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

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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. 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. Turner uses firsthand accounts by gay men such as Peter de Rome (who served in the Royal Air Force) and Quentin Crisp (who was rejected on account of ‘sexual perversion’) to demonstrate the variety of queer experiences during the war, and the need for nuanced study of those experiences. 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. Yet you can understand Turner’s insistence on including it: it’s another aspect to what these men would have experienced. It may also, perhaps, buffer against any detractors. Armed with the knowledge of a war aficionado, Turner cements his seat at the table alongside those who might resist his queer narrative of World War II.

Television Interview Lauren Graham: 'Why are men still surprised they like Gilmore Girls?' Read More So yes, my review is written with a slightly jaundiced eye: not that that should put you off reading what I see as a very worthy book, one that is linked to a definitive marking of time, where Luke Turner takes on an unenviable – but vital task of reminding us that yes; we need to mention the war. 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. A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. Library of Congress. Public Domain.This false presentation of wartime masculinity has left it open for idolisation. Visiting a convention for tank enthusiasts, Turner writes about his queasiness watching punters queuing up to take selfies with infamous German tank the Tiger, which was likely to have “killed thousands of our forebears”. 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. Men At War does not perpetuate romantic myths. Turner notes how “post-war struggles with mental health and PTSD impacted the generations on”. Britain’s victory had a high psychological price many would argue we’re still paying. Turner is aware of the potential controversies his book may stir up. Among them, he says, is “that some people in LGBTQ+ circles don’t want queer people to be warriors. I think sometimes there’s a feeling that that’s aggressive hetero-masculine behaviour. But I think that’s wrong, as much as the homophobic view that queer people can’t fight is wrong.” It’s also not an anti-war book, he says. “I think you have to fight sometimes. I don’t think there was any other way of stopping Nazism. I had to examine myself and ask if I was a pacifist, and the answer is no.” Then there is the issue of the wider cultural and social audience for all this terrible, miserable stuff about the mass killing of other human beings in the name of politics and “progress”. Professor Dan Todman once stated of memories garnered about the First World War that the sometimes ghoulish collecting and categorising of stories “raises the problem of whose culture is under investigation”.

The book is framed by the author’s own biography — relatives who served in World War II and Turner’s obsessive childhood interest in war films and model kits, enthusiasms that made him an oddball outlier at school, adding to the perplexities that came with his growing realisation of his bisexuality. But the book’s heart is a series of other biographies — wartime personal stories for which Turner draws on memoirs, novels, letters and service records. Dudley Cave ends up in a brutal Japanese POW camp, half-starved and resisting the sexual advances of a Japanese guard. After the war, Cave is a gay activist, fighting for LGBT+ inclusion in Britain’s war-remembrance ceremonies. Ian Gleed is an RAF fighter ace whose status allows him to be almost open about his gay relationships, among his RAF peers. Gay love was far from universally frowned on during wartime; RAF officers in make-up could be seen having fun around Piccadilly Circus. Yet, in Gleed’s 1942 memoir, Arise To Conquer, a longterm male lover becomes a woman called Pam. This fascinating, intricate examination of World War II and desire and sexuality has a rich cast. It ranges from Wanker Bill — a British serviceman said to have even ‘wanked between wanks’ — to the likes of the storied journalist, commando and poet Captain Michael Burn.For Turner, the “otherwordliness” of wartime conditions represent a period in Britain when many people found themselves free of repressive social norms and able to explore their feelings more honestly. “It was sexually a very radical time,” he says. But what comes out most strongly from his book are not just the homosexual or bisexual experiences of war heroes, but an embryonic picture of the broad spectrum of masculinity that is still emerging today. “I was very adamant that I didn’t just want this to be a book about sexuality,” says Turner. “I wanted to include men who were heterosexual too but who sit outside expectations of a vigorous war-like masculinity.” More seriously, the “leering boasting braggadocio” of some soldiers led to rape. We learn Berliners are known to refer to the Soviet memorial at Treptower Park as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”. As many as 1.4 million German women are thought to have been raped by the Russians. As a child, Luke Turner was obsessed with the Second World War. 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. Here we get echoes to Turner’s last book Out of the Woods, and the chapters exploring this less-trodden arena of wartime sexuality are where Men at War most succeeds in its rehumanisation of the war and where Turner’s prose is most alive. Whereas as a child, he felt connected to the minutiae and machinery of the Second World War, it’s now in this exploration of masculinity and desire that his interest is clearly piqued.

Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.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. There are conscientious objectors, a bisexual Commando, a pacifist poet who flew for Bomber Command, a transgender RAF pilot, a soldier who suffered in Japanese POW camps and later in life became an LGBT+ activist, and those who simply did what they could just to survive and return home to a complicated peace. While it was illegal to be homosexual at the time of the war, there was a certain permissiveness during the period, both in and out of the military. Here Turner writes energetically about men cruising during air raids, playful and exploratory approaches to gender expression in prisoner of war camps, and the sexual fluidity of soldiers, pilots and other military men who had sex with men.

My childhood was peopled by many such men, as well as widows of those who had not returned, their brief coupling preserved in wedding photographs, with the doomed groom in uniform. Men at war, I learnt, come in many guises, and that is the theme Luke Turner pursues, in a confessional curate’s egg of a book that is also a meditation on masculinity and his own sexual identity.

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I once read that in some circles in the US Army, thinking about the future effectiveness of its military was increasingly blinded by something called “Wehrmacht penis envy”. Ironically, tragically, the heroics of the ordinary Doughboys and Buffalo Soldiers was weighed against and maybe even subsumed by a “what if” narrative of a vanquished “master race”. The idea that military personnel become drugged automatons, whose actions are dictated by one top-down narrative is something I feel we, too, too often accept in our own national story of war. We need to own the mad and bad stuff, the queer and liminal stuff, the odd, the wyrd, the improbable, the personal, the free. It’s in our hands, if you will excuse the (necessary) euphemism. 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.