Juliette Pattinson

'The thing that made me hesitate…': re‐examining gendered intersubjectivities in interviews with British secret war veterans

The composure of subjective identities in the oral history interview has been the subject of recent research, yet the extent to which gendered intersubjectivity is a dynamic process shaping the content and form of interviewees’ testimonies remains unclear. This article draws upon interviews with fifty-eight male and female veterans who belonged to the Special Operations Executive, a Second World War organisation that equipped the resistance. While gender is important, impacting upon the conversations and exposing itself through particular narrative forms, it can be easy to become too preoccupied with gender, which can mask other dynamics, such as social status and generation. Moreover, while intersubjectivity can impact upon the narratives composed, its effect on the content of the testimony may be marginal as stories of life experience can be more resilient.

Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the Second World War

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the themed issue on Incarcerated Masculinities, providing an overview of the literature in this field, including both scholarly texts and personal memoirs. The issue addresses a variety of POW experiences and memories, ranging geographically across incarceration in Europe and the Far East, considers the representation and cultural memory of POWs in the post-war period and engages with the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories in subsequent decades. This article introduces the experience, impact and legacy of captivity amongst men from Australia, Britain and France during the Second World War which are explored in depth in subsequent articles.

‘Shirkers’, ‘Scrimjacks’ and ‘Scrimshanks’?: British Civilian Masculinity and Reserved Occupations, 1914–45

In both World Wars, the state retained men with essential skills on the home front. Despite needing to mobilise industry and labour in order to supply the military and to maintain key services such as healthcare and food provision, those men who remained in civilian roles were susceptible to accusations of cowardice and being derided as shirkers evading their patriotic duty. While the manliness of the ‘soldier hero’ was secure, the civilian man was susceptible to having his masculinity called into question. This article utilises a range of sources including parliamentary debates, cartoons, Mass Observation records, written testimony and oral histories to examine the policies that were implemented affecting civilian male workers deployed in essential jobs in both wars and the perceptions of men to their reserved status. While there were haphazard attempts to raise an ‘industrial army’ in the First World War, by 1939, a more systematic approach had been implemented with a Schedule of Reserved Occupations drawn up retaining key men in their work. While men on the Second World War home front were potentially diminished by the ‘soldier hero’ and the female war worker, they defined and defended their contributions to the national war effort in written and oral sources in gendered terms, making reference to job security, valued skills, significant earning power, the auxiliary position of female dilutees, positive cultural representations and the added dangers from aerial bombing.

Becoming Visible: Gendering the Study of Men at War

This introductory chapter introduces the thematic and theoretical underpinnings of the collection. It puts the proceeding chapters in their fullest context by exploring the history of the study of masculinities with specific focus on masculinities and the Second World War. The chapter then explores the state of the field today before discussing the parameters of the book and giving an overview of the content of the collected chapters.

Men, Masculinities and Male Culture in the Second World War

This edited collection brings together cutting-edge research on British masculinities and male culture, considering the myriad ways British men experienced, understood and remembered their exploits during the Second World War, as active combatants, prisoners and as civilian workers. It examines male identities, roles and representations in the armed forces, with particular focus on the RAF, army, volunteers for dangerous duties and prisoners of war, and on the home front, with case studies of reserved occupations and Bletchley Park, and examines the ways such roles have been remembered in post-war years in memoirs, film and memorials. As such this analysis of previously underexplored male experiences makes a major contribution to the historiography of Britain in the Second World War, as well as to socio-cultural history, cultural studies and gender studies.

Fantasies of the ‘Soldier Hero’, Frustrations of the Jedburghs

The volunteer, who was so key to the popular imagination of the First World War, did not exist in the same capacity in the Second. Yet men who felt stuck in inactive home front-stationed regiments and who wished to engage the enemy directly could respond to calls requesting volunteers for ‘special duties’. The war offered an opportunity for men, whose boyhoods were suffused with tales of adventure, to play out their masculine fantasies of soldierly heroism. Yet for many the reality of lived military experience was very different. This chapter utilises personal testimonies with British Jedburghs who parachuted in uniform into occupied France as a post-D-Day operational reserve, published and unpublished memoirs and files deposited at the National Archives in order to explore men’s desires to volunteer for dangerous work and their evaluations of their wartime contributions.