Voices of War at the War Museum

Voices of War at the War Museum In 1940, Donald Lashbrook from Exeter left behind friends and family to embark for India to serve in the British Army in the Second World War. He spent five years on the frontline in India, Afghanistan and Myanmar, as the British Army joined China and the United States in their fight against Japanese forces. On 15th August 1945, the war was declared over and Lashbrook, then 25 years old, was able to return home. "VJ (Victory over Japan) Day came, it was all over. Everybody was 'we're on our way home,'" Lashbrook said in an archived audio interview that now features in the Voices of War soundscape collection at London's Imperial War Museum (IWM). His voice is one of the many personal accounts presented by the IWM in the exhibition that was set up to commemorate the Second World War 75 years after its end. From 8th May to 15th August the museum has been sharing the personal stories of people who stood together during a time of national crisis and their reflections on a time of both celebration and cautious relief in the summer of 1945. "With Voices of War, IWM will be bringing the stories and memories of those who lived through the conflicting jubilation, hope, sadness and fear that was felt during the summer of 1945 directly to homes around the country. We want the public to reflect on this important historical milestone as many others did 75 years ago," said Diane Lees, director general of the IWM. Anthony Richards, head of documents and sound collection at the War Museum, played a key role in pulling together the audio and text archives. Spending years researching into private papers and interviewing relatives to help piece together a retelling of the personal lives impacted by war. The voices, testimonies of personal responses to moments in the war from people who were actually there, are selected as representations of three important anniversaries: VE Day (May 8th), the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (marked on August 6th) and VJ Day (August 15th). Among the voices, there is one from a British soldier, who was bayoneted in the arm by a Japanese soldier, about how joyful he was when he finally went home from the battle in 1945: “There was a banner outside, you know, 'welcome home' and it took me quite a while to knock the door. Just the feeling of getting home really you know and you hadn't seen your family for nearly four years and it was a very joyous occasion really”. There is also the voice of a former Japanese officer who took part in battle in both India and Myanmar but many years later worked hard to promote reconciliation between former enemies, saying "We arrive now after the war because of the many, many, war dead. So we owe them. We owe the dead." Extensive research was required to put the collection together. For Richards, it meant that he had to dig through the museum’s extensive archives, which held records of testimonies, interviews and documents going back to 1917 and beyond. To capture the voices of war he also went out to people's homes to sit down with them for hour-long interviews and cover their entire lives and their experiences of warfare. The intention behind the Voices of War project, he said, was to try and break down the complexities of the end of the Second World War through the personal stories of those who were directly impacted by it – and to show people today just how awful war is. He sees Voices of War as a reminder of how badly war affects ordinary lives and that is something he feels we ought never to return to. “In a way, it tells you more about how awful war is than anything else. It's the effect of ordinary people in ordinary lives,” Richards said. Despite victory and the war coming to an end, the audio interviews also detail people's concerns and uncertainty on “rebuilding the world”, something that according to Richards, resonates strongly with how people may feel today amid a global pandemic. “Looking at the wide variety of voices that we used for this project, I think they're interesting because they show how events at the end of World War II were never as clear cut as people think they were,” he said. “Current events in the news today are immensely complicated, and there's multiple viewpoints...And things were not straightforward. People felt very confused. They didn't quite know what was going to happen,” he added. Hearing the personal accounts of confusion and uncertainty, Richards feels that the voices from the exhibition – although from a different era – can be of inspiration to the people of today living through a global pandemic. “And obviously, it (global pandemic) is very different to a major world conflict. But there are parallels to be made there and I think we can take that away from the voices from 1945,” he said. Xinhua