Necessity is the mother of invention.
So is sending every third guy in the battle without a rifle and just saying "pick one up off a body".
The USSR was kind of fucked, but again, necessity...
Like Iraq. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Necessity is the blah blah blah.
However they DID fight on the ground for the red army, so there you go. They did it all the way to the end, which makes no sense if what you're saying is true about the men not wanting them to fight if they had it their way.
We had those Nazis bent over a barrel after they epically failed in Stalingrad, yet there are plenty of pictures of Svetlana soldiers celebrating with the other allies in Berlin.
i'd say that a couple thousand people being used and then keeping those experienced soldiers through the rest of the active conflict, and intentionally gathering women to fight in female units are very different. as you said, necessity is the mother of invention, but the necessity for the reds was to see every nazi that had stepped foot on their soil ground into dust. it was the same for americans, but on the other side. we never experienced the kind of damaging losses for front line maneuvers that pushed american women onto the battlefield. i don't think this says what you want it to say, bud. i'm still okay with letting women join the military but you are not going to find a single desperate wartime story that convinces me we should have a standing army made up of any considerable amount of women.
that 800,000 women number? that's only 5% of the red army's total fielded forces. women were a microscopic part of the victory for russia, no matter how modern historians want to play it. the hypermajority of victories of all kinds for the red army came from men. as for specific females on the front lines, snipers were the highest total, with a counted number of about 2,500. only about 500 came back from the war. the rest of those 'front line' women were anti-air battery operators who were pivotal, but rarely directly encountered nazi ground troops, especially as they pushed the nazis back out.
100% of the red army's nurses, and over 40% of all their paramedics and surgeons were women. women have plenty of places within the military, but getting their brains splattered onto the dirt is not one of them, for a variety of factors that have been explained here.
the US had even less women in the military at the time, only fielding about 350,000 women, NONE of whom were given combat positions. because of this, despite sending in significantly fewer women, american women returned from world war II at far higher rates, and it meant we had an influx of extremely talented surgeons and nurses from the military now working the homefield and saving lives.
women do not belong on the front lines. there is no data that supports that they do, and even in the most utterly desperate of times, EVEN FOR THE SOVIETS IN WW2, they were only willing to put a couple thousand women TOTAL into a ground unit, and it lost a huge percentage of its warfighters.
it's bad to put women on the front lines, and in combat roles. don't do it.
