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

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I have to admit I'm a fan of this style of social history and the unapologetic rewriting of History with a capitol H. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.

It’s this apparent contradiction that drives Men at War, a part-memoir, part-historical exploration of British Second World War masculinity. Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War .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. 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. 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. Interestingly it mirrors post-war behaviours among some peace-time soldiery so, perhaps, it isn't only war which brings this to the foreground.

This book is full of stories that intriguingly, lustfully and hilariously complicates Britain's cosy and homogenous national myth about how people in that era acted, thought and felt. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today.

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