isans.
Although women eventually learned almost all military skills, they played significant roles in air defense, signal communications, medical service and the traffic control service. Many women eventually saw combat duty because of the increasing shortage of men. Women served in all the services and were present on all fronts.
Eventually, a conscription became necessary. In the spring of 1942, Stalin and the Party decided to conscript 100,000 women for service. At first this was not very popular with veteran soldier. They were skeptical about a woman's ability to be a soldier faced with actual live fire. There were also more immediate problems related to housing of women and the services they would require. How well these problems were solved is not clear, but Stalin himself took an interest in women soldiers. He created a new billet in the Red Army specifically to work on these difficulties.
Despite the difficulties, women were not discouraged. Many had been asking to be let into the military and were eager to serve their country in any way that they could. The conscription was also of great benefit to the military because it released many men from rear support jobs to advance to the front. Women then stepped into both private and noncommissioned officer ranks. The mobilization of the conscripts also strengthened the National Air Defense Forces considerably. Most of the women who were mobilized served in the National Air Defense Forces, which was created during the war and afterwards became a separate service.
Although women had been concentrated in the National Air Defense, they soon became proficient in many areas. Women became machine gunners and learned to handle automatic weapons, rifles and grenades. They eventually replaced all-male units in charge of barrage-balloons, which were special balloons set up around major cities and industrial areas to force the enemy to fly either around them o...