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Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945 @ the National Army Museum

The main exhibition space at the National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently hosting an exhibition titled ‘Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945’. It is premised on one core fact: Germany has been at the heart of the British Army’s story since 1945.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum

Overview

The exhibition does what it says on the tin, giving a straightforward chronological account of the British Army’s time in Germany, from the closing battles of the Second World War (Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945( through to the present day. It covers:

  • the British Army’s role in helping to rebuild a completely shattered and broken Germany
  • how this quickly evolved into providing protection and defence against possible attack by Russia during the long period of the Cold War (1945 to 1990)
  • how the well-trained battle-ready forces in Germany then became a base from which to deploy troops across the world, specifically during the first Gulf War (1990), the civil wars in Yugoslavia (1991 to 2001), then the wars in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021)
  • finally, the drawdown in British forces in Germany, whose presence officially ended in 2019

Movement Forwarding Office boxes

Dotted through the exhibition are replica Movement Forwarding Office boxes. These were the wooden boxes personnel’s belongings were sent to Germany in. Here they are stamped with information panels but are also the site of recordings of ordinary people’s voices from each of the five sections of the exhibition (see below). In other words, the exhibition isn’t silent but, as you move through it, you hear a whole range of voices describing their experiences, from the occupying soldiers of 1945 onwards.

Two aspects

The British Army had a significant presence in Germany from the country’s defeat in 1945 to its final departure in 2019, near enough 75 years. During that time more than two million British service personnel and their families called Germany home. Many were posted for significant periods of time, got married and lived with spouses and children

The exhibition has two aspects: one is to give a detailed account of the changing military situation, describing all aspects of what was at first a military operation and then changed into a defence function as part of NATO. The second aspect looks at the social history of these people and this period, at what it was like to serve and live in Germany, at the impact it had on those two million service personnel and their families, and at the many traditions and institutions which rose between Brits and locals.

The exhibition is divided into five themes:

1. Winning the Peace

On 8 May German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. These nations – Britain, France, the USA, the USSR – divided the defeated nation into Zones of Occupation which they administered. The British forces were christened the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).

German map of the occupation zones (1945)

The BAOR was confronted with enormous problems. They had to feed the impoverished population. They had to deal with the revelations of the Holocaust. They had to manage the millions of refugees and homeless people. They literally had to set about rebuilding roads, houses, factories, the entire infrastructure of a modern nation. The display includes:

  • maps of the zones of influence
  • a hand-written statistical record compiled by a British soldier detailing the state of inmates, numbers of deaths, burials and evacuations at the Belsen concentration camp
  • the BAOR supervised the rebuilding of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg

In 1946 families were allowed to join the soldiers of the BOAR. Barracks were created. The British remained entirely segregated from the local population, using their own schools, their own currency, forbidden to fraternise with the enemy. The scale of the devastation and the task ahead were detailed in this 1946 documentary film.

Field Marshall Montgomery and Churchill took a victory parade of 10,000 British troops through the ruins of berlin on 21 July 1945. A series of letters from Montgomery give instructions on the strict non-fraternisation policy between Brits and Germans.

The athletics medals of Bevis Shergold, a veteran of the war in Europe who lived in Germany with her husband in the 1950s, indicate the thriving sporting and cultural scene that was established to cater to service personnel and their families. Many service personnel lived better in Germany, enjoyed better facilities, than back in Britain, much of which was also in ruins and subject to strict rationing.

‘Who was a Nazi?’ A major goal of the occupying forces was the denazification of Germany. Leaflets and pamphlets were written to help ordinary soldiers question German citizens and identify Nazis. Two million cases were investigated in the British Zone alone.

The Berlin airlift 1948 to 1949

Tensions with the Russians climaxed on 24 June 1948 when the Soviet authorities blockaded Berlin, in theory a city occupied by all four Allies but which was embedded deep in the Soviet Zone. The three Western Allies promptly set up airlifts to fly in food and other necessities. At its height a British or American plane was landing in one of Berlin’s three airports every 60 seconds. Eventually, after nearly a year, the Soviets abandoned their blockade on 12 May 1949.

Now it was clear for all to see who the enemy was, and the prolonged commitment of the Allies to Berlin changed the relationship between Germans and their occupiers. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was now, that the Germans were allies against the mightier threat, Russia.

2. Walls and Wire

Churchill had warned of an iron curtain dividing Europe as soon after the war as March 1946. The Berlin Airlift crystallised tension between the former Allies. But it wasn’t until 1961 that things took a further turn for the worse, when, on the night of 12 August, Soviet soldiers erected 100 miles of barbed wire around West Berlin, cutting it off from the outside world. In the weeks that followed the wire was followed by a concrete wall.

But the Berlin Wall was just a small forerunner of the bigger divided between east and West Germany. Eventually a wall, accompanied by barbed wire and guard towers, ran 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It eventually became, along with the border between North and South Korea, one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world.

The Berlin Airlift clarified the British commitment to Germany. The manpower of the British Army on the Rhine was set at 53 to 55,000. The sense of embattled threat from the East set the tone of British soldiers’ lives for the next 40 years. In Berlin itself, service life was dictated by a host of rituals, rules and regulations surrounding the Wall and the exhibition highlights many little known aspects.

For example, I didn’t know that the Queen visited British forces in Berlin on three separate occasions, in 1965, 1978 and 1987.

Westerners were only allowed to travel from the West to Berlin via one heavily monitored road and one heavily monitored railway line. The exhibition includes movement orders and information leaflets relating to both.

We learn about BRIXMIS, which was the British Commanders in Chief Mission to the Soviets in Germany. Officers from BRIXMIS held parties and receptions, but were also allowed to go on three-man fact-finding missions anywhere inside the Soviet sector. It was a small organisation, numbering just 31 people, yet had wide-ranging freedoms to travel in the Soviet sector. Despite their official status, members of the little BRIXMIS parties could still be subject to harassment and even violence from Soviet or East German troops.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing uniform and equipment used by the BRIXMIS unit.

The British Army presence in Berlin numbered 3,100, deployed in three infantry battalions, with a number of supporting units. They were rotated every two years.

In 1947 the BAOR instituted the Berlin Tattoo, two days of displays and pageantry. This was open to German citizens and became  part of the city’s social calendar. It continued until 1990.

3. Active Edge

‘Active Edge’ was the term used by the Army for exercises that brought about fast mobilisation under the Soviet threat. This section documents the changing face of the BOAR during the Cold War years of the later 60s, 70s and 80s. During this period there was a growing threat from biological and nuclear weapons, with far-reaching consequences for training and equipment. It saw the inauguration of so-called ‘Survive to Fight’ training. Suits designed to protect against nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are on display.

The army’s readiness peaked with 1984’s Exercise Lionheart, the biggest British military exercise held since the Second World War, which involved 131,000 UK troops.

National Service ended in 1960 although the last national servicemen were only discharged in 1963. By the 1970s the BAOR had long ceased to be an army of occupation and was a smaller, more professional army which focused entirely on the possibility of having to fight a war of defence on the North German plain. Money was invested in better uniform, weapons and equipment, some of which are on display here.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing weapons used by the British Army on the Rhine during the 1970s and 80s

A magazine was set up for service personnel and titled ‘Threat’ which kept its readers up to date with intelligence about Soviet weapons, and their weaknesses, and likely battlefield tactics.

A video shows the Queen’s visit to the BAOR in 1977 to mark the jubilee of her reign, alongside photos and a commemorative mug. There’s an old-style push-button display which contains a dinky diorama of rolling landscape with half a dozen toy tanks scattered among it. When you press a button spotlights illuminate the different tanks and you have to press another button to identify the vehicle as friendly or enemy, using the list of profiles next to the buttons.

A surprisingly dominant display is of a mocked-up catering van, testament to an enterprising German, Wolfgang Meier, who spotted a commercial opening for someone to offer grub to hungry thirsty troops on the well-known Soltau-Lüneberg training range. For 25 years his bright blue catering vans offered hungry squaddies a menu including bratwurst, currywurst, fish and chips, chicken and chips, and Coke, Fanta or Sprite.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing a mock-up of one of Wolfgang Meier’s distinctive refreshment vans

4. Deployments

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was quickly followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw pact, which had glowered at NATO forces for 45 years. What now for the British Army? What was it for? What should it do?

In brief, the Army in Germany was cut in size by half. But as the 1990s progressed new types of threat or emergency emerged, notably:

  • Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait which triggered the Gulf War (2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991)
  • the wars in former Yugoslavia, consisting of:
    • the Slovenian War of Independence (1991)
    • the Croatian War of Independence (1991 to 1995)
    • the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995)
    • the Insurgency in Kosovo (1995 to 1998)
    • the Kosovo War (1998 to 1999)

In Operation Granby an entire division of BAOR was deployed out of Germany as part of a multinational coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. British forces based in Germany also made major contributions to operations in Bosnia and the wider Balkans. They were then involved in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The BAOR came to be seen as a highly trained, highly motivated force which could be drawn on for operations in these other theatres.

This section examines the complete rethink about what the British Army in Europe was for, and contains mementos of the army’s involvement in some of these conflicts.

There’s a Seventh Armoured Brigade pennant from Kosovo. A copy of ‘Threat’ magazine, now focusing on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army rather than the Warsaw Pact. A road sign from Basra. A mannekin sporting a uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing the uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait with the flag of 1(BR) Corps in the background

At the same time, this final section dwells more than previously on the social aspects of British military life in Germany. A  case displays the wedding outfits of local girl Sigrid Krueger and British soldier Anthony Young whose marriage in 1990 symbolises the ever-closer ties between service personnel and locals. They met singing in an Anglo-German Choir in Rinteln and still live in Germany today. The harsh non-fraternisation policies outlined in Montgomery’s letters right at the start of the exhibition seem to come from another age.

There’s mention of the British Forces Broadcasting Service which began broadcasting in 1945 and kept going till the end. Generations of young Germans grew up listening to it, not least because it had lots of fashionable pop hits in the 60s and 70s.

There’s more about army schools, including a school uniform for a British forces-only school. Notes on the British Army  Summer Show which developed in the town of Bad Lippspringe and became a regular part of the British Forces Germany calendar, with its live music, equestrian events, trade stands, car show and beer tents. A description of the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) which ran pubs, clubs and supermarkets for the British. The biggest NAAFI in the world opened in Rheindahlen in 1972 and wives in particular would travel a hundred miles to stock up on British food and drink.

Grateful German municipalities sometimes awarded their local British forces a Fahnenband, the highest award that can be bestowed on a British unit by the German military, and several examples are on display here.

But the 1990s brought change on the social front, too. The first British Military Tattoo was held in Berlin in 1947. The last one was held in October 1992.

5. Legacy

In 2010 the Liberal-Conservative British government decided to reduce the size of the army from 112,000 to 82,000 with a reserve of 35,000. And plans were announced to withdraw the entire remaining 20,000 forces from Germany by 2020.

At the culmination of this 10-year drawdown, the British Army’s permanent deployment to Germany came to an end in September 2019. No British combat units now remain in Germany. It was the end of an era.

However, in November 2021 the Ministry of Defence announced that Germany would become one of three ‘Land Hubs’, along with Kenya and Oman, where the British Army can train abroad with NATO allies and partner nations. Significant numbers of British tanks, armoured cars and other vehicles remain in storage at a training area in Sennelager. A garrison support unit remains in Germany to to provide health service support, welfare and the British Forces Broadcasting Service. From the peak of 780,000 British troops in Germany in 1945, there are now just 135 Army personnel remaining in Germany, none of them combat forces.

In-depth walk through the exhibition (40 minutes)

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by Simon on March 29, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in European History, Exhibition, History, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on March 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/29/foe-to-friend-the-british-army-in-germany-since-1945-the-national-army-museum/

Road to Recovery @ the National Army Museum

‘Rehabilitation starts the moment a life is saved. From that moment we start to consider life beyond survival.’
Major Peter Le Feuvre MBE (Physiotherapist, Royal Army Medical Corps)

‘Road to Recovery’ is a fairly small but well laid-out and very powerful exhibition at the National Army Museum. It describes the modern treatment of soldiers who have experienced life-changing battlefield injuries, both physical and mental, and paints a vivid picture of the journeys of rehabilitation and recovery which each injured soldier has to take.

Installation view of ‘Road to Recovery’ at the National Army Museum

The exhibition is staged in one medium-sized room. In the centre is a starburst-shaped set of panels which present the stories of five particular soldiers who suffered life-changing injuries. They are:

  • Captain Harry Parker – double lower-limb amputation
  • Simon Brown – traumatic facial injury and severe visual impairment
  • Dave Henson – double lower-limb amputation
  • Gemma Morgan – complex post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Johnson Beharry – severe head and brain injury

Each panel gives the facts of their injury and their battlefield treatment, details of subsequent operations, and the physical and mental legacy. Then they describe the rehabilitation process. All of this is stated in a kind of bureaucratic summary, a standardised list of fields and very clipped text descriptions, their brevity making them all the more powerful. Here’s an example:

Harry Parker

Rank and regiment: Captain, The Rifles

Dates of service: 2006 to 2013

Operational tours: Iraq 2007, Afghanistan 2009

Present occupation: Writer and artist

Injury: Double lower-limb amputation (right leg above knee, left leg below knee); lost a finger of left hand

Cause of injury: Stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device) while leading a patrol

Impact: 18 minutes from point of injury to Camp Bastion hospital; resuscitated three times; right leg amputated after 10 days due to fungal infection; 10 days in intensive care unity; 6 weeks and 11 operations in Selly Oak Hospital; 10 weeks after injury standing on prosthetics; in and out of Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre (Epsom) for six years

Treated: Camp Bastion Hospital, Afghanistan; Selly Oak Hospital Birmingham; Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre

The details of each injury are harrowing enough, but each of the five case studies also has an interactive panel accompanied by headphones, where you press a tab and can watch and listen to the person in question being interviewed. The three short videos address the same topics, namely 1) the incident, 2) rehab, 3) the legacy.

Placed around the central panels describing the five specific stories, are more general panels describing different aspects of modern rehabilitation and how it’s changed and improved in recent decades. There’s a case showing a selection of prosthetic limbs, there are several artworks – three paintings and a bust associated with other survivors – and there’s a video in which occupational therapists, nurses and specialists explain the details and thinking behind modern rehabilitation treatment.

Unexpected survivors

In the last 20 years, particularly during the long conflicts in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021), huge improvements in battlefield medical care have led to many soldiers surviving physical injuries that only a decade or so earlier would have been fatal. In the jargon of the trade these soldiers are referred to as ‘unexpected survivors’. The wall panels indicate the extraordinarily skilled and sophisticated medical procedures which saved their lives on the battlefield and then at the rear area medical facilities in the first minutes and hours after the injury.

Respect to all the medical staff involved, but what really impresses is the resilience, bravery and determination of the patients themselves. The medics saved the soldiers’ lives but then, as the soldiers and physiotherapists and counsellors all make abundantly clear – that’s when the real journey to recovery begins, marking the start of the psychological journey to recovery.

The determination and bravery of the five selected soldiers is awe-inspiring. Would I be that brave and determined if my legs were blown off, if half my brain were permanently damaged, if I was blinded by a shell exploding a few feet from my face?

Here’s a painting done by Harry Parker, whose story I outlined above. He had studied art before joining the army. This is the first painting he did after his injury and, according to the wall label, painting it made him realise that he had more options in life than just being a soldier.

‘Legs’ by Captain Harry Parker (2013)

Harry realised there was more to him than obeying orders in the Army, that he had a lot more to contribute and live for. In its way this painting epitomises the fat that the key to recovery for most injured veterans is regaining their independence and finding a fulfilling alternative career.

PTSD

The exhibition is at pains to point out that soldiers suffer not only physical injuries but can suffer from severe mental trauma, too. The best known condition is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The symptoms of this include nightmares and flashbacks, trouble sleeping, being hypervigilant and angry, or, at the other extreme, becoming completely emotionally detached from your surroundings. As well as hurting the sufferers, PTSD can obviously also have a devastating impact on family and loved ones, struggling to cope with a loved one who, in extreme cases, becomes a complete stranger.

In the past the Ministry of Defence was guilty of failing to screen soldiers back from active service adequately, failing in its ‘duty of care’ as the jargon has it. Nowadays everyone is much more aware of the seriousness of the condition and soldiers can be referred to the NHS or to charities which offer help and support. Treatment usually takes the form of a combination of therapy and medication.

Four of the five detailed profiles laid out on the wall panels are of soldiers who suffered horrific physical injuries, but one of the five is devoted solely to psychological damage, the case of Gemma Morgan.

Gemma Morgan

Rank and regiment: Royal Logistics Corp

Dates of service: 1996 to 2002

Operational tour: Kosovo 1998 to 1999

Present occupation: Speaker and Leadership Consultant; ambassador at Help for Heroes

Injury: Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Cause of injury: Observing and verifying instances of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (a further wall label explains that Gemma witnessed acts of ethnic cleansing but, due to the nature of the mission was unable to intervene; it was this inability to help the innocent which caused her mental anguish)

Impact: Nightmares and flashbacks; alcohol abuse and emotional withdrawal; suicidal tendencies; wrongly diagnosed with moderately affective disorder, not attributable to her military service; three years after leaving the Army diagnosed with severe PTSD attributed to her service in Kosovo; seven weeks as an in-patient and over a year as an out-patient at a private clinic

Treated: Department of Community Mental Health, Aldershot; NHS; the Priory

As Gemma’s story indicates, the mental wounds are often harder to diagnose, harder to identify, and so harder to treat than physical ones. There’s an interactive panel which lets you listen to Gemma herself explaining her journey through the three steps of: incident, rehabilitation, and legacy. God, the poor woman.

Another wall label tells us that local villagers in Kosovo called Gemma ‘Djamelia’. At first she thought this was a local pronunciation of her name but then learned that it was a local word meaning ‘bringer of hope’, and this meant a lot to her later on, during her recovery. You can imagine how something like that must answer the need for purpose and meaning to events which otherwise just seem too horrific to process.

‘Rehabilitation for me has been about learning to find new meaning, learning to find new purpose to my life and finding a tribe that I belong to.’ (Gemma Morgan)

Jaco

The exhibition tells three or four more inspiring stories. Jaco van Gass lost his arm and suffered other life-changing injuries when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2011. After years of rehabilitation he became a para-cyclist and won two gold medals at the 2020 Paralympic Games.

Jaco van Gass by Caroline de Peyrecave (2017)

Snippets

At the peak of the war in Afghanistan, 2009 to 2010, Headley Court Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre in Epsom was the largest centre for prosthetics in the UK with 11 full-time prosthetists.

There are over 2,000 Armed Forces charities in the UK, from well known ones like Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion to more specialised ones like Blesma, Combat Stress, KartForce or Waterloo Uncovered.

The Invictus Games were set up in 2014 under the patronage of the Duke of Sussex, to give injured veterans a platform to compete at sports against their peers. Many have gone on to compete in the Paralympic Games.

Kings College London leads research into military mental health. As a result of its work, early screening and treatment for PTSD are being implemented.

Although there is more institutional help than ever before, more understanding, more therapeutic approaches and more charities working in the area of soldiers’ mental health, some still slip through the net. Surprisingly, maybe, the suicide rate among veterans is lower than the general population, but in 2018 75 veterans took their lives.

Best wishes

This is a very moving and often upsetting exhibition. Best wishes to all the veterans injured, either physically or psychologically, in all the stupid wars our politicians have sent them to fight. And huge respect to all the professionals – the medics and physiotherapists and psychotherapists and counsellors – who help put them back together again.

Related links

Charities mentioned in the exhibition

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by Simon on March 27, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, War
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Posted by Simon on March 27, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/27/road-to-recovery-national-army-museum/

The Art of Persuasion: Wartime Posters by Abram Games @ the National Army Museum

‘Maximum meaning, minimum means.’
(Abram Games)

This is a cracking exhibition, beautifully designed and laid out, packed with information about not only the artist (wartime poster designer Abram Games), and including a hundred or so dazzling examples of his ground-breaking graphic designs, but also providing a fascinating insight into the social history of the wartime years and after.

Abram Games

Abraham Gamse (later anglicised to Abram Games) was born in the East End of London to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1914. His dad ran a photographic studio and introduced the young artist to the airbrush which he used to retouch photos, and which was to play a major role in Games’s mature style.

Games left school at 16 and attended Saint Martin’s School of Art in London but left after just two terms, disillusioned by the teaching and worried about the expense. Nonetheless, he was determined to establish himself as a poster artist and so got a job as a ‘studio boy’ for the commercial design firm Askew-Young, from 1932 to 1936, while also attending night classes in life drawing. From 1936 to 1940, he worked on his own as a freelance poster artist.

Games was always a man of the Left and the exhibition opens with some posters he made to support the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil war (1936 to 1939) for free, on his own time. He was well aware that he was most inspired when trying to convey a message than sell a product.

Soon after the Second World War broke out, Games  was conscripted into the army, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

The exhibition includes several big display cases showing all sorts of personal belongings and documentation, photos and sketchbooks, easels and paintbrushes and pencils and crayons which once belonged to Games, and these include early photos of him with his dad, a school report, and then photos of the budding young artist in military uniform. Games contributed to regimental and army magazines and was quickly head-hunted into the War Office Public Relations Directorate.

He was classified as an ‘Official War Poster Artist’, given a desk in the Public Relations Department of the War Office, and went on to create some 100 posters for the Army. Probably his most famous work is the iconic recruitment poster for the Auxiliary Territorial Service – ‘Join the ATS’ – made 1941, which was subsequently nicknamed, for obvious reasons, the ‘blonde bombshell’.

‘Join the ATS’ (1941) by Abram Games

This poster immediately conveys the characteristic Games look, with its simple central image of a heroically stylised human head, its strikingly stark and simple use of colour, the crisp clarity of its graphic ideas, and the beautifully integrated typography (in the three colours of the Union Jack).

The airbrushing of the shadow across the face is obvious enough and was a characteristic touch. Less obvious is the way he has sketched in the background quite roughly, creating areas of light and shade, giving a sense of texture without perspective reminiscent of many of the neo-Georgian illustrators of the era.

The exhibition is divided into seven ‘rooms’ or areas titled thus:

  1. A good name is better than good oil
  2. Curiosity, ignorance, bravado
  3. Take a pride in being fighting fit
  4. I am not an artist – I am a graphic thinker
  5. Save more, lend more
  6. Your Britain – Fight for it now
  7. The way ahead

But after I’d worked my way carefully around the exhibition, I felt it fell into the following easy-to-remember categories:

Join the army

Games made numerous posters encouraging civilians to join the army or navy or ATS. They tend to be done in his classic style, featuring the big, stylised, Art Deco head of a man or woman in uniform, given his characteristic Deco burnish with stylish use of the airbrush.

‘Army, the worthwhile job’ (1946) by Abram Games

Training inside the army

A whole section is devoted to the training of soldiers once they were inside the army. These include a suite of posters on the topic of keeping fit and looking after yourself, including some slightly bizarre ones on the importance of cleaning your teeth regularly.

According to his daughter, Naomi Games, the author of a book about her father’s wartime art, among Games’s favourite works was this poster warning against careless talk. The way the sound waves emanating from the loose talker’s mouth morph into a red hot blade which transfixes three soldiers is startling and shocking. The six words of the text are secondary in size and positioning to the shocking imagery.

‘Your talk may kill your comrades’ (1942)

This section features another series, warning against slackness and indiscipline around live weapons and ammunition. Apparently one of them, showing a little girl in a coffin because she had touched a hand grenade which had been left carelessly lying around by thoughtless soldiers, was so disturbing that it was regularly taken down in army barracks by upset fathers.

This series about live ammunition highlights a major feature of the exhibition which is Games’s variety. If he had a classic style (burnished heroic heads), as described above, he was also capable of making something like this, which is wildly different.

It is a form of montage with photos of shells and mortars arranged on a graphically drawn coffin lid, one of them being tampered with by a pair of skeleton hands, and the whole thing floating at an angle in a black and white cloudy sky.

This style clearly owes a massive debt to 1930s Surrealism and, well aware of how they broke away from his normal style, Games apparently labelled the series his ‘Symphony Macabre’.

‘He wanted to see inside’ (1943)

By now we can generalise a bit about Games’s palette which he uses across all his styles – the way he restricted himself to a limited range of earth-based colours, often reserving bright red to make the strongest visual points.

The exhibition walls are covered with pithy quotes and apothegms from Games, which mostly boil down to the same thing: less is more. The message must be immediate. He said a good idea can be conveyed in any size. If poster designs ‘don’t work an inch high, they will never work.’ The image must unlock one central thought in the viewer’s mind.

He disliked the lettering part of the process, and so came up with designs which conveyed the entire idea visually, and needed only the minimal amount of text to ram home the message. As he put it:

I am not an artist, I am a graphic thinker

(Although the exhibition includes sketchbooks and quite a few drawings he made of soldiers which, although not perfect, are still impressive and atmospheric.)

The simplification (and occasional bizarreness) of Games’s imagery can be contrasted with the studied railway realism of a poster-maker like Frank Newbould, below.

‘Save for defence’ by Frank Newbould

You can see how the Newbould is much more realistic in conception style. It depicts an actual scene. The contrast brings out how much more abstract Games’s designs are, how he felt completely liberated from ‘realism’ to bring together all kinds of disparate elements (in the Surreal designs) or focus on highly stylised figures (in his Art Deco style). Just compare and contrast the Newbould with the skeleton hands on a floating coffin lid to see the world of difference between Games and his peers.

Support the army / advice for civilians

Another section is devoted to posters with advice for civilians, including quite a few on the familiar subject of being careful what you say about any aspect of the war effort in public.

There is also a series of posters warning against waste, with the idea that every piece of food or clothing or equipment or oil that is wasted, requires replacing by ship from abroad, and puts more pressure on the wartime Atlantic convoys leading, ultimately, to more deaths at sea.

‘Wasted Petrol is Another Ship Lost’ (1944)

Note, again, the totally schematic or diagrammatic conception. This is nowhere near a realistic scene, but uses real photographs as in a photomontage within a larger abstract design.

Support displaced person and refugees, especially Jewish refugees

The exhibition wall labels (and his daughter, Naomi Games, in one of the short videos you can watch on a screen at the end of the exhibition) emphasise that Games was proud of his Jewish heritage.

Games had been among the first in Britain to see evidence of the atrocities committed at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, when photographs taken there by British troops arrived at the War Office in 1945. The same year he produced a poster, Give Clothing for Liberated Jewry, and often worked to support Jewish and Israeli organisations.

‘Give Clothing For Liberated Jewry’ (1946)

Looking ahead to post-war Britain

Set up in 1941 the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) aimed to raise the morale of British soldiers through education. It was soon considered an integral part of Army training. From 1942 ABCA published fortnightly wall maps showing progress in the various theatres of war, designed to be stuck up in Army barracks, canteens and classrooms, and Games was involved in designing many of these.

They show another side of his work, since they tended to be heavy with text, which required headings and then explanatory text, not his natural medium.

In the same section is a display case showing the covers of books and pamphlets which he designed, especially for a series called ‘Target For Tomorrow’. Each of these pamphlets discussed political issues which everyone knew would have to be addressed once the war was won, such as ‘The Nation’s Health’, ‘Remobilisation for Peace’, and ‘the Future of the Colonies’.

(It must be said that most of these book covers don’t look like book covers at all – they have the extreme visual simplicity of the posters and his habit of trying to avoid all unnecessary text is a drawback in format where the reader needs to know, straightaway, both the title of the book and its author, facts which sometimes take a bit of puzzling out in Games’s book covers.)

I was fascinated by a series with the title ‘Your Britain – Fight For It NOW’. This series was commissioned by ABCA to show soldiers what they were fighting for. In the three examples on display here Games contrasts the bombed-out ruins and slums of the present with the shiny, modernist architecture which he, like so many other progressives, thought held the key to the future. The three posters here contrast the bleak grey and white ruins of the present with a shiny example of a school, a health clinic, and a sparkling new block of flats which we will build in the New Jerusalem.

‘Your Britain – Fight for it NOW’ (1944)

Political motivation aside, these also draw very heavily on the Surrealist painters of the 1930s – if you look at the way the damaged walls are painted, the combination of a kind of hyper-realism with perfect oil paint finish is very reminiscent of Salvador Dali.

As throughout the exhibition, the wall labels for these posters are first-rate, giving you fascinating insight into the images, the process of their commissioning and creating, and the social history behind them. The Your Britain series is a kind of poster equivalent of the famous Beveridge Report, published in 1942 and laying out the basis for a welfare state for all.

Post-war work

The war ended and Games was demobbed in 1946, resuming his freelance practice designing film posters, book covers, postage stamps and posters. Clients included London Transport, the Financial Times, Guinness and British European Airways.

In 1951 he won the public competition to design the emblem for the Festival of Britain. The brief asked for a design reflecting ‘a summer of gaiety’. Games’s winning design used the colours of the Union Jack, and the head (yet another stylised, Art Deco style head) of Britannia in her helmet, astride a compass bringing together people from north, south, east and west and linked by a gay string of bunting. Note the monochrome but subtly shaded background, just like in the ATS poster of exactly ten years earlier.

The emblem went on to decorate all the posters, commemorative memorabilia and merchandising surrounding the festival.

Festival of Britain emblem – the Festival Star (1951)

The exhibition concludes that, with his simple but highly impactful use of colour, shape and typography, Games revolutionised poster design, so much so that his effects can still be seen in some modern posters today.

Summary

If you’re at all interested in Games the poster designer, this is a must-see show, displaying not only 100 key works, each carefully and thoroughly explained, but also the display cases showing all sorts of ephemera such as the smock he worked in, his easel and brushes and pencils and crayons and much more. They’ve even got his pipe and ashtray!

If you’re interested in the history of 20th century graphic design, then this is a fascinating account of the contribution of one of its leading practitioners.

If you’re interested in the Second World War, Games’s posters shed fascinating light on not only the recruitment but the training of the Army, and many of the little details of Army life (how to keep your teeth clean, how to avoid VD, how not to shoot your mates by accident).

And if you’re interested in the post-war period, the heroic era of the Labour government which founded the welfare state and the National Health Service, then the exhibition also tells you a great deal about the hopes and expectations of the ordinary fighting men, and the work of the ABCA in preparing them for a better future.

(And, for younger readers, there’s a bit of snazzy interactivity with some touch screens where you can select Games-style background, colours and move around images and lettering to create your very own Games poster.)

This is really a beautifully presented, painstakingly explained and deeply rewarding exhibition.

The promotional video

Related links

Reviews of other NAM exhibitions

1 Comment
by Simon on April 24, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on April 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/the-art-of-persuasion-wartime-posters-abram-games-national-army-museum/