All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [226]
Damn this war … One sees only cripples … To my mind the most wretched is a captain, a sapper. He has no face, but instead just a terrible blue, purple and green mask. It is fortunate that he is blind, and so cannot see himself. People say that, before the war, he was a handsome man. Even now he is tall, slender, and neat. We think that if he had a child he would be born again in it, and everyone would see what he once was like. If only this damn war would end. They are killing and maiming the best. We need to be very strong, to survive it.
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.’
All the combatant nations deployed women as nurses, a role many found rewarding. Dorothy Beavers was twenty-two in 1942, daughter of an Ohio small farmer whose mother still drove a horse and buggy, with no phone at home. She worked in a little local hospital, and suggested to her father that she should join the army medical branch. Her two brothers had already gone to the service, and after some thought he said, ‘Maybe you should go and take care of them.’ She married an army doctor in Winchester, England, the night before sailing for France in June 1944, and landed on Utah Beach still clutching her bridal bouquet. ‘The job came naturally to me,’ she said. But it was a revelation to find herself treating eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds who had lost not only limbs, but sometimes their buttocks or ‘whole chunks of their hips’. No one could call Lt. Beavers and her kind publicity-seekers, but they all appreciated recognition back home. She was thrilled when a little paragraph about herself and a photograph appeared in the Ohio State Journal.
The Russians and Yugoslav partisans were the only fighting peoples to deploy women for combat functions. The British dispatched a small number of female agents to occupied territories under the orders of SOE, and women fulfilled vital administrative and support functions for Allied and Axis armed forces. They were treated with condescension by most senior officers, born into the nineteenth century. Western Allied commanders, if not their Soviet counterparts, deplored the intrusion into service relationships of sexual temptations and tensions, actual or potential. Nimitz, at Pearl Harbor, declined to accept any female on his staff. Sir Arthur Harris of Bomber Command said, ‘I always believed that women in uniform should either be so beautiful that they felt no possible threat to themselves from any other woman, or so old and ugly that they were past it.’
The RAF employed some German-speaking women to monitor enemy voice-radio transmissions. Most enthusiastically embraced the role, though a few displayed genteel scruples.