Anzac's Dirty Dozen (15 page)

In the past, when women were expected to identify vicariously with men's heroism, the absence of female heroines from the national story would not have been surprising or questioned. In the twenty-first century, however, a national myth that involves only half the population should be more problematic. How can women be encompassed within the Anzac paradigm? This is an issue that is important both to those who support the emerging focus on Anzac as the formative national experience and – for different reasons and motives – to historians who want to shift the focus to, or heighten the attention given to, women's own experiences.

This difficulty has been overcome to some degree by artificially extending Anzac to encompass women by exaggerating, wherever possible, their role and contributions to Australia's twentieth-century wars. This has often originated from a wellintentioned desire to ‘wish away' the exclusivity of the original concept of Anzac.
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It has resulted, for example, in a major focus on the experience of Australian military nurses. These formed the one group of Australian women to serve overseas in all major twentieth-century Australian conflicts, the only group of Australian women in a military capacity to be permitted to serve near the front until 1985, and also the only group of Australian women in a military capacity to become prisoners of war. The 38 Australian members of the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) who were imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II were the only Australian women normally resident in Australia to have an experience of danger, suffering and death equivalent to that of thousands of women in other countries during the same war.
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A wide-ranging hagiography of Australian military nurses has developed as a result, according to which Australian nurses were ‘gallant, unsung heroines' and ‘heroic women'.
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Importantly, nurses do not challenge traditional concepts of
gender roles in that they have often been historically perceived as embodying ‘female' characteristics through their selflessness, nurturing, caring and perhaps subservience to male authority figures like doctors.
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The resulting ambivalence this creates can be seen in Kirsty Harris's startling suggestion that the history of World War I nurses ‘contains pertinent lessons for today's military strategists, not least of which is that the presence of Australian women in a war zone can have immense benefits for Australian men away from home'.
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By this bizarre assertion, she suggests that Australian soldiers recover more readily when nursed by their own compatriots. Alternatively, nurses in casualty clearing stations occupied, in Ruth Rae's opinion, frontline positions. Exaggerated claims for the comparative role of nurses versus serving soldiers flow from this, including Rae's incredible conclusion that ‘the nurses were not combatants but they were witnesses and in many ways that can be a harder role. To endure pain is sometimes easier than to continually observe the suffering of others.'
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This sentiment is unlikely to have been shared by those actually suffering from war wounds. Such studies demonstrate a lack of realistic judgment and knowledge of the wider context of the war. Harris also claims, for example, that the execution of nurse Edith Cavell ‘highlights sharply the distinct differences in the scope of civilian and military nursing'.
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It does not. Cavell was a matron in a Belgian civilian hospital, who was executed not because she was a nurse but because she ‘was involved in resistance activities that no occupying power would tolerate'.
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The comparatively small numbers of Australian military nurses employed in overseas combat zones have been the subject of multiple detailed (although uncritical) studies. Yet at the same time exaggerated claims about their neglect by historians abound. It is a surprising kind of neglect since nursing is included, for example, in the medical history volumes of the official history
of World War I. Such claims are still, however, made by historians of nursing, by popular historians and in the general literature aimed at schools and the public by the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
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Jan Bassett, for one, suggested that army nurses have been neglected or idealised by historians.
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To Rae they are ‘forgotten'; Harris considers them marginalised by historians; and to Rees they are ‘the other Anzacs'.
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As late as 2005, Rae argued that ‘there is an almost total absence of information about the role of the Australian nurse during WWI'
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– yet there are at least eight specialist studies of them.
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Why are these claims both exaggerated and repeated? Why, no matter how much is written about Australian military nurses, is this never enough? Nurses' role in the Anzac myth, despite the best efforts of these authors, is and will necessarily remain marginal. It is marginal because their numbers, when set against the numbers of Australian soldiers who fought overseas, are minuscule. The more marginal the claim, the more, perhaps, it needs to be repeated.

For the record, the contribution of Australian nurses in World War I, and of Australian women in the women's services in World War II for that matter, was minor. This can only be concealed by over-claiming – and indeed the numbers involved seem to climb steadily, based on generous interpretations of service.
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Harris reaches a maximal number of 3199 Australian nurses who served in World War I by counting nurses who served with any Allied military unit, not just Australian organisations.
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If Rae's figure of 416 000 Australians who enlisted and served overseas in the first AIF is accepted, then these nurses would be some 0.76 per cent of the total (and even less, if Australian men who served in other Allies' services were also counted).
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Various authors give different figures for the number of men who served overseas in the first AIF – alternatively 324 000 and 416 000. Making some rough calculations, this was either 14 or 17 per cent of the Australian
male population at the time. Using Harris's generous figures for the number of female nurses serving overseas (3199), they represent just 0.14 per cent of the female Australian population at the time.

In World War II, 726 543 men enlisted in the 2nd AIF, comprising 21.57 per cent of the Australian male population. Taking Patsy Adam-Smith's figure of 66 718 women in the women's services and military nursing services, this was 2.04 per cent of the Australian female population.
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The Department of Veterans' Affairs' own figures for male and female service in World War II indicate that 66 160 women served in all the women's services, while 926 500 men served in the three armed services: giving women 6.6 per cent of the total Australians in military service.
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These figures are based on crude computations and need to be refined by closer statistical analysis, but they do give a sense of the relative insignificance of the role permitted to Australian women in both wars. Comparatively and proportionately, women's service was unimportant. It has gained disproportionate historical attention because nurses and other medical staff were the only Australian women allowed to serve near the front line.
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It is therefore, for most of the twentieth-century military history of Australia, the only way that Australian women could claim some of the aura or lustre of Anzac. The exaggerated service of Australian nurses thus served to prove that ‘Australian women were just as capable as Australian men of meeting the challenge of war'.
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Equally, the various cliches of popular belief about a distinctively Australian military ethos –usually differentiated from that of the British – are replicated for Australian women in war. A.G. Butler, author of the World War I official medical history, claimed that ‘Australian nurses, wherever they went, were courageous and tactful standard bearers of Australian democracy'.
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Other historians depict Australian nurses as similar to the ‘digger' in their
civilian ethos, their differences from the British, their bravery, their mateship, their egalitarianism and their loss of life.
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Harris even claims ‘a uniquely Australian set of practices for military nursing'. It is not clear what she considers these to be, although earlier in the book – based solely on the claims of Australian nurses themselves, and on one report of an Australian medical services' director – she asserts that Australian nurses were used to more responsibility and displayed more initiative than their British counterparts. She does not make any comparison to the military nurses of other Dominions. Here is a case of the Anzac myth influencing the interpretation of historical evidence. The information Harris herself provides also contains examples from which it might equally be concluded that British and American nurses had superior experience, training or were permitted to undertake responsibilities from which Australian nurses were excluded.
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Overall, the history of Australian women's involvement in Australia's wars is the history of an absence, but an absence which needs to be explained. In both World Wars, there was a clear gap between women's desire to participate actively in the war effort and the lack of wider social and political support for them to do so.
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What remains then to be investigated is the reluctance to use Australia's woman-power more extensively in the period 1941 to 1943, when the nation appeared to be facing a crisis of national survival. Contemporaries expected a Japanese invasion, yet the Australian War Cabinet ruled in 1943 that no servicewomen were to be sent overseas except in the medical services. More than 24 000 women joined the Australian Women's Army Service (AWAS) and over 400 eventually served overseas – mainly in New Guinea in clerical and signalling positions – but only after New Guinea was no longer judged to be a combat zone.
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Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) personnel employed
in the Allied Intelligence Centre at Air Force Command in Brisbane were not permitted to go outside Australia when the centre moved off-shore: instead US Women's Army Air Corps' staff had to be trained to replace the Australian servicewomen overseas.
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Equally, the most senior officer of the AWAS, Colonel Sybil Irving, claimed that she refused permission for AWAS to fire anti-aircraft guns, because ‘they will be the future mothers of Australia and one would not wish them to have the spilling of the blood of other mothers' sons on their hands'.
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It is also important to note that while Australian women may have felt they had possibilities for emancipation during World War II, what is striking is how narrow these possibilities actually were when contrasted to those of women in other nations, such as Britain or Germany. Comparative studies would highlight how minor the roles permitted to women in Australia actually were, which may be one reason such studies have not been done. The reasons for these restrictions are historically understandable in context. The gendered Federation settlement that had protected the interests of men as wage-earners meant that Australia was always ‘one conflict behind' in war's effect on opportunities for women.
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In World War I, the Australian Army Nursing Service was separate from the armed forces, while its British equivalent, the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, was incorporated within the British military medicine structure. While women's service units were already formed in Britain in World War I, it was not until World War II that similar units were formed in Australia.
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In 1938, Britain formed the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in June 1939. The WAAAF was the first such service formed in Australia, but not until February 1941.
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Sir Percy Spender claimed to Gavin Long that the army was responsible for this delay because of its strong hostility to the concept of women's
services: ‘Women's Services were ridiculed at the outset, and strongly opposed by the [Australian] Army. This was in spite of the fact that they were being built up in England.'
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Even in World War II, Australian gender attitudes remained conservative. The editors of the most recent significant study of gender and war in Australia (published some 16 years ago), Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, recognise that the war raised the issue of women's right to paid work symbolically rather than numerically, and they can only claim that women were enlisted and conscripted into employment on ‘a large scale'.
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Equally, Pat Grimshaw and her fellow authors claim that ‘large numbers' of women were drafted into the metal trades and munitions (50 per cent of munitions workers by 1943).
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And Kate Darian-Smith reports that in 1944, when female paid employment was at its peak, ‘women constituted almost 25 per cent of the total workforce, and almost one third of all women aged fifteen to sixtyfive years were in paid labour'.
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However, more accurate figures reveal that ‘almost 25 per cent' is, in fact, 24.1 per cent, while ‘almost one third' is more accurately 31.6 per cent.
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Rounding these numbers up makes them seem greater. The percentages of women described as ‘munitions workers' obviously depend on the historian's definition of munitions. Using figures provided in the official history of the war economy, women workers made up 41.15 per cent of those employed in government munitions factories, and 24.88 per cent of those employed by private contractors, making women overall 26.73 per cent of the combined workforce in munitions.
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Australia went into World War II with large-scale male unemployment and under-employment. Women's employment expanded not because attitudes to gender roles changed, but because the wartime economy soaked up the male unemployed and the number of women of working age also increased. In July
1939, women in paid employment were 23.4 per cent of the work force and 27.6 per cent of women aged between 15 and 65; in June 1943 women in paid employment were 24.3 per cent of the work force and 31.9 per cent of women aged between 15 and 65.
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These are modest increases. The percentage of women employed at this time was comparable to that in the United States (32 per cent), but lower than that in Britain (37 per cent). Australian conservatism at a time of national crisis can be further illustrated by a comparison to the employment of women in Nazi Germany. In 1939 women made up 38 per cent of the German civilian workforce; by September 1944 they were 52.5 per cent. While Germany's changing boundaries make it hard to compute women employed as a percentage of total German women, the percentage of German women in employment during the war ranged between 50.4 and 55.6 per cent. German women served not just as civilian auxiliaries to the armed forces but in anti-aircraft batteries and ultimately in combat.
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