5/18/2023 0 Comments Ww2 bomber crew storiesNumerous histories have been published recently about the British experience of war. It is the experience of the war by individuals and within popular culture that has really grabbed the attention of historians. The political history of the war has been hotly debated for many years, and has turned recently away from the seemingly endless discussions of why Labour won the 1945 General Election, to focus instead on how political ideas were understood within society and culture. Military history has declined in popularity relative to the rise of the social and cultural histories of the war. This trend has also been seen in academic history. These include Sarah Water’s The Night Watch (2006), Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl (2007), Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You (2009), and Gerald Woodward’s Nourishment (2010), as well as Day by A. Several have received, or been nominated for, major prizes, sold very well or have been subject to enormous critical response – and sometimes all three. (1) Numerous high-profile novels have been set against the background war in the last few years. This trend has been marked in recent literary fiction, and the war is also an increasingly popular backdrop to crime fiction. In particular, it is the experience of ordinary people in those extraordinary, but familiar, times that seems to captivate contemporary British culture. Whether it’s through television programmes, published diaries, or the ubiquitous designs influenced by the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster, stories of the wartime home front exert ever more allure. Tales of the blitz, evacuation and rationing dominate popular understanding of the war, and tales of El Alamein and Operation Market Garden, of bravery and derring-do from the fighting fronts, seem to have declined in importance. Yet in recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the war, at least if we go by the number of books written on it. Moreover, both are books that stay with the reader, leaving this one at least hugely impressed with two books which, taken together, seem to penetrate to the heart of the issue of the impact of war on those who fought it.Īt no point since 1945 could it be said that the Second World War was neglected within British culture. Both books show how the lives of airmen operated within these codes but also contradicted them, and as such are part of wider trends in the writing of history and historical fiction about the war. The codes emphasised bravery, self-sacrifice and commitment to building a better and more equal Britain and are part of a history of the war that is well established in the popular mindset. Probing individual and collective experiences, both The Flyer and Day investigate what it was like to live through a war which had codes of approved behaviour that are almost as familiar now as they were then. Rather than telling stories about fighting the war, they explain the consequences of fighting on the men that did it, how those men understood their wartime experiences, and how they interacted with others. They are both concerned with airmen serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, but focus on the place of those airmen within British culture and society. Yet it is the similarities between them that consistently strike the reader. One would naturally expect the two books under review, one a history published by an academic press and the other a novel, to be very different treatments of their chosen theme.
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