by Nancy Reagin
26. On COIN strategy, see David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 1964, 2006); and John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
27. A good summary of Nixon’s “liberal” social agenda is provided by Kurt Andersen, “The Madman Theory,” New York Times, August 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/the-madman-theory.html.
28. See the U.S. Army official website at www.army.mil and the article “School of Advanced Military Studies Reflects and Looks Forward after 25 Years,” May 26, 2009, http://www.army.mil/article/21643/school-of-advanced-military-studies-reflects-and-looks-forward-after-25-years.
29. See Fred Kaplan, “Force Majeure: What Lies behind the Military’s Victory in Iraq,” Slate, April 10, 2003, www.slate.com/id/2081388/.
30. Michiko Kakutani, “The Training of Navy Seals Commandos,” May 8, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/books/seal-team-six-and-the-heart-and-the-fist-reviews.html.
31. Nick Turse, “2014 or Bust: The Pentagon’s Building Boom in Afghanistan Indicates a Long War Ahead,” www.tomdispatch.com, November 5, 2009, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175157. The United States also built a colossal embassy in Baghdad and sprawling military bases in Iraq. In a linguistic form of jiu-jitsu, the United States described these bases as “enduring” facilities, rather than as “permanent.”
32. Sebastian Junger, War (New York: Twelve Books, 2010), 99–100.
33. Ibid., 83.
34. This is reminiscent of the “gook syndrome” of the Vietnam War, as discussed by Cecil Currey in Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army during the Vietnam Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 84–91.
35. Nick Turse, “A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon’s New Power Elite,” www.Tomdispatch.com, August 3, 2011, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175426/.
36. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War; and William Astore, “Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire: What It Means When We Say We Have the World’s Finest Fighting Force,” www.tomdispatch.com, January 6, 2011, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175337.
Chapter 2
“Part of the Rebel Alliance and a Traitor”
Women in War and Resistance
Janice Liedl and Nancy R. Reagin
“Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, flyboy!”
—Princess Leia, A New Hope
As the shuttle Tydirium approaches the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia Organa, a key member of the Rebel strike force, is filled with apprehension. Their mission is dangerous, maybe even suicidal. The Rebels are relying on stolen codes obtained by their own spies to bypass tight Imperial security. That will be only the start of the challenges she knows they face in the vital mission to take down the massive generator protecting the second Death Star. Most of the Rebels, Leia included, are dressed in forest camouflage, a time-honored guerrilla warfare tactic, to increase their chances of moving undetected once they close in on their objective. If captured, Leia and her comrades will be treated as traitors by an implacable enemy that sees them not as worthy soldiers but as “Rebel scum.” Leia is right to be worried about what fate they face as resistance fighters: our history and her own galaxy’s past show that women were not spared when they took part in the irregular warfare of the resistance fighter. Yet the Empire should be worried, too, because it faces a resistance made all the stronger by the women who lead and support the Rebel forces.
Leia is more than a figurehead; she is an active participant in bringing down the Empire. (A New Hope)
Princess Leia is a spy, a saboteur, and a guerrilla, as well as a leader in the overthrow of Palpatine’s tyranny. She wasn’t the first woman to fight those battles. In the egalitarian societies of the Star Wars galaxy, many women engage in battles against Palpatine’s plotting. From the Clone Wars heroics of Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker’s daring and resourceful Padawan, to Mon Mothma’s grave and measured guidance as the Alliance’s Chief of State, women fight for liberty. Historical women, many of them drawn from French history, such as Joan of Arc, Charlotte Corday, and the women of the French Resistance during World War II, also battled overwhelming opponents as resistance fighters on the battlefield and behind enemy lines.
A Symbol of Hope
Since the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, a woman has led France, at least when France was symbolized in the arts. An image of the classical goddess of Liberty was used to urge on the commoners against the oppressions of the king and his Ancien Regime. Dressed in Roman-style clothing and wearing a hat known as a Phrygian cap, an ancient symbol of freedom, this Revolutionary icon was known as Marianne as early as 1792. Even after the Revolution came to a sputtering end with Napoleon’s seizure of power, Marianne’s image remained strongly connected to a French national culture. During the July Revolution of 1830 and many times after that, Marianne was employed in nationalistic art to represent the freedom-loving ideals of France, particularly against oppression by reactionary or foreign occupiers.1
Marianne had come to symbolize the French ideal of liberty by 1830.
During World War I, Americans understood Joan of Arc as a symbol of liberation from tyranny.
Another feminine image of resistance to oppression that became popular in the nineteenth century was that of Joan of Arc, the medieval warrior who had inspired France’s leaders to reclaim French territory from English occupiers. She was sometimes presented as leading the people in ways similar to Marianne and was used even by the U.S. government (an ally of France) during World War I as a symbol for French liberation from oppression.
The Maid, the Countess, and the Padawan
Military command is often seen as a male preserve. Great generals in history have almost always been men, but there have been rare occasions where women have not only commanded resistance armies in name, as did Queen Zenobia in antiquity, but actually led these forces on the battlefield. The medieval French warrior Joan of Arc is among the most famous of women war leaders. Being a young woman, she seemed doubly unfit to lead a warrior’s life. That was the thought of many at the time, both among the French forces she rallied to win back the kingdom for the French heir to the throne, Charles, and for the English forces, desperately seeking to hold onto the French crown that the English king, Henry V, had claimed in the Hundred Years’ War.
By her background and training, Joan was anything but a warrior. A farm girl from the Burgundian village of Domrémy with a deep devotion to her religious faith, teenage Joan believed that she was commanded by heavenly voices to go into France and come to the aid of the dispossessed king Charles. Joan was frightened; she pointed out that she was only “a poor girl who did not know how to ride or lead in war.” Within a few months, however, she had taken up the voices’ challenge and traveled to the court of the French ruler, where she proved herself worthy of respect by the uncrowned king and his courtiers. Joan of Arc learned to handle a horse and maneuver in heavy armor. She was eventually given command of an army to raise the siege of Orléans. With this victory, the French celebrated Joan as the Maid, whose rise to prominence demonstrated God’s support of their cause. Wearing custom-made armor and wielding a sword she’d miraculously discovered behind the altar of a monastery church, Joan became, as one contemporary noted, “a captain, going to command in war, to draw her pay and her equipment, and to serve according to the size of her large heart.”2
Joan of Arc led the resistance against the English occupation of France in the 1400s.
Newly called to service as Anakin’s Padawan in her early teens, Ahsoka is remarkably young for the position and somewhat unseasoned. Yet the Republic’s battle against the Separatist forces requires the Jedi to muster all available members, and the young Togruta is quickly thrust into the heart of the action, joining Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi at the Battle of
Christophsis. Within a short while, “Snips” is commanding troops on her own with sometimes disastrous results, as when her reckless pursuit of the enemy at the Battle of Ryloth leads to the death of half of her squadron of pilots. The young Padawan is desolate at the results of her recklessness but eventually finds a balance between personal bravery and careful leadership.
Ahsoka bears the Jedi warrior’s burden of command. (The Clone Wars)
These were lessons Joan of Arc didn’t learn until after she’d achieved her greatest triumph, seeing Charles VII crowned as king of France in July 1429. Her king played at politics, negotiating a truce with the Duke of Burgundy, who had, until then, supported the English. Joan was irritated at King Charles’s disinclination to aggressively pursue the retreating English. She pushed for battle, following the English to Paris, where she experienced her first defeat and a costly one, at that. By one account, five hundred were dead after the initial assault, and a thousand more were wounded. Some of Joan’s contemporaries believed that the failure to take Paris broke her will. In any case, it helped seal her fate as she became increasingly sidelined in the French king’s court and council, while she sought to continue her campaign to drive the English out of France. To the end, she posed a daunting figure who inspired fear in her enemies.
According to accounts of Joan’s final battle, even though her force was small, her spirit was undaunted. She rode forward with her standard raised high as she joined the melee: she “held herself in her armor and with gestures just like a captain leading a great army.” This would be her last foray. In May 1430, Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne and was handed over to her English enemies to be tried as a heretic and eventually burned at the stake. She was not even twenty years old when she died.3
Centuries later, another inspirational woman leader rose up to help lead a resistance movement. Countess Constance Markievicz was, despite her name, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and deeply resented the British rule over Ireland. A women’s rights activist, she married a Polish count, and the two settled in Dublin, where she became involved in the Irish nationalist movement in 1908. Markievicz founded a paramilitary nationalist group, Fianna Éireann, for Irish teens, male and female. She encountered hostility when she joined Sinn Fein but persisted, despite the heckling her elite status earned her from other Irish nationalists, rather worse than the teasing Princess Leia received from Han Solo.
After the death of Constance Markievicz in 1927, Ireland memorialized the resistance fighter and politician.
In 1916, everything changed for Markievicz and for Ireland. That was the year of the Easter Rising, an armed insurgency designed to drive the British out of Ireland. Lieutenant Markievicz held an officer’s rank in the Irish Citizen Army and took her position seriously. She went into battle wearing her uniform and wielding her revolver. The Rising failed, however, and Markievicz surrendered to British authorities, along with the rest of her unit. She was the only one of almost a hundred women prisoners kept in solitary confinement, rather like Princess Leia on the Death Star.
Although Markievicz’s conviction could have carried the death sentence, the judge changed the penalty to life in prison. Markievicz was actually released as part of a greater amnesty in 1917 but soon was back in prison for antigovernment activism. In 1918, she was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons, an honor she pointedly refused to take up, preferring instead to sit in the new Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, when it was first convened. Today, Ireland celebrates Constance Markievicz as one of the nation’s resistance heroines.4
Keep Mum. She’s Not So Dumb!
Joan of Arc, Constance Markievicz, and Ahsoka Tano fought their enemies with weapons and sometimes in pitched battles. Many other women were rebels but in much less visible ways. As spies, women were particularly capable of making a contribution to a war effort. Because of prejudices about women as weak or incapable, few historical women were considered to be military threats, even when their nations were occupied by hostile powers. Loreta Velazquez boasted of performing amazing exploits as a spy for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. According to her, “For certain kinds of secret service work women are, out of all comparison, superior to men. One reason for this is that women, when they undertake a secret service job, are quicker witted and more wide awake than men, they more easily deceive other people, and were less easily imposed upon.”5
Leia was a spy and a courier on behalf of the Rebel Alliance to Restore the Republic. (A New Hope)
In the opening of A New Hope, Princess Leia relies more on the protections due her as a senator than as a woman when she tries to bluff her way out of Darth Vader’s control. Even when captured, she is still a successful spy, sending R2-D2 off to Tatooine with the Death Star’s plans entrusted to her by other spies for the Alliance. With her selfless drive and determination, Leia would have felt at home with many of the other women who spied for their cause and their country. Like Leia, countless other women spied in earnest and to great effect. Among them was Rose Greenhow, who ran a spy network of almost fifty Confederate sympathizers in the Civil War. After her father died, Rose’s aunt and uncle took her in, and she spent several years at their Washington boarding house, which served the likes of two-term vice president John Calhoun. Widowed in 1854, Greenhow became a mover and a shaker in Washington politics, supporting James Buchanan in his candidacy and during his term as president. His successor, Abraham Lincoln, was as loathsome to Rose as Palpatine became to Padmé by the time of the Clone Wars: Greenhow sought to oppose Lincoln as the Civil War began, since she saw him as a “tyrant.”
Rose Greenhow frustrated even President Lincoln with her spy network on behalf the Confederacy.
Guided by the belief that “all’s fair in love and war,” Greenhow used her connections with Washington’s elites, particularly its military men, to uncover secrets she could pass on to Confederate leaders using a secret cipher. Many members of Greenhow’s spy network were also women. One sixteen-year-old she recruited, Bettie Duvall, smuggled important intelligence to General Beauregard on papers tucked into her imposing crown of upswept hair, a trick that might have worked for Princess Leia, as well. With that information provided by Greenhow’s spy network, the South was able to handily counter the North’s maneuvers at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.
Greenhow’s high profile and Southern sympathies made it impossible for the Washington widow to escape notice for long. President Lincoln set Allan Pinkerton, the head of the new Intelligence Service, to keep a special watch on her, and that vigilance soon paid off. Uncovered as a key Confederate spy, Greenhow was put under house arrest. Even that failed to stem the tide of secrets she harvested and passed on. Exasperated, the Union leaders eventually exiled her to the Confederacy, and she continued to do her best to support their cause until her death by drowning in 1864.6
Blondes aren’t necessarily dumb: a 1942 British poster warning against female spies.
Careless talk costs lives: The Empire’s slogan evokes World War II propaganda. (Lucas Licensing artwork)
The success of female spies such as Loreta Valazquez and Rose Greenhow and the notoriety achieved even by failed spies such as Mata Hari during World War I—who was recruited by the Germans to spy on the French, but whose efforts never amounted to much—caused later wartime governments to blame women for intelligence leaks. British authorities during World War II feared that men in the armed services seemed particularly willing to disclose their rank and where they were stationed to attractive women.
Yet the image of a lone seductive spy surrounded by gullible men is misleading. One more truth that Greenhow’s story highlights is that spying was rarely a solitary occupation. Greenhow had many acquaintances and accomplices in and around Washington who helped her uncover and deliver news of the Union plans. All of these women who were successful spies built on their relationships to gather and transmit intelligence. Some paid with their lives, just as Mon Mothma notes that many Botha
ns did in bringing the Alliance news of the second Death Star’s secret construction installation at Endor. Whether in their galaxy or ours, spy networks such as these were crucial in helping underdog powers such as the Rebel Alliance hold their own against their opponents.
Mon Mothma notes that many suffered and died to help the Rebel Alliance in its struggle against the Empire. (Return of the Jedi)
The Princess and the Partisanes
Princess Leia embodies all of the traits we associate with a resistance fighter when she takes up a blaster to strike back against the Imperial forces on Endor. Many historical women fought against oppressors, although not all went so far as to take up weapons. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after the military leadership (supported by Spanish fascists) rose up against the democratic government of the Spanish Republic, leading to three years of bloody civil war. Women supported both sides in more traditional roles, but the militias defending the Republic also welcomed women as combat volunteers in the initial stages of the struggle. More than a thousand women served as milicianas defending the Republican zones during 1936.