Imperial War Museum. Via Wikipedia Commons
Women have historically been victims of warfare rather than participants. This mostly remained true during the Second World War. Women as combatants were limited to some Russian units in Europe and to last-ditch militia units in Japan that never saw combat. However, the major Western powers, the United States and Britain, employed significant numbers of women in noncombat military roles, and both these powers and Japan employed much larger numbers of women as part of the wartime labor force.
The Nurse Corps had been part of the Army long before the Pacific
War, but in early 1941 Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of
Massachusetts introduced a bill to establish a Women's Auxiliary Army
Corps. This did not receive serious attention until after the attack on
Pearl Harbor. After a long and
bitter debate, the WAAC Bill was passed on 14 May 1942 and signed into
law the next day. The WAAC was distinct from the Army and had its own
rank structure. Women officers were not authorized to command men and
pay was significantly less for women than for men of equivalent rank.
Authorized enrollment was 150,000.
WAACs performed duties ranging from air warning observer to file clerk to aircraft ferry pilot. As the war progressed and manpower became scarcer, the Army found more and more positions where exposure to enemy action was not anticipated and which did not require strength, endurance, or skills beyond a woman's ability. Every such position filled by a woman freed up a male soldier for more hazardous duty. The program was generally regarded as a success, and on 3 July 1943 a law was passed converting the WAAC to the Women's Army Corps, a part of the regular Army with pay, privileges, and theoretical legal protection if taken prisoner equal to that of the rest of the Army.
On 30 July 1942 a law was passed that instututed the WAVES, or Women
Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the Navy counterpart to the
WAC. These women were part of the Navy Reserve from the start, and
performed functions similar to those of the WACs.
Britain had similar programs, including the Women's Royal Naval Service known unofficially as the "Wrens". However, the Wrens did not become part of the regular Navy until 1993. The Auxiliary Territorial Service and Air Transport Auxiliary corresponded roughly to the ground and air branches of the WAC.
Women were heavily recruited into the labor forces of all the major powers in the Pacific. The U.S. labor force already included 13 million women in 1940 and had reached 18 million by 1944. Britain also heavily recruited women into its labor force. Japan was reluctant to take women out of their traditional roles, but as the war situation worsened, women began to be drafted into the work force, sometimes in roles as strenuous as coal mining. Entire classes of Japanese teenage girls were taken to factories by their teachers to perform lighter work.
Rape has always been one of the most brutal aspects of warfare. The Western powers tried to eliminate this by making rape a capital offense, but enforcement was spotty in combat areas. Some Japanese nationalists have claimed that up to 10,000 rapes took place in Okinawa after its capture in early 1945, a figure deserving some skepticism. Even this figure pales in comparison to the estimated 200,000 "comfort women" forcibly or deceptively recruited by the Japanese Army, which also actively encouraged rape in places like Hong Kong immediately following its capture.
There is evidence that Russian
troops engaged in widespread rape during and after their offensive in Manchuria in August 1945.
References
Bureau of Labor Statistics (accessed 2008-11-8)
Naval Historical Center (accessed 2008-11-8)
U.S. Army Center of Military History (accessed 2008-11-8)
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia (c) 2008 by Kent G. Budge. Index
