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

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Through exhaustive research, historical records, textual analysis and interviews, Turner uses the often obscured “flow of sexual imagination” of the Second World War period to reanimate these men through a queer and “sexually curious” lens. He became a bomb aimer in a Halifax squadron, 158, based at RAF East Moor, just north of York, whose Minster was a landmark for the airmen headed to drop their incendiary loads on the “Happy Valley” of the Ruhr. The losses were horrendous, the odds appalling. Meditating on the squadron’s motto, “Strength is Unity”, Warr wrote: “The members of the crew are strong,/ And all for one another,/ And that is how the end would come”. A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Just-published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Luke Turner’s ‘Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-45’ is a moving, multifarious meditation on all the ways we love each other, even while we’re killing each other, finds Roy Wilkinson.Or at least it did. Perhaps Turner’s book is evidence of a fresh new turn in the way we think about the Second World War – that the most explicit, unambiguous example of a war in which good conquered evil, and one quietly celebrated by Britons for decades, is now ripe for a more nuanced, reflective and, indeed, ambiguous examination of the diverse cast who did their duty despite the barriers placed in their way. One only wishes his examination had been more thorough. Both Winn and Turner’s books are now part of a growing history and literature that provide a corrective to past accounts of the kind of men who won the world wars. In Memoriam sits alongside the Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker’s series of historic novels in which Sassoon, Graves and Owen appear as characters, doing the valuable service of reminding us that the real-life queer men who inspired these books were just as likely to act heroically in the trenches as the straight men they fought alongside. The dozen or so characters he writes about all served in, or at least witnessed, the Second World War, though their experiences were, he argues, distant from the “dominant military narrative” of the time, for Turner’s cast includes gay, bisexual, and sexually opportunistic (or just desperate) men, and even a transgender pioneer – Robert, later Roberta, Cole – who in what was itself an act of considerable courage endured the first successful vaginoplasty to take place in Britain. Where Men at War’s memoirist approach falters is in Turner’s reluctance to consider himself critically within the already-substantial canon of queer men’s uneasy desire for England. Turner cites Derek Jarman’s film War Requiem, an adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 opera (in turn based on Wilfred Owen’s poetry) as a life-changing encounter with ‘a portrait of Britishness that was a safety net for someone trying to untangle ideas of patriotism and desire’. At times, his preoccupation with memory glides over the uglier, harder aspects of commemoration. He writes that he wishes the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park could be rebuilt to create ‘a sensation of grace and light’, ignoring the fraught negotiation required in commemorating a service also responsible for the firebombing of Dresden. Not for nothing did Churchill exclude Bomber Command from his 1945 victory speech. The memorial has been defaced by anti-war activists repeatedly since it was first unveiled in 2012.

I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. 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. Things came to a head when my brother and I borrowed Das Boot from our local library. He went to bed early, bored by hours of sweaty submarine misery. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. More immediately, I was aware that the allure these characters had for many of the men in my life was due to the fact that they weren’t allowed to transgress the bounds of heterosexuality. 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.What they are imagining, though, is a falsehood. While there was certainly bravery, these men of war weren’t all “ideologically committed to the fight”. Nor were they all exemplary studies of so-called “normal” masculinity. In fact, Turner argues, the myth of “brave boys doing their bit” has erased “the rough and ready nature of male desire”. Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war. 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. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men - including those in his own family - Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life.