How the Past Is Remembered at the Imperial War Museum
Giovanna Grizotte
The World War Two Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum is a place one could spend hours exploring. The exhibit spans from the events that led up to WWII, the six years of war, and the aftermath. With so much content to cover, the exhibit effectively takes the audience through the atrocities associated with war, focusing on the British perspective but still mentioning the other countries involved in WWII.
A significant amount of the exhibit showcases the Blitz, a period when Nazi Germany intensely bombed Britain. This part of the exhibit invokes a sense of fear and panic in the audience to parallel those feelings felt by British citizens during the Blitz. The ceiling above in this section imitates a dark sky with planes flying up above with noises of blaring sirens and bomb explosions. There is also a full-size Anderson shelter in the exhibit, allowing visitors to go inside the tightly spaced shelter many families spent hours in during the bombings. People with gardens could install this type of shelter because it would camouflage within their surrounding gardens. The museum label on the shelter says, “Air raids could be lengthy.
. People played cards and games, read, knitted and listened to music.” These features in the museum are directly related to the 1940 documentary London Can Take It and the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver. One of the scenes in Mrs. Miniver depicts a British family seeking shelter and shows two children trying to sleep through the explosions while their parents do their best to comfort them. This scene is the reality many faced during the Blitz. The WWII exhibit brings this harsh reality back to life for museumgoers to understand what living through the Second World War was like.
London Can Take It shows British citizens seeking protection in air-raid shelters or the Underground. In Todd Bennett’s One World, Big Screen, he says that the evidence of “physical destruction, human hardship, and death wrought by Germany’s bombs established Britons as the war’s victims” (Bennett 66). The documentary’s title is significant because despite the German attacks on the Londoners, “they could ‘take it’’’ (Bennett 66). The British would continue fighting for their country no matter how much they suffered. It is important to note that both Mrs. Miniver and London Can Take It served as WWII propaganda geared toward Americans to gain sympathy for the British. However, the Blitz section of the exhibit effectively depicts the horror and uncertainty Britain faced. The museum does not glamorize war and its ramifications. Instead, it displays the actual, gruesome nature of war in which war spares no one, not even civilians.
Another significant part of the WWII exhibit details the cracking of German codes at Bletchley Park. The designated area includes interactive enigma machines that allow visitors to engage in “similar” enciphering that mathematicians Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman did.
These mathematicians, alongside other helpers, designed a machine that intercepted German messages during WWII and became crucial in helping Britain in the war. The Imitation Game is a film based on the life of Alan Turing, who cracked Enigma, which cryptanalysts thought was unbreakable. One of the key scenes from the film comes after breaking the code. There is a moral dilemma if the British cryptologists should alert British troops of an incoming German attack or remain quiet so the Germans do not realize that their Enigma code has been broken. The cryptologists choose not to save the troops, reflecting the difficult decisions that the British had to make to win the war. The film also discloses that “historians estimate that breaking Enigma shortened the war by more than two years, saving over 14 million lives.” This technology saved millions, but who’s to say the cracking of Enigma would have saved more people if Enigma had been used to Britain’s advantage quicker in the war.
To conclude, I have visited the Imperial War Museum twice for my history course, and the second time around, I discovered more things than on my first visit. The second visit I made was during my final week of school after I had learned all about World War II. The WWII exhibit at the museum contributed to an accurate understanding of the WWII experience. The material I learned from class including our readings, films, and museum visits, directly aligned with the material at the exhibit. I find that the Imperial War Museum WWII exhibit creates an accurate representation of the past. This representation allows the exhibit to play a role in the peace process since visitors today can fully understand this past conflict and reflect on the effects of WWII on society.
