Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

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Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

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But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches).

Turner uses his own cultural memory of the war – from his grandfather’s religiously motivated conscientious objection, to a childhood fascination with planes – as signposts for a deeper enquiry into the lives and sexualities of perhaps the most celebrated generation of British men. Turner strips away the hero worship, the bravado and veneer of 'derring do' to show us some very human portraits of men at war. He refuses their dismissal from memory and offers their testimonies as evidence that many were true innocents abroad.It’s this apparent contradiction that drives Men at War, a part-memoir, part-historical exploration of British Second World War masculinity. As an adult historian of war and queerness, I came to understand better the tension between popular war narratives and the ones I sensed below the surface as a teenager: they tell seemingly contradictory stories about what it means to be a man. Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History. In Men at War , Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to recognise men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes.

In this book, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. Comparing British memory of the war with that of other countries, Turner asks why British soldiers are not remembered alongside Japanese and German men as potential perpetrators of sexual violence, despite evidence of these crimes during the Allied occupation of Germany and postwar colonial uprisings. This seemingly uncomfortable fit is heightened by the emergence of lad culture in the 90s and an increasingly jingoistic exhumation of the fallen soldiers for nationalistic and increasingly far-right causes. But the real strength of the book is in how it demonstrates the power of desire as a driving force: in intellectual curiosity, national myth-making and in writing history.Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome.

Turner's writing has matured since "Out of the Woods", but it retains a youthful freshness and sincerity. My fascination with uncontroversial classics – The Great Escape, Band of Brothers, Master and Commander – began to feel illicit, itchy, for reasons that seemed far less noble than my emerging anti-war politics. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. During a battlefield tour school trip, he experienced the agony of sleeping in a bunk just feet away from his teenage crush, hoping for contact while surrounded by a history that fascinated him.I thoroughly enjoyed this sensitive, at times tragic, story of love, lust, and sexual confusion among soldiers seaman and even air-aces of WWII. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings to life its subjects in a really startling way. The final 100 pages in particular beautifully synthesise personal experience and the untold queer context of the text. As someone who usually focusses on tales of WWI, and who finds WWII a little off-putting (in that main due to the reasons stated above) this book allowed me a whole new entry point to the period - one that isn't uncomfortable. Engaging, with remarkable insights into aspects of WWII which I hadn't seen explored in print before.

This certainly confirms his knowledge of the period and gives some historical colour and substance but if, like me, you aren't really interested in the engineering then it can be a bit of a struggle at times.

The self absorption has been replaced by healthy reflection, and there's a generosity towards the people who might sneer at his alleged sullying of their precious myth of British masculinity forged in the cauldron of war. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today. There was far too much about the author's interests in the Second World War as a hobbyist, which really wasn't very interesting. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject? Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War .



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