Men At War Quotes

“If war is the most extreme experience of the human condition, to make a simplistic moral judgement that all war is wrong and therefore all war is wrong and therefore all compulsion to study it similarly tarnished, is a wish to remain in dangerous ignorance.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“Instead of a necessary processing, a readjustment, a redefinition as a post-imperial island that ought to have learned from the terrors of its past conflicts to forge closer relationships with Europe, the jingoistic memory of the war gives a boost to a national selfhood that is gaseous and unsustainable, forever on the edge of - and perhaps now finally - collapsing into hubris.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“If we're to have a true picture of the masculinity of the war years, then as now, we cannot sweep the more unpleasant aspects of it out of sight in favour of idealised heroes. To deny men their raucous sexuality, however much it might have offended polite society then and a very different moral spectrum now, is to omit a huge part of themselves. Perhaps just like the boy who cannot resist picking up a twig to pretend it is a gun, they are a part of the uncomfortable truth of what it can be to be a man.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“The fecund exploration of the human body a reaction, conscious or otherwise, to the possibility of death in industrialised total war. The need for intimate human contact as a fleeting moment of comfort against both the mundanity and the horror of combat meant that sexual norms as defined by society and religion were inevitably to be broken, for the better or for worse.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“The decisions made and groups formed in a spirit of banter and playfulness were 'quite literally matters of life and death', and fate would decide that unfortunate alliances meant some of these young men were doomed even before they flew their first operation.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“Join the military, disappear into the wider whole; the pool of comradeship, discipline and military efficiency that is the physical representation of the nation at war.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

“The trite comments about the waste of life and so on and the greedy delving into the tactics of engagement are the veneer that we use to justify the macabre entertainment value of such an extreme act of violence, part of the eternal desire for realism in voyeuristically consumed combat that, for the majority of Western men, is lacking in our daily lives.”
― Luke Turner, Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945