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The Guardian
14 hours ago
- General
- The Guardian
The story of war is one of kidnapping, slavery and rape. And what we talk about is strategy and territory
I wouldn't ordinarily rush to the Imperial War Museum in London, because the place is one tricky proposition. I spent hours there when I was young, researching black servicemen in the first and second world wars, as part of a bigger project about multicultural London. (Newsflash – it's been multicultural since for ever.) The archives are incredible, and the staff could not have been more helpful, yet every day, ambling past the giant death machines at the doors of the museum, past the flying injury-bringers that hang from the ceilings, I couldn't help but think: pick a lane, guys. Either war is a bad thing, featuring real humans who lose their comrades, get hurt and killed, or if not, are changed for ever, in the service of an idea that later turns out to be some imperialist bullshit. Or, war is a good thing, because look at all this mighty equipment. It can't be both. Maybe the ambivalence wasn't the museum's, maybe it was my own, because I continued to go there until I took the kids when they were about seven and nine, and found myself having to explain the significance of Colin Self's Beach Girl (1966), in which the artist used a mannequin, blackened and mutilated, to convey the likely physiological impact of a nuclear attack. They both started crying, which maybe I should have predicted. Anyway, they are older now, but not old enough for its current exhibition, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, because none of us are. You may have the broad outlines of disparate atrocities in your head – the sex slaves taken by the Japanese imperial army between 1932 and 1945 as 'comfort girls', the rape of German women during the Soviet liberation, and the kidnapping and rape of Yazidi women in northern Iraq just over a decade ago. You may even know (though I didn't) about the rape of Ukrainian men by soldiers of the Russian federation in this current war. In your lifetime, you will have lost count of how often you have passed war memorials, to unknown soldiers, to RAF bombers, to animals, but you probably won't have seen sexual violence set in stone, which absence gestures towards one recurring theme in the code of silence: no society wants to look directly at this crime, because its details are hideous. I don't ever want to think again about the use of the bayonet in Boer war sex crimes. 'Code of silence' sounds simple, but would run to a thousand sub-clauses: there is social squeamishness, survivors' shame, an understandable sensitivity about the children who are born of rape. It's well known that if you make your testimony and aren't believed, the brutality is revivified; the jeopardy of saying this aloud to a postwar society that didn't want to hear it would have been immense. At the end of the account of one victim – a Welsh woman married to a Belgian man, she had been raped by German soldiers while heavily pregnant, and lost her baby shortly afterwards – there's a note from the recording official: 'A decent little woman and quite reliable. No exaggeration attempted.' There's something so revolting about the thought that your own decency would have to be adjudicated before you could be heard, that exaggeration would be assumed unless some random guy deemed it absent, and that you probably only made the cut because you happened to be Welsh, not Belgian. Threading through the exhibition are academic voices, describing the complex interplay between militarism, humiliation, barbarism and the patriarchy, but just to be really ham-fisted and painfully straightforward about all this: war is the pre-condition, the portal from civilisation into cruelty. This morning started with a thrum of news, from the Ukraine-Russia peace talks to the defence spending review, and it feels as though none of these conversations should be allowed to happen without first taking a minute to observe that war turns some soldiers, enough soldiers, into something less than human, and the results of that stain history for ever. It feels like the casual dehumanisation of military aggression gets lost in the margins of territory, strategy and percentages. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Tiger moth finds new home at WW2 airfield museum
A Tiger Moth has found a new home at an airfield where dozens of the aeroplanes were used to train pilots during World War Two. The biplane has been donated to the Bottisham Airfield Museum, near Cambridge, by the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. Jason Webb, chair of the airfield's trustees, said he was delighted about the donation, adding Tiger Moths were "top of our wanted list of exhibits". This type of aircraft was "the first to land at Bottisham in 1940 and the last to take off in 1946", he said. It will go on display at the museum for the first time on Sunday. Mr Webb said: "We became aware about six months ago that the Imperial War Museum was disposing of it as part of its reorganisation and put a bid in for it - alongside other museums - and they kindly selected ourselves out of all the others." The grass airfield at Bottisham was built in 1940 as a satellite for RAF Waterbeach and was initially used by Cambridge-based Tiger Moths from Marshalls (airfield) as a relief landing ground. The aircraft remained a regular sight in the skies over RAF Bottisham until 1946, serving with the RAF, the USAAF and the RAF Belgian section. Mr Webb said: "De Havilland Tiger Moths were elementary training aircraft, used to teach tens of thousands of pilots to fly, before they went on to fly Lancaster [bombers] or Spitfire [fighter aeroplanes]. "We want to put it on display to tell the story of pilots who flew them." In particular, he said he wanted to focus on the Tiger Moth's little-known role in Operation Banquet Lights, where the aircrafts were fitted with bombs just in case the Germans invaded England in 1940. "Luckily, this was not needed as it would have been a one-way trip for the pilots against modern German fighters," he added. Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X. Anniversary flight for 99-year-old RAF veteran Memorials planned for disused WW2 airfields The untold story of the battle that helped end WW2 in Europe WW2 plane's engine restored to honour RAF crew World War Two veteran celebrates 105th birthday Bottisham Airfield Museum
BBC News
3 days ago
- General
- BBC News
Tiger Moth finds new home at Bottisham's WW2 airfield museum
A Tiger Moth has found a new home at an airfield where dozens of the aeroplanes were used to train pilots during World War Two. The biplane has been donated to the Bottisham Airfield Museum, near Cambridge, by the Imperial War Museum in Webb, chair of the airfield's trustees, said he was delighted about the donation, adding Tiger Moths were "top of our wanted list of exhibits".This type of aircraft was "the first to land at Bottisham in 1940 and the last to take off in 1946", he said. It will go on display at the museum for the first time on Sunday. Mr Webb said: "We became aware about six months ago that the Imperial War Museum was disposing of it as part of its reorganisation and put a bid in for it - alongside other museums - and they kindly selected ourselves out of all the others." The grass airfield at Bottisham was built in 1940 as a satellite for RAF Waterbeach and was initially used by Cambridge-based Tiger Moths from Marshalls (airfield) as a relief landing aircraft remained a regular sight in the skies over RAF Bottisham until 1946, serving with the RAF, the USAAF and the RAF Belgian section. Mr Webb said: "De Havilland Tiger Moths were elementary training aircraft, used to teach tens of thousands of pilots to fly, before they went on to fly Lancaster [bombers] or Spitfire [fighter aeroplanes]. "We want to put it on display to tell the story of pilots who flew them."In particular, he said he wanted to focus on the Tiger Moth's little-known role in Operation Banquet Lights, where the aircrafts were fitted with bombs just in case the Germans invaded England in 1940."Luckily, this was not needed as it would have been a one-way trip for the pilots against modern German fighters," he added. Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Telegraph
21-05-2025
- Telegraph
The Imperial War Museum shines a blazing light on a neglected war crime
'No one knew the truth. If I didn't testify, it would be buried forever. I'll never forget the past, even if I am 100 years old. It was vividly carved into my head.' Tricked into sexual enslavement as a so-called 'Comfort Woman' for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War, this moving testimony from Kim Bok-dong encapsulates how easily the stories of sexual violence survivors and victims in conflict can slip through the cracks of posterity. Whether shamed or shunned, threatened or shushed, countless victims and survivors of sexual violence have been silenced for as long as wars have been waged. That it has taken until 2025 for the first major exhibition in the UK to deal exclusively with sexual violence in conflict demonstrates how, even within peacetime democracies, the subject has long been consigned to the shadows. But, with its brand-new exhibition Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, the Imperial War Museum shines a blazing light on 'the most neglected war crime', as described by the Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb in the exhibition's introductory video. While redeveloping the site's Second World War and Holocaust galleries in recent years, Helen Upcraft – lead curator of Unsilenced – and her IWM colleagues had quickly recognised that 'we needed a dedicated space to tell this story from start to finish, looking at all of those underlying societal structures and causes, through to justice and reconciliation'. Over the past six years, the IWM has drawn upon both its diverse collection of historical objects and the rich expertise of leading activists, journalists and academics in the field to realise this vision. When you step into Unsilenced, you are immediately struck by the unusual choice of material used to house much of the exhibition's information: fabric. The unravelling threads of the fabric as you pass through to the next room represent how war and conflict unpick societal norms; the wooden beams solemnly arching over your head symbolise the entrenched systems and unshakeable framework that enable sexual violence to be perpetrated in conflict. Although rape is synonymous with the subject, Unsilenced crucially reminds us that sexual violence is committed in many different forms. These include sexual humiliation and assault; torture and genital mutilation; forced sexual favours in return for basic amenities; and, at its most extreme, as part of ethnic cleansing. The main room highlights that such acts do not take place in a vacuum: rather, political structures, gender stereotypes, and power imbalances all contribute to their occurrence. An intriguing row of propaganda posters from multiple wars documents how men in war have long been portrayed throughout modern history. The men, of course, are rippling with muscles and oozing with machismo, virile and assertive in the heat of battle. Running concurrently beneath those posters, however, are the multiple negative stereotypes of women at war, such as being duplicitous sirens – 'Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb!' – or being weak and passive. Where Unsilenced is especially inspired, though, is how it flips our typical notion of military history on its head to reframe them from the perspective of sexual violence survivors and victims. An especially thought-provoking example can be seen in the German bayonet and scabbard on display from the First World War. As the accompanying panel explains, 'During the German invasion of Belgium in the autumn of 1914, witnesses testified that German soldiers raped Belgian women and used their bayonets to cut off their breasts before killing them.' Already a weapon with a grim military history to begin with, the thought that this exact kind of bayonet was also used to mutilate women out of sexual pleasure or vengeful rage makes the cold metal glint even more menacingly under the exhibition's spotlights. What is also sickening is the everyday nature of this sexual barbarity and dehumanisation of women in both World Wars. This is epitomised by the 'Comfort Women Station' sign that was reputedly taken from the door of a Japanese brothel in Burma during 1944. Forced to have sex with up to forty men a day, many of these women contracted horrific STDs and were rendered infertile; some were even raped to death. That the piece of wood is daubed with the words 'closed/just having a temporary 'rest'' on one side and 'sold out' on the other illustrates Imperial Japan's blasé commodification of between 50,000 and 200,000 'Comfort Women' from Korea, China, the Philippines, Burma and other Japan-occupied countries during the Second World War. Heartbreaking parallels can be seen in the exhibition's coverage of Yezidi women being registered, bought and sold as sex slaves by Isis fighters from 2014. But, though women and girls are heavily featured due to being disproportionally affected by sexual violence in conflict, Unsilenced highlights the sexual violence experienced by men as well. The present endemic of Ukrainian prisoners-of-war being sexually humiliated and tortured in Russian detention centres is mentioned, while references to the sexual humiliation, rape and torture of Abu Ghraib inmates by the United States Army and the CIA in the Iraq War are also made. Children, too, are covered by the exhibition. In a country whose popular culture is often transfixed on more nostalgic elements of the Second World War, Britons should not forget that up to 15 per cent of British child evacuees were subjected to physical, sexual or emotional abuse by their host families. Unsilenced, then, does not make for easy viewing; it therefore advises that children under 16 should not view this exhibit. Yet, though the full scale and scope of the subject are depicted, it is carried out with great attentiveness and the utmost sensitivity. 'We've tried to keep graphic content to a minimum,' Upcraft further explains, 'and we've tried to display it in a way that is sensitive to victims and survivors.' She adds that 'we don't want to shy away from the fact that this is an atrocity, it's a war crime, and people need to understand what that looks like – but ultimately, this exhibition is about making people feel confident and encouraging them to engage, and so we've definitely tried to do that with the objects we've put on display.' The exhibition deliberately covers some of the content in a lighter part of the gallery to represent the importance of no longer hiding a hushed subject in the shadows. What's more, Unsilenced is careful to reclaim the narratives of sexual violence survivors and victims by demonstrating that hope and community can follow trauma and isolation. By the end of the exhibition, the stitched-up seams of the previously fraying panels signify the vital process of healing and repair; of how strength and direction can be found despite the chaos of the past. The final sections of Unsilenced include the bringing of perpetrators to justice and also global activism – especially illuminating the vital support given to victims and survivors of sexual violence in conflict by non-governmental organisations such as the Free Yezidi Foundation, Women for Women International, the All Survivors Project and Waging Peace. 'It is vital,' the exhibition concludes, 'that we listen to and learn from victims and survivors and centre our discussions around their experiences.' The sheer assiduity and compassion that radiate from this remarkable exhibition proves that the Imperial War Museum has achieved precisely that.
Times
17-05-2025
- Times
Women are the forgotten victims of war — it's time that changed
Pass the massive naval guns in front of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and enter its spectacular atrium and you will be confronted by a Soviet tank and German V2 rocket while a Harrier jump jet and a Spitfire from the Battle of Britain dangle from the ceiling — the ultimate boys with toys fantasy. No surprise perhaps for a country that has fought more wars (about 120 in the last 300 years) than almost any other. But something is happening — upstairs a colourful North Korean propaganda poster advertises a new exhibition, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yes, it's tucked away behind the lifts on the third floor and comes with a trigger warning, but it's the first time any big western museum
