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

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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. 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. 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. 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”.

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. 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. 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. A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. Library of Congress. Public Domain. 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.

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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. 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”.

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. Television Interview Lauren Graham: 'Why are men still surprised they like Gilmore Girls?' Read More 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.

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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. 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. The bravery in, and of, Luke Turner’s book is the reason you should read it. Turner compellingly records the bravery of those who chose not to fight, but to find resistance in continuing to ballet dance on a London stage as the doodlebugs fall; or the bravery to talk about the inability to push a bayonet into another’s flesh and hear the often reported “hiss” as a life escapes the body. All of this we need to read and process, and reflect on. 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.” One of the most remarkable stories in Men At War is that of Dan Billany, a successful novelist who becomes a POW in Italy. While in the camp he co-authors a novel with a fellow prisoner. This novel is heavily autobiographical, taking in Billany’s bittersweet and perhaps unreciprocated yearning for his co-author. Billany and his POW pal are able to flee the prison when Italy withdraws from the war, but their subsequent fate is a haunting, mysterious one.

Some of this may have been down to “transitory homosexual experiences”, but Turner is eager to avoid crude assumptions that those who did engage did so out of convenience, instead suggesting that the war permitted queer men to be relatively open, while allowing other men the space to explore “their true bisexual selves”. It’s also a reminder of how easily history can become corrupted. While manufactured notions of the Second World War are being used as tools for marginalisation and to disguise the motives of an increasingly authoritarian government, Men at War provides some course correction. By liberating these men of their wartime closet, Turner is also attempting to free the war and its effect on Britain from the revisionist clutches of a growing nationalist right-wing political agenda. 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. He likens the experiences of men who explored homosexual desire and gender expression with his own difficulty accepting his bisexuality: “Even if these activities had been evidence of their true bisexual selves,” Turner writes, “it’s not surprising that they would deny them.” 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.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. 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.