Heroes, Soldiers, and Spies: Remembering the Brave Women of World War II

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Women may not be that rare, but it’s certainly not common to see them as active participants in wars. Even today, after the removal of policies that barred women from joining the army, only 14.4% of the U.S Military’s active duty members are women. The numbers are slightly better in the reserve and guard where women make up 17.9% of members.

While it’s true that there are still problems with gender integration in the military, a bigger reason for the low numbers is that so few women choose to enlist compared to men. The numbers are far from surprising. It’s not a traditionally feminine line of work and, let’s be real here, human anatomy puts female soldiers at a bit of a disadvantage.

Maybe that’s why women war heroes make for captivating heroines.

Disadvantaged but just as courageous, these women of World War II offered up their lives to causes they believed in. Though most women served as nurses and workers, these notable few took up the role of soldiers, spies, snipers, and activists in one of the most dangerous times to do any of those.

The Soviet Night Witches Bombed Nazis in the Dead of Night

The Night Witches may not be as well known as key officers from World War 2, but they’re easily the most popular women on this list. They didn’t name themselves witches. For them and their fellow Soviet soldiers, they were just the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. It was the German forces that they dropped 23,000 tons of bombs on that took to calling them witches.

“Nachthexen” was what the Nazis called them. Meaning “night witches,” the name referred to the sound their wooden planes made as they swooped in to deliver death and devastation to the Nazis.

The planes, which were too small for radar detection and too low tech to even be equipped with radios, were practically invisible to German forces as long as they flew in darkness.

The planes that made them so terrifying weren’t even the Night Witches’ first choice if they could have a say in it. As pressure grew, the Soviets found themselves needing women on the front lines.

With no time to do any gender integrations or provide the women with standard training, the new female pilots bore the brunt of sexual harassment and discrimination from male soldiers who weren’t too happy about seeing women do a man’s job.

Along with the poor training and the poor treatment came poor gear. The Night Witches were forced to use old men’s uniforms and, worse, crop-duster planes that were ill-suited for use on the battlefield.

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Just to give you an idea of how terrible these planes were, they were basically plywood and canvas boxes with wings. They also had to make do with manually planning their flights using stopwatches, maps, and compasses.

It seemed as if the Night Witches were set up for failure, but the lack of gear and the quiet planes allowed them to conduct more than 30,000 missions. Just a few months after the war, however, the Night Witches’ regiment was disbanded.

Susan Travers Went From Being a Party Girl to Becoming a Military Officer

Susan Travers is an extremely unlikely wartime heroine. She wasn’t the kind of woman you’d expect to be on the battlefield given that she was a socialite who lived in the lap of comfort and luxury.

Susan Travers was the daughter of Francis Eaton Travers, an admiral of the U.K’s Royal Navy. As an heiress, it wouldn’t have been surprising if she simply ignored the war and pretended everything was fine while she partied with other high society women. But Travers was made of sterner stuff.

Okay, maybe not so stern. She initially signed up to be a nurse but didn’t like how gory injured and sick soldiers looked so she switched to driving ambulances for the French Expeditionary Force.

Later, she found herself driving around male officers as part of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion. By this point, Travers seems to have lost whatever squeamishness she had when first joined the war effort.

Susan Travers would spend the rest of her military career driving in and out of the battlefield with soldiers, officers, and supplies. In May 1942, the Axis forces struck the 1st Free French Brigade in Libya.

Though command ordered the evacuation of all the women in the area, Travers returned to lead the retreating forces out of Libya. In the process, her car was littered with 11 bullet holes and lost its breaks. This close brush with death wasn’t enough for her as she went on to serve in Italy, France, and Germany.

She made her role in the military official after the war by applying to the French Foreign Legion. Travers conveniently failed to mention she was a woman and the officers who approved her application conveniently failed to raise questions.

“La Miss,” as she was known to them, had earned enough respect that everyone chose to look the other way as she became Chief Adjutant.

Lyudmilla Pavlichenko Was a College Student When She Decided to Be a Sniper

Few women of war can claim to be as iconic as the infamous Lady Death though she herself might have a thing to say about being called a lady.

Lyudmilla Pavlichenko often described herself as a tomboy with a competitive streak that drove her to succeed in sports that were typically reserved for boys. Unlike Susan Travers, Pavlichenko wasn’t a stranger to violence in her civilian days.

Before she joined the Soviet army, the then 14-year-old signed up for shooting classes and discovered that, hey, she was pretty good at this. Pavlichenko received a Voroshilov Sharpshooter Badge which is a short and fancy way of saying that she was a terrifyingly good shot.

If it were any other time, her shooting talents may have made her little more than a hobbyist who hunted on weekends and taught shooting classes on weekdays. But Pavlichenko was a senior student at Kiev University when Hitler launched his campaign against the Soviet Union. Perhaps recognizing that she’d be more useful killing Nazis than being a teacher, Pavlichenko signed up to be a sniper for the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.

If that were the case, then she was right.

Pavlichenko shot down 187 enemy soldiers at the Siege of Odessa, leading to her promotion to Senior Sergeant. She went on to fight in an 8-month long siege at Sevastopol. Pavlichenko rose to the rank of lieutenant sometime after her kill count hit 257.

It was at this time that her superiors and the Nazis began to take note of her skills. Both sides were counting now, keeping track of how many German soldiers Lady Death had put a bullet in.

At one point, the Germans began to offer her a place among them as an officer, loudly announcing over radio comms that they would reward her if she chose to be their secret weapon in the war.

When Pavlichenko continued to ignore them, except for when she was killing them, the Germans threatened to tear her into 309 pieces. The same number of Germans that she had killed.

Her fearsome reputation turned her into one of the faces of the war. That said, when she went with the American army on a tour of the U.S to campaign for the fight against the Germans, the American press was more interested in her lack of feminine graces.

Rather than ask about the Germans she had put under the ground, they remarked on Pavlichenko’s lack of makeup to which she had this to say: “Who had time to think of her shiny nose when there is a battle going on?”

Lyudmilla Pavlichenko may not have had the time to look pretty while killing Nazis, but this next war heroine made sure she looked every bit the beauty queen while she was slaughtering Japanese soldiers.

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso Wore Lipstick While She Led Troops Against the Japanese

Remedios Gomez-Paraiso was anything but a tomboy. The young woman started life in the sleepy town of Anao, a rural community in the countryside of Pampanga, Philippines. Like Travers, Gomez-Paraiso led a fairly comfortable life.

She was the daughter of the town’s mayor and belonged to a respected, well-off family. Before the war, she was known in the area as a beauty queen. It’s not hard to imagine why.

Even in the grainy photo above, it’s hard to deny that Gomez-Paraiso was a beautiful woman who liked to dress up. You can clearly see her perfectly arched eyebrows, dark lipstick, and curled hair. If she was wearing perfume in this photo, she likely made it herself. Gomez-Remedios spent her teens sewing dresses and making perfume.

There’s no doubt she would have been more than happy to continue living her Barbie girl dream. But when the Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, the safe and happy bubble she lived in popped.

Gomez-Paraiso’s father had anticipated the Japanese army’s arrival to Pampanga and quickly organized a resistance effort. For his hard work, the Japanese rewarded him with torture, death, and humiliation. After killing the man, they displayed his corpse to make an example of him.

Shortly after, Remedios Gomez-Paraiso joined the People’s Army Against the Japanese. Army may have been an overstatement. The Huks were a communist guerilla army made up of farmers gathered from the countryside of Central Luzon. But what they lacked in weapons and numbers, the Huks made up for with hatred of Japanese Imperialists.

Gomez-Paraiso had a unique way of showing that hatred. Aside from rising to become a military officer nicknamed “Commander Dawn,” she made a point of showing up to the battlefield looking like she was there for a party. Gomez-Paraiso would wear lipstick, do her nails, and curl her hair before leading her troops because she claimed she was “fighting for the right to be myself.”

This wasn’t just an idealistic feminist warcry. Gomez-Paraiso was publicly advertising the fact that she was a woman to Japanese soldiers who were known from Nanking to Manila for brutally raping women.

At a time when most women pretended to be men or afflicted with a contagious disease to avoid rape, Commander Dawn was cutting down Japanese soldiers in style.

Sophie Scholl Rallied Her Fellow Germans Against the Nazis

Not all women who joined the fight in World War did it by spying, nursing, and soldiering. For a rare few, the battle against the Nazis was just as much a matter of ideology as it was of actual fighting.

Sophie Scholl was one such woman.

When we think of iconic WWII women from Germany, the first one that comes to mind is Anne Frank. But Sophie Scholl also deserves credit for her public declarations against Nazi ideology.

For one, Scholl didn’t have to side with the Jewish people. She was German in the way that the Nazis wanted their citizens to be which is to say she didn’t have a drop of Jewish blood in her.

The Scholls, however, were not friends with the Nazi party. Robert Scholl, her father, was a politician with no qualms about criticizing the Nazis. Her brother, though once a supporter of the Hitler Youth program, began dissenting as well.

Soon enough, Sophie Scholl realized that maybe, and this might be a wild take, the people blaming an entire ethnic group for all of their problems weren’t in the right here. Racism. It’s bad.

Instead of taking up arms against the Nazis, though, Scholl did something that might be even harder for us to imagine: she resisted them passively. Together with her brother, Scholl created a group of five youths and a professor that they called the White Rose. They campaigned for the moral awakening of the German youth, passing out pamphlets that called citizens to wake up to the horrors of the Nazi party.

One day, Scholl climbed the stairs of her university’s main building and showered students with anti-Nazi pamphlets. An onlooker ratted her out to the Gestapo. Despite being arrested and interrogated, neither she nor her brother gave the names of the other White Rose members.

In the face of death, she held even firmer to her message of peace.

“Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Sophie Scholl was only 21 years old when the Nazis beheaded her via guillotine.