Oh, I just finally got around to reading the latest round of Slash Fandom and Female Characters, and there were a few too many comments about how of course some stories don't have women in - they're war stories, after all! To do the commentors justice, they were talking about what it means to be drawn to stories with no women in, but it did strike me that war stories were, in their mind, constructed so completely as men's stories that it didn't occur to them that the examples they cited could have had women in them. The choices the writers and producers made that removed women from the picture became invisible.

Admittedly, I don't watch a lot of war shows or movies - I have limited capacity for dealing with film and frankly, war movies are usually too much for me - so I haven't seen Band of Brothers or Pacific, but the lack of significant female characters in them certainly isn't because there weren't women involved in WWII!

(I think the last war film I watched was Sink the Bismarck!, which is British, and from the 60s, and features a very competent, confident young woman who's a naval... something or other, I forget, it was months and months ago, but she helps direct the operation. It might even pass the Bechdel test, but I can't remember.)