What do you think?
Rate this book
Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945
As a child, Luke Turner was obsessed with the Second World War. He spent hours watching Sunday war films, poring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums. Lying in bed beneath Airfix fighter planes suspended from his ceiling, he would think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them. Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war.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.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. By exploring a wartime experience that embraces sex, lust and the body as much as tactics and weaponry, Turner argues that the only way we can really understand the Second World War is to get to grips with the complexity of the lives and identities of those who fought and endured it.
320 pages, Paperback
Published September 3, 2024
29 people are currently reading
392 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
April 25, 2024
3.75
I can’t help but feel like Turner was trying to write two books at once. One book an exploration of his own relationship and infatuation with World War Two, and the other being an exploration of the sexuality of the soldiers in the war. Whilst the former was passionate and interesting, it wasn’t specifically what I’d sought out to read. Unfortunately, I felt that the part of the book that is marketed (the sexuality of soldiers), is the part that took a back seat. The parts that focussed on that were fascinating, and generally quite unique. But, for me, it did feel a bit lost in the more biographical side. Either way, a very decent read, even if it doesn’t consistently do what it says on the tin.
I can’t help but feel like Turner was trying to write two books at once. One book an exploration of his own relationship and infatuation with World War Two, and the other being an exploration of the sexuality of the soldiers in the war. Whilst the former was passionate and interesting, it wasn’t specifically what I’d sought out to read. Unfortunately, I felt that the part of the book that is marketed (the sexuality of soldiers), is the part that took a back seat. The parts that focussed on that were fascinating, and generally quite unique. But, for me, it did feel a bit lost in the more biographical side. Either way, a very decent read, even if it doesn’t consistently do what it says on the tin.
Read
August 7, 2023I 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.
In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence. He recalls being afraid to glue pilot figurines into his AirFix Spitfires out of a ‘moral anxiety’ that they might turn into flesh-and-blood men. 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. 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. ‘For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes.’
It’s this apparent contradiction that drives Men at War, a part-memoir, part-historical exploration of British Second World War masculinity. Turner uses his own cultural memory of the war – from his grandfather’s religiously motivated conscientious objection, to a childhood fascination with planes – as signposts for a deeper enquiry into the lives and sexualities of perhaps the most celebrated generation of British men. Intended as a broad challenge to notions of ‘real’ British manhood, Turner’s focus on queer life stories, from the bisexual commando-turned-writer Michael Burn, to the transgender Spitfire pilot Roberta Cowell, allows him to connect themes rarely considered together in scholarship on the World Wars. 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.
Read the rest at HistoryToday.com.
Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History.
In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence. He recalls being afraid to glue pilot figurines into his AirFix Spitfires out of a ‘moral anxiety’ that they might turn into flesh-and-blood men. 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. 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. ‘For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes.’
It’s this apparent contradiction that drives Men at War, a part-memoir, part-historical exploration of British Second World War masculinity. Turner uses his own cultural memory of the war – from his grandfather’s religiously motivated conscientious objection, to a childhood fascination with planes – as signposts for a deeper enquiry into the lives and sexualities of perhaps the most celebrated generation of British men. Intended as a broad challenge to notions of ‘real’ British manhood, Turner’s focus on queer life stories, from the bisexual commando-turned-writer Michael Burn, to the transgender Spitfire pilot Roberta Cowell, allows him to connect themes rarely considered together in scholarship on the World Wars. 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.
Read the rest at HistoryToday.com.
Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History.
June 28, 2023
A book of two halves, the latter of which I enjoyed much more.
Luke Turner is a bisexual man trying to reconcile his fascination with the machinery of WWII and his sexuality. 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.
In the first half of the book, Turner spends a lot of time (too much?) discussing the machines themselves - especially the aircraft. This certainly confirms his knowledge of the period and gives some historical colour and substance but if, like me, you aren't really interested in the engineering then it can be a bit of a struggle at times. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject?
What the first half does do well, however, is introduce us to the key human players of the text. Soldiers, airman and conscientious objectors who we will get to know intimately in the second half.
And what a second half it is! Turner strips away the hero worship, the bravado and veneer of 'derring do' to show us some very human portraits of men at war. Specifically, queer men - though in many cases their sexuality and/or gender is not decisively stated as we do not have it in the subject's own words.
As someone who usually focusses on tales of WWI, and who finds WWII a little off-putting (in that main due to the reasons stated above) this book allowed me a whole new entry point to the period - one that isn't uncomfortable. 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.
A brilliant piece of writing which ALSO gave me a handy shortlist of WWII fiction/memoir to continue my reading.
Luke Turner is a bisexual man trying to reconcile his fascination with the machinery of WWII and his sexuality. 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.
In the first half of the book, Turner spends a lot of time (too much?) discussing the machines themselves - especially the aircraft. This certainly confirms his knowledge of the period and gives some historical colour and substance but if, like me, you aren't really interested in the engineering then it can be a bit of a struggle at times. It almost feels (perhaps this is unkind) that Turner is trying to prove he is qualified to speak on this subject?
What the first half does do well, however, is introduce us to the key human players of the text. Soldiers, airman and conscientious objectors who we will get to know intimately in the second half.
And what a second half it is! Turner strips away the hero worship, the bravado and veneer of 'derring do' to show us some very human portraits of men at war. Specifically, queer men - though in many cases their sexuality and/or gender is not decisively stated as we do not have it in the subject's own words.
As someone who usually focusses on tales of WWI, and who finds WWII a little off-putting (in that main due to the reasons stated above) this book allowed me a whole new entry point to the period - one that isn't uncomfortable. 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.
A brilliant piece of writing which ALSO gave me a handy shortlist of WWII fiction/memoir to continue my reading.
May 2, 2025
I absolutely think this should have been edited differently, so if we'd have alternating chapters (C1 - authors story, C2 - WW2 story etc.) this book would have been a whole lot better.
I loved the passion and the knowledge, but it just got a bit lost in the book, and it sadly became a bit of a slog to finish.
I loved the passion and the knowledge, but it just got a bit lost in the book, and it sadly became a bit of a slog to finish.
August 27, 2025
The first 150 pages were a slog - mostly about the war as a whole from a british perspective, about the author’s own obsession with wwii, and mostly unrelated to the topic that I bought the book for (the private and esp sexual/romantic lives of soldiers). The second half of the book does deliver on this, and I enjoyed the second half a lot more after just skimming the first half.
One thing that annoyed me was the fact that the author does not know how to respectfully write about trans people. It’s 2025, we don’t need to be referring to pre-transition trans women as “he” & deadnaming them (this is in reference to Roberta Cowell). Also this sentence in the intro, wtf is this: “a woman - who against the standards of her day does not consider herself a woman at all” - then maybe don’t call that person a woman lmao???? Pretty sure this was in reference to EM Barraud who was then referenced around page 230, but still with she/her pronouns. In a book from the 90s I wouldn’t complain about this, but come on, this book is like a year old.
One thing that annoyed me was the fact that the author does not know how to respectfully write about trans people. It’s 2025, we don’t need to be referring to pre-transition trans women as “he” & deadnaming them (this is in reference to Roberta Cowell). Also this sentence in the intro, wtf is this: “a woman - who against the standards of her day does not consider herself a woman at all” - then maybe don’t call that person a woman lmao???? Pretty sure this was in reference to EM Barraud who was then referenced around page 230, but still with she/her pronouns. In a book from the 90s I wouldn’t complain about this, but come on, this book is like a year old.
March 8, 2024
Here is what I crave: a new take on WW2. An examination of masculinity, class, and especially sexuality, it amazes me how long it took to collate much of this information into a single volume. While the writing style and the organization occasionally feels rambling, the overall package is a fascinating examination of issues that many other overviews of the war either skirt or completely ignore. Well worth the read.
July 2, 2024
Who owns these symbols, these memories?
This is a fine read. I think it helps that Turner's reflection on how we remember the Second World War reflect mine to some degree.
This book is a history of the men who fought - and often died - during World War Two, the way their lives are commemorated and remembered - or not, and Turner's own relationship with the war. The need to restore nuance and 'normality' to how we see these men. To realise that the men who fought were all kinds of men.
It is interesting how the war seemed to open up a degree of freedom for gay and bisexual men despite official disapproval. Turner wisely talks about how it is an error to apply 2024 terminology to these men (and the stories are mostly men) because they wouldn't have thought of themselves in that way.
Turner talks about how many men who got - and forgive the direct language - a blow job from another man in the dark would have considered themselves as gay? Or bisexual? How many of them went back home to wives and lived heterosexual lives. There seems to have been a willingness to experiment for whatever reason. Both in terms of sexuality and gender. In our modern gender critical world it is interesting to read about the latter in particular. How do the gender critical deal with a heroic RAF pilot who was an early trans woman?
Turner talks to about how the memory of these men has been co-opted by the conservatives to support their causes in a way that strips nuance from those who fought in the war and of the war itself. It becomes a crutch. No one seems to remember that the war ended with the election of one of the most socialist governments in British history. With a landslide. That out of that came the Welfare State. A land fit for heroes. And that has been unwound and destroyed by the very people who wave Union Jacks and claim patriotism as theirs and theirs alone.
"It is as if they are claiming ownership of ghosts."
What more can I say? There's a book to be written about the women of World War Two of a similar type. It might have already been written. But if this book makes me think anything it is that we need to give voices to all the men of World War Two. So much has been lost. So many voices silenced that we will never hear them all now.
This is a fine read. I think it helps that Turner's reflection on how we remember the Second World War reflect mine to some degree.
This book is a history of the men who fought - and often died - during World War Two, the way their lives are commemorated and remembered - or not, and Turner's own relationship with the war. The need to restore nuance and 'normality' to how we see these men. To realise that the men who fought were all kinds of men.
It is interesting how the war seemed to open up a degree of freedom for gay and bisexual men despite official disapproval. Turner wisely talks about how it is an error to apply 2024 terminology to these men (and the stories are mostly men) because they wouldn't have thought of themselves in that way.
Turner talks about how many men who got - and forgive the direct language - a blow job from another man in the dark would have considered themselves as gay? Or bisexual? How many of them went back home to wives and lived heterosexual lives. There seems to have been a willingness to experiment for whatever reason. Both in terms of sexuality and gender. In our modern gender critical world it is interesting to read about the latter in particular. How do the gender critical deal with a heroic RAF pilot who was an early trans woman?
Turner talks to about how the memory of these men has been co-opted by the conservatives to support their causes in a way that strips nuance from those who fought in the war and of the war itself. It becomes a crutch. No one seems to remember that the war ended with the election of one of the most socialist governments in British history. With a landslide. That out of that came the Welfare State. A land fit for heroes. And that has been unwound and destroyed by the very people who wave Union Jacks and claim patriotism as theirs and theirs alone.
"It is as if they are claiming ownership of ghosts."
What more can I say? There's a book to be written about the women of World War Two of a similar type. It might have already been written. But if this book makes me think anything it is that we need to give voices to all the men of World War Two. So much has been lost. So many voices silenced that we will never hear them all now.
December 31, 2024
The author has simultaneously written two books of completely different vibes and meshed them into one, making it feel quite disjointed in parts. Swings between him talking about model plane sets and his obsession with the war, to venereal disease and lonely men at war masturbating over other soldiers while their wives are back home. Odd.
May 17, 2023
Though the book seems at times to wander from topic-to-topic somewhat like a stream of consciousness, it is nonetheless a fascinating work to supplement the World War II genre. In some ways the book is a memoir of the author's reassessment of his childhood fascination with the machines of the Second World War as he realized that he knew little about the people who fought the war. Adding an additional layer of interest to his search for information about the lives of the ordinary people that were crucial to the war was his perception of masculinity and sexuality that was driven by societal norms and idealizaton of the participants in WWII. This included discovery of the stories of LGBTQ+ people who fought courageously in the war and who ultimately helped to change attitudes and laws affecting LGBTQ+ people.
May 16, 2023
Phenomenal. A book that asks questions and starts you thinking about people involved in war in a way I had never before. To try and take people out the tropes and boxes that have been ascribed to them over time. To stop romanticising war but remember these were real people with all the quirks and foibles of any person today. A discussion of acceptance that transcends war and should make us think about society moving forward and what we want it to be. Sublime!
December 5, 2023
Not at all what I was expecting and the better for it. 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.
March 5, 2024
As a boy, Turner was obsessed with World War II technologies and machinery--particularly fighter planes which he recreated in model form over and over. The human element held little interest. In the first half of this book, he looks at this peculiar glorification of war and how it shows up in Tankfest weekends and a particular 'greatest generation' cardboard cutout view of masculinity--straight, brave, and square-jawed. In the second half of the book, Turner focuses on some of the men who fought, undercutting this cliche by giving voice to their own views and experiences. There are gay men who enjoyed a brief freedom (rapidly and firmly shut down after the war), bisexuals, a trans person, and even a conscientious objector family member. This second part of the book is more interesting in my view, though Turner brings these ideas together in providing a warning about the jingoistic, right-wing perspective of the good-old-days that gives over the memory of the war years as a nostalgic period when men were men. He rightly reclaims this territory by giving life to the many kinds of men who lived through those terrible times.
November 24, 2024
« There is a gap between the attitude of moralising military hierarchy and societal expectation and the reality of the human spirit for the men in the three services. Yet masturbation still disappears into the silence of history. There must have been hundreds of millions of ejaculations among His Majesty's Forces in the Second World War, intensely private moments. » ????? like what the fuck… i’m glad luke turner came to terms with his sexuality and the weirdness of his war obsession or whatever but i did not need to read a 300 pages book of poorly written ramblings to get there myself
Read
June 28, 2023Insightful 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. This book is full of stories that intriguingly, lustfully and hilariously complicates Britain's cosy and homogenous national myth about how people in that era acted, thought and felt. It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for.
January 14, 2024
A found this book disappointing overall. There was far too much about the author's interests in the Second World War as a hobbyist, which really wasn't very interesting. When he moves on to recounting the lives of some of the men fighting in the War, often relating to their sexuality, the book is more interesting, but actually there isn't that much of this and its a rather small cast of characters. Three stars is probably generous.
June 19, 2024
Despite being a bit disorganized, meandering, and unfocused, this book by Luke Turner reproduces many moving moments from World War II, and it contains reflections on the war's legacy and present-day echoes—especially, the Russo-Ukrainian War. Somewhat in parallel to historian John D'Emilio, Turner traces some of the lesser-known revolutionary-queer dimensions of WWII-era Britain and life in the British military, particularly the Royal Air Force (RAF).
December 6, 2023
Engaging, with remarkable insights into aspects of WWII which I hadn't seen explored in print before. Written with passion and sincerity, by a writer whose reflections on what makes the conflict so fascinating gave me much to ponder and to follow up on.
February 12, 2024
I loved everything about this book. I’m a former student of war studies, and I believe that Men at War touches upon something crucial, and crucially missing, from the the collective memory of WWII as well as the way it’s approached academically.
July 3, 2024
While I do think the book is sometimes at war with itself never finding a good balance between past and present, there is so much heart put into it. The are some really incredible highlights emphasising the struggle and beauty of life for queer people. Really a fascinating read.
September 30, 2023
A very interesting nuanced book.
November 8, 2023
Loved it!
November 24, 2023
3.5 stars
Read
March 11, 2025This was more biographical than I expected, not really what I was looking for.
June 9, 2025
3.75 stars
April 3, 2025
A very interesting read that looks into the very human side of war and the LGBT+ people who fought in WW2. An important antithesis to the way past wars get treated by our media and politicians who use them for their own purposes of nationalism and propaganda
February 2, 2024
Really enjoyed Luke's talk on this at Stoke Newington Book Festival.
Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. The final 100 pages in particular beautifully synthesise personal experience and the untold queer context of the text. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings its subjects to life in a really startling way.
Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. The final 100 pages in particular beautifully synthesise personal experience and the untold queer context of the text. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings its subjects to life in a really startling way.
April 30, 2023
Struggle to understand how Luke Turner ever got published. Even with a subject matter that is welcome that potentially shines a light on a topic that needs researching, his research is superficial, there is far too much- at times a bit lascivious and creepy- self-interest he wheedles into the text- and the prose style is clunky beyond belief. Heard of run-on sentences, Luke? You need a decent editor.
April 28, 2023
A really unusual take on a time period that appears to be totally covered- until you read this.
Powerful, surprising, and rewrites the history books for all the right reasons.
A great insight that takes you through looking at this with a new lens.
Moving and refreshing.
Powerful, surprising, and rewrites the history books for all the right reasons.
A great insight that takes you through looking at this with a new lens.
Moving and refreshing.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews