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

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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. Turner fearlessly interrogates the war-obsession of 1970s boyhoods and unearths some extraordinary testimonies and stories from the frontlines. 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. 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. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings to life its subjects in a really startling way.

It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for. 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 the rich humanity that lies beyond the myths, machines and iconography. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. 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.

During a battlefield tour school trip, he experienced the agony of sleeping in a bunk just feet away from his teenage crush, hoping for contact while surrounded by a history that fascinated him. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today. 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. The army which fought for the Allies was largely composed of conscripts who were not necessarily respectful of military mores and martial manners.

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.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. He gives a different and very personal insight into the long established "national narrative" about World War 2. 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. Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War . A discussion of acceptance that transcends war and should make us think about society moving forward and what we want it to be.

I thoroughly enjoyed this sensitive, at times tragic, story of love, lust, and sexual confusion among soldiers seaman and even air-aces of WWII. Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Turner's writing has matured since "Out of the Woods", but it retains a youthful freshness and sincerity.With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7.

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. With Turing, what began in the 1970s as activist attempts to reclaim queer figures in British history has, in recent years, been taken over by governmental use of his image in sanitised attempts to address historical wrongdoings against queer people. There was far too much about the author's interests in the Second World War as a hobbyist, which really wasn't very interesting. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1. In Men at War , Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. And hooray to Luke Turner for producing a thought provoking and entertaining alternative to the Airfix model rendition of men at war. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject? 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).