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

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Lying in bed beneath Airfix fighter planes suspended from his ceiling, he would think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them. 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. It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches).

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. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1.

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 this rich history.As someone who usually focusses on tales of WWI, and who finds WWII a little off-putting (in that main due to the reasons stated above) this book allowed me a whole new entry point to the period - one that isn't uncomfortable. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. 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.

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. 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.In this book, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. Turner's writing has matured since "Out of the Woods", but it retains a youthful freshness and sincerity. The real strength of the book is in how it demonstrates the power of desire as a driving force: in intellectual curiosity, national myth-making and in writing history. The final 100 pages in particular beautifully synthesise personal experience and the untold queer context of the text. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject?