World War Two was a war that was including the Axis powers and Allies. It is rare to hear about women in the war effort because during this time, discrimination for women was normalized. But because it was normalized, stories of them were rarely shared. Millions of women were in the war effort, whether talking about auxiliary, snipers, medics, or even factory workers. There is also dozens and dozens of incredible stories of women who contributed to the success of World War Two.
Women for the United States
Just in the United States alone, almost 400,000 women served with the armed forces. Over 460 of these women died as a result of warfare and 16 of them from direct enemy fire. Most American women were in auxiliary units, aircraft units, and nurses. If it were not for these would not have any war effort because of these units mostly women were running. They were also a big contribution to, and mostly ran, the mass production of ships, weapons, ammo, etc. In 1945, women comprised 36.1% of civilian labor force and in the heat of the war, there were way over 19 million working through this. The female labor force grew by 6.5 million people. In the war, women we roughly almost all medical personnel. The US army had 60,000 nurses (Not counting female doctors) and not a single male nurse. The military kept nurses as far from combat as possible, but occasionally get hit by mostly Kamikazes and multiple instances of people being taken as prisoners of war (mostly by the Eastern Front). And the US even recruited Japanese-American women in the armed services as translators, which really saved the US.
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Women in the Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union, there were over 800,000 women who fought on the front line. Most of them were also aircraft units, auxiliary, and medics, but because of the mass casualties, they were most likely put in the front line. Women were 3% of the military personnel and that number kept growing and growing because women were treated more equally in the military in Soviets than anywhere else in the world. Eighty-nine women received the Hero of the Soviet Union award (the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the United States) and among the women that received this award were pilots, snipers, machine gunners, tank crew members, partitions, and auxiliary. They had over 1200 snipers with a combine of 11,000 killings of enemy snipers alone.
Women in Ally Powers
In the allied powers, the female casualties were mostly from aircraft bombings. Aircraft women flew up to 8 missions per night. Their tactic was to fly low and stall the engine, coast on top of the targets and bomb them. Germans claimed it sounded like a witches laugh, so they were given the name “Night Witches”. Women were mostly recruited in France and Britain for secret missions and espionage.
Women in Axis Powers
On the German side, women were solely taken in for the medical field, they had four different medical units and one of them was only provided for dedicated Nazis. Meaning they had no female auxiliary. In Japan, women did not work, they recruited as sex slaves for soldiers and were called “comfort women”. 300,000 women were involved in sex slave and it was not just Japan, it was most of the Eastern front.
Honorable Women: Doctor Margaret Crayheel
Dr. Crayheel studied at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and served as a dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She was a private assistant in New York for general surgery, while also being given private practice for gynecology. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill and allowed women into the Army and Navy. Craighill became the first female doctor to receive army commission and was assigned to serve as a liaison with the Women’s Army Corps. She later on became a consultant on women veterans’ medical care.
Honorable Women: Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Pavlichenko was one of the first women to volunteer in the recruiting office. She was given the chance to be in the medical units, but she specifically asked to be a part of the infantry and, instead, became one of 2000 snipers for the Red Army. Pavlichenko was one of the 500 that made it out alive by the end. The reason she is so honorable is because she had an estimated 270 German kills, mostly officers, and 309 kills total including 36 enemy snipers. She ended up getting wounded and withdrawn. She was later invited to the white house by Franklin Roosevelt and invited to tour the US with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Honorable Women: Gertrude Boyarsky
Boyarsky was living in Poland when the Germans invaded. She witnessed her entire family get murdered. When she escaped, she found a Russian partition group and told them she was going to avenge her family. Boyarsky is honorable because not only did she steal a dangerous amount of kerosene from a German supply depot, she proceeded to burn a Nazi built bridge that connected the supplies to the German front line. When she found that the bridge was burning fast enough, she started pulling the bridge apart with her bare hands. She was a teenager.
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