Here’s a thought: how many allied special forces units were there in World War Two (not counting shock units like the VDV or the US Marines)? All of them, put together: Chindits, SAS, SOE, OSS, Rangers, Airborne. 80 000? Maybe 100 000? Out of a combined force of tens of millions. How many first person shooters and action stories put you in their shoes? What proportion of a late medieval army was made up of members of the military aristocracy? How many stories of medieval warfare star overbred louts in shining, anachronistic plate armour? How many fictional stories set in the Napoleonic Wars are based on a handful of regiments in Wellington’s small army on the Peninsula, or on the quarterdecks of that specific portion of the Royal Navy not committed to the blockade of France or the American coast?
The truth is, we are already very selective of the stories we tell, especially the war stories we tell, because those stories already fill a niche. When we tell a story centred around one part of a very expansive time, we are already distorting history, by focusing on that one point of existence to the exclusion of others. If I write a story about guild politics in the Hanseatic League, the Baltic Crusades, or the Hundred Years’ War will necessarily be out of focus. However, that doesn’t mean that the Baltic Crusades didn’t happen, and likewise, it doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be stories about Hanse Merchants because there were only a couple thousand of them, because maybe there’s an audience out there who want to hear about price-fixing ironmongery in Lubeck.
My point is, no story can necessarily be entirely historically comprehensive. Women fought in large numbers in WW2, in the Red Army as tankers and snipers and infantry and pilots, in the Volkssturm as last-ditch militia, as partisans from Cherbourg to Qingdao. Hundreds of thousands of women served direct roles in the war effort of the Western Allies, ferrying planes across the Atlantic and serving in administrative roles well within the range of enemy artillery. Speaking as someone who is a historian, we don’t hear a lot of these stories because these aren’t the stories we’re taught as children, and that’s why there’s a crying need for someone to tell them, even when it challenges our assumptions about what our honoured ancestors were like, even when it shows that our heroes were less heroic than we were taught they were. History is often passed on as myth, and as such, these myths often get perceived as “history”, to the point where other perspectives, other stories of things that happened are dismissed as false or somehow less true.