Just over 24 hours after having sent our letter to the Director-General of IWM regarding changes to the Research Room, we have received the following response.

Dear  Clare and signatories,

Firstly, I want to thank you collectively for your interest in the future of IWM and its collections.

One of IWM’s foremost corporate priorities is the effective stewardship of its collections. It is for that reason we are investing substantially in how they are stored. As part of IWM’s next phases of transformation, we will be building new state-of-the-art storage facilities for our collections at IWM Duxford to ensure they are developed and cared for now and for generations to come. Given our limited capacity at IWM London, this development is vital to enable us to continue to grow our collection, which is imperative as a national museum.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly or without consultation. As well as extensively consulting with The National Archives, we have also profiled the most frequently used items within our collections to ensure these remain at IWM London. This decision was, of course, also signed off by our Board of Trustees who represent a broad cross-section of industries and expertise. We appreciate that this is a change to our traditional process of access, but we hope this move will enable our users to better plan their research in advance as well as be reassured that their request for collection material will be fulfilled in its entirety.

We entirely agree that the collection should be made as accessible and widely‐available as possible. We have no plans to close the Research Room at IWM London and we are also looking to introduce publically-accessible research facilities at IWM Duxford. IWM also intends to offer better systems for users to access our collections by increasing the digitisation of collections online to effectively reduce the need for physical object movement in the longer term.

As experts, we have carefully risk assessed the movement of collection items being transported between our sites and believe we can manage this. IWM already moves items between branches on a regular basis using well tested methodologies, to enable our public programme, loans, research and access needs. Dedicated staff at IWM London and IWM Duxford already ensure that this is carried out safely and accountably.

I hope this response will go some way towards explaining that this decision was taken solely to ensure we can continue to fulfil our purpose of safeguarding the museum, and its collections, for generations to come.

Yours,

Diane Lees

Earlier this year, IWM decided to move its Research Room to a five-working-days advance ordering system. Today, I sent this letter, signed by over ninety historians, to IWM’s Director General, Diane Lees, and its Chairman of Trustees, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach.

Dear Ms Lees,

We, the undersigned, are greatly disappointed by the Imperial War Museums’ decision to move the Research Room in London to an advanced ordering system. This will significantly hinder academics and students’ ability to research productively and, we believe, will eventually restrict studies of modern warfare and impair our understanding of modern conflict.

IWM London possesses an unparalleled collection of documents and printed books, including some printed material which is not available in any other library. This should be made as accessible and widely-available as possible.

Historical research is not carried out by religiously sticking to a preordained reading list but through a dynamic process of building upon insights found in one source by turning to another and constantly flicking between primary and secondary material. The decision to require researchers to order their material five working days in advance flies in the face of the way in which most war histories are produced and written. To have to wait five working days in order to follow up a line of enquiry will make our work laboriously slow, if not impossible. Many scholars and students based outside London only have limited periods for their research. The librarians who staff the Research Room are also exceptionally knowledgeable about the collections, and are often more helpful than the online catalogue when searching for material. Thus, it is only after having arrived in the Research Room, and having had the opportunity to discuss one’s research with staff, that it becomes apparent that certain collections or books will be of interest.

To justify this decision, IWM has set out that this practice is in line with many other research centres. However, the combination of a five-working-days advance ordering system, plus only opening the Research Room for twenty-four hours a week, is a particularly inflexible arrangement, which is not in line with other major national libraries and archives, such as the National Archives and the British Library.

Given IWM considered closing its library three years ago, we fear this change in policy is part of a wider strategy to move the Research Room and all the collections to Duxford, or close it down altogether. Both would have a devastating impact on research into modern conflict.

We also note that while much is being made of Duxford’s new state-of-the-art paper store, there is no mention of how documents and books will be preserved while being transported between London and Duxford. How is long-term preservation compatible with a 54-mile transportation process?

Finally, we are struck by the apparent lack of transparency about this process. What consultation took place, and with whom? We would have preferred to work with you behind the scenes on this, perhaps via the academic historian on the Board of Trustees, but note with dismay that no such person has been appointed to replace Professor Sir Hew Strachan.

It is saddening that IWM London has again decided to put up another obstacle to researchers and students’ ability to access and utilise this national library and its world-class collections. It sends another signal that serious research into modern warfare is not one of IWM’s priorities.

We hope you will reconsider this decision.

Yours sincerely,

Jad Adams, Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Sally Alexander, Emerita Professor of Modern History, Goldsmiths UL, Editorial Collective History Workshop Journal

Dr Alan Allport, Associate Professor, History, Syracuse University

Dr Phylomena H. Badsey, Western Front Association Universities Officer and Trustee

Professor Stephen Badsey, Professor of Conflict Studies, University of Wolverhampton

Dr Roderick Bailey, Lecturer in the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, and IWM Research Associate

Dr Antony Best, Associate Professor of International History, London School of Economics

Professor Jeremy Black, History, University of Exeter

Professor Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History, Anglia Ruskin University

Dr Jonathan Boff, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Birmingham

Professor J. M. Bourne BA PhD FRHistS, Hon. Professor of First World War Studies, University of Wolverhampton, Vice President of the Western Front Association

Dr Timothy Bowman, Senior Lecturer in modern British military history, School of History, University of Kent

Dr Gilly Carr, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Cambridge

Professor Sir Christopher Clark FBA AHAF, Regius Professor of History, University of Cambridge

Dr Robert Crowcroft, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh

Mr Brian Curragh MA (University of Birmingham; British First World War Studies), independent researcher & author

Professor Douglas E. Delaney, Canada Research Chair in War Studies, Royal Military College of Canada

Professor Peter Doyle, Visiting Professor in History, LSBU

Dr Rachel Duffett, Senior Research Officer, University of Essex

John R. Ferris, Professor of History, The University of Calgary, Authorised Historian, GCHQ

Dr John Fisher, Senior Lecturer in International History, UWE

Dr Matthew Ford, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sussex

Ann-Marie Foster, doctoral student, Northumbria University

Dr Aimée Fox, Lecturer, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London

Professor Jo Fox, Director, Institute of Historical Research

Professor Martin Francis, Professor of War and History, University of Sussex

Barrie Friend, MBA, MA, independent researcher

Professor Peter Gatrell, FAcSS, FRHistS, Professor of Economic History, University of Manchester

Dr Jayne Gifford, Lecturer in Modern History, University of East Anglia

Midge Gillies, author

Dr Peter Gray, Director, Centre for War Studies, University of Birmingham

Professor Richard Grayson, Professor of C20th History, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dr Susan R. Grayzel, Professor, Utah State University

Timothy Halstead, Independent Historian

Dr Emma Hanna, School of History, University of Kent

Dr Barbara Hately, Independent Researcher

Andrea Hetherington, Writer & independent researcher

Professor Margaret R. Higonnet, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut

Dr Grace Huxford, Lecturer in 19/20th Century British History, University of Bristol

Mr Alan Jackson, MPhil/PhD student (Defence Studies), King’s College London

Professor Peter Jackson, History, Humanities, University of Glasgow

Elspeth Johnstone, Hon. Secretary, The Douglas Haig Fellowship

Dr Max Jones, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Manchester

Dr Spencer Jones, Senior Lecturer in Armed Forces & War Studies, University of Wolverhampton

Dr David Kaufman, Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh

Dr Saul Kelly, Defence Studies Department, King’s College, London

Dr Chris Kempshall, Academic Advisory Board to Imperial War Museum’s First World War Centenary Digital Projects

Michael LoCicero PhD, Commissioning Editor, Helion & Company

Dr Jenny Macleod, Senior Lecturer in 20th century History, University of Hull

Dr Clare Makepeace, Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London

Stephen Manning, postgraduate student, University of Wolverhampton

Phil McCarty, PhD student, University of Wolverhampton

Charles Messenger, Independent Military Historian

Professor Bob Moore, University of Sheffield/Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München

Kieron Moore, Independent Scholar

Dr Steve Morewood, Senior Lecturer in International History, University of Birmingham

Miss Francesca Morphakis, PGR student, The University of Edinburgh

Dr Emma Newlands, Lecturer in History, University of Strathclyde

Professor Lucy Noakes, Rab Butler Chair in Modern History, University of Essex

Dr Lizzie Oliver, Researching FEPOW History Group

Prof Haluk Oral, Gallipoli Campaign Researcher and author

Professor T.G. Otte, Professor of Diplomatic History, School of History, University of East Anglia

Professor Richard Overy, History, University of Exeter

Meg Parkes MPhil, Hon. Research Fellow, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Dr Juliette Pattinson, Reader in Modern History and Head of the School of History, University of Kent

Dr Julie Peakman, Honorary Fellow, Birkbeck College, University of London

Professor Catriona Pennell, Associate Professor of History, University of Exeter

Dr Matthew Powell, Senior Teaching Fellow, PBS, Royal Air Force College Cranwell, University of Portsmouth

Dr Tammy M. Proctor, Distinguished Professor and Department Head of History, Utah State University

Dr James Pugh, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Birmingham

Dr Pierre Purseigle, FRHistS, Associate Professor, University of Warwick / International Society for First World War Studies

Ms. Sneha Reddy, PhD candidate, University of St Andrews.

Dr Linsey Robb, Lecturer in Modern British History, Northumbria University

Stephen Roberts, PhD candidate at MMU and independent researcher

Professor Michael Roper, Department of Sociology, University of Essex

Dr Stephanie Seul, Lecturer in Media History, University of Bremen, Germany

Professor Gary Sheffield, Chair of War Studies, University of Wolverhampton

Dr Terry Smyth, Community Fellow, Department of History, University of Essex

John Mason Sneddon BSc MA PhD. Independent Historian

Dr John Spencer, independent scholar and author

Professor Peter Stanley, UNSW Canberra

Professor David Stevenson, Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science

Miss Sarah Stewart, Independent Researcher, Your History Revealed.

Dr Anne Summers, Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London; Chair, Friends of The Women’s Library

Martin Thomas, Professor of Imperial History, University of Exeter

Dr Dan Todman, Senior Lecturer, History, Queen Mary, University of London

Professor Christina Twomey, Head of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University

Professor Laura Ugolini, Professor of History, University of Wolverhampton

Dr Wendy Ugolini, Senior Lecturer in British History, University of Edinburgh

Robert N Watt, POLSIS, The University of Birmingham

Dr Dan Whittingham, Lecturer in the History of Warfare, Department of History, University of Birmingham

Andrew Wiest, University Distinguished Professor of History, Founding Director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, The University of Southern Mississippi

Dr Oliver Wilkinson, Research Fellow, University of Wolverhampton

 

I am very pleased to announce that my book, Captives of War. British Prisoners of War in the Second World War is published by Cambridge University Press on 12 October 2017.

The book was inspired by a conversation I had with my grandfather many years ago. He had been a POW in Poland for almost five years. I was, as I often did, pestering him to write a memoir about his experience or, at the very least, record something on a Dictaphone, but he turned to me and asked “Why would I record my story? It would just be one long tale of humiliation.” At that moment, I realised an incongruity lay between him and me. I was so proud of my grandfather. I thought he was incredible for what he had been through, for what he had survived and witnessed, and for who he had become as a result. He, meanwhile, seemed embarrassed and ashamed. My attitude was, no doubt, informed by the contemporary society in which I lived: an era when the war victim or sufferer had become a heroic figure and when the masculine ideal was far from synonymous with martial prowess. I wanted to understand my grandfather’s perspective.

The result is a pioneering history of the experience of captivity of British prisoners of war in Europe during the Second World War, focussing on how these men coped and came to terms with wartime imprisonment. I reveal the ways in which POWs psychologically responded to surrender, the camaraderie and individualism that dominated life in the camps and how, in their imagination, they constantly breached the barbed wire perimeter to be with their loved ones at home. Through the diaries, letters and log books written by seventy-five POWs alongside psychiatric research and

reports I explore the mental strains that tore through POWs’ minds and the challenges they faced upon homecoming. The book tells the story of wartime imprisonment through the love, fears, fantasies, loneliness, frustration and guilt these men felt, shedding new light on what the experience of captivity meant for these men both during the war and after their liberation.

Captives of War has been endorsed by four extremely eminent historians. Here is what they’ve said about their advance copies:

Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London: ‘Clare Makepeace is a rare historian able to combine depth of knowledge with exquisite sensitivity. By delving into the intimate lives of prisoners of war, Makepeace reveals the primacy of domestic ties in the inner lives of these captives, and emphasises the range and complexity of different masculinities. The book is a ‘must read’, not only for people curious about war and captivity, but also for anyone interested in the history of everyday lives’.

Dr Heather Jones, London School of Economics and Political Science: ‘This is a profoundly important new history of Second World War captivity. Through the experience of British prisoners of war, Clare Makepeace provides a groundbreaking appraisal of the impact of war upon masculine identity. A tour de force addition to the cultural history of modern warfare’.

Midge Gillies, author of The Barbed-Wire University: ‘Captives of War offers a rare combination of impeccable scholarship coupled with deep humanity for the men who lived through the history. Captives of War is teeming with vivid stories and compelling voices. Every page adds another level of understanding to what it must have been like to experience captivity. This riveting account will appeal to anyone fascinated by history – but also to any reader interested in how we respond to adversity’.

Professor Bob Moore, University of Sheffield: ‘By weaving together the diaries and letters of those involved with official sources, and with insights from Psychology, Sociology and History, Clare Makepeace shows what everyday captivity entailed for the many thousands of British servicemen captured by the Axis powers behind barbed wire. Carefully constructed and well-written, Captives of War breaks new ground in the understanding of the social and cultural history of British prisoners of war in the Second World War’.

 

 

I know that reviews should be written by people who can be objective about a performance, and by those who have some sort of theatrical grounding, and that I don’t qualify as either, but I haven’t been able to resist because…

This week, I had the tremendous pleasure of seeing ‘The House Behind the Lines’, a play by Buglight Theatre on the hidden history of prostitutes on the Western Front in World War I. Buglight were inspired to make this piece of work after reading an article I wrote for the Daily Mail on the visits of soldiers to brothels in the First World War.

It was such a treat to see this untold story of the First World War brought to life on the stage, and it was so refreshing to see a play on the Great War where women took the lead parts. And these women weren’t the grieving mother, the waiting wife, or the munitions worker, whom we might more commonly associate with women in World War One, but they were two prostitutes and a brothel Madame. The two soldiers in the play were, quite firmly, in supporting roles.

The main plot focused upon Paulette and Chantal, who had been driven to prostitution in order to survive – one had no family and the other had children and a husband (who had been wounded in the war) to support – and their relationship with the exploitative Madame. I was a little unsure of this broad narrative. The focus on women exploiting other women possibly failed to instill a crucial point: prostitution was, and remains, one of the chief symbols of gender inequality.

There was much brilliance. I loved the set. Although the scenes took place in a brothel, the set was a trench.  It meant the play was physically grounded in a First World War scene with which we are all familiar whilst dealing with an unknown aspect of the war. The way in which the scaling ladders became the beds on which the prostitutes lay was a stroke of genius. It both connected the prostitutes’ vulnerability to that of the soldiers going over the top to their death but it also meant that when the two prostitutes took their positions on these ladders, they resembled a crucifixion, so emphasising the sacrifice they were about to make of their bodies.

A recurring theme of the play, which I also really liked, was comparing the prostitute’s work to that of the soldier. This was particularly well done in a scene where a soldier getting his weapon ready for battle was interjected with a prostitute getting her body ready for an evening’s work.  It made acutely clear the mechanical nature of these women’s work.  This was also fantastically captured in another scene where Chantal and Paulette danced around the set whilst singing, with metronome rhythm, the repetitive cycle they went through evening after evening: ‘smile, laugh, wash, sex, pay, next’.

My background knowledge means I have glossed over the most important aspect of play. I knew that the British authorities sanctioned brothel visits, how hundreds of thousands of soldiers indulged in them, and that highly primitive measures were taken to avoid the spread of VD, but we rarely discuss these aspects of the First World War today. Instead it feels as we idolize and glorify the Tommy and his officer to an unhealthy and deluding degree. Through its narrative of sexual and economic exploitation, ‘The House Behind the Lines’ serves to give us a much more comprehensive understanding of what it meant to experience the First World War and brings to our attention the nature of sex work today.

I am utterly delighted that after years of hard work ‘The House Behind the Lines’ will open to audiences in Yorkshire this Wednesday.

The play takes a look inside the brothels of the First World War, and gives a voice to the women who worked in them.

I feel very humbled that it has its origins in a piece I wrote for the Daily Mail on prostitution in the First World War.

Understanding this aspect of the First World War is immensely important. It gives us a more comprehensive understanding of life in the trenches. At least a significant minority of British soldiers indulged in visits to prostitutes. Brothels provided them with a refuge from the horrors of the trenches. They were urgently needed by younger men who did not want to die virgins. Others saw sexual activity as a necessary component of being part of a virile fighting force.

Knowing about this aspect of the Great War also guards against any tendency towards excessive sentimentalism.

When we think of soldiers going over the top, we imagine them waiting in fear for the whistle being blown. We don’t think of the very unidealistic way in which many men reacted to that prospect. They had sex with prostitutes.

But most important is the new narrative of the First World War that ‘The House Behind the Lines’ introduces.

In all the research I’ve carried out, I haven’t found a single account by a prostitute describing what she went through during the First World War, despite tens of thousands of women being employed in this way.

‘The House Behind the Lines’, and its use of drama, gives a voice to these women in a way historians can’t.

It puts ‘girls’ who served ‘so many customers’, as one soldier put it, that ‘they had to be sent home in cabs as by that time most… were unable to walk’ alongside other groups who we readily acknowledge as suffering in the First World War: the wounded soldier or the grieving parent.

The play also allows prostitutes to take their place alongside munitions workers or female auxiliaries, as groups of women who saw their employment and economic opportunities change with the war.

Turning the spotlight onto this aspect of the war also makes this play incredibly important for the present.

Sexual exploitation against women and children in wartime remains a formidable challenge.

If we prefer to overlook this aspect of a war that happened a hundred years ago is, what chance do we have of tackling it in the present?

For tour dates and tickets for ‘The House Behind the Lines’ visit Buglight Theatre.

Today I had lunch in Chernobyl. Probably one of the most unlikely phrases I have uttered, but I did, indeed, munch upon salad, soup, meat, rice and pancakes whilst sat in the Chernobyl staff canteen. The canteen was as typical as any institutional dining hall: the scene from the window less so. Wide, empty streets suggested a place devoid of the original objective for which it had been built, but the odd, most-commonly male, person, striding past with a lanyard swinging from his neck, implied this was a town which still had business to do.

Chernobyl is not the exact location of site of the nuclear accident that occurred in the early hours of 26 April 1986, but it was the nearest large town to the power plant and, it seems, continues to mop up the consequences.

My journey began with a ninety minute minibus drive from Kiev to the first military checkpoint at the edge of the Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’, some 30 km away from the power station. Our passports were scrutinised as thoroughly as at any airport (we had to submit our passport numbers 15 days beforehand) and our government-employed Ukrainian tour guide hopped into our bus.  Now twenty-four years old, he was born after the accident, but became a ‘Chernobyl Child’ when he was three years old, as the small village where he had been born and lived was declared within the enlarged exclusion zone in 1993.

As we drove along the tarmac road that stretched out before us, so empty that it might have been built for our exclusive use, the guide pointed out the odd wooden dwelling and many mounds, each with radioactive signs perched on top, in the surrounding woodland. These were the remains of some of the 196 villages evacuated from this region. Some villagers, we were told, have since returned to their dwellings. An 85-year-old woman, apparently, can frequently be seen walking through these woods to and from Chernobyl town to do shopping.  I wondered how anyone could prefer to be neighbours with lethal doses of radiation than live in the towns to which they had been resettled, however unwelcoming they might have found them. Most of the houses, however, were dismantled and buried in the ground, along with their layers of radioactive dust that gathered on them. An expedient measure which might yet prove to be costly: there is, apparently, the danger that the radiation from these mounds might one day leech down into the region’s aquifer.

Our first stop of the day was an abandoned nursery. We left the security of the minibus and trampled an overgrown path towards a dilapidated one-story building. The surrounding playground was a mass of leaves, with rubber tyres, a record-player and a single plastic doll poking through. These dolls, with the odd missing arm or leg, have become such an icon of so many photos of Chernobyl that, for the first time, I realised I was actually, finally, standing on the soil of a place that had assumed mythic proportions in my mind. Although, after seeing a few more strategically placed dolls, I figured these objects were perhaps less symbolic of the passage of time and more that of someone setting up a good photo opportunity.  Inside, was the furniture of a typical nursery: posters, bookshelves, toilets and beds (presumably this was a nursery for very young infants). There were a row of lockers, each with their door open. I concluded these were signs of how each child’s belongings had been pulled out in great haste in 1986; but as we progressed on our tour, I reflected that more likely they had been visited by looters. Looters, we were to see time and again, were not fazed by the risk of radiation poisoning.

We then drove into Chernobyl town centre to see two memorials to the disaster. The first, an arch angel constructed from iron spokes, harking over a series of crosses, each representing one of the towns evacuated in the region. The second was a monument to the firemen who were killed in the disaster. These men were the first on the scene after fire broke out at the reactor, and died rapidly from radiation sickness.

In many ways, monuments in this region felt redundant. Monuments are society’s way of remembering events or people, yet, given only a very limited population ventures into this area, these structures can’t be reminding many people. And of those who did see them, there was, and will always be, just further down this road a much greater structure that will be ever-present on this landscape.

Six reactors make up Chernobyl nuclear power station. Three are being decommissioned (although they continued to function years after the nuclear accident in 1986), number four went into meltdown and the last two were never put to use. We drove a large circle round the complex before parking, probably about two hundred metres away from reactor four. Currently some 30,000 work and live in this area, although they work and live by halves, having 15 days in the exclusion zone and 15 days out of it, to limit the amount of radiation their bodies absorb. They are responsible for the decommissioning process, preventing leakages from reactor four and for building an enormous dome, which currently sits adjacent to reactor four, but which will be slid on top of the existing structure in three years times. I’m sure it will be the biggest, thickest, heaviest plaster that man has ever made.

The sarcophagus that currently surrounds the reactor, built in haste in 1986, is currently leaking huge doses of radiation, as our guide more than ably demonstrated.  As we walked towards the reactor four, and up to another memorial, this time dedicated to the destruction of the reactor itself, the gigametre started bleeping, and then went into overdrive, just as would parking sensors on a car, if one decided to something as stupid as to reverse into a concrete wall. Instead, we were doing something as stupid as voluntarily walking into an invisible mass of radiation.  What our guide next did made me feel acutely uncomfortable. He turned his back to the reactor, shielded the gigametre with his body, and the radiation levels began to decrease: his body was doing the absorbing and shielding, protecting the gigametre. I found myself instinctively taking a few steps back and then consciously take a few more. I was more than pleased to return to encase myself back inside our vehicle.

After a visit to the reactor came the reason for my trip: a visit to Pripyat, three kilometres from the reactor. This town was purpose-built for the power plant’s employees and my main reason for visiting Chernobyl.  Its 43,000 residents were evacuated via 1,100 buses sent from Kiev over 3.5 hours on Pripyat some forty hours after the accident had occurred.

Passing through our second military checkpoint of the day, we drove along what would have been the main road into the town. Trees had reduced it from a dual to single carriageway, and soon it wouldn’t even be as wide as that. We parked in what was once the central square, and set off on foot for our tour. First we visited the famous ferris wheel, another icon of Chernobyl, then we entered a secondary school, next an apartment block and finally a sports centre. These were the few remaining buildings left in the town that were structurally sound enough for us to enter.

The memorisation I experienced in these buildings, and this whole town, was, I think, for three reasons.  First, this was a chance to see a communist town frozen in time. I’ve always wished I could have visited the eastern block, but I was twelve years old when the USSR collapsed. This was the next best thing. The school, in particular, immersed me in this dying ideology. The hundreds of chidren’s gas-masks strewn across the floor of the dining room (presumably by looters) were an acute reminder that, when it was last used, people believed a nuclear war was imminent. Upstairs there were wonderful posters of Lenin greeting working men, or a proud labourer in overalls, presumably taking pride in his manual employment.

I was also in awe of this place simply because it took me back to 1986. I found myself indulging my vintage tastes as I admired the wall case in one apartment, fancying it in my living room. I was less enamoured with the plastic coated wall paper in another, which had a red-brick pattern printed on it, as if to give the impression of an external wall.

But, finally, I was captivated by this town bereft. There was enough intact so that one could easily imagine what it once was, and enough, therefore, to still make its inhabitants feel acutely missing. I think the swimming pool summed it up best. One so rarely sees a public swimming pool empty that it looks so odd when drained of water. A 50-metre pool, three diving boards, the deep slope half way down in the deep end, and the ladders at the deep end, each leading to nothing.  Everything was there, apart from the purpose for which it had been built: to hold swimmers and water.

Perhaps the desolateness was linked to the strange feeling of serenity and peace that I also felt in this town. This surprised me given that I was in an area that so literally oozed hazard and danger, and which also was responsible for the suffering upon hundreds or thousands of people. It took me a while to explain this feeling to myself, but I think it was this: nature seemed so much at ease in this area. It had already, with impressive speed, reclaimed much of the land, the roads, and the buildings. The cuckoos were the most powerful voice here. Man, meanwhile, in his quest for more energy, and whilst he plunders so many of the Earth’s resources, we had banished himself in perpetuity from this area. The half-life of the plutonium that leaked from the reactor is 24,000 years and only after thirty half-lives, or 720,000 years, is it likely that this area will once more be habitable for humans. I contemplated the irony of this as I wondered back to our minibus, as I did the irony of going off to do something as mundane and ordinary as having lunch in Chernobyl.

It was with relief that I found out a couple of weeks ago that the Imperial War Museum is no longer planning to pack up and close its library. This was quickly followed by disappointment, when I realised it was now, instead, toying with introducing ‘nominal charges’ for visitors to use its research room. They haven’t provided any numbers, but it worries me that this figure could mean tens or hundreds of pounds.

I know tough choices have to be made in this age of austerity, but why is serious scholarly study the one area the Imperial War Museum has decided to single out for extra charges?

One argument I’ve heard is that those who use the Research Room, to look at the Museum’s unrivalled collection of documents, oral histories, and printed material, end up profiting from it. This might hold true for a tiny number of historians and novelists, who have hit the bigtime on the shelves of Waterstones, but for most academics, it is not the case. I’ve now written a number of academic publications, based on the globally recognised collection of private papers that the Imperial War Museum holds. Despite spending months or years on this research, I’ve never received a penny of payment for it, from either the academic publisher or the institution for which I’ve taught at the time. Recently things reached a new low, when one publisher wouldn’t even give me a free a copy of my own work.  The tiny amount of money I’ve made from this research, by giving lectures or writing for newspapers or magazines, hasn’t come close to covering my costs.

This is, of course, my choice. If I can’t afford it, or if I’m not good enough to sell enough books so I can live off the royalties, perhaps I should quit. Maybe I will, or maybe I’ll have to dispense with those wonderful servicemen’s diaries, letters and memoirs, which I love to immerse myself in, and design my next research project around another archive, one that will incur fewer costs. But what of the long-term effect on military history, if others follow suit? The subject will end up either, at best, being even more elitist (there is, already, a rather moneyed and white feel to it) or, at worst, the breadth and depth of our understanding and knowledge of modern warfare will start drying up.

And it is not just academia that will suffer. With a subject that generates so much public interest as the two World Wars, our books and journal articles, which are stringently peer-reviewed for their accuracy, are often plundered by other historians, museum curators, novelists, and scriptwriters, to add depth and insight to their work.

Apart from these practical implications, there is also a principled objection to this latest proposal; a principle which, I should have thought, the Imperial War Museum would hold dear. This year, we are a hundred years on from the First World War and seventy years on from the end of the Second World War. More and more of those who lived through the Second World War are currently disappearing from our world. This is precisely the time when the Imperial War Museum should be doing all it can to ensure their voices continue to be heard. Introducing a daily fee cannot be a fitting way to remember them.

We live in the age of the anniversary boom. We remember, commemorate or celebrate any and every newsworthy event from the past when it hits a significant milestone. Nothing epitomises that statement more than 2014. We’ve excelled ourselves this year in the attention we’ve given to the centenary of the First World War. The Great War book industry has never had it so good, with about 1,000 titles being published on the subject. The BBC commenced its mammoth plans to spend 2,500 broadcast hours covering the conflict until 2018. National institutions, such as the Imperial War Museum, have been transformed; whilst local projects have unfolded the length and breadth of the country.

But commemoration, just like our memories, is selective. We remember according to our needs and desires, not what actually happened in the First World War. And what has struck me, above all else, about this year, is that, for a society whose popular culture is so saturated in violence, we have been rather squeamish when it comes to remembering the bloody side of the Great War.

The activities, which have grabbed the most attention, have produced a remarkably sanitised version of events. The Christmas truce seems to know no bounds in terms of its popularity. Sainsburys gave it centre stage in its Christmas advert, leading to an outpouring of emotion and comment. The truce also inspired the ‘Football Remembers Week’, promoted by the Duke of Cambridge and featured in Ed Miliband’s Christmas message and the Queen’s Christmas speech.

There is no question that the downing of arms by two warring sides, on the most sacred day of the year, is an inspiring story. If the soldiers did play the beautiful game, then the game can never have been more charming. But the Christmas truce is wholly unrepresentative. On that day, as well as the other four years, three months and 14 days that made up the conflict, most soldiers followed their orders and fought, maimed and killed for their country. They were, after all, at war.

The way in which we commemorated the start and end of the war also effaced the horrors that lay between those two dates. ‘Lights out’, quite appropriately, plunged the UK into darkness at 10pm on 4^th August, but the single light then left on seemed to almost romanticise the occasion.

The poppy installation in the Tower of London moat, which attracted an estimated five million visitors, was also, in itself, a beautiful sight. What it represented was not pleasant at all. Each poppy was a symbol for the 888,246 war dead. Yet, even our focus on the war dead, serves to sanitise the conflict. This may sound perverse but, by remembering the dead, we forget the dying. It becomes too easy to overlook the minutes, hours, days, weeks or years of writhing pain some, maybe many, of these men endured, before they became, in the Cenotaph’s words, ‘glorious’.

When I saw the Tower of London moat, I wondered about Lieutenant Francis Hopkinson. He was wounded in the Third Battle of Ypres on 12th August 1917. He had his left leg amputated three times and was hospitalised for shell-shock. He lived in severe pain, due to his agonisingly tender stump, until the age of 85. When I saw the stirring images of the poppy installation, I wanted a poppy for Hopkinson with the date of his death embossed on it: 17^th December 1974. It would force onlookers to think of the tortuous decades thousands continued to endure.

I could suggest many reasons for our desire to sanitise the war. One might be because we are now so strongly connected to the conflict. We are linked to it in a cultural sense, whether through the poetry taught in schools, or best-selling novels, or much-loved television series, such as Blackadder Goes Forth. We are also connected to the war in a personal sense. Most of us have had grandparents and great-grandparents who fought in the war. As a result, we feel some proximity to it.  But, since none of those people are still living, the First World War can now be our war. It belongs to each of us, as much as to anyone else. It is unsurprising that we prefer to associate ourselves with acts of humanity, rather than ones of aggression.

Our preference for remembering the dead, rather than the war wounded, may stem from the fact that the dead are not our responsibility. Men, such as Hopkinson, lived in our lifetimes. Remembering them entails our potential culpability, what more we could have done to alleviate their suffering.

Instead, our focus upon the dead of the First World War has become an end in itself in 2014. I’ve felt somewhat blasphemous asking what I think is a highly relevant question. What are we remembering them for?

This question is so important because how and why we remember has bearings on the choices we, and our government, make.

We are still going to war. We have a responsibility to stare squarely at all aspects of war, as we continue to choose to enter into more conflicts.

When we remember the First World War, we should remember everything. We should remember the dismemberment, disfigurement, the disembowelment that combatants went through, and not lose those graphic sights in symbolisation. We should remember the bloody acts of violence, revenge, even murder, as well as the inspiring gestures of humanity. We should remember not just the dead but those who bore war’s devastating physical and psychological scars, long after the conflict ended.

We should remember all of it and all of them. We owe it to them, and to us.

 

 

Last night I witnessed the most harrowing, horrible, sickening footage I have ever seen.

Night Will Fall is a remarkably euphemistic title for a film that so unflinchingly portrays scenes from one of the worst episodes of human history: the Holocaust. It is currently being shown at the British Film Institute (BFI).

The footage upon which the film is based was taken at the time of the liberation of the Nazi-run concentration camps.  8,000 feet of film reel from eleven camps was recorded by ordinary soldiers, British, American and Russian. The chiefs of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force were so shocked by what they saw that they commissioned Sidney Bernstein of the Psychological Warfare Division, later founder of Granada Television, to turn the footage into a film.

The documentary was never shown. The film, with the aim of demonstrating to defeated Germans what had been done in their name, and the even more monumental aspiration of ensuring that such crimes against humanity would never be repeated again, was unceremoniously shelved. Whilst Bernstein and his team, which included Alfred Hitchcock, worked over the summer months of 1945 to produce a ‘systematic record’ of what had happened in those camps, the political situation rapidly changed. Rather than getting the Germans to accept responsibility for their own guilt, the Allies’ priority became the reconstruction of Germany. They needed the support of the Germans to do this. Building up Germany became particularly imperative with the deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and the West.

Night Will Fall captures this story. It consists of the original footage shot in 1945, with a narrator speaking from the original script. There are interviews with the men who shot the footage, and the concentration camp survivors who feature in the original film. This is all framed within Helena Bonham Carter narrating the wider context of the making, and subsequent shelving, of the film.

I felt physically sick at what unfolded before my eyes.

Most powerful were the seemingly endless shots of emaciated, naked, dead bodies being gathered up following the camps’ liberation and thrown into mass graves by soldiers. It wasn’t so much their absolute emaciation. I have seen before images of dead and alive men and women, with protruding cheekbones, ribs and hips, sunken eye sockets and thighs ready to snap. This was different. Here were dead bodies being dragged, picked up, flung over a shoulder. Each body contorted as it was moved about; bones appeared and protruded under the flesh, in unrecognisable, gruesome ways. The corpse was then thrown amongst others, not gently laid down, there were too many for that, but all flung randomly together.

The nakedness was particularly horrible. Of course, it added to the indignity of these men and women: their indignity, we witnessed, continued into death. I felt almost complicit seeing them in these states. But even more horrible: the gentalia of the men, the pubic hair and breasts of these women, seemed to be the only things that made them recognisable. The parts of our bodies that culture requires us to cover up were the parts that identified them as human.

We saw bodies unburnt in the crematorium ovens, the camera zoomed in on a collection of hands and arms, almost grabbing out towards the door, towards the camera and towards us. There was a wide shot of survivors sitting on a large plain of grass, eating and drinking, but strewn around them were the dead bodies of their fellow inmates. How, I found myself asking, was it possible for someone alive to sit amongst that scene, what had they been through to make this situation tolerable?

A different form of death shown in the closing footage was equally hideous. The film ended with close ups of those who died from gunshot wounds, images normally reserved for clinical examination in medical textbooks. There were those with single bullets put through their brains, the holes so neat and delicate that they almost mocked the cruel circumstances of their death. Others had craters in their heads.

The film was also so powerful for what it was unable to convey. Time and again the interviewers and narrator referred to the smell of the camps, the original script was so desperate to make this point that the narrator drew upon two senses in order to convey the power of one. He spoke of how soldiers approaching the camps could ‘feel the smell’. It was also acutely obvious how the interviewees, particularly the soldiers who were involved in the liberation of the camps, lacked a language with which to describe what they had been through. ‘Hell’ and ‘horrible’ recurred again and again but, when matched with the images, these words were strikingly bland, mundane and superficial.

That was another strength of the film: it reminded us that the concentration camps did not close with their liberation. The struggle of the veterans to describe their experience reminded me of articles I had read on G.I. liberators who tried to tell people at home of the camps, but their photos and descriptions were responded to with disbelief, disgust or silence. They were silenced as a result. The footage also showed what happened to those survivors who remained in camps. They did not wish to go back to their original countries and Britain and America would not take them in. We only think of inhabitants of concentration camps as people who were held there under pain of death.  It is a sad indictment on the post-war democratic world that after the Second World War these people then voluntarily stayed in the concentration camps: they had nowhere else to go.

Alfred Hitchcock is reported to have said, sometime in the 1970s, ‘At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then nobody wanted to see it.’

This is the final cruelty. Not only did this happen, but the world then refused to acknowledge it.

The original film about the camps and the new documentary will be shown on British TV as part of the 70^th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Europe. This year, I criticised the First World War commemorations for sanitising war too much, for too frequently turning four years of carnage into pretty photo opportunities of poppies and lights. I was asked at one lecture what I’d like to see instead. I said a commemoration that unflinchingly recognised the horribleness, the cruelty, the grotesqueness of war: that recognises what all human beings are capable of doing to one another, given certain circumstances. We should all watch this film next year, every single one of us. It will be more effective and more sobering than anything else could possibly be. We should watch it so we face up to what happened seventy years ago, so we look it straight in the eye. Then maybe, although it will be seventy years too late, we could say with some chance of success: ‘never again’.

‘Gimmick’ now seems to be the word that accompanies any announcement about an event that will make up the centenary of the First World War.

I started this year with great excitement. I tweeted back in February how ‘brilliant’ it was to see a summary of historians’ debates on the origins of the First World War being the most shared piece on BBC online.

My own research on the First World War had also received a new lease of life, with all sorts of fascinating requests coming in for me to give talks, do interviews, and write articles.

2014 was to be our year, when academics stop talking amongst themselves and, for once, the rest of the population wanted to hear.

How naïve I was.

In the past month, I’ve noticed things descend remarkably rapidly downhill. My excitement has dissolved, to be replaced by disappointment, despair and now serious consternation.

I can single out three announcements.

The first was ‘LIGHTS OUT’. No, not some energy efficiency drive – although I’ve no doubt that will be the most useful outcome – but an ‘encouragement’ for people up and down Britain to turn all but one of their lights out at 11pm, to mark 100 years since Britain declared war on Germany. It has been thought up following the words of Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, spoken in August 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time”.

 Back in March, when I first heard of LIGHTS OUT I couldn’t understand the point. My lights are usually out by 11pm, both physically and metaphorically, as seems to be the case in most houses in my street, so this is hardly going to turn it into an exceptional moment in our lives. Exceptional would be to keep the lights on.

Last week, however, I saw a briefing on the event and the penny clicked. It’s a photo opportunity.  Photographers will have an array of landmark buildings to choose from, which will all have been darkened apart from one strategically placed light.

Lovely. I can already see the images on the front pages of all the newspapers the next day. The start of four years of unprecedented slaughter reduced to a pretty photo opportunity. I don’t think I can imagine anything less appropriate.

Two weeks ago, I felt another surge of despair. This time with the announcement that schoolchildren will be sent poppy seeds to plant. In the Prime Minister’s words, this will ‘help the next generation understand the significance of what happened during the First World War’. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. So, are we actually encouraging school children to think that, by the simple act of planting a flower, they should feel closer to those who experienced the First World War, even to understanding it?

And today came the announcement that there will be a commemoration project marking the Christmas truce football game. It is, as Prince William puts it, ‘wholly relevant today as a message of hope over adversity.’ A number of academics have been quick to point out that we don’t even have any solid evidence that football was played. So, now we seem to be singling out potentially fictional events for remembrance, out of all those incredible, fascinating, mind-boggling things that we know actually did happen. And even if it did happen, surely it would be more appropriate to remember who, and how they, quelled this hope: the British authorities’ harsh orders against those who fraternised with the enemy. It was a war after all.

For someone who has spent the last decade researching people’s experiences of warfare, reading unflinching accounts of how war destroys, maims, and ruins lives, I was frustrated and despaired by how wrong, how misplaced, how insulting it is to commemorate the fighting with pretty, upbeat activities.

Those emotions have now faded. I’m now thinking about this centenary as a historian should do when they study the commemoration of war. Not for the insight it provides into the 1914-1918 war, but for insight it provides into the society doing the commemorating, in this case, people’s attitudes and behaviour in 2014.

My consternation remains, however.  Not everyone will critically assess the centenary in the way I have quickly learnt to do.