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

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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.

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.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. 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. 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. 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”. 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.

But Britain’s fetishisation of the war has also diminished those who lived and fought during that time, flattening them into simple archetypal heroes. This “banality of generalisation”, Turner says, “does nothing to illuminate the complicated reality of their minds and bodies, but turns them into plastic icons for a form of ancestor worship”. 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. He’s not judgemental, though: this fascination, he suggests, stems from a “solidarity in geekiness” that, in a way, disrupts modern notions of masculinity. “It gives them the means to imagine themselves away from the cultural expectations of their day,” Turner writes. “I know because I was one of them.” 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. 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.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. Where Men at War’s memoirist approach falters is in Turner’s reluctance to consider himself critically within the already-substantial canon of queer men’s uneasy desire for England. 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’. At times, his preoccupation with memory glides over the uglier, harder aspects of commemoration. He writes that he wishes the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park could be rebuilt to create ‘a sensation of grace and light’, ignoring the fraught negotiation required in commemorating a service also responsible for the firebombing of Dresden. Not for nothing did Churchill exclude Bomber Command from his 1945 victory speech. The memorial has been defaced by anti-war activists repeatedly since it was first unveiled in 2012. 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. 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.