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

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And hooray to Luke Turner for producing a thought provoking and entertaining alternative to the Airfix model rendition of men at war. Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History. A book that asks questions and starts you thinking about people involved in war in a way I had never before. For a queer kid growing up under Section 28 and a new wave of Second World War mythologisation, history was a fraught country for self-exploration. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

As the Second World War moves beyond living memory and its last veterans leave us, we are in danger of losing our opportunity to understand the reality behind the conflict’s myths, machines and iconography. I thoroughly enjoyed this sensitive, at times tragic, story of love, lust, and sexual confusion among soldiers seaman and even air-aces of WWII. As the Second World War recedes from living memory, critical reflections like this – about what we do with our inheritance, both the one we are given and the one we choose – stand to become all the more important.Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome.

He gives a different and very personal insight into the long established "national narrative" about World War 2. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. 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. Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War . Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event.He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire.