Camping-field wives - this was the name of the front-line girlfriends in the Great Patriotic War.
The generals and officers of the Red Army, torn away from their families, gave birth to "civilian wives" from among the female military personnel. Doctors, nurses, telephone operators, and radio operators with attractive appearance faced increased attention from their male colleagues. Commanders of different ranks looked after with particular persistence. The officer corps, unlike ordinary soldiers, could afford to "spin a romance."
Camping-fighting wives began relationships with officers for love or convenience. Even some members of the high command had such concubines. For example, Marshal Zhukov appointed his fighting girlfriend as a personal nurse and received many awards. They went through the whole war together.
Before going over to the enemy's side, General Vlasov had two field wives: military doctor Agnes Podmazenko and cook Maria Voronova. Podmazenko even got pregnant from Vlasov, and the general sent her to give birth to the rear. She gave birth to a son to him and received 5 years in the camps "for a relationship with a traitor to the motherland."
The presence of field-fighting wives at the front was marked by the following events:
- hatred of legitimate wives from the rear towards front-line girlfriends;
- contempt of ordinary soldiers;
- fear of "exile" to a hot spot and tribunal.
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A woman who became pregnant lost her certificate. For ordinary nurses, this meant disaster. The history of front-line love was often temporary. It ended in death or separation after the end of the war. Only a few field wives managed to register their relationship with their "combat" comrades.
Despite the presence of a legal wife in the rear, officers of the Red Army entered into relations with temporary cohabitants. At the same time, many tried not to betray such situations to wide publicity or to assign it the status of moral baseness. Interestingly, Marshal Zhukov took decisive action in the fight against the moral decay of the soldiers and issued an order to remove almost all women from headquarters and command posts.
For such a work, he was almost deprived of his party card.
There were no legal regulators of relations between servicemen of different sexes, writes Colonel of Justice Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev. Cohabitation in military collectives was often qualified as domestic corruption and ended with the imposition of disciplinary and party penalties on the guilty, or conviction by an officer's court of honor. But the archives of the military-judicial department also left a trace of more complex collisions between men and women that unfolded in wartime. Up to prosecution.
For example, in the report of the chairman of the military tribunal of the Northern Front, the following example is given. The commander of the 3rd platoon of the searchlight battalion of the guard, senior lieutenant E. G. Baranov, who cohabited with a Red Army woman Sh., And, apparently, threw a scene of jealousy on her, accompanied by beating, was accused by the investigating authorities under Art. Art. 74 part 2, 193-17 item "d" and 193-2 item "g" of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The military tribunal of the 82nd division dismissed the case in a preparatory session only because Baranov had by this time entered into a legal marriage with Sh.