by John Man
The French arrested some Fon officials and set up a log fence in front of their trading post. In the darkness before dawn on 4 March, several thousand Dahomeans, including a ‘regiment’ of Amazons, attacked the stockade, prising the logs apart to fire inside. Bayol saw a young Amazon behead a white sergeant before being shot down. He recognized her as the ‘ravishing’ Nansica, who had decapitated the prisoner back in Abomey. French firepower, supported by a gunboat shooting from the shore, forced the Dahomeans back, leaving 120 men and seven women dead, with ‘several hundred’ others nearby uncounted. A Fon tale relates an incident that has become legendary, in which an Amazon, disarmed by an African-French soldier (or ‘French officer’, for versions vary), ripped his throat out with her sharpened teeth.
Six weeks later, some 350 French troops and 500 locals intercepted the Dahomean army at the village of Atchoupa, some 7 kilometres north of Porto-Novo. The Dahomeans, with a huge numerical advantage, routed the African contingent, but the French formed a square. Retreating steadily, they poured withering fire from their Lebel rifles. Over 600 Dahomeans died, including many Amazons, for the loss of eight on the French side. That was the First Franco-Dahomean War.
A treaty ensued, by which Dahomey recognized France’s authority over Cotonou and Porto-Novo, but clearly more violence would follow. The new king, Béhanzin, started buying modern weapons from German traders, including lever-action Winchesters (the 1873 version of which is known as the ‘gun that won the West’).
It was the Second Franco-Dahomean War of 1892 that finally did for the Amazons. War came quickly. In March, Fon warriors raided villages on the Ouémé River claimed by Porto-Novo. The French sent a gunboat to investigate. It was attacked. The French protested. The king rejected the protest. France declared war. The king said, in effect, bring it on: ‘If you want war, I am ready.’ So were the French, their army pumped up with Foreign Legionnaires, engineers, artillery and cavalry to over 2,000 men, with another 2,600 porters. In early July, gunboats shelled villages on the Ouémé and two months later the French were 80 kilometres upriver, at a village called Dogba on Dahomey’s border. On 19 September, some 4-5,000 Fon soldiers attacked.
That was the first of twenty-three engagements over the next seven weeks, in all of which some 2,000 or more Amazons, from a total force of about 10,000, fought with conspicuous bravery. ‘Oh, those Amazons!’ wrote a French officer later. ‘How they excited the soldier’s curiosity!’ The Fon, said another, fought with ‘ferocious rage, spurred into action by their fetishers [priests] and the Amazons.’ Their assaults were suicidal, given the effects of the Lebel repeating rifles. Twenty-four kilometres upriver, after several furious charges by the Fon, the French replied with their first use of bayonets, which outreached the Fon swords and machetes. In hand-to-hand fights, Amazons fought to the death. In one incident, one of them bit off a marine’s nose; at his scream, a lieutenant turned and cut her down with his sword.
In the penultimate battle, the French suffered forty-two casualties: five Europeans killed, twenty wounded, the rest being African troops. One participant described seeing
a little Amazon; quite young almost pretty, her big eyes open, glazed by a short agony. A Lebel bullet had fractured her right thigh, turning the limb completely inside out, chewing up the femur and detaching a hundred splinters. A very small hole could be seen on the inside edge of her left breast, while below her shoulder blade on the same side was a gaping wound.
‘When the bullet encounters a bone,’ said another, ‘the latter is pulverized, shredded; the flesh around it is chewed up. It was a heart-rending spectacle.’
Setting out on the final 40 kilometres to Cana, where the king had his residence, another battle on 6 October left 95 bodies, including 16 Amazons, for the loss of 6 dead on the French side. Fon sources suggest far worse: of 434 Amazons fighting, only 17 escaped. As the French made slow progress, hardly more than a kilometre a day, attacks came daily. On 26–27 October, the French fought with bayonets across trenches, while Amazons mounted counterattacks, ‘uttering terrible cries and making their big cutlasses whistle’. A few warriors were found drunk in their fox-holes, apparently having sought Dutch courage in the face of defeat. For a last-ditch stand in early November, the king assembled some 1,500, mostly Amazons, according to one account. After four hours of fighting, the Dahomeans withdrew, leaving the field strewn with dead. On 4 November came the final battle, and one of the most deadly. A last bayonet charge killed or scattered the remnants.
There would be no surrender, despite a few days’ grace. The king, having lost some 2–3,000 dead, burned his capital and fled north. The French hoisted the Tricolour over Abomey on 17 November. Their losses: 52 Europeans and 33 Africans dead. Another 200 died of disease, mainly dysentery and malaria.
Though the king tried to rally his surviving troops, there was no more fighting. Two years later, his brother was chosen as king. Béhanzin surrendered and was sent off to Martinique with five wives. In 1900, the French abolished the monarchy and began direct rule.
Many reports of the war followed. Accounts are dotted with words of praise for the Amazons: ‘Extreme valour’ … ‘Outstandingly brave’ … ‘Savage tenacity’ … ‘Remarkable for the courage and ferocity’ … ‘Prodigious bravery’ … ‘Really strange to see women so well led, so well disciplined.’ ‘They bring to battle a veritable fury and a sanguinary ardour,’ concluded Major Léonce Grandin in his two-volume account of the war, ‘inspiring by their courage and indomitable energy the other troops who follow them.’
There were many survivors, but they didn’t adapt well. Many never married, considering marriage to be servitude, and those who did, in the words of one historian, Auguste le Hérissé, writing almost twenty years later, seemed ‘to have reserved from their former condition only a certain bellicose temper … directed especially against their husbands.’ A friend of another writer described how in 1930 in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, he once saw an old crone leaning on a stick and muttering until she heard a stone being thrown, and took it to be a rifle-shot. She straightened. Her face lit up. She crawled. She pretended to load and fire a rifle. She pounced on an imaginary prey, and then, just as suddenly, stopped, hunched and staggered away. ‘She is a former warrior,’ an adult explained. ‘In the time of our former kings, there were women soldiers. Their battles ended long ago, but she continues the war in her head.’
In 1943, Eva Meyerowitz, a South African sculptor-turned-anthropologist, described how she had seen ‘the only Amazon still alive … A very old woman, hanging around the courtyards of the former royal palace.’fn4 There could have been others. If Nansica, killed at sixteen, had had friends, and if they had survived into their eighties, they could have lived to see her Dahomey meld into a French protectorate, which, almost sixty years later, became independent as today’s Benin.
11
AMAZONS WITH WINGS: RUSSIA’S NIGHT WITCHES
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of warrior women. Websites list them by the score. Some fought, some were great leaders, some visionaries, some (like Joan of Arc) all three, but that’s not the same as being Amazons. The defining trait of the Amazons was nothing to do with any of their qualities as individuals; the point was that they were a group. That makes them so out of the ordinary that, for almost all their history, they existed only in legend. Even their real prototypes, the Scythian Amazons, were not a group, regiment or nation: they were an integral part of their societies – honoured warriors and eminent leaders.
Until a few decades ago, there were many who found it hard to accept the non-existence of Amazons en masse. Quite the opposite: in the late nineteenth century, Amazons enjoyed something of a renaissance. Up until about 1860, conventional wisdom held to the idea, based on the generations as listed in the Bible, that mankind was created by God and that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. There simply wasn’t the time for a succession of prehistoric societies, of which the Amazons would have to be one. Not everyone believed Genesis, but few
dared deny it, because there was no evidence and no theoretical framework. Then came Darwin, proclaiming slow evolution combined with a geological revolution that rubbished Genesis. Suddenly, here was a timescale that could accommodate any number of prehistoric societies. In the late nineteenth century, social anthropologists became convinced that matriarchy, of which an Amazonian nation would be an extreme example, was a foundation from which patriarchies evolved. A pomposityfn1 of male Victorian academics became obsessed with the supposed sexual promiscuity in which these hypothetical prehistoric societies lived. What they were looking for was a pattern of cultural evolution, as the ‘survival of the fittest’ explained biological evolution. It was all wishful thinking. Cultures may be similar, but similarity does not mean they are connected (as, for instance, Lafitau thought that Hurons and Amazons were connected). A writer on the history of anthropology, Marvin Harris, called this ‘one of the most heated and useless discussions in the history of the social sciences.’fn2 But it did not die easily. Through much of the twentieth century, archaeologists and feminists, picking up the baton dropped by anthropologists, pointed to prehistoric ‘fertility’ statuettes of women with drooping breasts and distended stomachs to claim that during the thirty centuries of early agricultural society (c.6500–3500 BC), Europeans worshipped a Great Mother Goddess, and that the fundamental form of government was a village-based matriarchy. But the evidence fell short. It is not possible to use statuettes from pre-literate times to say anything firm about social structures.
Anthropology worldwide has had no better luck. In all the hundreds of societies, proto-states, tribes and clans studied in the field, no true matriarchies have ever been discovered. Yes, there were and are a number of egalitarian societies in which men and women are of equal status. I lived with one of them, the Waorani of Ecuador, who are considered not only egalitarian but also sometimes referred to as one of the few ‘simple’ societies, with very few artefacts or rituals, and basic social structures. But in none of them were there bands of women warriors. Apparently Amazons as a group existed only in legend – or in Dahomey.
Well, not quite so. There is a recent example of a group of female warriors, a unique product of a large-scale, complex society under intense pressure.
Before we get to them, it’s worth asking if there are other examples of groups of women that might have become violent if the circumstances had been just a bit more pressurized. Two come to mind: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which campaigned vociferously to ban alcohol in the US, and succeeded for thirteen riotous years (1920–33); and the Suffragettes, who fought for votes for women on both sides of the Atlantic. Many in both groups had the warrior spirit, being prepared to destroy property, suffer and in a few notorious cases die for their cause. But neither group espoused assassination, let alone all-out warfare. They were, after all, part of the societies they sought to reform. They wanted change, not conquest or victory through violence.
Nothing creates more intense pressure than war, except plague and famine. In 1937, Russia had been at war for over twenty years, first against Germany in 1914–17, then against itself – in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a terrible civil war, and a class war, all involving a nationwide struggle for industrial advancement. Grim times, made worse by a state sending millions to a variety of battlefronts and Stalin’s secret police sending millions more ‘enemies of the people’ to Siberian prison camps. But for young women not stigmatized by the arbitrary arrest of some family member, there were new socialist freedoms: equality, childcare, education, divorce and work, bringing unheard-of opportunities, in cash, in status, in self-confidence.
For women in the armed forces, the ground work had been laid in 1917, in the last days before the Revolution, when Russia was still fighting Germany. A peasant woman named Maria Bochkareva had suggested countering poor morale among front-line troops by forming a ‘Women’s Battalion of Death’. She commanded some 300 recruits in one inconclusive action, but then vanished from history after opposing the Bolsheviks. Aviation promised new opportunities. The Soviet government saw air travel as the best way to tie together their vast nation with commercial planes and to defend it with long-range bombers. By 1941, there were over 100 military flying schools. Despite opposition from conservative commanders, 25–30 per cent of all pilots were women, though they were not registered for military service.
One of these was Marina Raskova, a good-looking, intelligent and strong-willed daughter of the Revolution. She started work in a chemical plant, got married (Raskova was her married name), had a daughter, got divorced, and restarted work at an air-force academy. That inspired in her a new, thrilling, romantic vision. She wanted to fly. So did many other young men and women. There were more pilots than planes, but not enough navigators. That gave her an opening. At twenty-two, Raskova became the Soviet Union’s first female navigator, and proved perfect fodder for the Soviet propaganda machine, which was keen to promote the nation’s successes by idolizing ‘heroes’ in many different fields, including air travel. Women as aviators made excellent heroes, promoting both aviation and socialist ideals of achievement and equality. Raskova took part in two record-breaking flights, and then, in September 1938, in a spectacular attempt to fly non-stop the length of Mother Russia, from Moscow to Komsomolsk in the Far East, 6,500 kilometres, one-sixth of the globe, which would be a world record for straight-line flight without refuelling. The venture was a propaganda epic, followed by the nation. Stalin himself took a personal interest. In a long-range bomberfn3 named Rodina (Motherland), there were two women pilots, with Raskova as navigator in a glass nose-cone with no door to the rest of the aircraft.
It didn’t work out as planned. The plane hit bad weather, and lost radio contact after ten hours, sparking a massive search-and-rescue operation that cost the lives of sixteen people, killed in a mid-air collision, of which the public was told nothing. Raskova, with rudimentary maps, was trying to navigate with a sextant and compass over landscapes no one had ever seen from the air. Over the immensities of the Siberian forests, circling above low cloud in search of a gap and some place to land, the plane ran low on fuel. Since a crash-landing would most likely kill Raskova, in her glass nose-module, she bailed out. Landing safely, warmly dressed, but with only half a bar of chocolate, she set off walking in the direction she thought the plane must have crash-landed. For ten days, she survived on berries, mushrooms and one square of chocolate per day. She lost a boot, and became weaker, supporting herself with a stick. On the brink of collapse, she saw rescue planes circling, followed them, and found Motherland, which had belly-flopped in a swamp. It had covered 5,947 kilometres in 26 hours, 29 minutes, a world record. The three women, with a collapsible canoe, walked and paddled their way back to civilization. The nation went wild with carefully orchestrated joy. They were taken back to Moscow and driven in an open car to the Kremlin, while adoring crowds threw flowers. Stalin greeted them with kisses and a speech about avenging the oppression of women. All three were made Heroes of the Soviet Union, the first women to receive the honour. Raskova was the favourite, with her astonishing survival story, her good looks and a bestselling book, Notes of a Navigator. She had the world at her feet.
Then, suddenly, she didn’t. At 0415 on 22 June 1941, German bombers struck sixty-six Soviet aerodromes, opening the invasion codenamed Operation Barbarossa. By noon, over 1,000 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed on the ground, the first of 6,500 lost over the next three months. ‘We have only to kick in the door,’ Hitler told his chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Not so easy, as it turned out. Stalin turned from brutal oppressor to the saviour of his nation. Factories and people moved eastwards by train and road. By October, the Germans were at the outskirts of Moscow, but General Winter was coming to the rescue, as he had come when Napoleon’s army stood at Moscow’s gates in 1812.
Meanwhile, many female pilots, mostly members of flying clubs, had written to Raskova saying they w
anted to fight and complaining that no one would take them. She decided to form a regiment of women military pilots. With her fame, legendary toughness and status, she had a direct line to the top. This was in early October 1941, with Moscow likely to fall to the Germans in days. The Defence Ministry, perhaps Stalin himself, gave the go-ahead (accounts conflictfn4). So the world’s first women’s combat aviation unit came into existence not because there was a shortage of pilots – far from it, because so many planes had been destroyed on the ground – nor for propaganda (of which there was remarkably little), but almost entirely because one formidable woman cajoled and argued until she got her way.
There were to be three regiments: fighters, heavy bombers and night bombers, all staffed by women – pilots, navigators, mechanics, armourers, support personnel. Raskova gathered a few dozen of the volunteers and got uniforms issued – male ones, with massive overcoats and oversized boots. On 15 October Stalin ordered the evacuation of government departments and armament factories from Moscow. Over the next two weeks, 200 trains and 80,000 trucks headed east with the contents of 500 factories. Two days after Stalin’s order, Aviation Group 122, as Raskova’s 300–400 young women were called, marched in their ill-fitting uniforms past immobile trams and closed-up shops to Kazansky Station, and piled into goods wagons for the journey to the town of Engels, on the Volga, 800 kilometres to the south-east. It took eight days to get there. Hours were spent in sidings as troop trains lumbered westwards, while others headed east to the lands beyond the Volga with the wounded, government staff and heavy machinery. There were no toilets, and the food was grey bread, herring and water. Raskova went from car to car, keeping up morale. No one complained. Many of the women, scarcely more than girls – average age twenty – had been raised in harsher circumstances. All dreamed of serving Stalin, the Motherland and Marina Raskova.
