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. He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. 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.

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. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. Luke Turner is a bisexual man trying to reconcile his fascination with the machinery of WWII and his sexuality. 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.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. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today. WWII is not the reserve of the Nigel Farages of this world (don't worry - he gets a namecheck in the closing chapters) or the Johnsons and they can't be allowed to hijack the image of what the war was and meant for those who lived and fought in it. 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. In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence.

The army which fought for the Allies was largely composed of conscripts who were not necessarily respectful of military mores and martial manners. 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. There was far too much about the author's interests in the Second World War as a hobbyist, which really wasn't very interesting.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.

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. A book that asks questions and starts you thinking about people involved in war in a way I had never before. Lying in bed beneath Airfix bombers and fighter planes suspended from his bedroom ceiling, he would often think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them. Turner strips away the hero worship, the bravado and veneer of 'derring do' to show us some very human portraits of men at war.It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. Turner's writing has matured since "Out of the Woods", but it retains a youthful freshness and sincerity. He spent hours watching Sunday war films, poring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums. As the Second World War moves beyond living memory and its last veterans leave us, we are in danger of losing our opportunity to understand the reality behind the conflict’s myths, machines and iconography.