Despatches – Summer 2013

summer2013_cover_print 17/06/2013 14:28 Page 1

Secrets and spies

Despatches

summer2013_pp2-5_print 17/06/2013 14:29 Page 2

Support us and enjoy an exclusive pass to all five branches By joining IWM Friends you are giving invaluable support to a range of projects that will help future generations to understand the causes, course and consequences of war. In return you can enjoy: Unlimited free entry to IWM London paying exhibitions Horrible Histories: Spies opening on 29 July 2013 Free entry to IWM Duxford* Unlimited free entry to the Churchill War Rooms Unlimited free entry to HMS Belfast Despatches, the Friends magazine, delivered direct to your door Exclusive Friends events

To join or to purchase a gift membership please call us on 020 7416 5255 or visit iwm.org.uk/friends *except special events and airshow days at IWM Duxford Discounts and free admission are at the discretion of IWM and IWM Trading Company

2 n Despatches Summer 2013

summer2013_pp2-5_print 17/06/2013 14:29 Page 3

Despatches IWM MH 28306

Number 16, Summer 2013

Left: Ground crew of both sexes worked at Duxford during the Cold War. As Duxford veteran Jenny McRae remembers: ‘It was a different time as regards their attitude to women.

The majority did office jobs... but it was just beginning to open up for women to do more technical things’. See pages 20-21, ‘Story of an airfield’.

Cover picture: The WELROD: a one-shot silent killing weapon developed

by SOE at the Frythe Hotel, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. See pages 12-15, ‘Secrets and Spies’.

5 6 8 10 12 16 18 20 22

24

Comment Professor Sir David Cannadine, President, IWM Friends IWM Friends News Special Offers IWM News Secrets and spies Amanda Mason takes a closer look at the SOE IWM Contemporary Sara Bevan on a new film by the artist Omer Fast Behind the scenes Abigail Ratcliffe on IWM’s brand licensing initiative Story of an airfield Carl Warner offers an insight into the Historic Duxford exhibition Bricks, mortar, machinery and people Curator Claire Brenard previews Architecture of War, a new art exhibition at IWM London Acquisitions Stephen Walton reveals the story behind Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Hymn of Hate’

26 Essay: Dam Busters James Holland on the Dams Raid of 1943 30 Heroic but complex and flawed Geoff Simpson takes a closer look at Guy Gibson VC 33 The story behind the picture Hilary Roberts on Sean Smith’s photograph of the demolition of Saddam’s statue in 2003 34 Interview: Professor Sir Simon Wessely on the work of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research 37 Single spies and battalions Professor Martin Priestman takes a closer look at espionage in British fiction 42 Books 45 Shop 47 Friends Events 48 What’s On 50 And Finally Martin Brown, illustrator of the Horrible Histories series Summer 2013 Despatches n 3

summer2013_pp2-5_print 17/06/2013 14:29 Page 4

summer2013_pp2-5_print 17/06/2013 14:29 Page 5

Comment I am honoured and delighted to have been elected President of IWM Friends. I begin my first Comment by paying grateful tribute to my predecessor, Field Marshal Sir John Chapple, who brought to the post a lifetime’s distinguished military experience and public service at home and overseas, and whose commitment to the Friends and the Imperial War Museums were exemplary. He will be a hard act to follow.

I first visited the Imperial War Museum on one of my earliest trips to London, and like many boys of a certain age, I was thrilled by the weaponry that was on such abundant and exciting display. Only as I returned many times later did I come to appreciate that war was about death and destruction as well as glory and gallantry, and the IWM does an important job in conveying these varied and complex messages.

In more recent times, I found myself drawn into the work of IWM, serving as one of the external consultants when the Cabinet War Rooms were extended and developed into one of Britain’s foremost monuments to Sir Winston Churchill. The fiftieth anniversary of his death will be marked in 2015. There will be a wide range of commemorative events, and I look forward to working with Phil Reed on some of them.

One of the attractions of assuming the Presidency is that this is such an exciting – and challenging – time for both the Friends and the museum. It is exciting because the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War is not much more than twelve months away, the new First World War Galleries are scheduled to open in summer 2014, and this is but the first phase in an ambitious redevelopment programme.

Yet these are also very challenging times, too. Across the whole of the cultural sector, government funding has been cut in recent years; and it may well be cut again, while trusts and foundations are more hard-pressed than ever by museums and galleries across the country, which are finding it ever harder to make ends meet and to raise money for urgently-needed capital projects.

Like any such organisation, IWM needs all the Friends it can get, and I am delighted that we have committed to donate £50,000 a year, for four years, to cover the cost of the Your Country Needs You! display in the new First World War Galleries. This is serious friendship indeed, and I look forward to working closely with the Friends, the Director-General, the Trustees and the staff in the years ahead.

Lambeth Road, London, SE1 6HZ Registered Charity No. 294360 Telephone: 020 7416 5255 Email: friends@iwm.org.uk Website: www.iwm.org.uk/friends Honorary Members His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales His Royal Highness The Duke of York

Professor Sir David Cannadine President, IWM Friends

Patrons The Rt Hon the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury The Archbishop of Westminster The Chief Rabbi His Excellency the Secretary-General for the Commonwealth His Excellency the High Commissioner for Australia His Excellency the High Commissioner for Canada His Excellency the High Commissioner for India His Excellency the High Commissioner for New Zealand His Excellency the High Commissioner for Pakistan Her Excellency the High Commissioner for South Africa His Excellency the High Commissioner for Sri Lanka General Sir Peter de la Billière KCB KBE DSO MC and Bar DL Dr Alan Borg CBE FSA Field Marshal Sir John Chapple GCB CBE Sir Robert Crawford CBE Dr Noble Frankland CB CBE DFC Sara Jones, CBE, DL The Rt.Hon The Countess Mountbatten of Burma CBE CD JP DL Sir Harold Walker KCMG President: Professor Sir David Cannadine Friends Council Members Chairman: David Long Major General David Burden CB CVO CBE Emma Burrows Tony Hine Diane Lees FMA FRSA Donough O’Brien Professor Paul O’Prey Foster Summerson Marina Vaizey CBE Margaret Watson Head of the Friends: Victoria Thompson Membership Services Manager: Laura Whitman Founder: Air Commodore Dame Felicity Peake, DBE, AE Editorial Committee Chairman: Marina Vaizey CBE Lindsay Ball Elizabeth Bowers David Long Emily MacArthur Amanda Mason Professor Paul O’Prey Hilary Roberts Victoria Thompson Kieran Whitworth Despatches Editor: Victoria Thompson 020 7416 5372 Design: Smith+Bell www.smithplusbell.com Advertising and Print: George Young 020 7861 3915 To request additional copies or back issues call 020 7416 5372

Summer 2013 Despatches n 5

summer2013_pp6-9_friendsnews_offers_print 17/06/2013 17:33 Page 6

IWM FRIENDS NEWS

Our 26th AGM was held on 20 November 2012 at the Churchill War Rooms. The meeting was opened by our President ,Field Marshal Sir John Chapple, who welcomed the 140 Friends in attendance.

Sir John thanked the Friends Chairman, Council and staff and the Director General for all their work.

In his report our Chairman, David Long, thanked the Friends staff and praised their ‘friendly and energetic’ approach, and expressed his gratitude to Sue Coleman, IWM’s Director of Marketing and Development for her support. He echoed Sir John’s thanks to the Council and referred to a business plan which had been produced by Major-General David Burden.

Mr Long outlined the need to increase the number of Friends to enable the Society to give greater support to IWM and asked those present to help in this endeavour. He announced that the Society was in a position to give its largest grant to date to IWM and presented a cheque for £65,000 to Sir Francis Richards, IWM’s Chairman, who received it on behalf of IWM. £5,000 of the grant had been donated by Friends through our Your Country Needs You campaign.

The Chairman said that he was delighted to represent the Society and paid tribute to Field Marshal Sir John Chapple who would stand down as President at the end of the year and announced that he 6 n Despatches Summer 2013

(C) ANTONIO OLMOS

Friends give record grant at 26th AGM

After the AGM Jonathan Dimbleby gave a talk on the battle of El Alamein.

would be succeeded by Professor Sir David Cannadine.

David Sewell at haysmacintyre was re-appointed as Independent Examiner, and Tony Hine, an accountant and an IWM Friend since 2006, was elected as Treasurer.

Victoria Thompson, Head of IWM Friends, re-iterated the

Chairman’s thanks to the Friends for their continued support and said that since the Society was founded it had donated just under £450,000 to IWM. She warmly thanked the Friends’ volunteers for giving their time and their help for which she and the Council were immeasurably grateful.

In his address Sir Francis Richards outlined the important role which IWM would play in commemorating the Centenary of the First World War and referred to the Prime Minister’s recent visit to IWM in which he announced the government’s plans for the First World War Centenary, including funding of £5 million towards IWM’s new First World War Galleries. Sir Francis also highlighted the exhibitions at IWM London including Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War and A Family in Wartime.

He described two major projects at IWM Duxford – the Historic Duxford exhibition and the refurbishment of the American Air Museum.

Sir Francis said that the Churchill War Rooms had benefitted from a new entrance, but had seen a decline in visitors during the Olympics. HMS Belfast had launched the Gun Turret Experience, which was proving popular; and its new quayside entrance was scheduled to open by the end of the year.

IWM North had celebrated its tenth anniversary and had recently opened the exhibition Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict. Sir Francis thanked the Friends for the great support they give to IWM. After the AGM Jonathan Dimbleby gave a talk on the battle of El Alamein.

Joining the IWM Friends Council We invite applications from Friends to join our IWM Friends Council of Management, which governs the Society. The Council sets the Society’s vision and guides its direction, approves policies such as pricing and reserves, reviews risks, decides how funds donated to IWM are allocated, and ensures the charity complies with legal requirements.

Council members act as advocates both within and beyond IWM. Individual members also take a particular

interest in specific aspects according to their own personal qualifications and experience. The role of the IWM Friends Council is nonexecutive and voluntary. Staff employed by the Society develop and implement strategy and manage its dayto-day activities.

Applications are reviewed by the Friends Council of Management and approved candidates are nominated for election at an annual general meeting.

We wish to strengthen our

expertise in the areas of marketing and social media and special interest will be shown in candidates possessing these skills. We welcome applications from all interested parties.

To register your interest in joining the IWM Friends Council please send your CV and a personal statement to Victoria Thompson, Head of IWM Friends, IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ or email vthompson@iwm.org.uk. The closing date for applications is 31 August 2013.

summer2013_pp6-9_friendsnews_offers_print 17/06/2013 17:33 Page 7

IWM FRIENDS NEWS What does the First World War mean to you and why should we commemorate it?

Professor Paul O’Prey, Chairman of the Despatches Essay Competition Judging Panel, launches our IWM Friends essay competition.

As part of the IWM Friends commemorations for the First World War Centenary we shall be producing a special issue of Despatches in Summer 2014, in which all articles and essays will be First World War related.

We know that Friends have a keen interest in the First World War and many have a personal connection to someone caught up in it. We have therefore decided to launch a competition for articles and essays to be submitted on the subject of: ‘What does the First World War mean to you, and why should we commemorate it?’ There has been much discussion on this subject in the media, and we would like our Friends to join the debate.

We are interested in your opinion, whether it is based on

a personal or family connection, or the result of your own researches into the subject. Submissions must be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length. They will be read by our judging panel comprising myself, David Long, Chairman of IWM Friends; Marina Vaizey, Chairman of the Editorial Committee; Elizabeth Bowers, IWM’s Head of Publishing; Amanda Mason, an IWM Historian; and Victoria Thompson, Head of IWM Friends.

The winning entry will be published in Despatches and the writer will also receive a £50 voucher to spend in IWM’s shops. There will be two runners-up prizes of a selection of IWM books.

Please send all entries to Victoria Thompson, Head of IWM Friends, IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ or at vthompson@iwm. org.uk by 31 January 2014.

IWM Friends Appeal £250,000 – £240,000 – £230,000 – £220,000 – £210,000 – £200,000 – £190,000 – £180,000 – £170,000 – £160,000 – June 2013

£150,000 – £140,000 – £130,000 – £120,000 – £110,000 – £100,000 – £90,000 – £80,000 – £70,000 –

IWM Q 002756 / PHOTOGRAPHER: LT ERNEST BROOKS

£60,000 – £50,000 – £40,000 – £30,000 –

Your Country Needs You update We are delighted to announce that our IWM Friends First World War Centenary campaign has now raised more than half of the required funds to support the Your Country Needs You display in our new First World War Galleries.

Your Country Needs You will explore the recruitment campaign in both Great Britain and the Empire during the First World War and will look at how those who stayed at home did what they could to support their country.

To date we have raised £151,000 out of the required £250,000, £110,000 of which has been given in grants to IWM and the other £41,000 was donated by the Friends following a direct mail campaign. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has supported this campaign so far.

Every contribution, however large or small, will help us explain to our visitors why millions of people were driven to support the war effort in so many different ways. If you have not yet made a donation and would like to, please call us on 020 7416 5255 or visit: www.justgiving.com/ yourcountryneedsyou.

£20,000 – £10,000 – 0–

Left: A British soldier stands besides the grave of a comrade near Pilckem during the Third Battle of Ypres, 22 August 1917.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 7

summer2013_pp6-9_friendsnews_offers_print 17/06/2013 17:33 Page 8

SPECIAL OFFERS

Introduce a friend to the Friends and receive a free gift

Purchase a gift membership on 020 7416 5255 by 30 September 2013 and you will receive a gift from the following selection:

Bonzo’s War: Pets Under Fire 1939-1945

By Clare Campbell Courtesy of Constable and Robinson we have five copies of Bonzo’s War: Pets Under Fire 1939-1945 to give away. Thoroughly researched and deeply moving, Bonzo’s War gives fascinating account of, and a platform for, the forgotten stories as yet unheard, of the creatures great and small caught up in human conflict.

Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II

By Prit Buttar Courtesy of Osprey publishing we have five copies of Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II. Sandwiched between two hostile and aggressive nations, this new book tells the story of how three small countries – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – survived the battle for the Baltics.

Bully Beef and Boiled Sweets: Feeding British Forces for over 200 years

By James Mannion Constable and Robinson have also generously donated five copies of Bully Beef and Boiled Sweets: Feeding British Forces for over 200 years.

The book is a celebration of the achievements of the UK’s military chefs from 1707, through Waterloo and the two world wars to the present day.

Helmand: Diaries of Front-line Soldiers With a foreword by Simon Weston Osprey publishing are delighted to offer five copies of Helmand: Diaries of Frontline Soldiers. During their tour of Afghanistan in 2008 a few Royal Marines from 40 Commando kept personal diaries of their experiences of Afghanistan, their time in Helmand Province, their impressions of the war and their feelings towards the civilians they protected and the Taliban they fought. For the first time these diaries have been collected together to form a gripping account of what life is really like on the front line in modern warfare.

Special offers:

5% off Historical Trips

Save money on hotel bookings!

Historical Trips offer more than just battlefield tours.

Their historians outline the cultural and political contexts of historical events. In 2013 they will offer eight tours covering the various aspects of the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Spanish Civil War. These journeys range across Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Poland. IWM Friends are entitled to a 5% discount on tour prices. For further information please call 020 7993 6540 or email info@historicaltrips.com

We are happy to announce a new offer for IWM Friends that provides significant discounts on hotel rooms and other travel in the UK, Europe, the US and elsewhere. Booking a hotel in this way also helps IWM Friends financially through commission-sharing with travel providers. Please visit www.membertravelspecials.com/IWM.aspx to book your trip.

8 n Despatches Summer 2013

summer2013_pp6-9_friendsnews_offers_print 17/06/2013 17:33 Page 9

summer2013_pp10-11_IWMnews_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 10

RICHARD ASH

RICHARD ASH

IWM NEWS

HMS Belfast celebrates 75 years We celebrated the 75th Anniversary of HMS Belfast’s launch across the weekend of 15 – 17 March, beginning with an event on the ship attended by veterans, the Deputy Mayor of London, Above: Deputy Mayor of London, Victoria Borwick, receives a commemorative plaque on behalf of HMS Belfast, created by shipbuilders Harland & Wolff, from the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Alderman Gavin Robinson.

Victoria Borwick, and the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Alderman Gavin Robinson. Also on board were crew members of serving ship HMS Westminster. As part of the festivities, a Builders Plate was presented on behalf of Harland and Wolff, who built HMS Belfast.

HMS Belfast was launched on St Patrick’s Day 1938 by Anne Chamberlain, wife of the then Prime Minister; it was

IWM London update Work is well under way at IWM London to transform the atrium spaces and create our new First World War Galleries, opening summer 2014.

Throughout demolition works and the installation of new foundations, the Museum of London Archaeology Service has kept an eye on what has been coming out of the ground. Old wells have been uncovered (and covered up again) and in the area beneath the new café a large 10 n Despatches Summer 2013

Victorian plunge bath was discovered.

IWM London will partially re-open on 29 July 2013 with a family-friendly exhibition, Horrible Histories®: Spies, and IWM Contemporary, a new programme showcasing significant works by Right: Visitors to Horrible Histories: Spies will encounter this ‘Spy Rat’ in disguise.

and participated in a range of family activities and storytelling. Visitors were offered an opportunity to sit in the captain’s chair, and many watched the firing of the ship’s 4-inch guns.

The occasion was further enlivened by Irish-themed entertainment and food.

commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1939. From the 1930s onwards, the ship saw active service during the Second World War, taking part in the Battle of North Cape which saw the sinking of the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst.

The ship was also involved in the Normandy landings, reportedly firing one of the first shots on D-Day itself.

Veterans were on board the ship throughout the weekend

Above: HMS Belfast veterans gather on board along with sailors from HMS Westminster to celebrate HMS Belfast ’s 75th Anniversary.

leading artists in response to war and conflict. The first exhibition in this series is the film 5,000 Feet is the Best by Berlin-based artist Omer Fast, further details of which can be found on page 16.

Once we have partially opened, many of our free permanent galleries and exhibitions will also reopen. Returning will be A Family in Wartime, exploring what life was like at home during the Second World War, and Secret

War, delving into the world of espionage. The Lord Ashcroft Gallery: Extraordinary Heroes and the Holocaust Exhibition will also be back open as well as the exhibition Architecture of War (see pages 22-23), featuring works by some of Britain’s most significant twentieth century artists.

By summer 2014, our large objects, including aircrafts, tanks and artillery, will be back on display and the First World War Galleries and reconfigured atrium will open to the public, as well as our new shop and park-side café.

summer2013_pp10-11_IWMnews_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 11

IWM NEWS

Frontline medicine in action One of the objects on display in the exhibition Saving Lives: Frontline Medicine in a Century of Conflict, at IWM North until 28 August 2013, is a recently acquired shrapnel-scarred Land Rover ambulance. It was badly damaged in a rocket attack on the medical centre at Basra airbase in Iraq on 24 June 2007. It forms a powerful focal point to the display, emphasising how hazardous the life of both medics and soldiers can be on active service.

Amongst the visitors to the exhibition so far, Nicola Blake (pictured) found it even more powerful than most. She was stationed at the base as an emergency nurse with the Royal Air Force when the rocket struck. As the dust began to settle, she took photographs of

Sergeant Nicola Blake RAF showing the badge that denotes her role as an Emergency Nurse with a Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) helicopter, Afghanistan, 2010.

the aftermath of the blast and, along with her comrades, began to assess the damage.

Fortunately, no one was

seriously injured and the personnel in the area worked quickly to reorganise the medical centre so that it was ready for patients. Nicola has said of the experience, ‘It was very quickly patched up and sorted out, as if nothing had happened. Partly for morale but partly for practicality I went on shift later on that afternoon.

Next day everything was back to full working order’.

Nicola got in touch with IWM after visiting the exhibition. In January 2013 she came in to donate a series of photographs and videos, as well as to be interviewed, in association with IWM’s ongoing War Story project. This material gives a fascinating insight into her experiences up until leaving the military in late 2011, which have included deployments to

Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, she served as an emergency nurse on a Chinook helicopter as part of a Medical Emergency Response Team.

The material Nicola has donated will form part of IWM’s permanent national collection, informing exhibitions and also research into British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The series of photographs of the rocket attack will help to illustrate the incident that damaged the ambulance now on display. By collecting together this wide range of material – from large vehicles to photographs and eyewitness accounts – IWM is able to build up a more detailed picture of dramatic and complex events.

men and women from across Britain and the Commonwealth and saved their stories for future generations.

Diane Lees, Director-General of IWM has said of this groundbreaking project, ‘The Imperial War Museum was established while the First World War was still being fought to ensure that future generations would understand the causes and consequences of the war and to remember the men and women who played their role.

Now that the First World War is outside living memory, we are the voice of those veterans and the custodians of their stories – which we can now tell through Lives of the First World War’.

To watch a short film about the project, visit www.livesof thefirstworldwar.org

Help IWM tell eight million stories IWM has revealed its digital project for the First World War Centenary, Lives of the First World War. This innovative interactive digital platform will bring material from museums, libraries, archives and family collections from across the world together in one place, inspiring people of all ages to explore, reveal and share the life stories of those who served in uniform and worked on the home front.

The platform will go live later this year. By the end of the centenary we will have built a permanent digital memorial to more than eight million

Summer 2013 Despatches n 11

IWM HU 047912

summer2013_pp12-15_spies_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 12

IWM London reopens at the end of July 2013 with a new family exhibition based on the book Horrible Histories: Spies from the popular series of history books for children.

Historian Amanda Mason takes a closer look at the stories of some of those who feature in it.

12 n Despatches Summer 2013

IWM FLM 001250

SECRETS AND SPIES

Above: German three rotor Enigma machine.

Opposite page, top: An SOE signals station in the United Kingdom, c. 1944.

Opposite page, below: Still of SOE agent Jacqueline Nearne from the IWM film Now It Can Be Told, in which genuine SOE agents re-enacted their wartime roles.

Below: Foot print overshoes made for SOE agents in the Far East.

IWM EQU 012207

This year marks 20 years since the publication of the first Horrible Histories book. Since their launch, the range has expanded to more than 100 titles. Both IWM North and IWM London held successful exhibitions in 2008 and 2009 based on the Horrible Histories books Frightful First World War and Trenches Handbook.

Anyone who is familiar with aspects of undercover operations during the Second World War – particularly the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – might question whether the subject lends itself to a family exhibition. After all, many agents were captured, imprisoned in concentration camps or executed; there were violent reprisals on civilian communities. The SOE employed brutal tactics using any weapons at their disposal and resistance movements were involved in violent armed struggles.

However, the Horrible Histories books have been so successful exactly because they are not afraid of showing their young readers that history is full of horrible and unpleasant incidents. But they lighten the horror by using black humour cartoonstyle illustrations. This is an approach that is just as effective in an exhibition where visitors can see the historical objects from IWM’s collections in context.

The exhibition will also look at other secret activities such as signals intelligence and the work of the code breakers at Bletchley Park. It will include a wartime Enigma machine from our collections and the principles of its operation will be illustrated in a specially commissioned animated film, which will be projected alongside it in the gallery.

Codes and secret communications were vital in any successful clandestine operation. SOE developed different methods of passing on messages between agents and their home station. One of the more unusual forms of communication took place via the BBC. They broadcast messages personnels that consisted of specially pre-selected phrases to let agents or resistance organisations know that a certain event such as a supply drop or collection would take place.

The most important form of communication between SOE operatives in the field and their base was via radio (or wireless). Messages were sent in Morse code using a cipher and then decoded back at the base station. The exhibition

IWM COM 228

summer2013_pp12-15_spies_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 13

includes radio equipment used in the field and instructions for creating a cipher using a poem – a new acquisition to our collections. There is also an example of a ‘one time pad’, a silk sheet of code letters used as part of an enciphering system invented by SOE code specialist Leo Marks to improve SOE’s signal security.

There is an enduring fascination with the special equipment with which secret agents were issued. In 1941, SOE set up a dedicated research and development establishment in a country house called The Frythe near Welwyn in Hertfordshire.

This was known as Station IX and was where scientists and technicians developed a wide range of weapons and equipment to be used by SOE’s agents.

Among them were inventions which now appear so outlandish that they could be straight out of the pages of a novel. In fact, SOE had their own book listing all the equipment available for their agents; The Descriptive Catalogue of Special Devices and Supplies was first published in 1944 and revised in 1945 with additional material on camouflage techniques.

Some of the weapons and equipment developed were put into use straight away and proved highly effective. For example, the Welrod was a small 9mm handgun with a built-in silencer. It was known as the bicycle pump because of its distinctive appearance. The prefix ‘Wel-’ used for many Station IX inventions came from its geographical location. Other ‘Wel’ inventions included the Welbike miniature motorbike, the Welman one-man submarine and the Welfreighter submersible craft. The latter two were never used operationally. They were considered to be death traps by one former SOE operative who worked with these craft in the Pacific.

Other inventions developed for the use of SOE agents were more esoteric. ‘Sneakers’ were special overshoes for strapping on over boots to disguise the prints left by beach invasion parties. SOE’s sabotage specialists also devised numerous hiding places for explosives including statues, plaster fruit, fake animal droppings, torches and wine bottles. But the most well-known of these is probably the exploding rat – dead rats, hollowed out, filled with explosives and planted in factories. When thrown on the furnaces with other dead vermin, they would cause massive ‹ Summer 2013 Despatches n 13

14 n Despatches Summer 2013

Above: Wing Commander Forest Frederick Edward YeoThomas.

Below: Tear gas pen carried by YeoThomas.

IWM FIR 003683

‹ explosions, reducing Nazi war production. Unfortunately, a consignment of the rats was discovered before the plan could be tried out, but it encouraged paranoia among German factory workers who became unwilling to dispose of any rats, resulting in sanitation issues.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about clandestine operations are the agents themselves. What sort of person would or could do this sort of work? We can all try and imagine what it must be like to live a double life, keeping secrets from friends and family, but the constant fear of discovery and capture must have also put an almost unbearable strain on many agents working amongst civilian populations.

The original Horrible Histories: Spies book features some of the more wellknown personalities who worked either for SOE or as double agents operating undercover for MI5. For the exhibition we decided to focus on six key individuals whose stories visitors will discover in each section of the exhibition.

Among them is F F E ‘Tommy’ YeoThomas GC, codenamed ‘The White Rabbit’. He carried out three missions to occupied France, forging vital links with the Free French section of the Résistance. On his last mission he was betrayed and captured by the Gestapo. After enduring prolonged interrogation and torture he was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Despite being weakened by captivity, he was still determined to escape. First he managed to get transferred from Buchenwald by swapping identity with a dying prisoner.

After two further escape attempts he eventually reached American lines. He was awarded the George Cross for his ‘amazing fortitude and devotion to duty.’

Other SOE agents who feature include Harry Rée, a former conscientious objector and school teacher, who organised the sabotage of a car factory in France which was being used for German tank production. Another is David Smiley, who worked for SOE in Albania and later in the Far East. Shortly after arriving in Thailand in May 1945, he suffered from a nasty accident when an incendiary briefcase malfunctioned and exploded leaving Smiley with serious injuries. It was several weeks before he could receive medical treatment, by which time his burns had become infected

IWM HU 098898

summer2013_pp12-15_spies_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 14

and riddled with maggots. After being evacuated to India he made a full recovery from his injuries and was soon back in action.

During the Second World War, MI5 ran a successful network of double agents, known as the Double Cross system. Eddie Chapman was a petty criminal and safe cracker, imprisoned in Jersey before the war; he managed to get taken on by the German secret service as a spy.

In December 1942 he was dropped by parachute into the UK. He immediately gave himself up to the authorities and offered to become a double agent. Chapman’s biggest success came in 1944 when the Germans began attacking southern England with V-1 flying bombs. He passed on false information about where the bombs were landing. This contributed to the bombs being redirected away from central London.

IWM HU 056777

summer2013_pp12-15_spies_print 17/06/2013 14:30 Page 15

Above: The WELROD: a one-shot silent killing weapon developed by SOE at the Frythe Hotel, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.

IWM HU 061185

Below: The Special Operations Executive ‘demonstration room’ in the Natural History Museum. The display shows concealment of various materials in fake sugar beet and turnips.

Another of the Double Cross system’s star agents was Juan Pujol Garcia. He began his spying career in Lisbon independently by sending the German secret service fake reports about life in Britain – when in fact he had never left home. His successes convinced the British to bring him to the UK and integrate him into their spy network.

Pujol, codenamed Agent Garbo, played a key role in Operation ‘Fortitude’ – a deception plan intended to convince the German High Command in 1944 that the main Allied invasion forces would land in the Pas-de-Calais area of France rather than in Normandy.

The end of the exhibition will feature a wall of portraits of a number of SOE agents – many of whom were executed or killed during their service. This will act as a reminder that while we want visitors to enjoy the exhibition, we hope they will take away some understanding and appreciation of the bravery and sacrifice of the men and women who undertook such dangerous work.

Horrible Histories: Spies is not intended to be a definitive survey of Second World War espionage; it is a light-hearted look at some of the subject’s most engaging stories. But we hope that anyone coming to the subject for the first time through the exhibition will be inspired to find out more about the wartime work of the SOE and other secret services, and that they will take the opportunity to visit our Secret War exhibition as well, which will also reopen in July.

Horrible Histories: Spies opens on 29 July 2013 at IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ and is open every day (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm. Entry is free for IWM Friends; for further information and details of ticket prices for non-IWM Friends please visit www.iwm.org.uk.

From July – November 2013 IWM London, HMS Belfastand Churchill War Rooms will host a range of events and activities themed on the world of secret intelligence.

There will be a spy-themed Churchill Lecture Series and a ‘Secrets and Spies’ late event at the Churchill War Rooms. For further details see page 48 or visit www.iwm.org.uk Summer 2013 Despatches n 15

summer2013_pp16-19_omer-brand_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 16

Shifting viewpoints

Digital film stills from Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet is the Best, 2011.

16 n Despatches Summer 2013

IWM Contemporary, a new programme of contemporary art and photography exhibitions, will be launched at IWM London in July 2013.

IWM has a long history of commissioning, collecting and exhibiting contemporary art.

The artists responsible for many of the highlights of our First World War art collection were once the Young British Artists of their generation. A recent IWM commission was nominated for the Turner Prize and many commissions, alongside work from the contemporary collection, have been exhibited widely, both in the UK and abroad.

To build on this, at the end of July we will be launching a new contemporary art and photography exhibition programme, IWM Contemporary. Consisting of three exhibitions a year, the programme is aimed to increase the profile and discussion of contemporary visual responses to war and conflict and will include a variety of media, from installations and sculpture to documentary photography.

Opening the programme will be 5000 Feet is the Best, a 30 minute film by Omer Fast, originally shown at the 2011 Venice

summer2013_pp16-19_omer-brand_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 17

Omer Fast: 5000 Feet is the Best / 2011 / Digital Film Stills / Courtesy of the artist

IWM CONTEMPORARY

Curator Sara Bevan gives an insight into its first exhibition – 5000 Feet is the Best, a film by the Berlin-based artist Omer Fast.

Biennale. Fast is well-known for his explorations of the fickle relationship between reality and fiction, in which he invites the audience to consider how narratives within the media, cinema, and history are deliberately crafted and constructed. Much of his recent work is set within narratives of war and conflict. In this film he focuses on the controversial subject of drone warfare conducted with unmanned aerial vehicles controlled by remote pilots, used most recently in Afghanistan.

While researching this work, his initial attempts to meet drone operatives were thwarted when the FBI closed down his online advertisement, but he persisted and met one former pilot who was willing to speak to him. He conducted several interviews with the pilot, now a Las Vegas hotel security guard. These interviews form the basis for this film, which takes its name from the optimum height from which to

fire a missile from a Predator drone.

In the film, the pilot, his face blurred, recounts his experiences of flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan and the psychological impact of these missions.

Tales of war are heard while we view images of idyllic small-town New England, the contradiction provoking the viewer into questioning what they have seen. As the film progresses the ‘real’ interviews are inter-woven with scripted conversations with a fictional second pilot, derived from stories that the artist was told ‘off the record’. This pilot, avoiding the interviewer’s questions, begins to digress, telling three apparently unconnected anecdotes. The last of these is about an American family apparently going away for the weekend, but driving through what we are told are checkpoints manned by ‘occupying forces’.

Their journey is dramatically halted when their car is hit by a missile.

Through the disjuncture between the

visual story and the voiceover, Fast prompts us to question the certainty of our own security and our sense of distance from the war zone, which is all the more confused in the context of the drone. Throughout these interviews the pilot repeatedly interrupts the conversation to leave the hotel room as the narrative spirals and becomes increasingly disorientating.

With touches of humour, Fast presents us with an unnerving challenge to our perception of reality, melding fact and fiction. Without commenting directly on the ethical controversy surrounding drones, Fast raises interesting questions about the shifting nature of the experience and ethics of contemporary warfare.

Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet is the Best runs from 29 July 2013 to 29 September 2013 at IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, open every day (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 17

summer2013_pp16-19_omer-brand_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 18

BEHIND THE SCENES

IWM: responsible for a best-selling men’s product range at M&S

Denby used IWM’s poster collection for its range of mugs, coasters, trays and worktop savers.

Realm & Empire’s Autumn/Winter 2013 collection was inspired

by HMS Belfast and life at sea.

Abigail Ratcliffe of IWM London takes a closer look at IWM’s brand licensing initiative.

If this is a headline you never expected to see, then you will be equally surprised to learn that IWM’s brand licensing programme is growing year on year, with IWM-branded products becoming increasingly available online and on the high street. Our ‘Rally Round the Flag’ men’s product range, which was exclusive to Marks and Spencer and included a washbag, soap, shower gel and bath soak, sold out last Christmas.

Brand licensing is relatively new for IWM, but it will be familiar to anyone who has bought Star WarsLego, Hi-Tec’s National Trust hiking boots or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlerucksack. The principle behind it centres around sharing our brand values as the licensor (IWM’s reputation for quality and historical accuracy, our unparalleled collections and the expertise of our historians and curators) with respected commercial companies. The companies may be in any field (for example home furnishings, clothing, children’s games or stationery), and are experts in their own area, so there are mutual benefits to 18 n Despatches Summer 2013

sharing our competencies with theirs, and IWM earns royalties on every product sold. By partnering companies with strong, marketleading brands who understand and respect what IWM stands for, we have developed a range of licensed products which have been successful outside the museum.

Amongst our licensees are Denby, who have developed a range of housewares, including mugs, placemats, worktop savers and coasters; and Turtlemat, who have produced a range of doormats based around some of the posters in our collection.

We have a long-term relationship with Airfix and have developed sets inspired by our VC Collection, HMS Belfast and IWM Duxford. We have also launched ‘Brainbox’, a successful memory game for ages 8-16 featuring images from our collection, which is available nationwide.

One of the most interesting projects was developing a range of men’s clothing with R&E (Realm and Empire). Every licensee brings a new interpretation of the collections and the conversion of our

images into fashion has been done with respect and understanding. Each season’s collection is inspired by a different aspect of IWM, with the latest collection focusing on our naval stories. The photo shoot took place on HMS Belfast on a freezing cold January day.

As our brand licensing programme grows, new initiatives are developing alongside current successes. Our range of 2014 diaries and calendars with Francis Lincoln, Flametree and Salmons will be available this autumn in some IWM branches and on the high street. We will also be developing and extending our ‘Rally Round the Flag’ range with Marks and Spencer.

The First World War Centenary has increased our visibility, with organisations recognising the significance of our leadership of the anniversary and the value of our brand. In early 2014 we should start to see ranges of products inspired by posters and artwork of the time; so do look out for our products next time you go shopping.

summer2013_pp16-19_omer-brand_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 19

Story of an airfield

IWM DUX 000975

summer2013_pp20-21_duxford_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 20

IWM CH 1299

In March this year a new exhibition opened at IWM Duxford exploring its time as an airfield from 1918 to 1961 and telling the story of the men and women who lived and worked there. Carl Warner, IWM Duxford’s Research and Information Manager, takes a closer look.

(Left) Pilots of No. 310 (Czech) Squadron, which formed at Duxford in July 1940, in front of one of their Hawker Hurricanes.

Six of the pilots in this photograph did not

The Historic Duxford exhibition is the culmination of years of research into the history of our site. Sitting in Building 89, Duxford’s first Watch Office, it tells the story of the airfield and of those who worked there. Thanks to a two-decade long programme of interviewing veterans, we had a huge amount of material to work with.

Research conducted on our visitors informed us that they wanted to understand what people’s lives here were really like. They were also interested in learning as much about the domestic side of life on an RAF station as the working, technical side.

We therefore set about telling the story of Duxford as it was during its four decades of RAF service: a thriving, bustling military community of people with different perspectives on shared experiences.

‘I thought Duxford was a wonderful place! When I found out there were 20 n Despatches Summer 2013

survive the war.

Photographer, Mr R A Devon, Royal Air Force Official Photographer.

Spitfires, well that was it. There was nothing to work on like a Spitfire.’

Fred Roberts’ description forms part of the introductory area, where we show what veterans thought of the place when they arrived. From here, visitors can explore a chronological display depicting Duxford’s history as an airfield from 1918 to 1961.

RAF Duxford was created during the latter stages of the First World War. Its role was to train pilots. Between the wars, it became a fighter base, part of an RAF often described as ‘the best flying club in the world’. Visitors can hear George Unwin describe the scene on a replica 1930s telephone: ‘It was encouraged that you took an aeroplane away, so if you wanted to go away to see a pal of yours for lunch that was encouraged because it developed your map reading and navigation. And it was called the best flying club in the world, that’s all it was then.’

(Above) Included in the exhibition is a reconstruction of how Duxford’s Watch Office looked. This was the room from which flying was managed before the Control Tower was built.

(Right) Members of the WRAF operating the Duxford telephone switchboard in the 1950s.

RAF Duxford’s Second World War history is perhaps better known, and visitors can learn how Duxford’s Battle of Britain pilots, such as Richard Jones, coped with combat: ‘As a mere junior Pilot Officer sitting in his Spitfire going to meet the enemy, you looked around you and saw 65 to 70 Spitfires and Hurricanes. It gave you terrific confidence. Everyone suffers from fear, the person that tells you that he doesn’t feel, doesn’t worry about fear, he’s not normal. Everybody suffers from fear but you overcome it.’

A USAAF footlocker is unceremoniously dropped in the middle of our chronological display, indicating the arrival of the Americans at Duxford in 1943. Here, visitors can listen to some of their accounts before moving on to the final phase in Duxford’s operational history: the Cold War. This period saw many men do their National Service at RAF Duxford before the station’s eventual closure in 1961. It was a memorable time,

IWM MH 28316

summer2013_pp20-21_duxford_print 17/06/2013 14:31 Page 21

as Les Gange, a member of the Cold War ground crew, recalls: ‘In my room there was a guy who was doing an apprenticeship on the railways, to be a train driver. He was a magician, and you’d sit of an evening in the NAAFI and he would do tricks – fire eating! And there were all sorts of skills that these people brought. There were loads of characters.

We were always in a big crowd. It was a good time!’

Within the exhibition is a display entitled ‘Living and working at Duxford’. We developed this to show what life was really like here, and it focuses on the things that remained constant throughout Duxford’s history. It shows how the airfield’s people worked, rested and played, as Sir Dick Johns, one of Duxford’s Cold War pilots, explains: ‘It was an extremely comfortable life. It was so much fun. I loved the flying and so on because that was what I joined the Air Force to do but there was a super bunch of

people living in the mess. You would get your breakfast and you would go across the road to the Wing briefing room and you would have the morning briefing.

Then you would probably be finishing, if you were on day flying, at five-ish so back to the mess [for] tea – which would all be laid out in the ante room, some nice sandwiches. Then up to your room before dinner, because you had to be changed by seven o’clock in the evening. Have a bath, get changed, come back down, a glass of beer or whatever or go out to the local pub. If it was a Friday, someone would say, “Come on, let’s go down to London.”’

‘Duxford’s people’ is the part of the gallery that focuses on just seven of the tens of thousands of people who called Duxford home. It contains objects that had real personal significance for each of them. Representing Duxford’s First World War veterans is a generator propeller, given by an admirer as a token of affection to Muriel Vera Derby, a member of the

Women’s Royal Air Force. Camera equipment used in the early 1930s by ‘Sammy’ Sampson, an instructor with the Cambridge University Air Squadron, is displayed next to the actual film that he took at Duxford.

The Second World War collection includes medal groups belonging to two of Duxford’s pilots with very different backgrounds: the Eton-educated Douglas Blackwood, who commanded the Czechoslovakians of No. 310 Squadron, and the coal miner’s son George ‘Grumpy’ Unwin. Displayed next to these is the uniform jacket worn by Sir Douglas Bader, and an A2 flying jacket worn

by American Lawrence Casey of the Duxford-based 78th Fighter Group.

Duxford’s Cold War veterans are represented by Les Millgate’s flying helmet.

Les served at Duxford in the 1950s, and now volunteers at the museum, sharing his knowledge and memories of many years flying in the RAF and in civilian life.

We have used interviews to tell a rounded story of each person. So fellow pilot Gordon Sinclair, for example, can be found here discussing Bader: ‘I think Douglas Bader shoved things forward when he came to Duxford. He was a brilliant tactician; I don’t think he was a frightfully good strategist, because he rubbed everybody’s backs up the wrong way. That was his trouble really. I liked him, he was a great friend of mine and I liked him very much indeed. But he wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, there’s no doubt about that.’

We have tried to create an exhibition that illustrates what life at Duxford was really like for those who lived, worked and sometimes died here. We hope that the memories of people such as No. 264 Squadron Defiant gunner Fred Barker will encourage visitors to see the site in a different way, not just as a museum but as an airfield built for war: ‘There were twenty people in the Nissen huts. All gunners together. That was one of the tragedies. You’d go back to the hut, and after a few days you’d look around and ten or twelve weren’t there any more. It brings it home to you.’

Historic Duxford is a new permanent exhibition at IWM Duxford, Cambridgeshire CB22 4QR, open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm (until 26 October 2013), 10am to 5pm (27 October 2013 to 14 March 2014).

Summer 2013 Despatches n 21

summer2013_pp22-23_architects_print 17/06/2013 14:32 Page 22

Bricks, mortar, machinery and people Curator Claire Brenard previews Architecture of War, a new art exhibition opening in July at IWM London adversity. More personal responses are represented by Priscilla Thornycroft’s ‘Oh I Was Very Lucky’, London, 1944 (1979), a darkly humorous take on the Blitz spirit; or Keith Vaughan’s Echo of the Bombardment (1942), an expression of the mental strain endured by people living with the threat of air raids.

The next section explores cities, mainly focussing on images of Berlin, Belfast and London. Included are drawings of the Berlin Wall made twenty years apart by Ronald Searle and Paul Hogarth, an example of the built environment having a direct impact on people’s lives. Works about 1980s Northern Ireland express the atmosphere and character of cities in conflict: Anthony Davies’s exuberant marchers and bandsmen; and Kieran McCann’s defiant yet stark images of murals. Peter Kennard and Eric Rimmington present very different ways to express anxiety about nuclear proliferation in 1980s London.

In the last room there is a series of interior scenes showing confined or protective spaces such as shelters, huts and control rooms. The threat from outside hangs over many of these places. More desolate scenes

include Angus Boulton’s photograph of an abandoned Soviet military base in East Germany (2000) and David Baxter’s muted watercolour The Dining Room, Hotel Christol, Boulogne (c.1918). Although they share an atmosphere of quiet emptiness, this has arisen for different reasons. Baxter’s dining room is only temporarily deserted, suggesting that action is happening elsewhere, outside.

The pictures featured in the exhibition have been chosen to echo each other visually, from the strong diagonals of belts and girders in the first section to the repeated motif of the square of light emanating from a central doorway in the interiors section. Starting with the energy of mass production, progress through the galleries takes in the chaos and alienation of war before entering the more confined space of the final room. Whether reaching this area feels more comforting or more alarming will be up to the viewer to decide.

Architecture of War runs from 29 July 2013 until 5 May 2014 at IWM London, Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ, open every day (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm.

Above: Paul Hogarth’s US Military Police Patrol Near Checkpoint Charlie, US Sector, Berlin 1981.

22 n Despatches Summer 2013

Above: Priscilla Thornycroft’s ‘Oh I Was Very Lucky’, London 1944, 1979.

Right: CRW Nevinson’s Making the Engine, 1917.

IWM ART 691 a

IWM ART 15295

IWM ART 17476

To coincide with IWM London’s reopening, there will be a new exhibition exploring the impact of modern warfare on the places people inhabit and build. All the works have been selected from IWM’s exceptional art collection and span almost a century of British art, from the First World War to the present day. The far-ranging effect of conflict on civilian life is exemplified in images of factories, ruins and divided cities, made in a variety of different media.

The exhibition begins with images of construction. Here artists offer insights into the scale and atmosphere of workplaces, fortifications and machinery specifically built for war. Works by CRW Nevinson (1917), Roland Pitchforth (c.1941) and Margaret Abbess (c.1943) give us a sense of the purpose and energy of a war effort that absorbs civilians into munitions and aircraft manufacture. In these images the people are subordinate to the machines they operate.

The second room addresses destruction, drawing from a wide range of responses to this subject in the collections. Artists use images of ruins to express the chaos of war or represent resilience in the face of

summer2013_pp22-23_architects_print 17/06/2013 14:32 Page 23

summer2013_pp24-25_acquisitions_print 17/06/2013 14:32 Page 24

ACQUISITIONS

Ernst Lissauer and his ‘Hymn of Hate’, 1914 Stephen Walton, of IWM’s Department of Documents, reveals the story behind Ernst Lissauer’s 1914 poem, ‘Hymn of Hate’.

In September 2011 IWM received an email from a member of the public, offering for purchase what was described as an original manuscript draft of the famous ‘Hymn of Hate’ (Hassgesang gegen England), penned at the beginning of the First World War by the German-Jewish poet and writer Ernst Lissauer.

Following protracted deliberations, background investigation and a visual 24 n Despatches Summer 2013

inspection, the purchase was agreed and concluded in March 2012 and IWM came into possession of what may well be the only extant handwritten draft of this poem, the stark title and message of which still has a widespread popular resonance and encapsulates for many the ugliest aspects of war propaganda. And yet, whilst the ‘Hymn of Hate’ continues to enjoy a measure of notoriety, its author has to a large extent been consigned to obscurity.

Ernst Lissauer was for most of his literary career a prolific and highly-regarded poet and writer in the best traditions of German-Jewish humanism (as witnessed by the extensive Lissauer Collection now in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute,

New York). However, his last years were overshadowed by controversy, vilification and self-doubt, a direct consequence of this one poem with which his name became almost exclusively associated in his own lifetime.

The message of Lissauer’s ‘Hymn’ is in many respects as crude and immediate as a hammer blow, and spoke directly to the frenetic jingoism of large sections of the German populace in the early months of the war, a state of mind inflamed (and perhaps largely manufactured) by the popular press and other organised public voices. The literary creation is firmly subordinated to the uncompromising message it was written to convey:

summer2013_pp24-25_acquisitions_print 17/06/2013 14:32 Page 25

“The message of Lissauer’s ‘Hymn’ is in many respects as crude and immediate as a hammer blow, and spoke directly to the frenetic jingoism of large sections of the German populace in the early months of the war, a state of mind inflamed (and perhaps largely manufactured) by the popular press and other organised public voices.”

We will never forego our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions choking down.

We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe and one alone...

ENGLAND! Lissauer did not write this poem as an official commission for the German propaganda machine, although one would be forgiven for assuming so.

According to his own later account, it was produced more or less spontaneously from deep patriotic feelings and he had no notion that it would become such a popular success. However, no sooner had it appeared in print than it became a potent weapon in the war of words, copies of it being widely distributed to German troops, printed in newspapers and school textbooks, being set to music and sung in concert halls and theatres across the country.

Such was its popularity and impact that Lissauer was honoured with the Order of the Red Eagle, a prestigious state decoration, from the hand of Kaiser Wilhelm II and became a national hero overnight. Translations of the poem soon appeared in the foreign press, and so it achieved international prominence as well (the most popular English translation still used today was originally printed in the New York Times in October 1914).

A close personal acquaintance of Lissauer was Stefan Zweig, one of the most influential and celebrated AustrianJewish writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In Zweig’s

autobiography, The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern), published in 1942, Lissauer features amongst the pantheon of German writers and poets who ‘felt themselves obliged, like the bards of the ancient Germans, by songs and runes to inflame the advancing warriors with enthusiasm for death’. For Zweig, Lissauer was ‘the most typical and most moving case of such honest and at once insane ecstasy [....]. Germany was his world and the more Germanic anything was, the more it delighted him [....]; like so many Jews whose families had entered German culture late, he had more faith in Germany than the most devoted of Germans’.

According to Zweig, the poet was devastated at being rejected for military service at the outbreak of war and resolved to employ his literary talents in the service of his fatherland’s war effort.

The most effective product of this decision, the ‘Hymn of Hate’, ‘exploded like a bomb in a munitions depot’. It both caught the popular mood and helped to inflame it even further, holding perfidious England up as the arch-adversary which was plunging Europe into war with its cultural and diplomatic arrogance. As Lissauer wrote at the beginning of the poem: French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot!

We love them not, We hate them not …We have but one and only hate... ENGLAND! Zweig commented, ‘[it] was soon fatefully apparent how easy it is to work up hatred’, and it took not much longer ‘for it to become apparent how terrible a disaster had been caused by these songs

in praise of war and orgies of hatred’.

Perhaps most poignant (and shocking) is Zweig’s opinion that in writing his litany of hate, ‘this blinded, fat little Jew, Lissauer, anticipated Hitler’s example’. Stefan Zweig took his own life in 1942, the same year in which his autobiography was first published, in exile in Brazil. He had fled there to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews and the horrors which Hitler was inflicting on his beloved Europe – a victim of the many hatreds which, some thirty years previously, his friend Lissauer had been instrumental in propagating.

Ernst Lissauer himself died in relative obscurity in Vienna in 1937, the year before Hitler’s armies marched into Austria to popular acclaim. In many respects he was himself in exile from the Germany he loved, a sad and lonely figure wrestling with the demons he had raised in 1914 and which had subsequently made him an object of contempt across the political and cultural spectrum. In a poem written a year before his death, Lissauer gave voice to his sense of fractured identity: O people, my people! Which people, then, is now mine?

Like a basket full of history’s stones I drag the burden of two peoples along.

To the German a Jew, got up as a German, to the Jew German, unfaithful to Israel...

Elsewhere he stated, more simply, that rather than writing a hymn of hate for England he would have done far better to write a hymn of love for Germany. It was just as well that Lissauer did not live to see the results for Germany, and the world, of Nazi nationalist and racial hate, which far surpassed any apocalyptic scenario predicted in 1914.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 25

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 26

ESSAY

Remembering the Dam Busters

To coincide with its seventieth anniversary, historian James Holland takes a closer look at the Dams Raid.

the reality. The Dams Raid was more exceptional than the film ever suggested. The science was more impressive, the politics behind it more fascinating and nuanced, and the decision to approve the project certainly more astounding than many might appreciate. The human drama was also richer, more absorbing – and more tragic – than the film ever managed to portray.

The recent seventieth anniversary commemorations of the Dams Raid have been extraordinary: vast amounts of newspaper and magazine coverage, radio and television programmes, and numerous fly-pasts. Rarely has the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight been more busy. Yet as I stood in Lincoln Cathedral during two minutes’ silence in the middle of the special commemoration service on 17 May, I was suddenly conscious how little was still known of those 133 men who took off from RAF Scampton that night of the raid. They had become ‘the Dambusters’, the ‘brave aircrews’, but as a body of men, not individuals. How many can most people name today? Gibson and a few others? Five, maybe? Ten at a push?

Who now, for example, remembers Flight Lieutenant Charlie

IWM CH 13618

IWM CH 9687

It is still the most famous air raid of all time: 133 men, in nineteen Lancasters, flying low-level, at night, into Nazi Germany to destroy key enemy dams using a bomb that bounced across water. A few days later, newspapers all over the world were full of pictures of the breached Möhne and Eder Dams, of the vast floods, and of accounts of the raid. Guy Gibson, who led the raid, was awarded the Victoria Cross and he and the others fêted unlike any bomber crews before or since.

Later, in 1955, came the film, and it is this more than any book or documentary that sealed the raid in our public consciousness.

It is still regularly repeated on television, and the DVD a permanent fixture on the shelves of many of us. It’s a terrific film too, yet what struck me when I began my research into Operation ‘Chastise’ a few years ago was how much it fell short of

26 n Despatches Summer 2013

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 27

Pictured opposite page: Portrait of Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, 1944. Picture

by Royal Air Force Official Photographer Stannus (F/O).

Williams, radio operator on Norm Barlow’s aeroplane? Williams was an Australian, the second son of a cattle farmer from northern Queensland. Williams need never have joined up at all, but like so many from around the Dominions, he volunteered and found himself sailing half-way around the world, via the United States and Canada, to reach England and join Bomber Command.

At 32, he was older than most, and strikingly good-looking.

Williams had never married, but had been planning to in the promised leave following the raid; a few months earlier he had fallen madly in love with an English girl called Gwen Parfitt; before Williams joined 617 Squadron, he had been based at Syerston, closer to Nottingham, where Gwen lived and worked. During his training for the raid, their opportunities for meeting were rare, and telephone calls, laboriously put through an exchange and distorted by static, were far from ideal. Instead, they wrote to each other almost daily. Williams’ letters are now to be found in the IWM archives, largely forgotten; when I first looked at them, it was clear they had been unread for years.

Below: Aerial reconnaissance photograph showing the breach in the Möhne Dam caused by No 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force’s raid on 16 May 1943. Picture by Fray, J (F/O), No. 542 Squadron RAF.

Unsurprisingly, they tell us little about the raid, but they are rich in small, human details – his irritations and frustrations, his joys and interests, his anxieties, and above all, his love for his girl, leap off every page. Gwen was an only child and her parents were understandably upset that she wanted to marry this Australian airman; they knew they would lose her once the war was over – she planned to follow Charlie back home. However, just a week before the raid, they gave the couple their blessing.

In the days before the raid, he sensed it was imminent; he could not tell her much about it, but promised that once it was over, he would get some precious leave and then they could be married.

Just two hours before taking off on that lovely sunny Sunday, 16 May, Charlie Williams sat at his desk in his room in the Mess at Scampton and wrote once more to Gwen. ‘Well, cheerio for now, Darling,’ he signed off, ‘and believe me when I say I love you very dearly and always will.’

Less than two hours later, at 9.28pm, Charlie Williams was in the crew that first took off for Operation ‘Chastise’. They successfully crossed the North Sea, flew over Holland and had just reached the German border when they collided with some power cables.

Immediately, the Lancaster plunged to the ground, hitting a field and erupting into a ball of flames. Charlie Williams and all on board were killed.

Then there is John Fraser, 19, newly married and, like Charlie Williams, a long way from home. From Vancouver, Canada, Fraser’s letters home also reveal much of the young man he was.

They are full of small but telling observations: impatience one moment, extraordinary sensitivity the next, and a sense of bewilderment and wonder at how different England is from home. Fraser was the bomb-aimer on John Hopgood’s crew, but joined 617 Squadron late, on 22 April, only three and a half weeks before the raid; they were supposed to all have at least two months. Hopgood, 21, was a friend of Gibson’s and had served under him when the latter had been CO of 106 Squadron. In the film, Gibson appears to hand-pick the entire squadron, but in reality, nothing could have been further from the truth. Gibson personally knew three of his pilots, had briefly met a fourth, and was aware of a fifth. The rest were all strangers to him before they joined the new squadron.

Gibson not only liked Hopgood, he trusted him too, which was why he chose him to carry out the third run on the Möhne Dam, the most important of the targets and the only one to be defended with anti-aircraft guns. This third run, however, was possibly the most dangerous: the gunners defending the dam now knew what was happening, and had got their aim. What’s more, although Hopgood and his crew had plenty of bombing operations under their belts, they had amongst the least training for this particular mission of all the 617 Squadron crews.

Operation ‘Chastise’ called for very different skills.

No longer would they be flying at 18,000 feet or more and scattering bombs over a wide target; this mission required them to fly at around a hundred feet, at night, with only moonlight to ‹ Summer 2013 Despatches n 27

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 28

The breach in the Möhne Dam four hours after the Dam Busters raid in May 1943.

‹ show the way and their skills in basic navigation to help them.

The latest navigational aids would not work at such heights; and to climb higher and use them was to risk being picked up by enemy raiders, night-fighters and flak. Once at the target – if they managed to get there – they had to drop the rotating bouncing bomb (codenamed ‘Upkeep’) on a proverbial sixpence.

John Fraser had only been with 617 Squadron six days before they were given 48 hours leave and then he promptly became ill with impetigo and was hospitalised for five days. I reckon he had just over a week’s training before he took part in the real thing.

Hopgood’s navigator, Ken Earnshaw, meanwhile, only joined the squadron on 30 April. There was almost an inevitability about the shooting down of Hopgood’s plane. Third to attack the Möhne, flak hurtling towards them, they were struck just as young John Fraser released the Upkeep. Hopgood, his plane rapidly turning into in inferno, thundered over the dam, banked and tried to climb. Three men managed to jump out – Fraser one of them – before the stricken Lancaster crashed and exploded into fragments on the hillside a mile to the north of the dam. Fraser was later captured and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war; only one other survived. In the distribution of medals handed out following the raid, neither Hopgood nor any of his crew were acknowledged, posthumously or otherwise, yet if any crew had been given a suicide run, it had been them; Hopgood had suspected as much before the start of the raid.

The Möhne was eventually breached by the fourth Upkeep dropped by ‘Dinghy’ Young’s crew. Young was 27, bright, goodlooking and married to an American wife. He was new to the Lancaster, having spent the early years of the war in Coastal Command and then in the Mediterranean. Young had twice ditched his aircraft into the sea, taking to his rubber life boat – hence the nickname; he had also rowed for Oxford in the Boat Race. After a brief and successful stint as a staff officer in the Middle East, Young had returned to England, been posted to 57 Squadron at Scampton, and then, along with all the squadron’s C Flight, been moved across to 617, where he became a flight commander. While Gibson was endlessly called upon to attend meetings, demonstrations and briefings, it was Young who took charge of the day-to-day training and organisation of the new squadron.

After breaching the Möhne, both Young and Gibson helped lead the remainder of the first wave to the next major target, the Eder Dam. This was around 45 miles further east and although it was not defended, presented enormous difficulties for the attackers. High, wooded hills surrounded the narrow lake, while only two-thirds of a mile from the dam wall, a large spit curved round. Somehow, the crews had to drop down through a narrow gorge, then turn ninety degrees past the spit, level out at sixty feet and drop the Upkeep at precisely the right spot. The Lancaster weighed 30 tons, the bomb a further four, and it was rotating at 500 rpm, creating an intense giro effect that ensured turning would be even harder. On top of that, the wings were 28 n Despatches Summer 2013

IWM HU 4594

ESSAY

102 feet wide and tilted as the Lancaster banked to port on the turn past the spit. To say this was a very difficult manoeuvre was something of an understatement.

There were three armed Lancasters left for this attack, and both Henry Maudsley’s crew and that of David Shannon failed to create a breach. Australian Les Knight’s crew were the last chance, yet in what must rank as one of the most astonishing pieces of flying in the entire war, Knight somehow brought the great beast around and in the right spot, where the bomb was successfully released. Moment’s later, a tsunami-like flood was gushing down the valley from the breach. Knight and Shannon made it back, but Maudsley and his crew came down on the route back, as did ‘Dinghy’ Young’s plane, just as they crossed the Dutch coast. A few yards to the right or left, or just a little bit lower, and perhaps they would have been all right. All were lost.

And what of Gibson himself? In the film, Richard Todd – who had parachuted into France on D-Day – plays Gibson as square-jawed and imperturbable. In truth, Gibson was far more complex. By March, when he left 106 Squadron having commanded it for nearly a year, he was physically and mentally drained. Aircrew in Bomber Command were expected to complete a first tour of 30 operations and then, after a second of a further 20, it was felt

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 29

IWM TR 1128

617 Squadron at Scampton, Lincolnshire, 22 July 1943. Picture by ‘Royal Air Force Official Photographer’.

they had done their bit. By March 1943, Gibson had already flown 72 bomber operations and a further 90 as a night-fighter pilot.

As a young boy, he had shown no obvious promise; at school he had neither shone academically nor demonstrated much sporting prowess. In the air, he suffered repeated bouts of intense fear; after one operation back in January 1943, he had shaken uncontrollably for several minutes. Yet he had led 106 Squadron not only by example but by showing a ‘press-on’ attitude that had impressed Air Marshal Arthur Harris no less, now commander-in-chief of Bomber Command.

When he had been asked to take command of a new squadron for one special mission in mid-March, he had only just left 106 Squadron, was still just 24, and had had no leave that year. Despite being at the tipping point of complete mental and physical collapse, he took the job, and shouldered the huge burden of responsibility without complaint. He helped organise the squadron, attending endless meetings at Group HQ, made trips to see Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, watched trials of the weapon, and still found just about enough time to train for the operation. Suffering from gout, the medical officer recommended he be grounded, but Gibson laughed this off.

On the raid itself, he once again led from the front. Reaching the Möhne Dam, he flew a dummy run, then made the first attack himself and subsequently made a further five runs in an attempt to draw fire from those making the actual attack. With the Möhne breached, he then led and was the first aircraft to reach the Eder Dam, despite the valley mists that were making navigation so exceptionally difficult. With the Eder breached, he then led the remainder of the first wave back home again.

It was a truly exceptional performance that required Gibson to dig into the very depths of his soul and call on his last reserves of strength. What makes his part in the Dams Raid so especially impressive is that he achieved this in spite of exhaustion, illness and an all-but empty bank of personal bravery. If ever a pilot deserved a Victoria Cross, it was Gibson for his performance that night.

Seventy years on, we should remember not only the raid itself, but also the men that flew it: men like Gibson, but also the forgotten heroes too – like John Fraser, or those like Charlie Williams, who along with 52 others, never came back. Theirs is a story more extraordinary even than Hollywood.

Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the Dams, 1943 by James Holland is available in paperback priced £7.99.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 29

IWM TR 001125/ROYAL AIR FORCE OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 30

Wing Commander Guy Gibson pictured sitting in a poppy field reading a book, 22 July 1943.

Heroic but complex and Geoff Simpson, a former IWM Friends Council member and author of Guy Gibson: Dam Buster, takes a closer look at the hero of the Dams Raid There were many heroes amongst the Dam Busters, as they were quickly dubbed, but inevitably the bulk of the attention has focussed on 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the leader of the attack.

Gibson was a complex and flawed hero, yet his achievement was immense in raising the squadron from scratch, training it for a frightfully difficult task in a very short period and then leading the operation.

Guy Gibson was, of course, awarded the Victoria Cross. Throughout the history of the VC there has been debate over the relative value of ‘hot-blooded’ and ‘coldblooded’ deeds. Gibson had a very good idea of what he would face, long before he took off. Over the Möhne lake he coldbloodedly flew his aircraft towards antiaircraft fire to distract the gunners as other Lancasters attacked.

Opinions about the adult Gibson were rarely neutral. His childhood had been 30 n Despatches Summer 2013

Guy Gibson VC

fractured by the break up of his parents’ marriage. A great influence on him was the Cornish village of Porthleven where his maternal grandparents lived. In ‘Port’ as the locals call it, he spent much time with the fishermen.

At St Edward’s School, Oxford and in his pre-war RAF service he showed scant evidence that he would become a high achiever. He was clearly someone who, to an extreme degree, failed to understand the impression he made, so popularity often eluded him.

Gibson was a man for war. He was brave; tough, even brutal, with his subordinates when they did not meet his standards; and not a brilliant pilot, but a ‘press-on’ type in the speech of the day. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the long-term leader of Bomber Command, liked ‘fire-eaters’ to command squadrons and Gibson was that type too.

It was possible to be close to Gibson, if you were successful, appealed to him socially (which meant not being an intellectual for one thing) and preferably were an officer and a pilot. He greatly enjoyed the company of women, but often did not respect them as contributors to the war effort.

Those not admitted to Gibson’s circle created nicknames, not for his ears, that included ‘The Arch Bastard’ and ‘The Boy Emperor’.

Guy Gibson suffered much frustration after the success of Operation ‘Chastise’.

He was largely kept off ‘ops’, to his great displeasure. He made a propaganda tour of Canada and the United States, and wrote a book, Enemy Coast Ahead – some dispute the extent of his authorship, but there is much evidence of his involvement. He was given ground jobs he didn’t want and he seems to have become more arrogant. He died needlessly, in far from explained circumstances, having gained permission to act as Master Bomber on a raid in September 1944.

Seven decades on he remains, deservedly, one of the great RAF symbols of the Second World War. Guy Gibson : Dam Buster, published by Pen & Sword, is available in hardback priced £19.99. ISBN 9781781590553.

summer2013_pp26-31_dambusters_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 31

summer2013_pp32-33_story-picture_print 17/06/2013 15:24 Page 32

summer2013_pp32-33_story-picture_print 17/06/2013 15:24 Page 33

GUARDIAN NEWS & MEDIA / SEAN SMITH

THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURE

A new exhibition at IWM North by the award-winning British photographer Sean Smith marks the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. Smith was sent to Iraq by the Guardian in January 2003. In the weeks before the war began on the evening of 19 March 2003, he documented Iraqi people enjoying social events and weddings while preparing for war.

Smith stayed on in Baghdad throughout the ensuing Allied campaign, photographing the devastating impact of the conflict on civilians. He returned to Iraq several times during the subsequent insurgency, working as an embedded photographer with US and British armed forces.

The photographs depict the collision between the two worlds in which local civilians and overseas military personnel were forced to co-exist. The story of the complex relationship between these two communities – sometimes touching, sometimes tragic – is told through Smith’s own words and images.

One of Smith’s best known photographs of the conflict shows the demolition of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square

Hilary Roberts, Head Curator of IWM’s Photograph Archive, on the Demolition of Saddam’s Statue, Firdos Square, Baghdad, 9 April 2003 (2003) by Sean Smith. in Baghdad on 9 April 2003. As US troops moved into the city, Iraqis celebrated by vandalising the many public portraits, statues and other monuments to Saddam.

This statue, which was originally erected in honour of Hussein’s 65th birthday in 2002, was located close to the Palestine Hotel, the headquarters of the international press corps. Its destruction, widely reported, has become synonymous with the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The Iraqis initiated the toppling of the statue, attacking the plinth with a sledgehammer and putting a noose around the statue’s neck. However they were unable to pull it down until American marines moved in with an M88 armoured recovery vehicle to finish the job.

Sean Smith’s memory of the occasion is as follows:

‘A month into the conflict, rolling newsfeeds were desperate for a defining moment. In truth, Saddam’s statue being pulled down was a hollow moment as a) it was pulled down by US troops, and b) it was heavily reported by the media as it took place in Firdos Square, in front of the hotel we were all staying in.

The soldiers looked really nervy. Initially, they tried to put a US flag over its face, but the few people who were there started shouting, so they pulled it down. The soldiers nearly fired at the hotel, believing reporters on the roof might be snipers. So when I took this, I wasn’t trying to picture the toppling of a regime, I was showing how jumpy the troops were. That same squadron actually came and kicked our hotel room doors down the next day. I told them “You could’ve knocked.”’

Iraq: Photographs by Sean Smith is on display until 2014 at IWM North, The Quay, Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1TZ. Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am to 6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am to 5pm (1 November to 28 February).

Summer 2013 Despatches n 33

summer2013_pp34-35_wessely_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 34

INTERVIEW: PROFESSOR SIR SIMON WESSELY ‘A colleague and I set up the first large scale studies of UK Gulf War veterans comparing them with service personnel who had served elsewhere. Over 8,000 male and female serving and ex-serving personnel agreed to give us information’ Professor Sir Simon Wessely is the chair and head of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London. Professor Wessely’s research expertise is in the area of epidemiology, the study of illness in populations.

He set up one of the first largescale studies of UK Gulf War veterans and is a co-director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research.

In 2006 the King’s Centre published the results of a study of the physical and psychological health of 12,000 UK military personnel, half of whom had served in Iraq. In 2010 a further study was conducted with those who had taken part in the earlier study to look at the longer-term impact of serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

34 n Despatches Summer 2013

What did your research into Gulf War Syndrome entail and what were your findings?

Shortly after the cessation of hostilities, reports started to emerge from the United States of clusters of unusual illnesses occurring amongst Gulf War veterans.

Claims were made that previously fit veterans had developed unusual illnesses, diseases and symptoms. The same sequence of events happened in the UK. Using my background in epidemiology, a colleague and I set up the first large scale studies of UK Gulf War veterans comparing them with service personnel who had served elsewhere. Over 8,000 male and female serving and ex-serving personnel agreed to give us information about their health and well-being via a mailed questionnaire. The Gulf veterans were more likely to report each of the 50 symptoms we asked about. They also reported them at greater intensity. This was conclusive evidence that something had affected the health of the UK Gulf veterans.

Our study looked at what differentiated those who had problems from those who did not. We found it did not matter which branch of the armed forces you served with, nor what your job or task was.

Reserves had the same risk as regulars, as did women compared to men. Exposure to depleted uranium (DU) munitions was often cited as the cause of ill health in Gulf personnel. But exposure was largely restricted to those in armoured brigades and also Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), who deal with combat damaged military vehicles, yet this was not a risk factor for illness.

Another possible cause of illness was exposure to organophosphate (OP)

pesticides, used during the Gulf campaign to reduce the threat of insect-borne diseases. However, detailed studies of the nervous system of Gulf War veterans made it unlikely that poisoning by organophosphate pesticides had occurred. We did find that psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had doubled in Gulf veterans, but the actual level of psychiatric disorders in those serving elsewhere was not high. That did not mean that psychological factors played no role in their health problems. Classic psychiatric disorders such as PTSD are not the only outcome of prolonged stress or fear.

There was a real threat posed by chemical weapons before the Gulf War and during the campaign itself there were several thousand documented chemical alarm alerts. So it was possible that a part of the ill health experienced after the Gulf campaign was triggered by anxiety caused by chemical weapons.

Before the Gulf War, service personnel were offered vaccination against plague and anthrax, both of which are potentially lethal biological weapons. The anthrax vaccine was also given with pertussis vaccine, the whooping cough vaccine.

There was a small relationship between anthrax/pertussis and the symptoms, but not sufficient to account for much ill health. But many people had told us that they had received what they considered to be a lot of vaccines in a brief period of time.

There were in total seven biological warfare vaccines, and 13 “normal” vaccinations, so a person could have received up to 20, although most received nothing like that. Most experts do not think that vaccination can overload the immune system, but we did find a statistical link between the number of vaccines that people received and health.

What did your study of service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan entail?

One of the many lessons learned in the aftermath of the Gulf conflict was the need to have improved health surveillance and/or research in place after another major deployment, especially if it was in similar territory, against the same opponent, and, as it seemed at the time, requiring similar protective measures

summer2013_pp34-35_wessely_print 17/06/2013 14:33 Page 35

against chemical or biological warfare.

We were asked to carry out such a study soon after the end of the initial operation, Operation ‘TELIC 1’ (the Iraq War 2003).

It was not dissimilar to the general strategy of the previous Gulf War programme. Over 10,000 military personnel completed a questionnaire on their health and wellbeing – asking the same questions we had asked Gulf War veterans. It was clear that this time there has been no repetition of the symptoms we saw in Gulf War veterans.

However, by 2006 there were considerable concerns expressed about the mental health impact of the war in Iraq on UK service personnel, and it was already clear that some were already coming back with psychological problems such as PTSD. About 20% of those returning from Iraq showed some symptoms of what are called common mental health problems, such as stress, poor sleep, unhappiness, worry and anxiety. It did not mean that 20% of the armed forces had mental disorders, although some of those in this category had clinically-significant depression or anxiety.

The data showed that those who had experienced combat, for example, reported more PTSD symptoms than those who had not. This was unsurprising as those in combat roles would have been exposed to enemy fire or spent time handling the dead and wounded. Also important, but more related to general mental health and well-being than PTSD, were chain of command issues such as supply of information, comradeship, mismatch of trained ability and deployed role, confidence and trust in the leadership, perceived usefulness of postdeployment briefs and support by the military (and the media) both for troops in theatre and their families at home.

Did you find any differences in the health and well-being of reservists, compared to the regulars?

Yes, they were twice as likely to have symptoms suggestive of common mental health problems than fellow reservists who had not been to Iraq, and six times as likely to have symptoms suggestive of PTSD. However, whilst this is a substantial increase in risk, it was still the case that the actual rate was relatively low, at 6%, and was lower than the comparable rate for US forces.

Why do you think this was?

We think that the answer may lie in differences before the reservists deploy, and after they come home. When regulars return from a tour of duty, by and large they continue to spend time with the same people they have served with, and have ample opportunity to talk with people who have shared the same experience. By contrast, after a brief demobilisation and a period of post-tour leave, reservists return to a civilian environment, away from their military colleagues. Family, friends and employers may have little understanding of the reservists’ experience, and they may be subject to more open criticism of the war in Iraq.

Because reservists no longer had access to military medical services, any health problems they developed would have been the responsibility of the NHS. The number of NHS doctors who have personal experience of the military is now extremely small, and many either lack knowledge, or perhaps interest, in the problems that people may encounter after deployment. When our results were published, the MOD addressed this gap with an announcement that reservists would now be entitled to access to military mental health care for two years after deployment, even when they have returned to civilian life. We have also established a mental health programme for reservists.

What are some of the mental health challenges that ex-servicemen and women face when they re-enter civilian life?

The majority are fine and most adapt very quickly. But there are some who do not.

Very often these are those who are young, leave the service early and may have left under a cloud. There is little support for these people and more support is needed. These people have more health and social problems and are more likely to abuse alcohol and get into trouble with the law.

Does rank have any bearing on the mental health?

Most studies confirm that socioeconomic status is strongly related to health – physical and psychological health are worse for those at the lower end of the social scale than those at the upper end. The armed forces are little different and the higher the rank, the better the general health and wellbeing.

How do you think service and exservice personnel suffering from PTSD and other mental health issues can be best helped?

First they need to come forward; I estimate that about half of those who have PTSD do not come forward. The process from there is slow and steady.

What projects is the King’s Centre for Military Health Research currently involved in?

We are conducting a new work of data collection from Afghanistan looking at what happens to service personnel after they leave. For example, are they gaining employment? The relationship between those leaving the services and getting into trouble with the law is being studied, and we are also studying the mental health of 10,000 service personnel postdeployment.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 35

summer2013_pp36-39_spynovel_print 17/06/2013 14:34 Page 36

GETTY IMAGES

summer2013_pp36-39_spynovel_print 17/06/2013 14:34 Page 37

Martin Priestman, Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton, looks at espionage in British fiction

Single spies and battalions Two Israelite spies testing the insides of Jericho’s walls for weak spots are saved from discovery when the converted harlot Rahab covers them with flax. Her life is subsequently spared from the massacre following their report back to Joshua, thanks to the agreed sign of a red cord hanging from her window. In Homer’s Iliad, a wolf snuffling towards the tents of the besieging Greeks is grabbed by two of the apparent corpses strewing the beach – Odysseus and a sidekick, playing dead – who pull off his skin to reveal him as a Trojan spy named Dolon. Successfully ‘turned’ by the promise of life, Dolon spills the beans on the positions of the Trojans’ allies, and is promptly decapitated.

Similar stories of undercover foreign agents, turned insiders and disguised

Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

counter-agents are dotted through the world’s literature, but start growing to prominence in the nineteenth century historical novels of Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas. However, it is only around the turn of the twentieth century that fictional agents really come at us as, to quote Claudius in Hamlet, ‘not single spies, but in battalions’.

In the work of E Phillips Oppenheim (beginning with Expiation, 1887), William Le Queux (Guilty Bonds, 1890), ‹ Summer 2013 Despatches n 37

38 n Despatches Summer 2013

John le Carre ANNALENA MCAFEE

Childers (The Riddle of the Sands, 1903) and John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915), British Secret Service agents battle heroically against those of various foreign powers, but especially of Germany. In the arms-race whose horribly inevitable outcome was the First World War, the growing importance of technology made the plans for new weaponry increasingly crucial, as with the stolen submarine designs of The Adventure of the BrucePartington Plans (1912), which Conan Doyle thought one of his best Sherlock Holmes stories.

From the middle of the Great War, the 1917 Russian Revolution produced a rather more confused picture, with the defeated Germany partly replaced as Public Enemy Number One by the Soviet Union, or the more global communist threat it seemed to mastermind. Though hostile, the Germans were understood to be clever and arguably gentlemen like us, but now a cruder dynamic kicks in, with H C ‘Sapper’ McNeile’s masked Bulldog Drummond leading his eponymous Black Gang (1922) of upper-class thugs into battle against assorted trade unionists, Russian agents (who confusingly cry ‘Mein Gott!’ when cornered) and non-specifically shifty Jews who clearly deserve everything they get. After soundly thrashing such communist low-lifes, Drummond turns his attention to a much smoother article: the mastermind Carl Peterson, whose vampish assistant Irma’s attempts on the married Drummond’s honour are thwarted almost as often as Peterson’s own elaborate schemes for world domination.

If this pattern – of communist threat overlain with the schemes of a powercrazed mastermind, sometimes with seductress in tow – sounds familiar, it is no coincidence: Ian Fleming readily admitted the huge influence of ‘Sapper’ on James Bond, who came to dominate the fictional perception of espionage in the decades after the Second World War, and perhaps still does. The same double-vision – it’s the Soviets but it’s also an impossibly wealthy terrorist of some other nationality we don’t like – permeates the Bond novels from Casino Royale (1953) to The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

Only From Russia, with Love (1957) fully dispenses with the individual mastermind

Ian McEwan JAMIE HUGHES/BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING PLC.

‹ Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901), Erskine

STEPHEN CORNWELL

summer2013_pp36-39_spynovel_print 17/06/2013 14:34 Page 38

Stella Rimington

‘Spy fiction has offered powerful metaphors for more subjective contemporary anxieties.’

in favour of a close focus on what the exNaval Intelligence officer Fleming knew about very well: the actual structure of the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH, whose precise Moscow address is given in a laconic opening note. Sending both a pretty young trainee and a coldeyed assassin to destroy the British ‘myth of Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service’ in the shape of the one man it most fears (‘There is a man named Bond’) – SMERSH constitutes the undoubted villain of the piece, although, curiously if diplomatically, the immensely successful films which made Bond a worldwide icon dilutes this story’s unambiguous cold-warrior stance by attributing its picture of Soviet villainy to a shadowy organisation called SPECTRE, dreamed up in the later Bond novels to fudge the border between political and more fanciful enemies, when Fleming feared the end of the Cold War might also put a stop to his hero’s career.

Rather more nuanced readings of espionage than Sapper’s or Fleming’s had also emerged in the interwar years, particularly among writers of more leftward leanings. For Eric Ambler (Cause for Alarm, 1938; The Mask of Dimitrios, 1939) and Graham Greene (The Confidential Agent, 1938; The Ministry of Fear; 1943), the heroes tended to be common men caught up in webs of treachery spun in fascist Italy, Spain or Germany, while Soviet agents sometimes turned up as helpers and allies.

While the fellow-travelling scales had fallen from Ambler’s eyes by the time of the fiercely anti-Soviet Judgment on Deltchev (1951), Greene’s loyalties stayed closer to what (quoting Browning) he liked to call ‘the dangerous edge of things’.

His wartime work for MI6, partly under the notorious double agent Kim Philby, sonicknamed from his admiration for the spy-hero of Kipling’s Kim, gave Greene an inside knowledge of British Intelligence’s own various Achilles’ heels, from the ease with which agents could fabricate reports (Our Man in Havana, 1958) to the failure to grasp the ‘human factors’ which might drive an agent into the arms of the Soviets in preference to nasty if convenient allies such as apartheid South Africa (The Human Factor, 1978).

Another writer who worked under Philby only turned from espionage to full-time

summer2013_pp36-39_spynovel_print 17/06/2013 14:34 Page 39

authorship when Philby’s 1964 defection to Moscow blew his cover. Adopting the pseudonym ‘John le Carré’ (perhaps with a nod to one of the fathers of spy fiction, William le Queux) because agents could not write anything under their own names, David Cornwell had already published three novels, including the masterpiece The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Here the agent Leamas finds himself and the only other two people he cares for (both sincere communists, as it happens) callously sacrificed by his own side and an unreconstructed East German Nazi, in the name of preserving the latter’s deep cover. After further analyses of what one title calls The Looking-Glass War (1965), le Carré’s second masterpiece, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) dragged his undemonstrative series-hero George Smiley through the tangled undergrowth of MI6 (ironically renamed ‘the Circus’, both after Cambridge Circus and the tricks that are played there), in quest of a deeply-buried ‘mole’ clearly modelled on Philby.

Though le Carré took it to the most tragic level, other writers too played effectively ironic games with the unfeeling duplicity at the heart of intelligence work: in The Ipcress File (1962), Len Deighton’s unnamed agent (who became Harry Palmer in the films starring Michael Caine) finds himself working for two rival bosses, one of whom is finally exposed as a Soviet spy while the other blithely gives a job to the hero’s erstwhile torturer, who has spent most of the novel viciously turning British scientists into brainwashed Soviet pawns.

Laconically, the hero declines this new colleague’s dinner invitations because ‘it’s not wise to make too many close friends in this business’.

For some more recent writers of ‘literary’ rather than ‘genre’ fiction, the Cold War has continued to offer templates for exploring some of the ironies of the human condition: Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990) uses the image of the Berlin Wall to mirror the intricacies of complicity at a more personal level, while in his Sweet Tooth (2012) an apparently realistic portrait of MI5 in the 1970s disconcertingly turns into a meditation on the spaces between truth and fiction. By contrast, the equally sophisticated literary

‘In spy novels, the distinction between states at war and states of mind is sometimes hard to draw.’

novelist Sebastian Faulks joyfully relives past certainties when (following a lead set

by Kingsley Amis’s 1968 Colonel Sun) he skilfully resurrects James Bond in Devil May Care (2009).

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, there were many predictions of the demise of spy fiction. With no more Cold War, where was the excitement or nobility in the effort to prevent a hot one? These predictions were somewhat premature, if not wholly so: le Carré brilliantly extended his range to explore corrupt arms-dealing, the fallout from the breakup of the USSR, and big business’s use of dying Africans as cheap pharmaceutical guinea-pigs. And, luckily for espionage if not the world, the part-fantasy figure often lurking around spy fiction’s edges now stepped forward to fill the USSR-shaped gap. The terrorist bent on world domination seemed to become actualised in some of the claims of Islamist extremism, and from 2001 to 2011 all those cave-dwelling Bond villains from Mr Big to Dr No found their counterpart in the supposedly troglodyte mastermind of terror, Osama Bin Laden.

However, the idea of a ‘War Against Terror’ had too many complications and (perhaps) absurdities to produce any clear-cut narrative of undercover British heroism. Scattered groups claiming, however misguidedly, to stand for the oppressed are very different from massively-armed world powers, and some of the most effective narratives of this type of conflict have as much to say about Western misreadings of nuances within the Islamic world as about the transfer of old assumptions to new settings: hence the example of an earlier thoughtful thriller like Ted Allbeury’s No Place to Hide (1984) has been followed by both le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Dead Line (2008) by Stella Rimington, the ex-MI5 boss who – in a fine tradition – has turned to thriller writing in her retirement.

As well as throwing light on great world conflicts, for at least some of the writers discussed above, spy fiction has offered powerful metaphors for more subjective contemporary anxieties: about divided loyalties, the suppression of authentic identity, and the inability to distinguish fact from well-crafted fiction. In spy novels, the distinction between states at war and states of mind is sometimes hard to draw.

Summer 2013 Despatches n 39

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 40

BOOKS

Many of the featured books are available in IWM shops and online at www.iwmshop.org.uk where Friends receive a 10% discount

Collection to write home about Love, Tommy: Letters Home from the Great War to the Present Day

By Andrew Roberts Published by Osprey in association with IWM Friends will be aware of the extensive collection of letters held by IWM which are used extensively by researchers and writers on a wide range of subjects.

Indeed, many books – including some previously reviewed in Despatches – quote from letters within the collection, as well as from recordings in the museums’ Sound Archive. Some might therefore question whether there is a need for a book of this kind. I would argue that there is.

Many authors who have made use of letters in the IWM’s collection have done so in connection with a specific battle, campaign, or about a particular aspect of warfare. The significance of Love, Tommy is conveyed in the sub-title; namely it covers letters written by service personnel of all ranks from the time the IWM first began gathering together such material to the present. Thus it is possible to see how subject, content and language have changed, or not changed to any degree, over this period.

The book contains a helpful introduction which draws attention to the remarkable statistic that up to nine million letters and postcards per week were sent by members of the British Expeditionary Force during 1917. The author also notes that researching the collection has confirmed what he long suspected; namely, that Second World War poets were every bit as good as those in the previous war, and this is illustrated later in the book with a poem and touching letter sent to his pregnant wife by an officer on his departure for North Africa in 1942.

As one might expect from an author of Mr Roberts’s standing, there is a concise summary of the conflicts during which the letters were written together with brief details about each writer and the military situation at the time. In some cases, several letters from the same correspondent have been grouped together and this helps the reader to gain an insight into the character of the writer; and so often their determination and good humour, as well as concern for loved ones, shines through.

The letters sent during the two world wars understandably comprise the greater part of the book, 40 n Despatches Summer 2013

but those written during post-war conflicts – including Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan – are not forgotten. Indeed, perhaps because of their lesser exposure in published material, they are of particular interest.

There is one significant omission in relation to the post-war material for which the author bears no responsibility; the conflict in Northern Ireland is not covered. It is explained in a note, somewhat tucked away below the publication details, that ‘… IWM could not allow access to the archives they hold due to classification and sensitivity surrounding the documents’. Whatever one’s views about this policy, I would have preferred to have seen the qualification noted in the ‘Modern Warfare’ section. But this should not be taken to detract from an excellent book which I commend to readers of Despatches.

Foster Summerson ISBN: 9781849087919 Hardback: £20.00

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 41

BOOKS Incendiary lives and loves of the literati The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War

By Lara Feigel Published by Bloomsbury The restless lives alluded to in the title of this meticulously sourced and lengthy book are rather remarkable, a highly selective roll call of five of Britain’s most interesting and celebrated writers. Rose Macaulay, Henry Yorke (an upper class businessman, writing novels which now have cult status as Henry Green), Graham Greene, the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the Austrian author Hilde Spiel, are, so to speak, the lead characters in this densely-written, exhaustive narrative.

The wide-ranging exploration of a web of personal connections, attachments to family, friends, partners and lovers draws on diaries, letters, published fiction and non-fiction, archives, interviews, articles, reviews and other published sources to produce a highly detailed chronicle, primarily focussed on wartime London.

Moreover, the shadows, echoes and influences of real incidents are traced in elegant, graceful précis of the creative fictions of the writers themselves.

Writers, being writers, wrote: the fascination of this history is the interweaving of their experiences with the continuation of their imaginative, literary life. And many of the leading lights of the wartime intelligentsia and others turn up too in major and minor roles, from Cecil Beaton to Stephen Spender, Rosamund Lehmann to Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas to Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford to Virginia Woolf; not to mention Winston Churchill and other politicians.

What is described is threefold. There is the actual texture of quotidian civilian life during the war, almost entirely taking place in London but ranging as far as Ireland, Africa and Portugal. Then there is war-work of all kinds itself; and social life in all its guises, from intense love affairs to supper parties, moving round the city and further afield.

The heart of the social intricacies thus depicted is the emotional manoeuvring of highly intelligent, self-aware and creative people whose feelings were almost unbearably heightened by the tensions of London in wartime. As one female character says in a fiction by Henry Green, ‘War … was sex’. Elizabeth Bowen remarked that it had come to be rumoured that everyone in London was in love.

Life was of course unusually unpredictable, potentially and actually unexpected and overtly dangerous. The home front was in its way a battlefront too. The writers volunteered: Rose Macaulay, once a pacifist, drove an ambulance, and oddly the horrors she witnessed abraded her pacifism. There is a devastating account too of her heartbreak at the total destruction of her flat, and with it her books, which she mourned almost as though they were living entities which had perished in the conflagration of the bombs, subsuming a private grief in a public lamentation.

An epilogue traces personal trajectories after the war, but nothing was so intense, so lived, again. The love affairs were memorialised in post-war fictions, but at the time Graham Greene suggested that ‘the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm’.

Marina Vaizey ISBN: 9781408830444 Hardback £25.00 Summer 2013 Despatches n 41

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 42

BOOKS Coming soon

Also recommended

Tunnel vision The Great Escaper

By Simon Pearson Published by Hodder in association with IWM in August 2013 The Great Escaper is the first biography of the enigmatic Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, who masterminded the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III, immortalised in Paul Brickhill’s book and the epic film. But there was far more to this man than the character moulded in Hollywood fifty years ago. Bushell, the son of a South African mining engineer, was bold and brash, loved by women and revered by men, a multi-lingual barrister, a fighter pilot – and a useful intelligence asset.

Driven by a sense of duty, Bushell waged an unconventional war on the Nazis. He led an international brigade of prisoners who became one of the most belligerent, imaginative and mischievous ‘armies’ ever to confront Hitler’s ‘monstrous tyranny’.

Shot down in 1940, Bushell escaped three times. He came within sight of the Swiss border in 1941. Four months later he reached Prague, where the Gestapo suspected him of involvement in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust. After his third escape, Hitler demanded his execution.

Drawing on exclusive access to the Bushell archive at IWM London, as well as new research in Poland, the Czech Republic, South Africa and the UK, Simon Pearson creates a compelling portrait of a man described by his commanding officer as ‘one of the greatest of his generation’.

42 n Despatches Summer 2013

Tracing Your Prisoner of War Ancestor: The First World War

By Sarah Paterson Published by Pen & Sword Books in association with IWM An essential introduction for readers who are keen to get an insight into the experience of a POW or an internee during the First World War, and a valuable guide for anyone who is trying to trace an ancestor who was captured.

ISBN: 9781848845015 Hardback: £14.99 D-Day to Victory: The Diaries of a British Tank Commander Sgt Trevor Greenwood, edited by Sally Partington Published by Simon & Schuster in association with IWM A record of the Second World War in Europe from the rarely-seen perspective of the ordinary soldier.

ISBN: 9781471110689 Paperback: £7.99 A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton Edited by Ruth Cowan Published by Simon & Schuster in association with IWM The story of Sister Edith Appleton, a

nurse who served near the Western Front in the First World War. Her diary deals with compassion all the horrors of the ‘war to end all wars’ including the first use of poison gas and the terrible cost of battles such as Ypres.

ISBN: 9781849833660 Hardback: £14.99 Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War Edited by Hilary Roberts Published by Jonathan Cape in association with IWM Published to accompany the major exhibition Cecil Beaton:Theatre of War held at IWM London in 2012, this book features extracts from Beaton’s diaries and full page reproductions of his wartime work surveying Bomber and Fighter Commands for the RAF and recording the heroism of Londoners under attack. Also included are photographs from his travels throughout the Western Desert, Middle East and India and the end of the war in Chinese territory where he witnessed the Nationalist resistance to the Japanese.

ISBN: 9780224096300 Hardback: £35.00; special edition: £100.00

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 43

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 44

summer2013_pp40-45_books-shop_print 17/06/2013 14:35 Page 45

IWM SHOP IWM Shop includes presents for all occasions including our new range at HMS Belfast. For those with an interest in Historic Duxford, shop for our classic aviation gifts. As a Friend you enjoy a 10% discount. To use this discount online simply register and email iwmshop@iwm.org.uk to confirm your Friends membership.

Anchor cushion Give your living room a nautical feel with this cushion £35

Monty duffle coat Made in London to original Second World War Design £325

A Seaman’s Pocket-book Pocket book issued to all ratings during the Second World War £6.99

Aviator goggles Classic aviator goggles to make a style statement £35

Wartime newspaper Replica from June 1940 covering RAF operations £5

Dambuster chocolate Delicious dark chocolate handmade in Somerset £4.50

Red corsage brooch Our popular handmade Fair Trade flower corsage brooch £12

Reproduction telephone Beautiful steeple tone reproduction telephone £50

Righto mug Remember a bygone era with this quirky ‘Righto’ mug £9

Summer 2013 Despatches n 45

summer2013_pp46-47_friends-events_print 17/06/2013 14:36 Page 46

summer2013_pp46-47_friends-events_print 17/06/2013 17:35 Page 47

Americans in London in the Second World War. The walk takes in the site of the last V1 to hit the city; where Glenn Miler spent his last night in London; and the American memorials in Grosvenor Square and at Hyde Park Corner.

IWM Friends: £15; guests: £17 Walk: Spies and Spycatcher’s London 1 October, 2pm Meet outside the Clydesdale Bank, near subway exit 3 of Piccadilly Circus underground station Richard Walker leads a walk focusing on spies, both real and fictional, venturing into the covert London of MI5, MI6 and the American OSS, progenitor of the CIA. IWM Friends: £15; guests: £17 Visit: North Weald Airfield and Museum 5 October, 11am Ad Astra House, 6 Hurricane Way, North Weald, Essex, CM16 6AA. A visit to the North Weald Museum which commemorates those who served at the former RAF North Weald from the First World War onwards, followed by a minibus tour of the airfield.

IWM Friends: £10; guests: £12, includes tea and coffee on arrival Visit: Bentley Priory 8 October and 6 November, 2pm Bentley Priory, Stanmore, HA7 3GA A visit and guided tour of Bentley Priory, the headquarters of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, recently reopened as a museum.

IWM Friends: £12; guests: £15 IWM Friends Military History Conference 12 October, 11am-3.30pm IWM London Join us for our second Military History Conference, featuring a range of talks by respected historians. Among the speakers will be Richard Overy, who will give a talk on The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945.

IWM Friends: £35; guests: £45 Book before 31 August and receive a £5 deduction on each ticket!

September to December 2013 IWM PST 0311

Visit: Commonwealth War Graves Commission 5 September, 11am 2 Marlow Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6 7DX Meet the staff at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and find out more about their work.

IWM Friends: £10; guests: £12 Visit: Eton College 11 September, 2.15pm and 8 November, 2.15pm Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 6DW Michael Paterson leads a guided tour of Eton College, focusing on its strong military connections.

IWM Friends: £16; guests: £18 Visit: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office 12 September, 5pm and 19 September, 3pm Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles St, City of Westminster, London SW1A 2AH A guided tour of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, including the Durbar Court and the India Office Council Chamber.

IWM Friends: £5; guests: £8 Visit: Military Intelligence Museum 17 September, 11am Military Intelligence Museum, Chicksands, Bedfordshire SG17 5PR A guided tour of the Military Intelligence Museum, which combines the Intelligence Corps collection of artefacts with the Medmenham Collection of aerial imagery and reconnaissance photos.

IWM Friends: £10; guests: £12 Visit: Tower Museum Bassingbourn 21 September, 2pm Hangar 3, Bassingbourn Barracks, Royston, Hertfordshire, SG8 5LX A private visit and guided tour of the wartime home of the ‘Memphis Belle’ where RAF and USAAF heavy bombers were stationed.

IWM Friends: £10; guests: £12 Walk: Wartime Mayfair 24 September, 2pm Meet at Marble Arch underground station Blue Badge Guide Mike Armitage leads a tour looking at the

IWM FRIENDS EVENTS IWM PST 2734

To book tickets for IWM Friends events please complete the enclosed application form or call us on 020 7416 5372.

All events include a donation to IWM Friends. Where two dates appear for an event please select one day.

First World War recruitment posters: Britons. Join Your Country’s Army!

by Alfred Leete (1882-1993); Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?

by Saville Lumley (d. 1950). See Talk, 2 December.

Talk: Air photo intelligence in the First World War 15 October, 2.30pm IWM London Nicholas Watkis takes a closer look at the origins of air photo intelligence in the First World War. IWM Friends: £8; guests: £10, includes tea and coffee Visit: The British Library 24 October, 6pm The British Library Curator Hedley Sutton will talk about the art on display in the Asian & African Studies Reading Room and show documents relating to the Indian Army and the forces of the East India Company.

IWM Friends: £8; guests: £10.

Visit: Royal Engineers Museum 30 October, 2pm Prince Arthur Road, Gillingham, Kent, ME4 4UG A curator-led guided tour of the Royal Engineers Museum which tells the story of the Corps of Royal Engineers, from its origins and in its widest context of military and civil endeavour, in peace and war.

IWM Friends: £15; guests: £17 IWM Friends AGM 14 November, 5pm Churchill War Rooms After the AGM there will be a talk by Professor Sir David Cannadine, followed by a reception.

AGM only: Free (members only) Talk and reception: IWM Friends: £15; guests: £17

Talk: Montgomery and the First War on Terror 27 November, 2.30pm IWM London Bernard Law Montgomery, later Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, was Britain’s most able counterinsurgency commander during the inter-war period . Robert Oulds will argue that the insights of ‘Monty’ need to be remembered in today’s war in Afghanistan.

IWM Friends: £8; guests: £10, includes tea and coffee Talk: Your Country Needs You! 2 December, 2.30pm IWM London James Taylor takes a closer look at the history of the propaganda poster, including First World War recruitment posters.

IWM Friends: £8; guests: £10, includes tea and coffee

Summer 2013 Despatches n 47

summer2013_pp48-49_whatson_print 17/06/2013 14:36 Page 48

WHAT’S ON

July to October 2013

For further information visit www.iwm.org.uk

LONDON Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 Closed until 28 July 2013.

Partially open daily from 29 July 2013 10am–6pm (except 24, 25, 26 December) To buy tickets for charging exhibitions and events visit the website or call 020 7416 5439. IWM Friends receive free, unlimited entry to all charging exhibitions.

Please note: IWM London is only partially re-open and will not reopen fully until summer 2014.

EXHIBITIONS Horrible Histories: Spies Opening on 29 July 2013 IWM London’s new major family exhibition focusing on Second World War spies and spycraft.

Tickets: Friends: free; Adult: £5.50; Concessions: £3.95; Child: £2.95 A Family in Wartime Re-opening on 29 July 2013 The story of the Allpress family in the Second World War – looking at both their lives at home and in the wider world at war, from the London Blitz to D-Day. Architecture of War 29 July 2013 – 5 May 2014 Bringing together a range of highlights from IWM’s art collection, Architecture of War presents artists’ responses to the impact of warfare on our surrounding landscape and environments.

48 n Despatches Summer 2013

IWM Contemporary: Omer Fast: 5000 Feet is the Best 29 July – 29 September 2013 A 30-minute film work, based on interviews with a former drone operator in Las Vegas, details the operator’s experiences guiding the unmanned planes to fire at targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

EVENTS Horrible Histories with Terry Deary 1 August 2013, 12pm and 3pm A family-orientated event in which Horrible Histories® author Terry Deary delves into the foul facts, dreadful details and strange stories that make his bestselling books so appealing.

Tickets: £8 per person From page to stage with Horrible Histories®: Spies 10 and 17 August 2013, 2.30pm – 3.30pm A children’s drama workshop devised by the Birmingham Stage Company, the theatre company behind the Horrible Histories® live shows.

Tickets: £8 per person Papers Please!

2–8, 26–30 August 2013, 11am–12.30pm and 2–4pm In this craft activity children can create a spy character and learn about work carried out by forgers during wartime.

Free drop-in event Martin Brown draws Horrible Histories 19 and 20 October 2013, 12pm and 3pm Horrible Histories® artist Martin Brown shares tips for bringing characters from the best-selling series to life.

Tickets: £8 per person

CHURCHILL WAR ROOMS Clive Steps, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AQ 020 7930 6961 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 9.30am – 6.00pm Admission: Friends: free; Adult: £17; Over 60: £13.60; Children under 16: free To book tickets for Churchill lectures please visit: www.iwm.org.uk/visits/ churchill-war-rooms/tickets EXHIBITIONS Undercover – Life in Churchill’s Bunker Until 31 December 2013 First-hand accounts of those who worked in the Cabinet War Rooms during the Second World War. EVENTS Churchill Lecture Series 2013 The Spy Who Loved 17 September 2013, 7 – 9 pm (doors open 6.30pm) Christine Granville was one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated female special agents, and reputedly Churchill’s favourite spy. In this talk Clare Mulley pays tribute to this charismatic woman who seemed to know no fear and exercised a mesmeric power over those who knew her.

Tickets: Friends and Concessions: £13.60; Adults: £17.00 The Great Escaper 15 October 2013, 7 –9 pm (doors open 6.30pm) Author and Times journalist Simon Pearson tells the story of Roger Bushell, known as Big X, a prisoner of war noted for masterminding the ‘Great Escape’ at the infamous Stalug Luft III camp.

Tickets: Friends and Concessions: £13.60; Adults: £17.00 Churchill War Rooms ‘Late’ 4 October 2013 A ‘late’ event after hours, giving visitors a chance to enjoy drinks and entertainment in what once was the home of the War Cabinet during the Second World War. For further details please visit our website.

HMS BELFAST Morgan’s Lane, Tooley Street, London SE1 2JH 020 7940 6300 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am–6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am–5pm (1 November to 28 February) Admission: Friends: free; Adult: £14.50; Over 60: £11.60; Children under 16: free EXHIBITIONS Gun Turret Experience Immerse yourself in the new Gun Turret Experience, a chance to see what fighting at sea would have really been like.

The Operations Room The Operations Room’s rotating radar screens have been recreated for the first time since the ship was operational, giving a sense of the movement and urgency of the room.

EVENTS Dazzle Camouflage 13–14 July and 10–22 August, 11am–12.30pm and 2–4pm Learn how dazzle camouflage was used to keep HMS Belfast from being discovered by other ships and take part in a creative animation workshop.

summer2013_pp48-49_whatson_print 17/06/2013 14:36 Page 49

DUXFORD Cambridgeshire, CB2 4QR 01223 835 000 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December) 10am–6pm Admission: Friends: free; Adult: £17.50; Concessions: £14.00; Children under 16: free Tickets for the events listed below can be purchased online at www.iwm.org.uk or by calling the box office on 01223 499 353 EXHIBITIONS: Somewhere in England: Portraits of Americans in Britain 1942-45 Until 31 December 2013 Highlights of the Roger Freeman collection of photographs of the US Army Air Force during the Second World War. Flying Legends Air Show 13-14 July 2013 Each of the historic aircraft on display at Flying Legends is a living tribute to the outstanding skills of the people who built, maintained and flew them and to the dedication of those who have brought these stunning aircraft back to life.

To purchase tickets please visit our website.

Spitfires, Merlins and Motors 28 July 2013, 10am–6pm A celebration of the legendary Supermarine Spitfire and the unmistakable Merlin engine.

Spitfires will be on static display before they perform aerial displays.

Tickets: Adult (16-59 years): £18.50; Concessions: £14.80

Animals in War Sunday 11 August, 10am–6pm Find out more about courageous roles played by animals during war and conflict and meet some military mascots and working animals.

Tickets: Adult (16-59 years): £18.50; Concessions: £14.80 The Duxford Air Show 7–8 September 2013 Featuring contemporary jet aircraft, historic warbirds, and aerobatic displays.

To purchase tickets please visit our website.

Autumn Air Show Sunday 13 October The Autumn Air Show closes the flying season in relaxed and informal style with a focus on the the historic aeroplanes that are operated by flying partners based at the museum.

To purchase tickets please visit our website.

NORTH The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, Manchester M17 1TZ 0161 836 4000 Open daily (except 24, 25, 26 December), 10am–6pm (1 March to 31 October), 10am–5pm (1 November to 28 February) To book tickets for family events please contact learningnorth @iwm.org.ukor call 0161 836 4000 Admission free

display, by award-winning Guardian photographer Sean Smith.

Contemporary Art from IWM’s Collection 12 October 2013 to 23 February 2014, IWM North Special Exhibitions Gallery A major exhibition of contemporary art exploring artistic attitudes to conflict from the Gulf War in 19901991 to the present day.

EVENTS Iraq War 2003 tours 1–15 July 2013, Monday to Friday A special tour exploring personal stories, photographs and artefacts relating to the Iraq War 2003.

EXHIBITIONS Saving Lives: Frontline medicine Saving Lives tours 7 and 14 July 2013 in a century of conflict Until 1 September 2013 A tour of the Saving Lives exhibition, A major new exhibition exploring exploring the theme of war and the difference between life and medicine from the First World War to death on the front line. present day conflict.

Remembering 9/11 Military Pride tours Until September 2013 25 August 2013 A display commemorating the A tour timed to coincide with tenth anniversary of the 9/11 Manchester Pride focusing on attacks on the World Trade Center. the hidden histories of LGBT communities in periods of war A Star Shall Stride by and peacekeeping.

Chava Rosenzweig Until December 2013 Build the Truce tours An installation by Manchester Every Sunday to Friday in ceramic artist Chava Rosenzweig – September 2013 the latest in the Museum’s Reinstated at the 1992 Games, the Reactions series where artists are Olympic Truce continues today; join invited to display work showing how us to explore the theme of war shapes lives. international truce.

Iraq: Photographs by Black History Month tours Sean Smith 1–4 and 6–11 October 2013 9 March 2013 – February 2014 Find out more about some of the To mark the tenth anniversary of personal stories in our collections, the invasion of Iraq, IWM North linked to the theme of Black launches a new photographic History Month.

Exhibitions featuring loans from IWM’s Collections The British Library 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, 020 7412 7332, www.bl.uk Propaganda: Power and Persuasion Until 17 September 2013 The first exhibition to explore international state propaganda from the 20th and 21st centuries

V&A Museum of Childhood Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA, 020 8983 5200, www.museumof childhood.org.uk War Games Until 2 March 2014 Exploring the relationship between conflict and children’s play and providing an insight into the ways toys have been influenced by warfare from 1800 to the present day.

National Portrait Gallery St Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HE, 020 7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk Laura Knight Portraits 11 July–20 October 2013 This exhibition of over 30 portraits will reveal Laura Knight’s distinctive and vivid work, and illustrate her success in gaining greater professional recognition for women in the arts.

National Army Museum Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HT, 020 7881 6606 www.nam.ac.uk Unseen Enemy 18 July 2013-March 2014 The story of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in recent conflicts, focusing on the British Army’s experience in Afghanistan.

The Historic Dockyard Chatham, Kent ME4 4TE, 01634 823800, www.thedockyard.co.uk From Shore to Sea: Paintings by Sir John Lavery RA, 1914-18 15 September – 1 December 2013 An exhibition of Sir John Lavery’s paintings of naval bases around Britain in the First World War. Summer 2013 Despatches n 49

summer2013_pp49-52_andfinally_print 17/06/2013 14:37 Page 50

IWMN 001234/DAMON CLEARY

AND FINALLY

Drawing inspiration Martin Brown, illustrator of the Horrible Histories series, on working with IWM. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I trained to become an art teacher and didn’t complete the course. Instead, like many other young Australians before me, I travelled around the world and ended up in London where I illustrated mugs and greetings cards among other things before I moved into illustrating children’s books.

I approached various publishers with my portfolio and Scholastic employed me to illustrate Coping with Parents by Peter Corey. This was the first of a series of books aimed at children and young people which later included Coping with Teachers, Coping with School and Coping with Pets.

I also illustrated Peter’s book on Christopher Columbus and this gave us an idea that we should write a book called Coping with History . When I approached my editor at Scholastic with this 50 n Despatches Summer 2013

suggestion, she said ‘Hold that thought’ and showed me Terry Deary’s proposal for the Horrible Histories series. It was serendipity.

I never thought that Horrible Histories would be as successful as it has and there are now several illustrators who work on the series. When we started Terry wrote books which followed the Key Stage 2 curriculum, such as Rotten Romans, Vile Victorians and Terrible Tudors. The popularity of these titles grew steadily and each time sales peaked we thought ‘we can’t do better than this’, but sales kept increasing. If someone had told me 20 years ago how successful the Horrible Histories series would be I wouldn’t have believed them. I am proud of our talents and I think that we were in the right place at the right time.

One of the reasons I think that our books are so popular is because Terry Deary is a very skilled storyteller and history has the best stories to tell – you literally couldn’t make it up. We also comment on history and challenge accepted views, sometimes poking fun at how history has been

presented in the past. I think that children appreciate this non-conformist approach, which gives the books an ‘edginess’.

Before I draw a character I find as many existing images as I can and try to find the thing that defines their face. Some characters I find easier to draw than others – for example drawing Henry VIII now comes quite naturally to me, but Sir Winston Churchill with his round face and tiny nose I find more challenging.

However, I have found looking at the cartoons which David Low drew of Churchill in the 1940s and 1950s very helpful. I enjoy drawing characters who are less familiar because you can be more experimental; and costumes, such as that of a Stone Age man, can come directly from my imagination.

Because history is so broad we don’t tend to have one central character. Every book has a rich and varied cast. However, there is one character who appears in every book and that is Rattus Rattus, who we use as a sort of commentator. Every period in history has had rats and IWM has used him in all their Horrible Histories exhibitions. In Horrible Histories: Spies Rattus Rattus will feature in in a multitude of disguises and he appears in the new Horrible Histories: Rotten Rationing Big Picture Show at IWM North. Interestingly, IWM North wanted a Rattus Rattus which looked different to the one in Spies – they wanted a leaner rat.

While the Horrible Histories books are part of a sequence, an exhibition is seen in isolation and is looked at more carefully and more closely. It is also important to take more care over the reference material. I drew a U-Boat and a 1940s typewriter from IWM’s collections for Rotten Rationing and I had to ensure that it was accurate whilst still appearing cartoon-like. Similarly, drawing the six spies who feature in the Spies exhibition presented some challenges – I didn’t want to make them grotesque or humorous but at the end of the day they are cartoons.

I have found the experience of working with IWM great, great fun. IWM has some excellent resource material and I have enjoyed interpreting this in an illustrated format. It was a real privilege to travel to IWM North to see the Rotten Rationing film on display and I am very much looking forward to visiting Horrible Histories: Spies when it opens.

summer2013_pp49-52_andfinally_print 17/06/2013 15:26 Page 51

summer2013_pp49-52_andfinally_print 17/06/2013 15:26 Page 52