Hell Hath No Fury (41 page)

In April 1945, Toguri married Felipe D'Aquino, a Portuguese citizen of Japanese descent. After the marriage she did not renounce her US citizenship and, in spite of her husband's misgivings, continued to appear on
Zero Hour
until the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945.

In the immediate aftermath of the war she was tracked down by American journalists and rashly agreed to give an interview, signing the contract as “Tokyo Rose.” The interview notes were later handed to the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps and Toguri, now D'Aquino, was arrested, imprisoned, and released in 1946. She was rearrested by the US Army in September 1948 and brought under military escort to San Francisco, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation was waiting with a warrant for her trial for treason.

The trial opened at the beginning of July 1949 and lasted sixty-one days. Tokyo Rose was found guilty of only one of the charges brought against her: “that on a day during October 1944, the exact date being to the Grand Jurors unknown, said defendant at Tokyo, Japan, in a broadcasting studio of the Broadcasting Corporation of Japan, did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.” She was sentenced to ten years in prison, becoming the seventh person to be convicted of treason in the history of the United States, at an estimated cost to the US government of $750,000. The trial judge, Michael Roche, disallowed much of the mitigating evidence in her favor and later admitted that he was prejudiced against her, as his son had served in the Pacific.

D'Aquino was released in January 1956 after serving six years as a model prisoner at the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She successfully resisted attempts by the US government to deport her, and in January 1977 she obtained a pardon from President Gerald Ford. Her marriage to D'Aquino was dissolved in 1980. He could not live in the United States, as he had been deemed an undesirable alien after testifying for his wife during his trial.

Reference: Masayo Duus,
Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific,
1979.

WALKER, MURIEL,
see
K'TUT TANTRI,
Chapter 9.

10

VALKYRIES, FURIES, AND FIENDS

Ruthless Opportunists, Sadists, and Psychopaths Unleashed and Empowered by War

As bonny a girl as one could ever wish to meet.

—SS concentration camp guard Irma Grese, as seen by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint, who executed her in 1945

F
OR CENTURIES
, the myth has persisted that men make war to protect and defend women, and that the only task of the female of the species is to keep the home fires burning, and to encourage “our boys.” World War II Hollywood films like
Mrs. Miniver
(1942) and
Since You Went Away
(1944) embody these archetypes, with Greer Garson and Claudette Colbert, respectively, portraying women as the gentle sex, passive but warmhearted and conformist guardians of hearth and home.

Women have not always conformed to this saccharine stereotype. When they did go to war, accounts of their activities stress their valor, nobility, and self-sacrifice:
Joan of Arc
and
Florence Nightingale
are the archetypes here (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 8). Otherwise, men went to war and if women came along, they were seen as nonparticipants, trailing behind, “following the flag.” Military “experts” are particularly prone to insist that women only enter the annals of warfare as hapless bystanders, or as the spoils of war.

Yet many women have been drawn to war both for its excitement and for the chance it offered of escaping the female role (see chapter 3, “Runaways and Roaring Girls”). Of these, a fearsome few sought or found in war the opportunities for a level of cruelty and sadism rarely acknowledged as part of the female psyche. Societies everywhere normally experience violence as the problem, preoccupation, and even recreation of the male, but not all the horror and violence in human nature can be blamed on men. Numbers of women in war have demonstrated that they can be as capable of cruelty as men, when, like men, they are given the power to inflict it.

This dark side of female nature is well recognized in myth and legend, from the Celtic Great Goddess of war and death, the Morrighan, to the Hindu goddess Kali Ma, “the Black Mother,” with her girdle of venomous snakes and her necklace of men's skulls. Many tribal societies empowered their women to take revenge on a defeated enemy, and some developed refined rituals of sadism in which the women tortured prisoners to death (see
Tribal Revenge,
Chapter 10).

These were particularly significant in warrior societies like Afghanistan, where women's low status denied them any other role of importance in the tribe. In North America, the Cherokee, Iroquois, Omaha, and Dakota tribes also followed this tradition, with the aim of adding the pain of humiliation to their victims' physical agonies. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), which saw the annihilation by the Sioux and Cheyenne of a contingent of the US Seventh Cavalry commanded by General George Armstrong Custer, Native American women roamed the battlefield, pounding the faces of dead and dying cavalrymen to a bloody pulp. And as late as the 1930s, British aircrew flying air control missions over Afghanistan carried a so-called blood chit, a piece of paper promising to ransom any captured servicemen, but only if they were returned with their full complement of testicles, penises, fingers, toes, and eyes.

Nazi Germany, too, provides support for the dispiriting observation that when authorized to do so, women can behave as badly as men. The Hitler regime was initially reluctant to mobilize women for the war effort, stressing that their contribution was essentially reproductive and domestic. But the SS, the most powerful administrative arm of the Third Reich, had a special role to play. With the encouragement of its chief, Heinrich Himmler, it found a niche for a few thousand females in the one industry at which it excelled, the industry of death, in whose execution its personnel, both male and female, were given almost unlimited power.

Some women have undoubtedly found it easier to liberate their capacity for cruelty when acting in groups. But power, not gender, is the key to behavior that transgresses all the norms. The women who were enrolled to serve as guards in the Nazi death camps were accorded a limited and grotesquely negative form of empowerment. In them, the ideological obsessions of this intensely chauvinist society were responsible for producing some arch-sadists of the female sex. Nazi theories of racial purity and Aryan superiority created the concentration and death camps of the Third Reich and with them a climate that made it possible for a number of women to be appointed to positions where they could exercise arbitrary power—the power of life and death—over the female inmates (see
Braunsteiner, Hermine,
Chapter 10, and
Grese, Irma,
Chapter 10).

The women invested with this power in war had made no previous mark on peacetime society. They had lived anonymous and often frustrated lives, with one at least, Irma Grese, experiencing the violence she was later to inflict: the first time she presented herself at home in her SS uniform, her father beat her up. In this sea of apparently motiveless malignity, it is also noteworthy that some of the SS women met the classic psychological profile of the “true believer.” In common with many a cult follower, they found in the rituals and paraphernalia of their new calling an escape route from the humdrum world of nonentity they had previously inhabited. Perhaps most remarkable of all, one of the worst of these women, Braunsteiner, who initially escaped justice after World War II, quietly sank back into drab suburban anonymity as if nothing had happened, and remained undetected for many years after the war.

In recent years in the Middle East, a complex web of social and political factors has given rise to a new phenomenon, the female
suicide bomber
(see Chapter 10). These women and girls form a far more varied group than the SS women of the death camps. They range from bright young lawyers to the unemployed, the uneducated, and even the elderly. There is no template for the woman who loads herself with bombs and goes out to kill, without even the promise of eternal sexual delight in paradise that is offered to her Islamic male colleagues.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison can be made between the SS women and the female US service personnel at the heart of the 2003 scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Official sanction there was given to a regime in which Iraqi prisoners were treated with a contempt that recalls some of the racial persecution of World War II. Images of the grinning figure of
Lynndie England
(see Chapter 10) straddling naked and cowed Iraqi men, or the use of snarling attack dogs to exert “control” over them, conjures up the pictures of laughing Nazi troops viciously tugging the beards of terrified Jews in occupied Poland. In a link to the female role in tribal revenge, being stripped naked and tormented by a woman would immeasurably add to the humiliation of devout Islamic men. Like their SS forbears, at least some of the perpetrators of the outrages at Abu Ghraib had to answer for the lawlessness that prevailed there. But those who devised such policy and authorized its implementation have not been brought to justice.

AFGHANISTAN, WOMEN OF,
see
TRIBAL REVENGE,

Chapter 10.

AMMASH, DR. HUDA SALIH MAHDI

“Mrs. Anthrax,” Iraqi Scientist, b. 1953

Ammash was one of the few women in the inner circle of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the only female to feature in the United States' list of fifty-five most wanted Iraqis catalogued by the Pentagon on a deck of playing cards issued to US troops during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Saddam was the ace of spades; Ammash was the five of hearts.

The chairperson of the Baath Party's Youth and Trade Bureau, Ammash sat on the eighteen-member Iraq Command that ran the party and was also a party regional commander. However, the US-educated microbiologist was better known to Americans for her involvement with Saddam's program for weapons of mass destruction. US intelligence dubbed her “Mrs. Anthrax” and accused Ammash of masterminding the rebuilding of Iraq's biological-warfare inventory after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

After gaining a master of science degree from Texas Woman's University and a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Missouri–Columbia, Ammash returned to Iraq in 1983 to train under Nassir al-Hindawi, the father of Iraq's biological-weapons program. In 1996 she became the head of Iraq's Microbiology Society, a front for research into the military uses of anthrax and smallpox. In the 1990s she also reputedly conducted research into the illnesses that may have been caused by the use of depleted uranium expended by Allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War, which resulted in her developing breast cancer.

The mother of four and a fluent English-speaker, the busy Ammash also served as Saddam's unofficial ambassador to Jordan, Yemen, and Lebanon, and as the dean of the University of Baghdad. She was the only woman pictured at a meeting of Saddam and eight of his most senior officials in Iraqi television footage shot in March 2003 shortly after the launching of the US-led invasion. After the collapse of Saddam's regime at the beginning of May 2003, Ammash disappeared and was initially thought to have escaped to Syria. However, shortly afterward she was found in hiding in Baghdad by US troops and taken into custody. She was released in December 2005 along with Dr. Rihab Taha, who had led Iraq's biological weapons program until 1995.

Reference: Charles Duelfer,
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD,
2005.

APACHE, WOMEN OF,
see
TRIBAL REVENGE,
Chapter 10.

BRAUNSTEINER, HERMINE

“The Stamping Mare,” German SS Auxiliary and War Criminal, b. 1919, d. 1999

The daughter of prosperous Viennese parents, Braunsteiner failed to realize her early dream of becoming a nurse and was equally unsuccessful when she tried to enter domestic service in England.

Her life changed in 1939 when she was plucked from a job at a Berlin aircraft plant and sent for training as a guard at the nearby Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. It was here that she was dubbed “the Stamping Mare” after trampling a number of old women to death with steel-studded jackboots.

In October 1942, she was transferred to Maidanek, a labor camp near the Polish city of Lublin that in early 1942 had been converted into an extermination center. Promoted to the rank of assistant wardress (
Aufsehirin
), Braunsteiner was able to give free rein to her sadistic impulses. She was involved in the selection of women and children for the gas chamber and also subjected them to random homicidal whipping and stomping.

In March 1944, with the Red Army poised to drive through Poland, Maidanek was evacuated. Braunsteiner was ordered back to Ravensbrück and promoted first to head a work detail and then to the post of supervising wardress at a satellite camp.

In May 1945, with Germany in ruins, Braunsteiner became one of millions of displaced persons fleeing the Red Army. She found refuge briefly in Vienna before being arrested by Austrian officials in May 1946 and imprisoned until April 1947. In April 1948 she was rearrested for crimes committed at Ravensbrück; she was released in November 1949.

Braunsteiner received an amnesty from the Austrian government and thereafter supported herself by working in hotels and restaurants. She became engaged to an American soldier, Russell Ryan, and in 1959 married him. The couple settled in Queens, New York, and Braunsteiner became a US citizen in January 1963. However, time was running out for the Stamping Mare. She was tracked down and exposed by a
New York Times
reporter, Joseph Lelyveld, who had been tipped off by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. When Lelyveld confronted Braunsteiner on her Queens doorstep, she greeted his arrival with weary resignation.

In March 1973 Braunsteiner became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to Germany. She stood trial, with fifteen other SS men and women, for crimes committed at Maidanek. In 1971 she had been stripped of her US citizenship, and in May 1980 she was given a life sentence. Suffering from diabetes, she was released from prison in 1996, and she died three years later.

Reference: Daniel Patrick Brown,
The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Concentration Camp System,
2002.

ENGLAND, LYNNDIE

US Army Private and Antiheroine of the Iraq War, b. 1982

Lynndie England was a bit player who came to symbolize a horror story of American misconduct and mismanagement in the aftermath of the war against Iraq.

The daughter of a railroad worker, England grew up in a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. She joined the army reserve in 2001, when she was in high school, to earn money to go to college and train as a meteorologist. After an unsuccessful marriage, she was posted to Iraq to serve as a specialist with 372nd Military Police Company.