An unknown Ethiopian artist’s impression of the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 painted on an antelope’s hide, a jigsaw puzzle made of Nazi swastikas, and a flat iron pan from the Partition of India in 1947. It’s through objects such as these that the Imperial War Museum in London is hoping to offer visitors a bold global look at the Second World War.
In October the museum opened the doors to its new Second World War and Holocaust galleries after a massive £30.7m reimagining. It’s the first major redevelopment of the museum’s permanent representation of the Second World War since 1989. A lot has changed. Gone are the hugely popular war “experiences” of the 1990s, where you could walk through a recreated bombed-out street or trench. Instead, the museum shows the different global environments – desert, tropics, tundra – that the war took place in. Experiences of civilians, rather than battles or weaponry, are now front and centre.
Links are made between the War Galleries and the new Holocaust Galleries, both through narrative and a shared exhibition space. But it is the rendering of the Second World War that is a significant departure for IWM. Why was it done now? And does it succeed?
Every British schoolchild has been taught the stories of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. Along with endless repeats of Dad’s Army, and the “Great Escape” sung at football matches, it can seem as if the Second World War is ever-present in British culture. It was weaponised during the 2016 EU referendum by both sides: Nigel Farage invoked the trope of Britain “alone” fighting the Germans, while the Remain camp argued that the conflict taught us the need for close ties with the continent. At the beginning of the pandemic, then-health minister Matt Hancock went so far as to compare Britain’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic with the national resilience shown during the Blitz.
The vital role of museums
But these takes often have more to do with Britain’s culture wars than with historical accuracy. As the last generation that actually survived the war passes away, the role of museums in cutting through the confusion and forging a clearer relationship between the public, the politicians and our national collective memory of the war becomes ever more necessary.
We live in an age of emotion, with a need for personal connection. The stories of more than 100 individuals from 30 different countries are told in the new galleries, part of a wider trend in the museum sector called “peopling”, where personal lives are given space, along with the more abstract narratives of movements and battles. Take Sam Martinez, for instance. Martinez, whose passport is displayed, was an “Axeman” from British Honduras (now Belize) who rushed to Glasgow to contribute to the war effort. We learn not just of his bravery but of the prejudice he faced: while invited to dances in Scotland, he would also hear local leaders complain about “black foresters starting relationships with Scottish women”.
Discovering his story, we empathise with his courage and determination and acknowledge the acute racial tensions of the era – although the museum stops short of calling this what we would now recognise it as: racism. Still, it’s important to remember that racism itself is an evolving historical concept: the racism experienced today is different to racism as it was experienced during the time of the British Empire. What we do see in these stories is an institution tentatively coming to terms with some of the legacies of Britain’s imperial past. The new galleries hope to tell a “global story”. That includes the former British Empire, but it also extends to the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean. Special attention is given to China, as well as the Japanese and Allied campaign in East Asia and the Pacific.
That’s not to say it shies away from representations of the war in Britain. However, it does seek to clarify the facts. One way in which the British story of the war has been warped in the popular imagination is the idea of Britain singlehandedly fighting the Nazis, following the fall of France and much of Europe to German occupation. In reality, Britain was very much not “alone”, relying heavily on its empire for resources, financial support – and, of course, troops. In exposing its historical inaccuracy, the Imperial War Museum, London shows how this idea erases the contribution and exploitation of millions of individuals across the globe.
It is the hope of many historians and museum professionals that realigning the narrative in public spaces like the IWM will exact real political change, encouraging the public to recognise when their politicians, and national press, are touting phony historical equivalencies.
The new galleries also want to expand the concept of the Second World War as a “Total War”, in which the distinction between civilian and combatant is made redundant and entire nations and their populations are mobilised for the war effort. Dr Yasmin Khan, who advised on the new galleries, says: “The war touched many parts of the globe far from the usual epicentres or theatres, and impinged on civilian lives in myriad ways: social, economic, political, from food shortages to internment or deforestation. So part of the new approach to the war is to try and understand this total effect, the way that so many aspects of human life were shaped – often far away from the frontlines, in places we might not immediately associate with the war. This is what I think the new galleries achieve.”
Indeed, as IWM curator Kate Clements adds, “By drawing comparisons between, for example, the experience of civilians being bombed in Britain, Japan, Germany and China, we are able to demonstrate that although the effects of war were felt to different degrees, in different places and at different times, there was a commonality of experience in the war that collectively bound together those millions that lived through it.”
Hence the museum does not hold back when showing the horrors of war: visitors will learn that in 1941, two million out of the three million Soviet prisoners held by the Germans died within six months, either through starvation or neglect. Similarly, sexual violence – an often-underexplored aspect of the war – is shown through the stories of so-called “comfort women”, those forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. Starvation and hunger are explored via the controversial starving of roughly 3 million people in British-controlled Bengal.
The "anti-woke" backlash
So, has the IWM succeeded? While generally met with positive reviews, its new galleries have not gone without criticism. A recent review by Peter Hitchens suggested that while impressive, too little was included on how Stalin treated Soviet citizens. Similarly, historian Laurence Rees wrote in the Telegraph: “No prominence is given to the horrific crimes Stalin committed during the war against his own people”, such as the deportation of entire ethnic groups like the Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and Chechens.
These critics have a point. After all, the Soviet Union did suffer the highest number of wartime casualties and the stories of those abused and murdered by its regime should be fully told. However, we shouldn’t ignore the context of these criticisms. After Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn years and amid the rising popularity of left-wing politics among young Brits, there is a hint of moral panic around calls to emphasise communist atrocities in culture and academia: a pertinent example of how the war is still being used as a point of reference for contemporary debate.
Fears over “woke” or left-wing education have led to calls for new public spaces which provide a counternarrative. This includes a newly proposed museum to communist atrocities, the board members of which include former Conservative MP Owen Paterson and MEP Daniel Hannan. The would-be director of the museum, James Bartholomew, who is also a former Brexit Party candidate, said last year that teachers “who, if not Marxist themselves, are left-wing” are to blame for a lack of knowledge about communist atrocities.
The same fears over how Britain’s past is represented came into play after the National Trust published its report in September 2020 investigating the proven links of some of its properties to the slave trade. The backlash against perceived “wokeness” led to the foundation of the protest group Restore Trust, which lists amongst its main aims to “restore the [National] Trust’s original apolitical ethos”.
Challenging uncomfortable histories
The government itself is certainly not shy of engaging in these culture wars. Following concerns over the Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of statues in the US and the UK, then-culture secretary Oliver Dowden sent a letter in September last year to institutions funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport implying that their funding could be at risk if they removed controversial statues or objects.
Many museums will be watching cautiously. Having lost so much revenue during the pandemic, it would be understandable for some to shy away from taking a bold stance in their representation of the past.
Nevertheless, it is more important now than ever that museums continue to question and challenge uncomfortable histories. They would be doing a disservice to the public if their representations of the past were mediocre, or boring, for the sake of avoiding debate and controversy. As the war generation leave us, being able to interact with authentic material culture from the time is even more important for our ability to resist simplistic culture war debates.
The new galleries at the IWM are not without fault, and invariably miss out histories that do not fit into either their overarching narrative or exhibition space. But their attempt to offer a more global look at the Second World War is admirable, as is their foregrounding of personal stories, along with the complexities of economic, social and military histories. They offer something that is rarely found on the internet, in political rhetoric or in newspaper columns: the nuanced insights generated by the coupling of historical lives and extraordinary objects.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe today.
