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

Product Information

Turner prefers to explore the lives of everyday actors, figures such as Henry Denton, an army officer who became a ballet dancer after being found ‘temperamentally unfit’ to fight by military tribunals. Despite the richness of British masculinity studies and the pervasiveness of queer First World War poetry in British school curricula, Emma Vickers’ 2013 Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45 remains one of the few academic monographs to consider queer men not just as a given in British histories of war, but as a distinct culture enabled by wartime mobilisation. It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today. Engaging, with remarkable insights into aspects of WWII which I hadn't seen explored in print before.

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. By exploring a wartime experience that embraces sex, lust and the body as much as tactics and weaponry, Turner argues that the only way we can really understand the Second World War is to get to grips with the complexity of the lives and identities of those who fought and endured it. The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject? 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’.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.

A brilliant piece of writing which ALSO gave me a handy shortlist of WWII fiction/memoir to continue my reading.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.

WWII is not the reserve of the Nigel Farages of this world (don't worry - he gets a namecheck in the closing chapters) or the Johnsons and they can't be allowed to hijack the image of what the war was and meant for those who lived and fought in it. In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence. Insightful and affecting account of the people whose lives and love lives have been forgotten since World War 2 - to the detriment of them and to us. Nothing else I have read has come so close to elucidating what it is I mean when I say "I'm interested in the Second World War" and the conflicting feelings that come with that.In this book, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. Men at War is a thoughtful, empathetic and necessary examination of the impact of the Second World War on British culture. Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. 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. 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.

As the conflict moves beyond living memory and the last veterans leave us, we are in danger of missing the opportunity to gain a true understanding of the rich humanity that lies beyond the myths, machines and iconography. In Men at War , Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. Interestingly it mirrors post-war behaviours among some peace-time soldiery so, perhaps, it isn't only war which brings this to the foreground.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. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.