend nearby compelled her to kill
two scouts. As the Wehrmacht pushed the Red Army back to Sevastopol, she
quickly demonstrated that she was so capable that she was assigned to kill
enemy snipers. By the time she was pulled from the battlefield, she’d shot 36
of them from a total of 309 enemy casualties. Over time, the Germans heard
about her and began broadcasting propaganda asking her to defect, promising her
plenty of chocolate. When that didn’t work, they switched to broadcasts that
threatened to cut her into as many pieces as the number of soldiers she’d
killed, independently confirming her body count. All this did not come easily
to her: she was wounded four times in action as suffered from shell shock.
After the war, having reached the rank of major, Pavlinchenko
finished her education at the University of Kiev and became a historian. In
1957 Eleanor Roosevelt went on a tour of the Soviet Union and asked to meet her
again. When the two reunited, they threw protocol out the window and gave each
other a big hug after she took the first lady into her bedroom, away from their
supervisors.
3. Trung Sisters
Millenia before the eyes of the world turned to Vietnam, a pair of
sisters named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi dared to defy the mightiest nation in
Asia. In 39 AD (so no, that’s not a photo of them above – it’s a parade
honoring them), Trung Trac’s husband was assassinated by the Han Dynasty on
suspicion he was taking part in a mission to liberate Vietnam from China. In
response, Trung Trac took command of his and other local chiefs armies, her
sister Nhi joining them. Over the next year, she conquered 65 Chinese strongholds, creating an independent
Vietnamese state.
It lasted for three years, until the Chinese army defeated their
army at what is now Hanoi. The sisters committed suicide by drowning. Yet their
legacy of standing up in the face of insuperable odds survived so that
centuries later, when Vietnam achieved more lasting independence, buildings and
streets were named in their honor.
2. Nadezhda Durova
While women seeing combat in the Red Army was fairly common during
World War II, it was basically unheard of during the Napoleonic Era. Born in
1783, Nadezhda Durova abandoned her noble Siberian home to fight in the Csar’s
Army not because of any heightened sense of patriotism or to strike a blow for
feminism, but just because the societal expectations of being a woman and
Siberian winters were intolerable. Joining a passing regiment of Cossacks in 1807, she quickly demonstrated bravery that crossed over
into recklessness, so much so that her commanding officer and her uncle wrote
to Czar Alexander asking that she be sent home, as her combat experience was
sure to kill her.
When Alexander had an audience with her, she begged him to send
her back to the front. She thus took part in resisting Napoleon’s infamous 1812
Russian invasion and was one of the Cossacks that chased him back,
distinguishing herself particularly at the 1813 Battle of Smolensk. Despite
risking death in a way that her commanding officers found particularly
worrying, she survived the war and lived to be 86-years-old.
1. Lydia Litvyak
Even before the Second World War began, Litvyak was a wunderkind.
She’d begun flight lessons when she was 14, and by the time she was 19 she was
a flight instructor who’d trained 45 pilots. It was also at that time that
Germany invaded, and like Katya Budanova she answered the call of Marina
Raskova and joined the Red Air Force. (In fact, in the photo of Budanova in our
earlier entry, that’s Lydia on the left.) Also like Budanova, she was assigned
to fight over Stalingrad in 1942. There, she outdid her friendly rival by being
the first female pilot to shoot down an enemy combatant, getting two on
September 13.
The single most celebrated event of her career was when she shot
down German flying ace Erwin Meier (himself with 11 kills). Meier was taken prisoner, and
shortly after met Litvyak in person. He refused to believe the young woman had
shot him down until she detailed the steps of the dog fight. In total, she
scored between 12 and 14 kills at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Litvyak most tragically paralleled Katya Budanova in that she did
not long survive her greatest achievement, either. On August 1, 1943, she was
killed in action near the city of Orel while attacking a group of fighters. As
it happened, it was rumored that she was taken prisoner, a condition which
required that she not be given the honor Hero of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t
until 1979 that an expedition found what was claimed to be her remains, and not
until 1990 that Mikhail Gorbachev gave her the posthumous honor
