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Abstract
This article revisits the topic of Soviet women in the ground forces in the Second World War. The focus is on the nature and variety of women's combat experiences. Although most women were noncombatants, many did participate in activities normally associated with combat, and some women participated in virtually every combat role of the time. The available evidence indicates that women in the Red Army performed, overall, as well as men in combat situations.
Introduction
A typical view of the historical role of women in combat was expressed by John Keegan in his 1994 book, A History of Warfare: "Warfare is . . . the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart . . . Women ... do not fight . . . and they never, in any military sense, fight men."2 It has often been said that one of the first casualties of war is truth - and that seems to be the case here. More than 1 million women served with the Soviet armed forces, militias, and partisan groups in the twentieth century, most during the Second World War.
In its use of large numbers of women in combat, the Soviet Union was unique in world history. During both world wars and the Russian Civil War, women fought on the front lines.3 Soviet women engaged in combat in all branches of service in addition to their mass employment in support services.4 Soviet women were unique in being the only women soldiers who fought outside die borders of their own country in die Second World War. If historians have failed to note the evidence that women have served in combat, it is at best the result of tunnel vision, and at worst, a case of deliberate oversight. Keegan derides the habitual reluctance of military historians "to call a spade a spade," but it seems that Keegan himself, among others, exhibits precisely this reluctance regarding the military history of women.5 In the words of D'Ann Campbell, women continue to be the "invisible combatants" of military history in general, and of the Second World War in particular.6
In this article I take an intentionally traditional military history approach, the kind that is sometimes denigrated...