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. 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. 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.

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.

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. Men at War is an attempt to rectify this. Part self-examination, part historical reframing, it grapples with the country’s fascination with the Second World War, while also disassembling the wartime myths of masculinity and disrupting the tired assumptions of stoicism perpetuated by the jingoistic and conservative rhetoric now associated with the war.

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”.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. 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.

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”. 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.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. 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.