Musket Girls! ~Tensei Sanbou to Senretsu Otome-tachi~ - Vol. 4 Ch. 22 - The Grim Reaper at the Funeral

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Two things had to happen before women were legitimately recognized as combatants.

1) Combat moved to weapons which weren't as dependent on physical strength. Mainly, guns. It doesn't matter if the person holding the gun is a man, woman, or child. If they aim it at you properly, you're just as dead.

2) Populations grew to the point that further population growth wasn't as important. The rate at which your population can grow is proportional to the size of the female population, not the male (because one male can impregnate multiple females, but not vice versa). That's why e.g. crab harvest regulations require releasing all females, only keeping males. With respect to the maintaining your population growth rate, the males essentially end up being disposable.

So the MO in olden times was to shelter your women at home, send your men off to war, and have the women give birth to new men to replace the men who died fighting. But once your population grows large enough, a smaller fraction is lost during wars, and sheltering the women becomes less important to maintain your population size. Freeing you up to allow women to participate in combat.

Practically, women probably could have fought during WWII without issue. But around the same time, the tooth-to-tail ratio began skewing. That's the ratio of people who fight, versus people who support those who fight. Some armies in ancient times had a 1:1 ratio. During WWI it was about 1:2.6 (2.6 people involved in logistics and support for every 1 combatant). In WWII it rose to 1:4.3. (Korea and Vietnam saw it rise past 1:10.) So more people were needed to support the combat troops during WWII. And since women were staying home for cultural reasons anyway, it made sense to shift them into production and support roles, rather than combat.


That's one of the things the author tries to convey via this story. That even though they are the invaders, most of the soldiers who fight and die had no say in the matter (including MC). That decision was made by stupid / corrupt higher-ups. And it's innocent soliders who pay the price with their lives.

This is what led to the modern thinking that wars are fought between governments, and the individual soldiers are hapless participants with little power to refuse. So we try to treat captured prisoners humanely. And once the war is over, we just repatriate all the POWs. Even help rebuild the defeated side.

I don't want to get into a flame war so take this only as me showing my opinion on the matter and not wanting to "refute" or get into a discussion about it. I'm just severely autistic about this sort of stuff so I want to have the opportunity to sperg on something I'm interested in.

For Infantry both in the timeline of the manga, and between then and now, the duties of someone in the Infantry do not start and stop at their ability to fight. Infantry soldiers are in large supply in most theaters, and so they are used as manual labour for building fortifications. Especially during this time where the speed at which you can construct something was largely determined by the size of your labour pool. The hundreds of men required to build a railway, for example. While WW2 was one of the first conflicts where the development of small arms progressed to a point where hand-to-hand combat started becoming the exception rather than the rule, women still would not have fared very well in that environment.

One of the core determining factors around infantry surviving is the quality of cover that they have from enemy projectiles. And in WW2 where the focus was on maneuver warfare rather than emplacement, infantry needed to spend as little time as possible outside of cover - lest they fall victim to mortar/artillery or gunfire. It is unquestionable that men have an advantage in sprinting.

As well, only people who have been in real combat would be able to tell you, that the physical strength and endurance required during even short periods of engagement is massive. Military leaders emphasize physical fitness not just because of the requirements of marching or even the potential for forced marches, but because it turns out that fighting for your life in any era requires an extreme level of fitness in order to function. Even 30 minutes of combat can drive a normal untrained person to the limit of their physical capabilities, and then add on the stress of being in a life threatening situation, and you will begin to see why every professional military in the world now has comprehensive basic training and ongoing readiness training to be able to withstand that level of operational cadence.

Arguably, this period is IMHO one of the only periods of history where Females could engage in warfare, as line combat (barring bayonet combat, charges, or CQC) allowed armies of the period to recruit men who usually wouldn't have fit into these combat roles. It's very common in the period for boys as young as 14 to be drafted into infantry formations, or more commonly into support elements like bands, artillery, or logistics. In this way Musket Girls avoids a lot of cognitive dissonance involving females in combat roles, as they've split their previously all infantry unit into several separate units for Artillery and logistics to better utilize their manpower. They even stated explicitly that the girls who were less capable combatants than their peers were reassigned to logistics and artillery where their physical and psychological capabilities would be better put to use.
If this manga took place later on, for example, after the development of cartridge artillery, then the guns and shells would be too large and need to be loaded in too high a volume in order to be properly managed by women.

However where Musket Girls does require some significant suspension of disbelief is that combat during the time that's portrayed in the manga is heavily maneuver based. Forced marches were common and engagements between military formations rarely happened in an environment that was not massively in favour of one side or the other. Because of the lack of "mechanization" (horses were still VERY expensive, and wagons were not capable of travelling much faster than a marching pace) one formation would not engage the other unless they were at a distinct advantage that could guarantee victory - unless they were forced to through strategic necessity. If you were not at an advantage in a battle, your forces moved just as fast as the enemy. So if the enemy was trying to engage you and you didn't want to engage - then you would just march away to a position that was more advantageous to you. And once you got there, the enemy wouldn't attack because now they have lost the advantage and they're not going to sacrifice soldiers in a combat they're sure to lose.

This put the emphasis during the period on forced marches, being able to move to a position where you are strong before the enemy can attack you while you are weak. Forced marches were very VERY common during this period and commonly drove men to their limits of endurance - not to mention the effect of hunger, thirst, and disease (there was no such thing as a water purification capsule - men drank from the river which had all sorts of runoff and diseases). It wasn't until after this period that the majority of casualties of actual conflict actually exceeded the casualties because of disease. In this conditions, men suffered greatly - and women would have suffered even more. But - it's a manga. So idgaf I'm just here to watch cute girls look cute in their cute uniforms.