Inferno - Max Hastings [226]
It would be mistaken to romanticise the role of Rosie: the U.S. industrial workforce remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the lifestyle of that early generation of working women was often wretched. A vast, squalid trailer park grew up beside Ford’s Willow Run plant. Some workers commuted as much as sixty miles daily rather than endure life there. Wages were high, but there was social concern about “eight-hour orphans”—the children of working wives simply abandoned at home through the day. A few such hapless offspring, it was discovered, were left in cars at factory parking lots. Moreover, many of the new workers took time to acquire appropriate skills. Some “Rosies,” like their male counterparts, were less than competent, a reality reflected in the structural limitations of some of the ships they built. Likewise, the intense agricultural effort on both sides of the Atlantic was sometimes blighted by ill-judged production decisions and inadequate skills. In April 1942 Muriel Green, working in a market garden in southern England, reflected glumly on the waste of much of her effort growing vegetables: “I suppose in everything there is waste: that is what is the matter with this country. There seems so little full effort and so little result—so far.”
In Russia, the plight of both women military conscripts and civilians was vastly worse. Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman recorded in his diary the desperate efforts of Moscow housewives to escape factory service. Those with children under eight were exempted until the summer of 1942, but thereafter this age limit was lowered to four. Women begged for office jobs of any kind to avoid labour in the ZIS vehicle works. Brontman recorded the droll assignment of some privileged women who became “hooves”—avoiding more demanding duties by working in a Moscow theatre imitating the sound of galloping horses during a play about Soviet cavalry. More than 800,000 Russian women served with Stalin’s armies. For some, including ninety-two who became Heroes of the Soviet Union, the experience may have been uplifting. The female “rabbit units” of the Red Air Force, named in self-mockery for an incident early in the war when desperately hungry female flight trainees ate “like rabbits” raw cabbages which they found on a station, became famous. A handful of women served as snipers at Sevastopol and Leningrad, and in 1943 large numbers of female graduates began to emerge from sniping schools. Their superior breathing control was found to promote marksmanship, and they played a useful role in the latter war years—though not, contrary to myth, at Stalingrad.
Some women, however, recoiled from the experience of battle. Nikolai Nikulin witnessed an incident on the Leningrad front, during shelling which left a sentry writhing in agony on the ground. A girl nurse sat sobbing beside him, “tears running down her filthy face that has not seen water for many days, her hands shaking in panic.” The wounded man himself eventually pulled down his trousers and bandaged a shocking thigh wound, while seeking to calm the girl. “Daughter, please don’t be scared! Don’t cry.” Nikutin observed dryly, “War is not a place for girls.”
Many women in uniform were ruthlessly sexually exploited. Capt. Pavel Kovalenko wrote one day: “I went to visit the tank regiment. The unit commander