The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944), released in cinemas in June 1944 with an all-star cast, followed a group of British conscript soldiers as they navigated training and experienced torpedo fire, and subsequent sinking, at sea before culminating in battle in North Africa . The recruits grumble and grouse throughout their training and wilfully allow themselves to be captured while on an exercise scheme in order to return prematurely to the barracks where beds and hot food awaited them. However, in the face of danger the men are proven to be competent and brave soldiers. In the closing minutes of the film Lieutenant Jim Perry, played by real-life soldier David Niven, defiantly tells German soldiers, who are offering them the opportunity to surrender during a respite from attack, to âgo to hellâ before leading his men forward to battle. As the men fix bayonets and ready themselves for action they mock both the situation and each other, asking if they âhave enough to grumble aboutâ and complaining of being hungry. Before they move from their sheltered position Sergeant Fletcher, played by William Hartnell, rallies them by jesting âcome on lads. Once more for the day you missed on the exercise.â The men walk resolutely towards the enemy to the sound of a military brass band playing an upbeat tune. Their fate is left unknown as they disappear one by one into the smoke-strewn battlefield, but while this is the last scene of the film, the audience are informed by a title card that this is âThe Beginningâ.
In many respects, The Way Ahead is typical of the British war film . The men are a cross-section of British society: an older ill-tempered cockney working as a boiler stoker in the House of Commons, who has a grown-up assertive daughter; a young malingerer and complainer; a Scottish farmer; a conceited youthful man who drinks too much; an enthusiastic travel agent; a middle-class store manager and his younger and deferential colleague; a tough working-class sergeant; and a married upper middle-class officer with a received pronunciation accent. This was a common trope in war films , such as In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, 1942), San Demetrio, London (Charles Frend, 1943), The Gentle Sex (Leslie Howard, 1943) and Millions Like Us (Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, 1943), which all brought together disparate characters from a range of class backgrounds, ages and regions across Britain, albeit never Northern Ireland, and charted over the course of the film their emergence as a functioning cohesive group. This narrative premise was crucial in emphasising the unity of the country in fighting a âPeopleâs Warâ . Also in common with other war films, notably We Dive at Dawn (Anthony Asquith, 1943), the men in The Way Ahead overcome initial animosity and competing tensions to become comrades and âpull togetherâ effectively in the face of battle. The emphasis on the homosocial aspect of the military was common throughout wartime society. Indeed, a 1940 guide entitled Joining Up instructed its readers, âwhatever branch of the Service you eventually find yourself in is an honourable one and youâll find good pals thereâ. And this sentiment even extended to uniformed quasi-military civilian organisations, with Sir James Grigg, the Under-Secretary of State for War, calling the Home Guard a âbrotherhoodâ. 1 Another persistent trope of British masculinity documented in The Way Ahead, and many other wartime films such as San Demetrio, London, was the ability to âkeep smiling throughâ and joke in the face of danger .
Wartime films, like The Way Ahead, are in many ways formulaic, with common themes repeated frequently. These ideas, in turn, have come to shape the popular memory of the war. Indeed, the narrative of Britain as a nation of plucky underdogs who stood united together, laughing in the face of the much more powerful Nazi war machine, has gained huge traction in modern Britain. These repeated patterns of representation, regardless of the branch of the armed forces, suggest that military service was a very homogeneous experience. However, war is inevitably a point of rupture. The Second World War was no different: men were allowed, and even encouraged, to kill; women took on previously inconceivable roles in the military and civilian sphere; even children were taken from their parents to be raised by others in areas far from home. Such acts shifted seemingly inviolable social codes. Inevitably, then, there were also shifts in idealised conceptions of malehood. Moreover, as the military expanded massively and rapidly, many men found themselves in new overwhelmingly male environs. In many ways this makes war an ideal moment to examine male cultural practices as the epitome of manly duty and masculinity became singularly focused on the military. Indeed, as Corinna Peniston-Bird argues, âopportunities for contradiction, transformation and resistance were limited. Men did not have a choice whether to conform or reject hegemonic [military] masculinity: they positioned themselves in relation to it.â 2 However, as this collection shows, the male wartime experience was far from singular: the war was experienced differently by the spitfire ace based in Britain, the army serviceman stationed on the home front, the skilled worker retained in his civilian employment, the soldier who engaged in land combat overseas, the paramilitary fighter who undertook guerrilla operations, the combatant who was made a prisoner of war and the man who sustained disabling injuries. Moreover, these diverse experiences shaped not only menâs retrospective memories of their wartime lives, produced in oral history interviews and memoirs , but also the ways in which they have been remembered in post-war society, commemorated and immortalised in print, film and stone. Clearly, therefore, despite the enduring popularity of the war film with its rigid one-dimensional representation of masculinity, being a British man during the Second World War could involve a broad range of roles, challenges and activities which had diverse effects on menâs sense of self. As such, this collection explores the myriad ways war impacted on British men, masculinity and male culture. It reveals that masculine desires for war service were complex and challenging; that manliness could be forged in the workplace and in the field of battle but that emasculation nearly always haunted wartime performances of masculinity; that all-male groups fostered their own renderings of masculinity that were specific to a given context and could be looked on as perplexing by outsiders; and that many post-war representations of wartime service, in contrast to lived experiences, often became simplified and lacked nuance. All of the chapters exploring menâs wartime experiences engage with highly personal subjective accounts: oral testimonies and written memoirs enable the authors to reconstruct in very rich detail the lived experiences of British men during the Second World War. This introduction chapter surveys some of the key developments in the field of gender history over the last forty years in order to locate this collection in the wider context of the project to make visible menâs gendered lives.
Towards a Gendered Study of Men: Making Masculinities Visible
Histories of men dominate bookshelves: thousands of studies have been published about kings, politicians, imperial adventurers, revolutionaries, inventors, warriors and sportsmen. Yet analysing menâs experiences through the adoption of a gendered perspective is very much a late twentieth-century phenomenon. The history of masculinity was preceded by, and developed out of, the field of womenâs history. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the discipline of womenâs history bloomed alongside the new social history and as a direct consequence of a growing mass âsecond-waveâ feminist movement. A key focus of such enquiry was to recover a âherstoryâ, providing a corrective to centuries of androcentric scholarship, or histories, which erased women as historical agents. This was âMenâs Studies Modifiedâ, in which women, the ahistorical âOtherâ positioned on the margins outside of history, were placed centre stage. 3 The titles of texts such as Sheila Rowbothamâs Hidden From History (1973) and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonzâs Becoming Visible (1977), were explicit affirmations of the endeavour of restoring women to the historical record. 4 The ideology of âseparate spheresâ, which located women in the domestic arena and men in the public realm of work, politics and war, was a useful, although later critiqued, discourse for those researching womenâs lives since the 1750s. 5 It enabled historians of women to move beyond the recovery phase towards a proclamation of the significance of gender as an organising principle within a class society.
While the primary focus of most historians of women was, quite obviously and unapologetically, women , some advocated a relational view of gender, noting that women ought not be studied in isolation. Natalie Zemon Davis, for example, argued in 1976 that âwe should now be interested in the history of both women and men. We should not be working on the subjected sex any more than a historian of class can focus exclusively on peasants.â 6 The discipline of womenâs history developed into, but was not eradicated by, the emergent field of gender history which foregrounded the social constructedness of femininity and masculinity, which were defined in relation to each other. Joan Wallach Scott , who argued in 1986 that the focus on herstory actively ghettoised womenâs history, urged a new way of writing about historical women. She asserted that gender was a more âuseful category of historical analysisâ and in so doing, shifted the paradigm. 7 Noting that historians have too often conflated sex, the fixed biological assignation, and gender, a fluid and socially constructed set of behaviours, Scott deco...
