Dan Snow's History Hit - Love and Lust in WWII

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Though rarely spoken about, love, lust and sexuality were key to many soldiers' experiences of the Second World War. Veterans might allude to them in their recollections, but what do we know about wartime experiences of sex and sexual identity? And how did this intersect with the soldiers' understandings of masculinity?For this episode that marks the beginning of Pride month, Dan is joined by Luke Turner, author of Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering, 1939 - 1945. Luke has assembled a cast of fascinating characters, from a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp who later became an LGBT+ activist, to a gay RAF fighter ace; their stories help to demystify notions of sexuality and masculinity in the Second World War.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've interviewed so many veterans of the First and Second World War, but being a prude, being British, I never really talked to them about one element of the war that actually looms very large if you read the contemporary accounts and the diaries taken at the time. And that is sex, that is sexuality, love, lust. Some of them mention it in passing, They tell me things about Cairo. They give you fascinating little glimpses, descriptions when it seemed like there was a time when things loosened up a little. You could be yourself. You could explore your sexuality and other people's. One account written just after the war of a soldier serving in the Far East,

he talks about little else other than the people he was able to sleep with. And the last chapter of that book, he had a particularly fertile time because he was on a ship full of civilians and soldiers heading for demobilization on a long, hot passage all the way from Asia round to Britain. My goodness, that chapter needed a parental advisory warning. My goodness, I chapped into the parental advisory warning. But the issue of love and lust and sex, sexuality, is such an important one in the Second World War. And Luke Turner is a historian. He's been working on this.

He's just written a book called Men at War, Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering. And he's assembled a cast of extraordinary characters, from a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp, who later became an LGBT plus activist, to an ace trans RAF fighter. And he's really shined a light on this period, helping to rescue history, I think, before much of it is lost forever. This is the beginning of Pride Month here in Britain. So this is the perfect timing for this conversation. Enjoy. Luke, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me on. Do you think we remember the Second World War as a time when men were men? And why do you think that is? Was that something that was projected at the time and since in film and things? Yeah, I mean, that's essentially the question I was asking when I started writing Men at War

as being a child of the late 1970s, growing up with Airfix kits and war films and war books and feeling that in recent years perhaps there'd been a bit of a strange shift I think we used to when I was a kid we used to remember the men of the war as being these people who did talk about it you'd sort of leave them alone they just go on with their lives sort of like a revival of a heroic narrative or the creation of a heroic narrative not that I don't necessarily think they were seen as macho people but I felt that there was a aspect of the masculinity that was a little bit two-dimensional and missed a sort of an idea of them as complex men you know I don't think men

are any more complex in 2023 than they were in the 1940s I wanted to sort of ask, were they maybe more like us or what were the struggles they were working against and how that affected their internal lives really? It's so fascinating that we read about these people and we're pretty sure they are all like us, but then we think, well, what if they're not? What if in some way people in the Renaissance or people in ancient Athens or people in the second world actually were quite different? I'm engaged in a kind of lifelong battle about this because sometimes their belief systems, the Iroquois or the Aztecs, were very different to us and therefore they must have had a different worldview. And then you just get these little insights that remind you of this

kind of shared humanity that seems to cross cultures. That's kind of why the focus of the book, to an extent, is on sexuality because sexuality is such a core part of who we are as human beings but it is buffeted by societal expectations at the time and obviously sexuality in the 1940s when homosexuality was illegal and there were a lot more sort of moral constraints did put a quite tragic framework on how people experience their own sexuality or that of others but the nature of desire i think is quite eternal it seems odd you start talking about films we'll get into your work in a sec but it seems odd to about films like and there was there was a change i think probably in sort of 2010 or possibly where

you can't get a second world war story without there now being a very very traumatized people in it and b like crazy lgbtqi like plus stuff going on right we just had the recent hugely successful rogue heroes here in the uk and the intelligence officer in cairo is portrayed as like a makeup wearing cross-dressing you know kind of very queer character and that now feels like de rigueur for a world war ii drama but he actually was so wasn't he i mean i write about him in the book, Dudley Clark. He was arrested in neutral Spain, dressed as a woman, and there's some amazing photos of him

sort of awkwardly holding onto a chair in his outfit, and those pictures were sent to Churchill to try and discredit him as a counterintelligence move. You know, Rogue Heroes I thought was a very good series, and, you know, the Paddy Mayne character was fascinating, but one of the things Ben McIntyre wrote about in his book was the you know speculation about paddy main's sexuality and there's quite a strong indication i think that he might have had a certain amount of repressed homosexuality i think it's not that those characters are introduced now it's that they

were very absent before i think that's the difference like we're introducing people of color or women i think that's right so in a way that's the difference. Like we're introducing people of colour or women. I think that's right. So in a way, that's a strange thought. Are we actually creeping closer to a slightly more historically accurate portrayal of World War II as we get further away from it? The sort of premise of what I was trying to write about was were the men of the Second World War

a lot more fluid than we realise or we have commonly seen because sexual fluidity is a part of humans you know you go back into ancient history and it was a strong part of culture in many societies and I just had this inkling that the second world war there was a lot more going on because of the pressures of the time and the bending of moral codes and people being away from home and under fear of death there was a loosening up in some ways and a bending of what was acceptable and what was normal as the word that came up again and again in all my research, this sort of archetype of masculinity that everyone had to try and be normal. And it appears

in army documents, in cultural writing, health guides, you know, normal is just this sort of little strange word that is the default position. And I think the war ended up with a lot of men, not self-consciously so, but actually ending up transgressing it. Now, is that because we have a citizen army? Is that because millions and millions of men and women are now serving? Obviously, therefore, it's impossible to have a kind of normal. And you're bringing people from different backgrounds and walks of life and opinions into the forces.

And therefore, they lived like that that even though they're in uniform or is that because of the war itself did the strict mores loosen as people faced down death as you went to Cairo as you as you're young and free and had money in your pocket and thought you might die tomorrow and started to behave in a more perhaps a way that was a little bit more extreme than you might have done if you just continued a kind of peacetime existence as a clerk in harrogate i think it's a an aspect of all of that to be honest there's an amazing quote from quentin crisp you know the very famous camp writer and lgbt sort of originator anyway he he said as soon as the bomb started to fall london became like one glorious double bed you know that there was a a change in how people behaved

because of the fear of death, I think, because the next moment might be a laugh. So why would you necessarily think what you've been told by society or politics or religion and so on? And the mixing of people, the exoticisation of foreigners, I suppose, or people from the empire. I think just the strangeness of being thrown together in these situations with people you've never met before,

might never see again, in very intimate situations. You're very conscious of the physicality of other people, I think. If you're in the army, compared to if you're a clerk in Harrogate, you're seeing each other naked all the time. You're probably showering together. You're in very confined spaces together, and that's going to change the way you feel about your body and other people's bodies i think it's quite sort of fecund quite liberating in a way physically from what people used to probably intimidating also but

i just think it made everything so complicated that it allowed people to do things they might not normally have done in my extremely limited experience of going to Warzones, the first thing that goes out the window is like any worries about anything else that isn't in the next five minutes. Right. Rather than going, oh, you know, I'm really nervous about how my career is going over the next five to ten years. You're just like, are we all going to be okay for ten minutes?

In which case, that's really the kind of time horizon i'm interested in and then that can lead to all sorts of interesting you know social and sexual decisions as well i guess it's difficult because there's not much record of this stuff so the characters i was right about the book there's another sort of men who after the war came out as gay after homosexuality being legalized and it's interesting in their memoirs is they talk about having sex with a lot of men during the war. And they all say about the war year was a time of liberation. Quentin Crisp again says the peace was terrible.

A person I wrote about, a guy called Peter DeRome, he had to leave Britain because of the conservatism of the 1950s. He had a wonderful time in the war with all sorts of people in the army and in civilian life. And so it got me thinking that well if this is out gay men who had sex and did things with a lot of men who were not out gay men who after the war went back to inverted commas heterosexual life I just thought this was absolutely fascinating because it was suddenly shining a light on a very fluid sexuality that

we just don't normally hear about when we're thinking about the Second World War. Tell me about some other particular examples. It's so interesting. I'm thinking of that wonderful book about Naples following the occupation. The only thing they all seem to be doing is focusing on who they can have sex with in that book. It's remarkable. Yeah, Naples 44 is just an absolutely incredible book. It sort of captures that what war does to places and to people

and how the people of a city can switch from, you know, being ruled by italian fascists and germans to to the allies i mean the sexuality is described in that book is very depressing at times you know there's a scene i write about where there's soldiers queuing up to swap sort of tins of stolen army rations for sex and there's rape in there and children being offered in exchange for sex and i wanted to write about that sort of exploitative, misogynist side of sexuality because I think it's important to know that that was going on.

I mean, there's a lot of knowledge around sort of what the Red Army did through Anthony Beaver's research. I read that in his Berlin book about the mass rapes committed by the Red Army. But I think there's an assumption that, oh, the Allies, we never did things like that. We were squeaky clean and we were fighting a good fight.

And it's more complicated than that, that the Allies were capable, not on the same level at all, but some soldiers did do terrible things. And Naples 44 is a fantastic book that describes that, really. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about lust and love in the Second World War. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And what about some other examples? Because I've always found this a very, very difficult subject. I think it's my own prudery,

but I've interviewed so many veterans. They often make allusion to like what Cairo they all talk about Cairo in particular it seemed to be this extraordinary place where you would go and and get whatever you wanted but I've always been too prudish to go like go on then Vic tell me what was you know what happened so how do you get close to some of these people some of these stories that was the interesting thing was when I started writing a book it was a February 2020 which was not really a good time to try and get in touch with veterans or go into archives or anything. So my plan was to speak to veterans and get anecdotes. But then I kind of realised that I can't necessarily go up to someone who's 101 and say, so tell me about your time in

Cairo, or was there same sex stuff going on with your comrades? So the approach changed. But, you know, I spoke to one veteran of the RAF, John Keston, who told me a very beautiful story that was, they went to a airbase in North Africa that the Germans had occupied. And on the wall of one of the huts, there was this sort of incredible drawing of a naked woman. And it really moved him that the man who'd drawn that was just the same as him. And all these men were looking at this very erotic picture and putting their own desires and imagination onto it. And I thought that was quite a universalizing thing. But it was these particularly LGBT characters who I wanted to write about because they illuminate wider masculinity. I think I didn't want to write a book that was just about gay men or bisexual men. I wanted to write a book that was

about wider masculinity, but maybe through the prism of these men who are slightly removed from ideas of what's normal because I think they had a very acute idea of you know other men as well as themselves but my favorite character in the book was called Dudley Cave and he was a cinema projectionist and cinema manager who joined the army and was captured at Singapore and he spent many years in Japanese POW camps working on the Burma railroad and he was gay and after the war set up the gay and lesbian switchboard which was instrumental in helping people in the AIDS crisis and he did a lot of work with Peter Tatchell kind of trying to get LGBT veterans recognized at the Cenotaph and to campaign against the ban on gay people serving in the military during the 80s and 90s.

And he led a very sort of determined battle. And at that point, the Royal British Legion did not like this at all. They were pretty homophobic and said some quite grim things about gay people who'd fought in the war. But they actually eventually won the battle. And it was while I was writing a book, you had LGBT serving soldiers, airmen and women, sailors all marching at the cenotaph

under a sort of LGBT banner in 2021. And I thought that was incredible that this struggle that began with Dudley Cave's experiences on the River Kwai and his sort of sense of injustice, that battle's been won. Because there's some of the characters, there are sort of quite fruity tales, you know, some of the stuff I haven't covered, it's quite explicit.

People were very frank about writing it in an explicit way, which, again, is one of these strange things that feels quite modern, like Peter Jerome, who after all became a PR, and he worked on Star Wars, but he wrote this memoir that was all about these incredibly fruity escapades kind of having sex just after D-Day at an orchard near Bayou as an artillery barrage was going off. I just think there's something about these men that is a bit of a subversion of what we expect

from some of the way the archetypal soldier or airman or sailor is depicted there was a RAF pilot called Ian Glead who ended up as a wing leader who was the fastest ace in the battle of France he shot down I think five German aircraft in four days and he won the DSO DFC Croix de Guerre was decorated at the palace in the same bracket as Richard Hillary. You know, one of these archetypal Battle of Britain sort of Johnny Good chaps. And it turned out that he was gay and had a sort of secret gay existence in the RAF. A lover of his, a guy called Christopher Gotch, revealed it in the late 90s on a TV program called It's Not Unusual. And in his memoir, he talks about a lover called Pam,

who's a woman who he goes sailing with. But in his biography, this woman called Pam is obviously a younger man who was his lover. And he would fly a Tiger Moth to go pick up his young friend and fly him back to the squadron, which I thought in itself was very interesting because if you're a commanding officer and you're on this sort of strange mission on the city, I keeps buggering off to london in a tiger moth and

bringing back this chat to come and go sailing with him i think everybody must have known what was going on but there's maybe a bit of an immersion maybe it was what happened in the war stayed in the world nobody liked to talk about it and then obviously in the 50s there was a huge amount of repression of gay men and gay lifestyles. And I think these little hints I found of these men who did stuff fairly openly. You know, there were certain places in London where you'd get officers in makeup. And one soldier writes about seeing some people from his own unit there and them saying, now, don't tell anyone, dear, you know, have a nice weekend.

Don't tell anyone, dear. There was a lot of this going on it just made me think that the war was a very different time from how it's often portrayed now with the various more conservative views of the war and military identity that I think we've seen in Britain in recent years yeah I think that's an interesting point because we all go around even in my own family even me I sort of feel that i am always going to be like a hopeless pale little version of my brilliant grandpa and for all we know my grandpa was cross-dressing every wild old time and therefore if we're doing those things we might feel insecure and somehow we're failing and we're

we're involved in some kind of societal decay and then as we know that can feed into extremist political movements and that kind of stuff as well. So they can still be the greatest generation, but can also be a bit queer, and as colorful and diverse as we are. Exactly. And there was that insecurity. It's interesting, the years between the wars, there was a lot of insecurities. So George Orwell writes about Elizabeth Bowen, the novelist Graves wrote about this sort of insecurity that that generation had missed the First World War. And they felt that they'd fluffed the catch. They would never be able to prove their masculinity as the First World War generation had. Of course, they did end up in the Second World War. So this sort of generation that felt they'd missed out on the First World War ended up in the

Second. One of the things I uncovered was the sort of age-old, God help us if there's a war attitude, where you've got people like Adam Brooke and Monty writing about how kind of this new generation of soldiers are terribly soft and they're not killers, these British lads, and they're all softened by cinema and dating and culture and this is awful. They're all into music. And I just thought this is very similar

to the invective you see now, people going on about snowflakes and the Generation Z or whatever. Exactly the same thing was going on in 1940. Every time I post something about a veteran on my social feeds, there is at least one reply from someone going, my God, today that would be impossible. Today they wouldn't be able to fight like that or sacrifice.

And you just go, have you not seen any of the stories out of Afghanistan? You know, like astonishing bravery of young men and women, gay, straight, who were born in 1985, 1990. And that's exactly what they said on the Falklands recently. Again, 1980s, you know, people are very worried about the 70s, national decline. And then a bunch of British teenagers carried out an extraordinary epic of endurance and courage and fighting Argentinians, the weather, limited supply, to pull off an extraordinary liberation of the Falkland Islands. And then we see people,

so it's funny how we keep feeling like we're pathetic compared to a previous generation. Exactly. I guess you could sort of say, well, Afghanistan, the Falklands, that's people who are volunteers, it's different for its conscription. But you've only got to look at Ukraine. The entire society has been mobilised and people have gone from being web coders into the front lines. And I actually think that even the Ukraine war is being fought against a homophobic regime. Chris Bryant's book about the young men who helped Churchill in the struggle against appeasement, they were specifically doing that because they were gay men who were in Berlin and knew exactly what Nazis did to gay men. So who is going to be a more fierce fighter against fascism in the 1940s than a gay man who is persecuted at home that is fully aware

that the Nazis want people like him dead? You know, I think that probably a lot of gay men had a lot more at stake when fighting than some of their straight comrades, because it was a war of survival for them in their identity. And I think that's sort of something that we don't really think about. Right. Well, I think that's a really important point. It's like aristocratic white Brits would actually have been a group who would probably have suffered the least in the event of a Nazi takeover of Britain.

And it's Jewish people, queer people, people of colour, communists. They would have been wiped out in the event of an arts takeover so actually you're right i think there's a kind of very interesting and untold story there about the second world war before you go give us another character that you've come across i guess we're talking a lot about lgbt people here and that's only like a third of the book but there is a very interesting person who was a Spitfire pilot, very brave pilot, did two tours of operations, called Robert Cowell, was very masculine, did motor racing, was into fighter planes, was very aggressive, very homophobic. I always felt very discomforted in who he was. And then

after the war, had a PTSD experience in a war film and various other things happened. And he started seeing psychiatrists and realised that his identity was wrong. And the aggressive masculinity was because he felt more like a woman. And again, one of these untold stories, I think, of the war is that we all know that combat is a brilliant furtherer of technology and innovation. But transgender surgery also comes

from the First and Second World Wars. And Robert Cowell became Roberta Cowell, was the first transgender woman operated in Britain, by Archibald, McIndoe and Harold Gillies, who had been pioneers of plastic surgery, specifically repairing servicemen, especially the Guinea Pig Club for burned RAF pilots, which Richard Hillary was a member of. The hospital where a lot of burned pilots were treated. And I think it's incredible that the war enabled this technology

that now has enabled people to transition and to be themselves. And I think there are going to be more and more of these untold stories and little strange connections that actually, you know, my whole thing about the war is a lot of my friends who aren't into military history say, oh, why are you so fascinated with it? It was grim. It was ages ago. It was 80 years ago. We're bored of Brexit people going on and on about the war. And we can still learn a lot about who we are as people now by going back 80 years and considering them in a fresh light. Brilliant, Luke. Thanks so much, buddy. What's your book called? It's called Men at War, Lusting, Loving, Fighting, Remembering 1939 to 1945.

Brilliant. Luke Turner, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks very much, Dan.