Last weekend, I went to the new Second World War gallery in the Imperial War Museum for the second time. The more I see it, the more I like it. It’s actually quite hard to find, tucked away at the far end of the (godawful – but more on that later) main hall, past a threadbare collection of heavy equipment with minimal explanation, and impossible to reach without passing at least one gift shop. You can always nitpick (my own nitpicks are that the fall of France and the Pacific naval war needed far more attention), but overall it’s clearly a really good, really modern history – by which I don’t mean it’s the worthless interpretive “bombs were dropped on houses. How do you think it would feel to be bombed?” wank currently in vogue in museum design, but that it wonderfully articulates the most up-to-date historical understanding of the war, with an appropriate, effective balance of objects and non-dumbed-down explanations.

People who don’t spend too much of their spare time thinking about this might be surprised that there is much new to say about the war, but a great deal of our improvements in understanding stem from deconstructing popular myths that sprung up after the war. Britain tried to cope with its loss of empire and general national decline by developing a strange narrative where it started the war as a weak, unwilling but plucky participant, sacrificing everything out of decency – ignoring that in 1940 the largest, richest empire in history chose with confidence, if not exactly enthusiasm, to start a war it knew it could win against a bottled-up regional power that it had already recently beaten.* America, with almost nothing to prove, developed a fascination with supposed Nazi “superiority” in equipment, tactics, strategy and super science verging on a weird inferiority complex, never mind that Nazi Germany’s tanks were moderate to bad, its strategy demented and its superweapons meaningless.** Russia, unable to ever really escape the cult of Stalin and desperate to distract from Brezhnev-era stagnation, invented a psychotic, chauvinistic cult of victory which is getting people killed in Ukraine right now. The process of unpicking all this (and, let’s be honest, weaving new myths to suit the current political-academic zeitgeist) is ongoing.

I think the museum works very well because it presents its truth without even acknowledging those myths – you need a knowledge of WW2 historiography to notice when they are being attacked. But I have that knowledge and I can see the sacred cows being slaughtered and the propaganda being peeled carefully away from the (current best understanding of the) truth. So that absurd “very well, alone!” narrative, belonging more to one David Low cartoon than any reality, is thoroughly stamped on.*** Looting and class distinctions show we were not “all in it together” during the Blitz. Uncomfortable truths, like British tabloids screeching about floods of Jews and enemy aliens, anti-war propaganda from America First (“THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING”) and articles about “how to tell a Chinaman from a Jap”, are displayed, rather than hidden: there was no mass, righteous unified opposition to Nazism from the beginning, disgusting “scientific racism” was not confined solely to The Baddies. Gone, too, is the idea that strategic bombing achieved much, or that the Nazis gave more than they got (accompanied by a perfect, truly terrifying timelapse video clip mapping every air raid in Europe all war, with pulses of Blitz and V-1 strikes on Britain bookending vast waves of Allied raids sweeping across the continent, Malta down in the Med as a continually pulsing dot).

Talking about the largest conflict ever with limited floorspace, it is reduced to the broader brush-strokes, but there aren’t many big gaps. The museum gives appropriate attention to less-known but very significant areas of the war (the Katyn massacre, the Burma campaign, Japan mostly being beaten by American submarines, the grotesque divvying up of Europe into Stalin’s empire by Allies too exhausted for another war). The usual pop-culture-friendly Dunkirk-Battle of Britain-Alamein-D-Day bits are there, but in their proper place: mid-sized elements of a vast whole. Africa was a sideshow, Norway was a shitshow. The Battle of the Atlantic is represented in an outstanding display of month-by-month ship losses.  Choices large and small (it’s a model Hurricane, not a Spitfire, in the Battle of Britain case) have been carefully, and correctly, made.

And, while not making more of an overt point of it than necessary, it also very firmly rams home the diversity of stories and individuals involved, with faces of every colour and culture involved given their space. I resent that culture wars bollocks and reflexive tabloid outrage even makes this a point that can be argued over in TYOOL 2022, but I am very pleased to see people who aren’t white men in uniform given their screen time. They were real, they existed, and the biggest, nastiest myth – of omission rather than invention, but no less pernicious – is that they didn’t matter.****

I despaired of the IWM with its disastrous, self-mutilating mid-2010s refurbishment (my rage at how badly they fucked up the main hall from a vast, airy exhibition space to a pointlessly ugly, inaccessible and claustrophobic mess is an entire post in itself, and moving all the heavy equipment to Duxford, which is absolutely inaccessible without using a car, and charging £25 a ticket for it is basically criminal). But this, on top of the outstanding Great War gallery, is a really, really good exhibition and thoroughly worth your time.

 

_{* Not to mention hand in hand with the second largest, richest etc etc etc
** As a tool for winning wars, not Top Trumps, the Sherman was the best tank of WW2 followed by the T-34. Don’t @ me.
*** Or as I once saw someone on 4chan say, (“Hitler had the British surrounded? Which fuckin war were you watching?”)
**** Weirdly, a museum laser-focused on war contains probably the best acknowledgement of how extractive Imperial relations actually worked I’ve seen in a mainstream British museum, a brilliant bonus. They could do more – I think Willem Arondeus and the Navajo code-talkers deserve at least a corner of a cabinet – but I understand the limits of space.}